Jean-Baptiste Cavaignac

Jean-Baptiste Cavaignac (10 January 1763 – 24 March 1829) was a French politician and statesman.

Biography Born at Gourdon (Lot département), he was, after the outbreak of the French Revolution, a member of the département'''s directory and then elected its deputy to the National Convention, where he associated himself with the party of the Mountain and voted in favor of the death penalty for King Louis XVI.

He was constantly employed on missions in the provinces and distinguished himself by his staunch repression of the anti-Revolution risings in the newly designed départements'' of Landes, Basses-Pyrénées, and Gers. He represented the Convention in the Revolutionary Armies of Brest and of the Eastern Pyrenees in 1793, and in 1795 he was sent to the armies of the Moselle and the Rhine. With his colleague Jacques Pinet (1754–1844), he established at Bayonne a revolutionary tribunal, with authority in the neighboring towns. His appointment was also followed by unrestrained revolutionary takeover and over-zeal, including a prohibition to use Basque in all public transactions and schools (proclaiming that "fanaticism speaks Basque"), as well as the indiscriminate deportation of thousands of residents to the Landes of Gascony.

Estimations on the number of deportees range from 4,000 to 8,000, representing between a quarter and half of the inhabitants of 17 villages of southern Labourd, of which 1,600 never returned alive. A local society denounced Cavaignac for cruelty before a tribunal of the reshuffled Convention in 1795, who went on to acknowledge the consideration of victims to the civilians, but neither Cavaignac nor any other high-ranking official was held accountable.

During August 1794 in the context of the War of the Pyrenees, as the highest authority of the Convention in Bayonne, he was in charge of negotiations with the representatives of the bordering Basque Spanish district of Gipuzkoa seeking detachment from Spain and conditional allegiance to France. Cavaignac's and Pinet's confrontational and clean-sweep approach towards a possible Gipuzkoan protectorate by France broke any possibilities of an understanding with the regional authorities. Cavaignac went on to order their arrest and imprisonment in Bayonne, with the Gipuzkoans opting to turn their loyalty to the Spanish heir apparent Ferdinand VII and raise a militia against the French.