Joachim Vilate


Joachim Vilate, also known as Sempronius-Gracchus Vilate was a French priest and French revolutionary figure; an agent of the Committee of Public Safety and member of the jury of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Biography

An issue of a bourgeoise family of Haute-Marche, he was the son of François Vilate, a surgeon juror of Ahun, and Marie Decourteix. He studied at Eymoutiers and later at University of Bourges. Later he attended a seminary at Limoges, he was named by the administrators of the second professor's department along with the city's royal college, in 1791, he was a rhetoric at Saint-Gaultier in Indre.
On 12 October when Hébert accused Marie-Antoinette during her trial of incest with her son, Robespierre had dinner with Barère, Saint-Just and Joachim Vilate. Discussing the matter, Robespierre broke his plate with his fork and called Hébert an "imbécile". According to Vilate Robespierre then had already two or three bodyguards.
Vilate was arrested on 3 Thermidor, year II on orders of the Committee of General Security for the crime of having invited Johann David Hermann, the piano-forte teacher of the royal family, to the sessions of the tribunal. He was released in the afternoon of 9 Thermidor.
Vilate was the author of The Secret Causes of the Revolution of 9th and 10th Thermidor and its two sequels, published during the Thermidorian reaction, while he was in prison. Exaggerating the numbers, raged against Robespierre keeping 300,000 people in prison and trying to guillotine two or three hundred people every day. Sentenced to death, he was guillotined, with fourteen other defendants on 18 Floreal, Year III, in the Place de Grève, Paris at about eleven o'clock in the morning.