Pierre-Denis de Peyronnet

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Pierre-Denis de Peyronnet

Comte Pierre-Denis de Peyronnet (incorrectly called Charles-Ignace de Peyronnet in the literature ; born October 9, 1778 in Bordeaux , † January 2, 1854 in Montferrand Castle in Saint-Louis-de-Montferrand , Gironde ) was a French politician . From December 1821 to January 1828 he served as Minister of Justice and from May to July 1830 as Minister of the Interior. He showed himself to be a reactionary representative of the ultra-royalists , fled in July 1830 after the overthrow of King Charles X , but was arrested and interned until 1836.

Life

Lineage and Early Career

Pierre-Denis de Peyronnet was the son of Jean-Louis Peyronnet (1731-1794), honorary chief treasurer of the Guyenne tax office , and Dame Rose Beau (around 1745-1820). His father had just before the outbreak of the French Revolution bought the office of a royal secretary (1789) and was ascended to the nobility, but it was during the reign of terror by the guillotine been executed.

Peyronnet studied law with Monsieur Ferrère and was admitted to the bar in 1796. He settled down as a lawyer in his hometown and was distinguished by his natural but violent eloquence. In his youth, he is said to have been very addicted to pleasure, but married at the age of 17 on March 21, 1796 with Marie Anne Marguerite Aimée de Perpignan (1776–1842), with whom he had two sons and two daughters. However, the relationship was not happy and the spouses divorced.

During Napoleon's reign of the Hundred Days (1815), Peyronnet rescued the Duchess of Angoulême on a British ship so that she could escape to England. For this service Peyronnet was appointed President of the Tribunal of First Instance in Bordeaux after the Restoration of the Bourbons on October 26, 1815. In 1816 he went to Paris to bring complaints from the Bordeaux drinks sellers to the government. Soon afterwards he was appointed General Procurator at the Bourges Court .

For the Cher department , Peyronnet was elected on November 13, 1820 as a government candidate for a member of the Chamber of Deputies . There he was one of the most violent leaders of the right and passionately persecuted all Bonapartists and republican-minded people. He moved to Paris with his mother-in-law and his sister-in-law, and in 1821 he represented several persons responsible for the attempted military coup of August 19, 1820, in which several suspects were sentenced to death before the Pairs Court. Not long afterwards, Peyronnet became procurator general at the royal court in Rouen .

Minister of Justice

On December 14, 1821, when the cabinet was formed, Peyronnet received the portfolio of justice from Jean-Baptiste de Villèle and elected, among others, Antoine Lefebvre de Vatimesnil as general secretary of his ministry. On August 17, 1822 he was granted the hereditary count and shortly thereafter he was appointed officer of the Legion of Honor . His first steps were directed against the press, bringing the judiciary of press offenses and the oversight and arbitrary repression of newspapers to the royal courts. Journals could now be banned if their orientation seemed contrary to the interests of the state. Peyronnet knew how to oust the liberal judges or those who sympathized with the Bonapartists from office and to force the judicial officers to consider ministerial candidates in the deputy elections. In the cabinet he urged military intervention in Spain .

From September 6 to October 29, 1822, Peyronnet also took over the Ministry of the Interior on an interim basis, and later twice more, namely from July 9 to August 2, 1825 and from August 30 to September 19, 1826.

On March 6, 1824, Peyronnet was elected deputy in both the Cher and Gironde departments and opted for the latter mandate. He played a major role in the introduction of a seven-year legislative period (septenality) for the Chamber of Deputies. Shortly before the death of Louis XVIII. (September 1824) Peyronnet enforced the reintroduction of censorship , albeit temporarily . As the keeper of the large seal, he, the strictest absolutist, created the Sacrilege Act of 1825. According to this, burglary in buildings that served the practice of the state religion should be punished with death, as should the profanation of consecrated vessels and wafers; the desecration of the hosts should even be punished like parricide, namely first chopping off the hands and then beheading. Less serious cases of theft of cult objects are to be punished with prison sentences. However, the sacrilege law was never applied.

Peyronnet then again sought to severely restrict the freedom of the press and was immediately confronted with strong criticism while drafting a corresponding draft law. Because he described his planned law as one of justice and love in an article in the governmental newspaper Le Moniteur in an article in defense of his plan , it was subsequently generally scornfully dubbed the “law of justice and love”. According to the bill, every piece of writing would have to be submitted to the Ministry of the Interior before it was sold and had to be paid for every printed work of 5 sheets and less, stamp duties, and much higher penalties would have threatened for press offenses. François-René de Chateaubriand spoke of a "vandal law" and the Académie française also expressed concern about the attempted attack on freedom of the press. Ultimately, the government withdrew its draft of the press law on April 17, 1827, because it had been heavily watered down in the Chamber of Peers.

In the elections of 1827, the electoral colleges of Bordeaux and Bourges rejected Peyronnet's candidacy. With the fall of Villèles, he had to resign as Minister of Justice on January 4, 1828, but was immediately appointed Peer of France . In the new cabinet, which was under the leadership of Martignac , Joseph Marie, comte Portalis Peyronnets took the place of Minister of Justice.

Home Secretary, Imprisonment, Late Years and Death

Comte de Peyronnet 1831

In 1828 Peyronnet remained politically in the background. The Chamber of Deputies took revenge on him by making him responsible for the 180,000 francs that he had arbitrarily used for the establishment of the chancellery hotel during the session of 1829. In the cabinet of Jules de Polignac , Peyronnet took over the interior department in place of Guillaume Isidore, comte de Montbel on May 19, 1830, worked here in the sense of the extreme ultras and signed the ordinances of July 25, 1830, who cost King Charles X the throne .

During the July Revolution of 1830 , Peyronnet fled but was arrested in Tours around the end of August and imprisoned in Vincennes . When he appeared before the Pairs Court on charges of high treason , he tried to have his attorney Hennequin defend himself by claiming that he had personally opposed the orderlies and had only signed them out of consideration for royal authority; he also regretted participating in a measure that had caused so much bloodshed on both sides. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and loss of civil rights with Polignac, Jean de Chantelauze and Martial de Guernon-Ranville on December 21, 1830 and brought to the fortress of Ham . He was released on October 17, 1836 by a royal orderly. He died on January 2, 1854 at the age of 75 in his Montferrand castle in the Gironde department.

Works

  • Esquisse politique , Paris 1829
  • Pensées d'un prisonnier , 2 volumes, Paris 1834; German 2 parts, Leipzig 1834
  • Histoire des Francs , 2 vols., Paris 1835; 2nd edition, 4 vols., 1846
  • Satires , 2nd edition Paris 1854

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ [1]
  2. ↑ According to the article on Pierre-Denis de Peyronnet on data.bnf.fr. he was born on October 17, 1778.
personal data
SURNAME Peyronnet, Pierre-Denis de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Peyronnet, Charles-Ignace de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French politician
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1778
PLACE OF BIRTH Bordeaux
DATE OF DEATH January 2, 1854
Place of death Montferrand Castle, Saint-Louis-de-Montferrand , Gironde department