Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau

Born into nobility in 1749, Mirabeau arrived at the Revolution with a reputation already in tatters from years of personal scandals. His gift was oratory, and after his election to the Estates-General in 1789 it carried him to the top of the new National Assembly, where he pushed for constitutional monarchy on the British model while holding a leading role in the Jacobin Club. When he died of pericarditis in 1791, the revolutionaries gave him a hero's burial — the first body laid in the Panthéon. The 1792 trial of Louis XVI shattered the myth: Mirabeau had been taking the king's money in secre…