Hérault de Séchelles came from an ancient and distinguished noble family. Wealthy, handsome, and witty, he was appointed attorney to King Louis XVI in 1777, and in 1785 he was made attorney general to the Parlement of Paris, one of the high courts of justice. Nevertheless, upon the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, Hérault joined the crowd that stormed the Bastille (July 14). In 1791 he was elected a deputy to the Revolution's Legislative Assembly. Hérault joined the Jacobin Club and sat with the Montagnards (as the Jacobin deputies were called) in the National Convention, which succeeded the Legislative Assembly in September 1792.

On May 30, 1793, he was elected to the first Committee of Public Safety. During the Jacobin coup d'état of June 2, Hérault, as president of the Convention, ordered the arrest of the leaders of the moderate Girondin faction. The Jacobins, in alliance with the Parisian lower classes, then took control of the Revolution. Hérault drafted most of the new, radically democratic Jacobin constitution that was submitted to the Convention on June 10. A month later he was reelected to the reorganized Committee of Public Safety.

Despite his prominence among the Jacobins, the genial, epicurean Hérault was out of place among the determined men who dominated the Committee. He aroused distrust by parading his cynicism and by taking the wife of an émigré (noble in exile) as his mistress. In October 1793 his colleagues were told that he was plotting with Hébertists (left-wing Jacobins) and foreign agents against the government. The charges were almost certainly unfounded, but, after he returned from a mission to Alsace in December, Hérault was suspended from his duties. He was imprisoned in March 1794 and guillotined several weeks later.