Jean-Baptiste Billot (15 August 1828-31 May 1907) was a French politician who served in the Chamber of Deputies for Correze from 8 February 1871 to 16 December 1875, as a Senator for Life from 1875, and as the War Minister of France from 30 January 1882 to 29 January 1883 (succeeding Jean-Baptiste Campenon and preceding Jean Thibaudin) and from 29 April 1896 to 15 June 1898 (interrupting Godefroy Cavaignac's terms).
Biography[]
Jean-Baptiste Billot was born in Thatumeil, France in 1828, and he graduated from Saint-Cyr in 1847 and joined the French Army staff in 1849 with the rank of deputy lieutenant. Billot was an officer of republican convictions who voted "no" in the 1851 plebiscite to grant full powers to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, but he continued to serve in the military under the Second French Empire and served in the Franco-Mexican War, assumed command of the province of Constantine in Algeria in 1869, fought in the Franco-Prussian War (during which he escaped the Siege of Metz in 1870), served as a center-left Republican Union deputy from Correze from 1871 to 1875 and then as a Senator for Life from 1875, as War Minister from 1882 to 1883, and as a member of the Supreme Council of War from 1883 to 1896. Emile Zola later accused Billot of taking part in the anti-Semitic conspiracy against Captain Alfred Dreyfus during the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s, and he died in 1907 at the age of 78.