François Régis de La Bourdonnaye

François Régis de La Bourdonnaye

François Régis de La Bourdonnaye, comte de La Bretèche (born March 19, 1767 in La Varenne , Maine-et-Loire department ; † August 28, 1839 at Mésangeau Castle near Beaupréau , Maine-et-Loire department) was a French legitimist statesman . He was a strictly royalist-minded supporter of the Bourbons and a staunch opponent of the ideas of the French Revolution . From 1815 to 1829 he served as the leader of the extreme right in the Chamber of Deputies and in 1829 briefly as Minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Jules de Polignac . After King Louis-Philippe came to power in 1830, he lost all political influence.

Life

Ancestry, Early Life, and Political Beginnings under Napoleon

François Régis de La Bourdonnaye came from an aristocratic Breton family, one branch of which had been resident in Anjou for a century . He was a son of Joseph Avoye de la Bourdonnaye de Liré and Bonne Jeanne Tranchant du Tret. In 1786 he joined the Royal Army's Austrasie infantry regiment as an officer and served there until the outbreak of the French Revolution, with which he did not sympathize at all. Instead, he joined the Chevaliers du poignard , who expressed their royalist sentiments in the service of Louis XVI. showed. On February 28, 1791, he was captured by the National Guard in the Tulerien and, after a few days in custody, sent to his regiment, which was stationed in Briançon . He emigrated, took service in Prince Condé's army in October 1791 and spent a few months in Switzerland after its dissolution .

Thereafter, La Bourdonnaye returned to France under the directorate , where he married Émilie Vollaige de Vaugirault on September 9, 1797 in Angers after a short stay in Orléans under the false name Guibert . The coup d'état of the 18th Fructidor V (September 4, 1797) forced him barely 15 days after his marriage to seek exile again in Switzerland, where he remained until October 1802. Then he was allowed to go back to France and settled in Castle Mésangeau, which was located in the municipality of Drain .

La Bourdonnaye submitted to Napoleon Bonaparte , became a member of the general council of the Maine-et-Loire department by his decree on September 3, 1803 and soon afterwards a member of the municipal council of Angers, of which he was a member until 1815. In 1806 in the General Council of Maine-et-Loire he supported the address to Bonaparte for the heredity of the crown. In 1807 he was proposed as a candidate for the legislative body, as he wished, but Napoleon refused his appointment. When Napoleon returned from Spain, La Bourdonnaye greeted him in the name of the département, was graciously welcomed, but did not receive the senatorium, which was soon requested.

Since the emperor's Russian campaign (1812), the count again turned to the Bourbons and took part in the intrigues in their favor. After he had been secretary of the General Council of Maine-et-Loire in 1807, he became its president on May 10, 1813. In this capacity he was the first to swear the oath of allegiance to King Louis XVIII in 1814 after Napoleon's abdication . which his colleagues then put aside. Otherwise he did not do any service in 1814, but was proscribed during Napoleon's renewed rule of the Hundred Days .

Political career under Louis XVIII.

Role in the chambre introuvable

After the second restoration of the Bourbons and the associated return of Louis XVIII. La Bourdonnaye came to power on August 22, 1815 for the Maine-et-Loire department as a deputy in the so-called Chambre introuvable and soon became the head of the so-called counter-opposition on the extreme right for almost 15 years. Here he stood out for his merciless bitterness against the "revolutionaries" and fanatical royalism . He and Jules de Polignac refused to take the unconditional oath on the Charte constitutionnelle .

When drafting the amnesty law of November 11, 1815, La Bourdonnaye suggested the notorious categories according to which he proposed all participants in Napoleon's rule of the Hundred Days to be severely punished by class. He asked for blood to prevent the blood regiment from returning and wanted to "spread the white terror." Against the “criminal intrigues of the rebels” he called for “chains, the hangman and death”, since in his opinion only death could scare off their like-minded people. He was therefore called the "man of categories" or the "white Jacobin " throughout the country .

According to La Bourdonnaye's strict proposal, the amnesty was to exclude from the amnesty those high public servants who had formed the government during Napoleon's Hundred Days, the commanding generals and prefects who had transferred to him, as well as those who assumed offices or held his positions Houses of Parliament had sat. They should be killed or deported and their goods confiscated. La Bourdonnaye also called for the exile of the former members of the convention who were responsible for the death of Louis XVI. had voted and called them virtuous people who were always dangerous. The Duke of Richelieu based himself on La Bourdonnaye's recommendations for the amnesty law, but defused them in his law proposal on December 8, 1815, which was accepted.

