this turns out". As Robespierre's fall seemed inevitable, Legendre sided with the Reaction, and led troops against putsches of Jacobins and Charles Pichegru (1795). He was elected president of the Convention, and helped bring about the impeachment of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the perpetrator of mass executions by drowning (noyades) of royalist sympathizers. He was subsequently elected a member of the Council of Ancients. During the French Directory, Legendre was elected to the Council of Five Hundred, but was already suffering from dementia. Mistaken identity For two centuries, until the recent discovery of the error in 2005, books, paintings and articles have incorrectly printed a side-view portrait of Louis Legendre as that of the French mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752–1833). The error arose from the fact that the sketch was labelled simply "Legendre". The error was only corrected when an 1820 book containing the sketches of seventy-three famous French mathematicians was discovered in 2008. References Additional sources In turn, it cites as reference: François Victor Alphonse Aulard, (2nd ed., Paris, 1906, 2 vols.), and "" in the Histoire politique de la Révolution française (vol. xl., 1901). 1752 births 1797 deaths Deputies to the French National Convention Politicians from Paris Regicides of Louis XVI