Jacques Mallet du Pan

Jacques Mallet du Pan (5 November 1749 – 10 May 1800) was a Genevan political journalist and propagandist. A Calvinist thinker and counter-revolutionary reformer, he opposed extreme positions held by both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary partisans during the French Revolution.

Life Pre-French Revolution Mallet du Pan was born in Céligny to a Protestant minister from an old Huguenot family. He was educated at Geneva, and through the influence of Voltaire was appointed as a Professor of French Literature at Kassel, however he soon resigned from this position. In 1771, at a time of mounting opposition to the oligarchic rule of the upper class, he wrote what was considered by the ruling council in Geneva to be an inflammatory pamphlet entitled Compte rendu de la défense des citoyens bourgeois. It was condemned by the council and burnt in the main square.

Hoping to find more independence as writer, he travelled to London to find Simon Nicholas Henri Linguet and propose that he become co-editor in the production of the "Annales Politiques", to which Linguet agreed. This collaboration was broken in September 1779 with Linguet's imprisonment in the Bastille. Du Pan then brought the Annales to Geneva to continue the work himself (1781–1783) under the title Mémoires historiques, politiques et littéraires. After Linguet's release from the Bastille in 1782, Du Pan felt he had to distance himself from the Annales for fear of being accused of profiting from Linguet's misfortune by seizing his property during his imprisonment, and he discontinued this work.

Following the Geneva Revolution of 1782 and several years in exile he adopted the ideological position of the juste milieu (the middle way). This position stood in opposition to both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces and brought him to a second exile. He went to establish himself in Paris, where he had a reputation as a skilled publicist. While in Paris he worked and lived with the book-seller Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, publishing a new journal titled Journal historique et politique de Genève from January 1781.

From 1783 he incorporated this work with Panckoucke into an editorial position at the Mercure de France, where Panckoucke was the publisher. In all the political writings published by Mallet du Pan before the revolution he used his position to propagandise in favour of a constitutional monarchy in France. He supported the introduction of a system similar to the constitutional monarchy of Britain, which he believed was possible to apply in France with some light modifications. Staunchly loyal to his ideological positions, he used his post in the Mercure to defend them ferociously and polemicise against those he saw as not sharing his positions. In his writings, he came to increasingly criticise the French Revolution. In 1792, he was charged by King Louis XVI to draw up a manifesto in the name of emigrants and coalition powers. The manifesto, believed to have been written by Jérôme-Joseph Geoffroy de Limon and published by Panckoucke, Mallet's old collaborator, was known as the Brunswick Manifesto and declared that if the French royal family was harmed, French civilians would be harmed by the coalition powers. He published a number of anti-revolutionary pamphlets, and a violent attack on Bonaparte and the Directory resulted in his being exiled in 1797 to Berne. which originally appeared as "A l'exemple de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants". Translated into English at the time, the essay was read by William Pitt and influenced his views.