La Bourdonnaye spoke repeatedly on the occasion of the electoral law and recommended a seven-year term and three degrees. As a bitter opponent of Élie Decazes , he applied for an investigation into whether the charges on the games, cabs and journals could be levied by the Minister of Police.

Further political activity as a leading ultra-royalist

After the dissolution of the Chambre introuvable on September 5, 1816, La Bourdonnaye was re-elected as deputy for Maine-et-Loire on October 4, 1816 and again acted as head of the extreme right. However, the ultra-royalists had lost their previous majority in the Chamber. Since the cabinet, in which Decazes played a leading role, had opposed his candidacy, La Bourdonnaye ran fierce opposition to government policy. As a member of the petition commissions, he vigorously advocated the editor of the Fidèle ami du roi . He opposed the cabinet's proposal for a new electoral law because it gave the ministers too much power as "a governing board of directors"; He also denied that the proposed 100,000 or so voters represented the entire nation.

On January 14, 1817, La Bourdonnaye spoke against the law on personal freedom and continually railed against Decazes, who as police minister had too much power. He also called for the strictest thrift for the state budget and attacked the censorship law for journals. On January 16, 1818, he fought the recruitment law as a questionable strengthening of governmental power at the expense of public opinion and the chambers. He criticized the advancement of officers according to the principle of seniority, which curtailed the rights of the king (who could only occupy a third of the ranks freely according to his wishes), and the establishment of veteran legions, which seemed to him to form a parliamentary army at the disposal of the legislature . La Bourdonnaye also called for a law on ministerial accountability, the abolition of stamp duty for brochures and non-daily newspapers, and spoke in favor of freedom of the press . But when Charles Nicolas Fabvier published his brochure Lyon en 1817 in 1818, he rebuked the fact that Fabvier would not be prosecuted for it, and was therefore referred to by the liberal newspaper Minerva as the “ Ajax of the Right”.

La Bourdonnaye requested the repeal of the Ministry of Police, spoke in favor of François Barthélemy's request to modify the electoral law, attacked the ministry in 1819 for pushing a pair , opposed the creation of large books of public debt for the provinces on March 24 of the same year, and on March 17 of the same year May the petition in favor of the exiles and on June 2nd the law on recruiting again. He fought passionately against the admission of the Abbé Grégoire to the Chamber of Deputies, since he was unworthy of being a “regicide”, and on December 24, 1819, called the ministry “isolated in the middle of France” because of its unsteady policy.

The murder of the Duke of Berry provided the desired cause for the overthrow of Decazes. La Bourdonnaye proposed the Chamber on February 14, 1820 to Louis XVIII. expressed condolences and was pleased about the dismissal of the minister he hated, to which measure he had contributed significantly. He supported the plan to suspend the personal freedom law, fought for the reintroduction of censorship on March 31, and accused the liberal writers of trying to overturn legitimacy and religion while preaching equality and popular sovereignty. But he demanded that the censorship law should only be in effect temporarily. Royer-Collard supported him, but his opinion did not get through. On May 15, the Count approved the new electoral law and mustered all his strength to bring down what he hated of February 5, 1817.

Elected to the Chamber on November 13, 1820 in Maine-et-Loire and Indre-et-Loire , La Bourdonnaye accepted for the former department. In 1821 he demanded that General Lavaux and Benjamin Constant be called to order because of what they said . When he declared on the same day that France no longer wanted any left-wing deputies, de Corcelles and Alexandre de Lameth did not call him to order. On July 7, 1821, he turned against the Ministry's demand for an extension of press censorship and on July 12, against the abolition of the salt tax . Like the left, he and other ultras relentlessly attacked the President of the Council of Ministers, Richelieu, who finally resigned in December 1821.

La Bourdonnaye also initially disliked the new cabinet headed by Jean-Baptiste de Villèle , although Villèle belonged to the ultra-royalists. It is true that La Bourdonnaye obtained the most votes for the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies in June 1822; nevertheless chose Louis XVIII. Auguste Ravez , who had received 16 fewer votes instead of being President of the Chamber. So La Bourdonnaye had to be content with the post of Vice-President. He broke up with his friend François-René de Chateaubriand when he became foreign minister on December 28, 1822.

