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Claude Fauchet (22 September 1744 &#x2013; 31 October 1793), often called the Abbé Fauchet, was a Nivernais clergyman, social theorist, and politician of the French Revolution. Although he enjoyed the favor of the Ancien Régime,[1] including an appointment as one of Louis XVI's official preachers,[2] Fauchet had publicly criticized the opulence and lax morals of the nobility and upper clergy and expressed sympathy for the ideas of the philosophes before the Revolution.[3] He was among its earliest and most prominent clerical supporters,[4] serving first as a leading member of the Paris provisional government and gaining notoriety as a protagonist in the Storming of the Bastille.[5][6]

In 1790, Fauchet worked with Nicholas Bonneville to establish the Cercle Social,[7] an intellectual society with a significant publishing arm.[8] It became closely associated with the Girondins,[9] and was an early mouthpiece for republican, anti-slavery, and feminist ideas.[10]

He was elected constitutional bishop of Calvados in May 1791[11], and in September elected to represent Calvados in the Legislative Assembly (and would the next year be elected to its successor body, the National Convention).[12]

On June 22, 1793, Fauchet was suspended from the Convention and placed under house arrest along with other leading Girondins.[13] In July, the Montagnard publicist Jean-Paul Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday and a federalist revolt erupted within his diocese, at Caen. Accused of complicity in both,[14] he went to the guillotine on October 31.[15]

De la Religion Nationale, one of his few substantial works,[16] was written during the Revolution's early phase and proposed many of the ecclesiastical reform measures which would be implemented with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.[17] But his reputation among his contemporaries primarily rested on his skills as an orator of both religious and secular occasions.[18] Among his most important orations was a series of public commentaries on Rousseau's Social Contract at the Palais-Royal.[19] In one he declared that "every man has the right to the land and should have possession of property for his livelihood...his portion should be limited by the rights of his equals."[21] Both royalists and Jacobins consequently accused him of advocating for an "Agrarian Law,"[22] and he has sometimes been identified as a proto-Socialist and forerunner of Gracchus Babeuf.[23]