Jean Antoine Michel Agar

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Jean Antoine Michel Agar , Comte de Mosbourg from 1807 (born December 18, 1771 in Mercuès , Lot département , † November 8, 1844 in Paris ), was a senior civil servant during the French Empire .

Life

Agar grew up with his family in Saint-Domingue , where he witnessed the slave revolt against French colonial rule at a young age . After his release from brief British captivity in 1794, he studied law at the University of Toulouse . After working as a lawyer in Cahors , Joachim Murat appointed him provisional commissioner of Tuscany , conquered by French troops in 1799 , which was to be converted into the Kingdom of Etruria in 1801 and annexed by France in March 1808. 1806-1808 agar was finance minister and temporary Minister of State and President of the State Council in the Grand Duchy of Berg under the Grand Duke ascended Joachim Murat , whom he knew personally in recent years. In addition, Agar married a niece of Murat's in 1807.

In the relatively short time he worked in the Bergisch seat of government in Düsseldorf, Agar earned lasting merits in those areas that Murat had been able to shape before Napoleon's personal takeover of the government in Berg: the emancipation of the Jews , which was outstanding at the time and which was very complicated Abolition of feudal rights including the aristocratic manor and the reform of the judiciary.

In recognition of his services and loyalty, Murat had given his protégé Agar the title of Comte de Mosbourg in 1807 and, associated with this, the ownership of Morsbroich Castle in what is now Leverkusen and larger surrounding lands. However, Agar seldom resided in Morsbroich, but had to be mainly present in the Bergisch state capital Düsseldorf. In 1808 he followed his employer Murat, who had been made sovereign of the Kingdom of Naples , to Naples .

In 1808, Agar was followed in the Grand Duchy as a leading figure in the higher administration by the more conservative-minded Jacques Claude Beugnot , acting as Napoleon's acting representative. In Paris, after Agar's departure, Minister-State Secretaries for the Grand Duchy of Berg were appointed, first Michel Gaudin (1808), then Hugues-Bernard Maret (1809-1810) and finally Pierre-Louis Roederer (1810-1813) - as superior Beugnots . Agar himself stayed at the side of Murat, who was appointed in the Kingdom of Naples , where he served as finance minister until his death in 1815.

After the Rhineland became part of the Kingdom of Prussia as a result of the Congress of Vienna , Agar succeeded in asserting the possession of Morsbroich Castle and the lands previously connected to the county. He sold it to the Cologne banker Abraham Schaaffhausen as early as 1817/18 . The claim made by a German art historian that Agar had his wife and their three children murdered in January and March 1818 in order not to have to share the sales proceeds of 700,000 francs has since been refuted. In fact, Agar's first wife Alexandrine Andrieu (1791–1811) and their children died in Naples between 1811 and 1813, where Agar had their sarcophagi placed in the sacristy of San Domenico Maggiore, a burial place of Neapolitan kings and nobles.

After his active time in the civil service, Agar worked on a regional level in his home district of Cahors . Admitted to the Legion of Honor in 1804 , he was awarded the title of Peer of France in 1837 .

Agar's second marriage to Alexandrine Andrée Janet (approx. 1795-1874) had three children, including the future French diplomat Michel Pierre Antoine Laurent Agar de Mosbourg .

Works

  • Seconde lettre a son excellence M. le comte de Villèle, Ministre des finances président du conseil des minstres, etc., etc., sur le projet de remboursement ou de réduction des rentes. Delaunay, Paris 1824 ( digitized ).
  • Supplement aux observations on the projet de loi pour la conversion des Rentes. Delaunay, Paris 1825 ( digitized )
  • Observations on the new projet de loi for the conversion of rent. Delaunay, Paris 1825 ( digitized )

literature

  • Charles Schmidt : The Grand Duchy of Berg 1806-1813. A study on French supremacy in Germany under Napoleon I (= Bergische Forschungen. Volume 27) [Ger. Translation of the 1st edition, Paris 1905].
  • Klaus Rob (Hrsg.): Government files of the Grand Duchy of Berg (= sources on the reforms in the federal states of the Rhine. Volume 1). Munich 1992.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hermann J. Mahlberg : The county of Morsbroich. 700,000 francs and a murder scandal. In: Morsbroich Castle in Leverkusen. , 1995, page 90 ff. On the other hand, Hans Jürgen Dorn: The responsibility of the historian in the province, Part 1: Four dead! A murder plot? . In: Niederwupper - historical contributions 25 (2013), pp. 6–25, here pp. 6–10. Dorn proves that the wife and children had died between 1811 and 1813 and that Mahlberg grossly misinterpreted files 3000,690 in the Leverkusen City Archives. He also points out that Agar died unmolested and honored in Paris in 1844.
personal data
SURNAME Agar, Jean Antoine Michel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Comte de Mosbourg, Jean Antoine Michel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French civil servant
DATE OF BIRTH December 18, 1771
PLACE OF BIRTH Mercuès , Lot department
DATE OF DEATH November 8, 1844
Place of death Paris