It is said that Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just called for Single Non-Transferable Voting in 1793.
I have not found his exact wording (even in translation) but have found this in worldhistory.org:
With the king dead and the Girondins in prison, the Jacobins could finally work on giving France a new constitution. On 24 April 1793, Saint-Just submitted a lengthy proposal that included the right to petition, universal suffrage, and called for elections to be decided by a simple majority.
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Wiki SNTV says:
Single Non-Transferable Voting first proposed in solid form by Saint-Just in 1793 in a proposal to the French National Convention. He proposed having the whole country as one multi-seat district. It was not adopted in France at that time. (Hoag and Hallet, PR, p. 163)
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St Just:
Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just (1767–94);
French military and political leader, elected to the French National Convention in 1792, and a leader of the government of the First Republic. In 1893 he proposed to the National Convention that the electoral system for the whole nation should be the single non-transferable vote (SNTV), which if adopted would have been the first national usage of a system of proportional representation;
his proposal was “quickly surpassed by the violent opposition of Robespierre” (Hoag and Hallett 1926, 163).
SNTV was used to elect 17 members in the 1840 Adelaide city election
Two others were elected by quorum (groups of voluntarily-associated voters).
This election was famously witnessed by young Catherine Helen Spence, and helped inspire her to a life-long campaign for PR.
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