In 1823 La Bourdonnaye zealously supported the French intervention in Spain and violently attacked the ministry, which had entered into negotiations with rebels. He voted in February 1823 for the extraordinary funds for the war and despite his low confidence in the ministry, he spoke out in favor of the loan. He wanted to see Jacques-Antoine Manuel expelled from the chamber because of allusions to the executions of Charles I Stuart and Louis XVI. on the occasion of the debates on the intervention in Spain, came to the commission meeting on this and made its report on March 1, to which the angry leftists raged. As a result, Manuel was expelled from the chamber. During the budget discussion, La Bourdonnaye called the submitted budget a fictional, financial novel; he attacked Villèle as too weak against the enemies of legitimacy and undecided on the Spanish question, combated the secret police expenses and demanded that part of the loan of 2.2 million francs should be examined by the Chamber of Deputies.

In 1823 the ultra-royalists thought of bringing La Bourdonnaye to a cabinet under Baron Vitrolles . La Bourdonnaye was inclined to accept, but Villèle thwarted her plans and La Bourdonnaye's anger with him rose. On March 6, 1824, he was re-elected as a deputy. When discussing the law on the conversion of the pension on April 24, 1824, he spoke against Villèle's proposal and attacked those who claimed that the funds previously used to buy the pension and the agiotage game would be used for trade and agriculture as a result of the new law pour in; his own bills failed. On May 28, he spoke again against a new recruitment bill and the increase in the length of service to eight years and proposed two amendments : the exemption of the only and the oldest family sons from military service and the abolition of the right to advancement. On June 5, 1824, he spoke out against the electoral law with a seven-year legislative period.

When discussing the budget for 1825, especially when mentioning the secret funds, La Bourdonnaye attacked Villèle relentlessly. On July 12, 1824, he accused him of having a fund for the elections which he called the Saturnalia of the representative government; he showed the Chamber to which persecution the journals hostile to the ministers had been exposed, and put the sums expended on the purchase or the establishment of a few periodicals to more than two million francs. He also tried to brand the ministers as tyrants and murderers of public opinion. The calm and coldness of his personality contrasted strangely with his passionate bitterness, which is why Decazes called him a “tiger full of cold”.

Political career under Charles X.

Opposition politician

La Bourdonnaye considered the law of compensation for emigrants of 1825 petty, because he argued that either the national assemblies of the revolution were illegal, then all their acts are null and void, or legal, then the emigrants have no right to compensation. If the charter guaranteed the sale of national goods, then this is only a political measure which guarantees the buyers the value of the goods they have bought, but does not give them any ownership rights. He therefore vigorously opposed the ministers' draft, which offered too little and too much to the emigrants and consisted of sheer deceptions, the sole purpose of which was to place all public and private assets in Villèle's hands without responsibility, and demanded a new legal review.

When the Chamber of Deputies dealt in February 1826 with the case of a possible indictment of the Journal de Commerce , requested by the ministers , in which, according to Charles-Marie d'Irumberry de Salaberry, some MPs had been insulted, the question was whether a simple majority for the decision-making is sufficient. Simonneau and Chifflet affirmed this view, because otherwise a minority could prevent a project by the chamber majority. On this occasion, La Bourdonnaye advocated freedom of the press and firmly rejected the view of Simonneau and Chifflet, which amounted to a curtailment of opposition rights. The parliamentary form of government needed a strong opposition; without this it would be just organized tyranny.

On February 14, 1827, La Bourdonnaye repudiated the government's planned, severe censorship of the press law, which was ironically called the "Law of Justice and Love". He claimed that France could only find its salvation in a close alliance between the Charter and legitimacy, and that it therefore demanded the Charter in full (which he himself attacked in 1823), but that no representative government could exist without freedom of the press.

After the Chamber was dissolved, La Bourdonnaye was re-elected as a deputy for the fifth time on November 24, 1827 in Angers. When Villèle resigned on January 3, 1828 and a cabinet led by Martignac took over the government, La Bourdonnaye took a lively part in the deliberations on its composition and hoped to become finance minister. But when the news of this flooded the stock exchange, the prices fell immediately and La Bourdonnaye waived his expectation. He failed again in his candidacy for the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies, although he had received a relative majority of 178 votes in the first ballot.

As a result, La Bourdonnaye remained the head of the extreme right, but seemed to have somewhat moderated the vehemence of his previous systematic opposition behavior. On January 22, 1828, he joined the commission which was to examine the measures to be taken to implement the laws of the country in relation to the spiritual secondary schools , and expressed a favorable attitude towards the Jesuits . In the secret session of July 14th, he flatly refused to consider Salverte's proposal to ask the king to reorganize the disbanded Paris National Guard. Then he became a member of the budget commission and was entrusted with drawing up the report on the projected income for 1829. When Salverte took up Guillaume-Xavier Labbey de Pompières ' initiative on February 19, 1829 to indict the former ministry of Villèle, La Bourdonnaye, to everyone's astonishment, criticized the manner in which this application was handled, which incidentally had no consequences. In April 1829 he opposed the legislative proposals presented by the ministers for the departmental and communal organization; as a result, these applications were withdrawn by the government.

