Louis-Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau
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Louis-Michel Le Peletier (Lepeletier), Marquis de Saint-Fargeau , (born May 29, 1760 in Paris , † January 20, 1793 ibid) was a politician during the French Revolution . After his murder by a royalist , he was venerated as a revolutionary martyr and had his tomb in the Panthéon for a few years . His younger half-brothers were the politician Félix Lepeletier (1767-1837) and the entomologist Amédée Louis Michel Le Peletier (1770-1845).
Life
Louis-Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau came from a wealthy and influential family of the Noblesse de robe ("Robenadel", i.e. official nobility) and was born as the son of the President of the Paris Parliament (Court of Justice), Baron du Péreuse. The young Le Peletier inherited his father's extensive property in 1778, worked as a lawyer in Châtelet from 1783 and took over his father's office in 1785.
The nobility of the city of Paris elected Le Peletier as a member of the Estates General in the spring of 1789 . He voted on May 6, 1789, together with the nobility and clergy, against voting by heads. After the members of the Third Estate declared themselves to be the National Assembly , Le Peletier joined at the express request of Louis XVI. on June 27, 1789 to the third estate. In the following weeks he radically changed his previous views and, despite his immense fortune and numerous privileges, developed into a passionate advocate of the ideals and goals of the revolution. He demanded the recall of the Finance Minister Necker , who was dismissed on July 11, 1789, and voted on August 4, 1789 for the revocation of the noble privileges. In addition, Le Peletier campaigned for the equality of citizens before law and the tax authorities and for constitutionally enshrined fundamental rights. He gave up his title, renounced his seigneurial rights without compensation and since then has only used his "civil" name Michel Le Peletier.
From June 21 to July 5, 1790 Le Peletier served as President of the Constituent Assembly. A little later he worked in vain as the rapporteur for the constitutional committee for the lifting of the death penalty, the galley penalty and the branding of convicts. However, he succeeded in abolishing torture and replacing the cruel and dishonorable type of execution of hanging (or even wheels and quarters as in the case of the king's assassin Damiens in 1757) with that of the head, which was carried out quickly and therefore regarded as less painful.
In September 1792, Michel Le Peletier of the Yonne department , where his estate and Saint-Fargeau castle were located, was elected to the National Convention. As a partisan of Robespierre, he was a member of the Montagne and, in his speech of October 30, 1792, declared himself in favor of the need for unrestricted freedom of the press. Le Peletier also drew up a national education plan that included compulsory schooling for all children of both sexes between the ages of seven and twelve. This project should be financed through the additional taxation of the wealthy classes. But Le Peletier's plan was not carried out despite Robespierre's energetic advocacy. In August 1793, Le Peletier's plan was rejected by the National Convention.
Murder and veneration
On January 17, 1793, the previous opponent of the death penalty, Le Peletier, voted for the execution of Louis XVI. When he was having dinner in his regular restaurant in the Palais Royal on January 20, 1793 , a royalist former soldier of the royal bodyguard approached him and stabbed him for consenting to the king's execution. Le Peletier was taken seriously injured to his brother Félix's house and died there a few hours later. The perpetrator Philippe Nicolas Marie de Pâris (1767-1793) actually planned an assassination attempt on the highest ranking "regicide" Philippe Égalité , but decided after the failure of his original intention to assassinate Michel Le Peletier. Pâris fled after the attack and shot himself at the moment of his arrest on January 31, 1793.
The National Convention adopted Le Peletier's daughter Suzanne (henceforth called Mademoiselle Nation ) and granted Michel Le Peletier the first state funeral in the Panthéon in June 1793. The painter Jacques-Louis David documented the dead in his painting Les derniers moments de Michel Lepeletier ( The last moments of Michel Lepeletier ), which became a cult object of the patriots.
The murder of Le Peletier and Jean-Paul Marat by desperate individual perpetrators led to increased use of terror . On July 14, 1793, Robespierre demanded in his speech at the Jacobin Club :
“The murderers of Marats and Lepeletiers must atone for their terrible crimes on Revolution Square. The henchmen of tyranny, insidious MPs who raised the flag of rebellion, and all those who raised the flag of rebellion, and all those who always sharpen the knife over the heads of the people, home and some of their sons Those monsters who have overthrown, I say, have to pay with their blood for the blood of our brothers who fell in the name of freedom, for the blood they shed with such cruelty. Each of us must, at least temporarily, serve the republic with all our might and forget about ourselves and devote ourselves completely to its concerns. "
Le Peletier was revered as a martyr of the revolution alongside Marat and Joseph Chalier . After Robespierre's fall on Thermidor II (July 27, 1794), David's picture was destroyed, Le Peletier's body was removed from the Panthéon and shortly afterwards transferred to Saint-Fargeau . Michel Le Peletier found his final resting place in the family seat there.
Le Peletier's name is now borne by the Saint-Fargeau district with rue Saint-Fargeau in the 20th arrondissement of Paris and also by the Saint-Fargeau metro station there .
Individual evidence
- ^ Albert Sacharowitsch Manfred: Rousseau - Mirabeau - Robespierre . Verlag der Nation, East Berlin 1989, p. 246
literature
- Jacques Herissay: L'assassinat de Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, 20 janvier 1793 , ed.Emile Paul, Paris 1934
- Jeannine Baticle: La seconde mort de Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau. Recherches sur le sort du tableau de David in Bulletin de la Société Française d'Histoire de l'Art (1988), pp. 131-145
- Robert Simon: David's Martyr-Portrait of Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau and the conundrums of Revolutionary Representation . In: Art History , 14, No. 4 (1991), pp. 459-487
- Roberto Martucci: En attendant Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau . In: Annales historiques de la Révolution française 2 (2002) pp. 77-104
- Marc Vanden Berghe, Ioana Plesca: Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau sur son lit de mort par Jacques-Louis David: Saint Sébastien révolutionnaire, miroir multiréférencé de Rome . Brussels 2005
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, Louis-Michel |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Lepeletier, Louis-Michel |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Politician during the French Revolution |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 29, 1760 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 20, 1793 |
| Place of death | Paris |