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 secret. His remains were removed from the Panthéon, and historians have argued ever since whether he was the statesman who might have prevented the Terror or just a skilled talker working both sides for pay.