Étienne Deydier

Born in Pont-de-Vaux (Ain) on April 6, 1743, of Sieur Joseph Bonaventure Deydier, commissioner of seigneurial rights, and Marie Claudine Reymond, who died in Nyon (Switzerland), he was a feudist notary, surveyor, and vice bailiff of Pont-de-Vaux before the Revolution.

On September 1, 1791, he was elected deputy for the Ain in the Legislative Assembly, the 3rd out of 6, by 193 votes out of 327. He sat in the majority and showed in several circumstances as much humanity as courage. He saved the life of Mr. Gueidan, deputy of the clergy in 1789, imprisoned in the prison of the Force, during the massacre of the prisons (September 2, 1792), as well as that of an aide-de-camp of General Miranda, threatened by the people on August 10; at the same time, he gave the latter a bourgeois costume and a sum of two hundred écus to facilitate his escape.

Re-elected by the same department on September 4, 1792, as a member of the Convention, on the 1st of 6, with 305 votes out of 371, he took his place on the Mountain, and, in the king's trial, answered the 3rd roll call: "I vote for death.". In the session of the Society of the Jacobins of 8 Nivôse, Year II, he spoke on the question of the purification of the members of the Society: "And I ask," he said, "that membership be withdrawn from all societies which have been formed only since May 31."

On 4 brumaire year IV, he entered the Council of Elders as a former conventional, and was re-elected to the same council for the department of Ain, with 204 votes out of 235.

On 27 Thermidor year VI, he had the resolution approved that removed the deputy Sonthonax from the list of emigrants. He was not hostile to the coup d'état of brumaire, and on 29th Germinal year VIII, he was appointed judge at the Court of Appeal of the Ain. The emperor called him, on April 2, 1811, to the functions of adviser to the imperial court of Lyon.

He resigned after Napoleon's first abdication, was reinstated in his place during the Hundred Days, then revoked on the second return of the Bourbons, and struck by the law of January 12, 1816 against "the regicides", had to expatriate although doctors' certificates had attested that he was affected by "an erratic tasteful mood that mainly carries his impression on the brain. This led to instantaneous and more or less prolonged loss of memory and reason." The prefect of the Ain, Mr. Dumartroy, gave him a passport to leave France; on February 17, 1816, Mr. Deydier left for Geneva, passed through Constance, and finally settled in Nyon where he died.