Louis-Marie Prudhomme

Who was Louis-Marie Prudhomme?

Louis-Marie Prudhomme, was a French journalist and historian.

A librarian in Lyon, then in Paris, Prudhomme settled in Meaux, as a bookbinder. He returned in Paris, and was stopped several times for his writings: between 1787 and 1789, he is thought to have written about 1,500 lampoons. Among them, ''Résumé général, ou Extrait des cahiers de pouvoirs, instructions, demandes ou doléances remis par divers bailliages, sénéchaussées et pays d’État du royaume, written in collaboration with Laurent de Mezières and Jean Rousseau and published in three volumes in 1789, which was seized by the police.

From July 12, 1789 to February 28, 1794, he published a newspaper, les Révolutions de Paris, whose principal writer was Elisee Loustalot, with Sylvain Maréchal, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette and Fabre d'Églantine, and which was a great success. At times imprisoned as a royalist, in June 1793, he moved away from Paris and the political life.

In 1796 he published a two-volume work that was a list of all persons known to him who were sent to death during the Reign of Terror.