Interior minister

After the resignation of the Martignac ministry, La Bourdonnaye, whom Chateaubriand called the “male megarie ”, became Minister of the Interior on August 8, 1829 in the new cabinet led by Jules de Polignac . He was immediately opposed by numerous liberal newspapers; only the Quotidienne and the Gazette de France spoke out in favor of him. The Journal des Débats , which had praised him when he fought Villèle, now recalled that in 1815 he had wanted to exclude entire classes from the amnesty. According to this newspaper, it was his sole fault if the Polignac cabinet failed to find majorities; his hateful, exaggerated demands and his impetuosity were unbearable; he would have boldly planned an anti-liberal counter-revolution. But this assessment is unlikely to do justice to La Bourdonnaye. The royalists were divided on him; the group around François-Marie Agier rejected him, the supporters of Villèle considered him incapable. Only those ultra-royalists who advocated harsh measures held on to him as their husband.

The attacks on La Bourdonnaye became even more vehement when on August 13, 1829, Claude Mangin was appointed Paris Police Prefect. Meanwhile, there were differences of opinion within the government. La Bourdonnaye advised Polignac to leave the Jesuits out of the political game; he would have preferred the police and not the Jesuits to put the liberals in their place. Polignac, on the other hand, found La Bourdonnaye incompatible, and this did not harmonize with other ministers either. King Charles X is said to have said about the transfer of government responsibility to La Bourdonnayes that those people who constantly complained would have to be tested. Ultimately, Polignac had to try to assert himself politically against La Bourdonnaye.

Envious of the king's preferred head of government, La Bourdonnaye opposed the appointment of a President of the Council of Ministers, despite Polignac offering him the position, and when Charles X handed it over to Polignac, he resigned to the delight of his colleagues. As early as November 18, 1829, Guillaume-Isidore, comte de Montbel, was his successor. As a pretext for his resignation, he mysteriously stated that the ministry was playing a game where it was a headache and that he wanted to keep the cards in hand. He left only two traces of his work as Minister of the Interior: a decree on the butchers in Paris and a circular on the puppets; he had also made improvements in the medical academy and the École des chartes .

Later life and death

King Charles X granted La Bourdonnaye a pension of 12,000 francs, appointed him minister of state and member of the royal privy council, and on January 27, 1830, peer of France . Without influence in the chamber of peers , La Bourdonnaye had no part in the measures that led to the overthrow of Charles X. After the July Revolution of 1830 , he refused the oath of subjects to the new King Louis Philippe . The Chamber of Deputies declared all pair appointments made under Charles X (14 in total) to be null and void, so that La Bourdonnaye lost his peerage again. Since then he has lived without any further political activity at his castle Mésangeau near Beaupréau, where he died on August 28, 1839 at the age of 72.

He had published the work Proposition d'une loi d'amnistie faite par M. le comte de La Bourdonnaye à la chambre des députes dans la séance du November 11, 1815, et prize en considération le même jour (Paris 1815). This work had three editions within a month and a fourth in early 1816. La Bourdonnaye had also had numerous speeches given in the Chamber of Deputies printed.

literature

• Arthur Kleinschmidt : Labourdonnaye ('François Régis, Count of) . In: Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste , 2nd Section, 41st Vol. (1887), pp. 90-92
• Bourdonnaye (François-Régis, comte de la Bretèche) , in: Adolphe Robert, Edgar Bourloton, Gaston Cougny (eds.): Dictionnaire des parlementaires français de 1789 à 1889. Volume 1 (1889), pp. 437-439.

Web links

• Biography on the site assemblee-nationale.fr (French)

Remarks

1. ^ For example Arthur Kleinschmidt , in: Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste , 2nd section, 41. Vol. (1887), p. 92. According to the Dictionnaire des parlementaires français de 1789 à 1889 (Volume 1, p. 437) died La Bourdonnaye on July 28, 1839.

predecessor	Office	successor
Jean-Baptiste Gay, vicomte de Martignac	Minister of the Interior of France August 8, 1829 - November 18, 1829	Gullaume Isidore, comte de Montbel