The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England. Volume 6 (of 6): Mémoires d'outre-tombe volume 6Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de
General
The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England. Volume 6 (of 6): Mémoires d'outre-tombe volume 6
Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de, 1768-1848
[284] Ferdinand Philippe Louis Charles Henri Duc d'Orléans
(1810-1842) married, on the 30th of May 1837, the Princess Helen of
Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He was killed, on the 13th of July, at Neuilly,
by leaping from his carriage, of which the horses had run away. His
widow, who was and remained a Lutheran, died in 1858.--T.
[285] Charles Jean Marie Barbaroux (1767-1794), a noted Girondin
orator and politician, belonged, like most of the participants in
the Revolution of 1789, to the middle-classes, and was a lawyer by
profession. He led the Marseillaise section in the attack on the
Tuileries, on the 10th of August 1792. He was sent, as a Girondin
deputy, to the Convention, where he appears to have been noted for the
beauty of his person no less than for his eloquence, and soon went to
loggerheads with Marat and Robespierre. In the trial of Louis XVI.,
he voted for the appeal to the nation. He was proscribed, on the 31st
of May 1793, as a Royalist and an enemy of the Republic: he sought
shelter in Calvados and took ship at Quimper for Bordeaux. Hardly had
he arrived there when he was arrested and well and duly guillotined, on
the 25th of July 1794 and in the twenty-eighth year of his age. Carlyle
says, wrongly, I believe, that he shot himself to escape arrest.--T.
[286] Antoine Saint-Just (1767-1794) has been only once mentioned in
the Memoirs (_Cf._ Vol. III., p. 196). He was born a few months after
Barbaroux, and died three days later. This "black-haired, mild-toned
youth," to quote Carlyle, was one of the most violent organizers of the
Terror. He became President of the Convention in February 1794 and took
charge of the reports against his colleagues Danton, Camille Desmoulins
and others, who were promptly sent to the scaffold. Almost alone he
defended Robespierre, was eventually involved in the same condemnation,
and was guillotined with him on the 28th of July. Saint-Just cultivated
the Muse: at the early age of twenty, he published _Organt_, a
licentious poem in twenty cantos (1789). He also left the _Esprit de la
Révolution_ (1791) and a number of Reports and Opinions delivered in
the Convention.--T.
[287] _Cf._, in Chateaubriand's preface to his _Études historiques_,
the table of the victims of the Terror, taken from the six volumes of
Prudhomme, the Republican. There were 18,923 men not of noble birth, of
different conditions; 2,231 wives of labourers or artisans; and 2,000
children guillotined, drowned and shot. In the Vendée, 15,000 women
were killed, and almost all of these were peasant-women. Terrible as
they are, these figures are very far below the reality.--B.
[288] Thiers was Premier and Foreign Minister from the 22nd of February
to the 25th of August 1836 and, for the second time, from the 1st of
March to the 28th of October 1840.--T.
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