LOUVET DE COUVRAI, JEAN BAPTISTE (1760-1797), French writer and politician, was born in Paris on the 12th of June 1760, the son of a stationer. He became a bookseller's clerk, and first attracted attention with a not very moral novel called _Les Amours du chevalier de Faublas_ (Paris, 1787-1789). The character of the heroine of this book, Lodoïska, was taken from the wife of a jeweller in the Palais Royal, with whom he had formed a _liaison_. She was divorced from her husband in 1792 and married Louvet in 1793. His second novel, _Émilie de Varmont_, was intended to prove the utility and necessity of divorce and of the marriage of priests, questions raised by the Revolution. Indeed all his works were directed to the ends of the Revolution. He attempted to have one of his unpublished plays, _L'Anobli conspirateur_, performed at the Théâtre Français, and records naïvely that one of its managers, M. d'Orfeuil, listened to the reading of the first three acts "with mortal impatience," exclaiming at last: "I should need cannon in order to put that piece on the stage." A "sort of farce" at the expense of the army of the _émigrés, La Grande Revue des armées noire el blanche_, had, however, better success: it ran for twenty-five nights. Louvet was, however, first brought into notice as a politician by his _Paris justifié_, in reply to a "truly incendiary" pamphlet in which Mounier, after the removal of the king to Paris in October 1789, had attacked the capital, "at that time blameless," and argued that the court should be established elsewhere. This led to Louvet's election to the Jacobin Club, for which, as he writes bitterly in his Memoirs, the qualifications were then "a genuine _civisme_ and some talent." A self-styled _philosophe_ of the true revolutionary type, he now threw himself ardently into the campaign against "despotism" and "reaction," i.e. against the moderate constitutional royalty advocated by Lafayette, the Abbé Maury and other "Machiavellians." On the 25th of December 1791 he presented at the bar of the Assembly his _Pétition contre les princes_, which had "a prodigious success in the senate and the empire." Elected deputy to the Assembly for the department of Loiret, he made his first speech in January 1792. He attached himself to the Girondists, whose vague deism, sentimental humanitarianism and ardent republicanism he fully shared, and from March to November 1792 he published, at Roland's expense, a bi-weekly _journal-affiche_, of which the title, _La Sentinelle_, proclaimed its mission to be to "enlighten the people on all the plots" at a time when, Austria having declared war, the court was "visibly betraying our armies." On the 10th of August he became editor of the _Journal des débats_, and in this capacity, as well as in the Assembly, made himself conspicuous by his attacks on Robespierre, Marat and the other Montagnards, whom he declares he would have succeeded in bringing to justice in September but for the poor support