Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours

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Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours

Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours [ pjɛːʀ saˈmɥɛl dyˈpɔ̃ dənəˈmuːʀ ] (born  December 14, 1739 in Paris , †  August 6, 1817 in Eleutherian Mills, Delaware , USA ) was a French economist .

Life

education

Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours was the son of the Parisian watchmaker Samuel du Pont de Nemours (1708–1776) and Anne Alexandrine de Montchanin (1718–1756).

He too first learned the watchmaking trade from his father, but then, at his mother's insistence, intensively studied the humanities. Pierre Samuel du Pont devoted himself to the classical studies of political economy and became a follower of the teachings of François Quesnay , to whose dissemination he contributed extraordinarily.

He edited the Journal de l'agriculture , the Éphémérides du citoyen and wrote Physiocratie, ou constitution naturelle du gouvernement le plus avantageux au genre humaine (Paris 1768, 2 volumes), a work in which the views of the physiocratic school are set out and that gave this school its name.

In 1766 he married Nicole Marie Le Dee de Rencourt (1743–1784), his first wife. The couple had three children, Victor Marie du Pont de Nemours (1767-1827), Paul François du Pont de Nemours (1769-1770) and Eleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours (1771-1834).

Ascent

In 1774 he accepted an invitation from the Polish-Lithuanian king, Stanislaus II August Poniatowski, and helped organize the educational system on site.

At the end of the 1770s he became Jacques Necker's economic advisor . During the economic state crises of pre-revolutionary France, Charles Alexandre de Calonne took over his office as general controller of finances, Contrôleur général des finances under the reign of Louis XVI on November 3, 1783 . Du Pont de Nemours became an economist in the government of Calonne, Commissaire général du Commerce . With Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier , he worked from 1785 on the Committee of Agriculture Administration , Comité d'Administration de l'Agriculture .

At the beginning of the 1780s he was also included in the negotiations for the British-French trade agreement of 1786. In 1786 he was appointed Counseiller d'Etat to Louis XVI. appointed. The following year he was appointed secretary of the Assemblées des notables at Versailles.

revolution

He was a member of the Third Estate in the Assemblée nationale constituante (1789–1791) and a member of the Society of Thirty . He later joined the moderate Girondins . When he was without income in 1791, Lavoisier granted him a cash advance to buy the printing press in the Hôtel de Bretonvilliers . It was the former printing house of the Ferme générale that had recently been closed.

After Maximilien de Robespierre took over power , Pierre Samuel du Pont was arrested in July 1794 as a " reactionary " ( réactionnaire ). He escaped the guillotine through the fall of Robespierre. In 1795 he was elected as a member of the Council of Five Hundred . After the coup d'état on September 4, 1797 , he was arrested again for one night.

Disliked by the government because of his work, he had to emigrate and only returned to France after Turgot was appointed finance minister. In a subordinate position of his loyal assistant, he was removed from the business when Turgot was overthrown and only re-employed as a councilor under Calonne . As a member of the National Assembly, he cast his vote particularly on financial issues.

politics

Marie Lavoisier - Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, courted the widow's hand

After the execution of Antoine Lavoisier in 1794, he showed interest in a relationship with his widow Marie Lavoisier , who rejected his solicitation in favor of Benjamin Thompson .

Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, the youngest son of Pierre Samuel du Pont, doing laboratory work with Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier

His second wife was Marie Francoise Robin Poivre, née Marie Françoise Robin de Livet (1748–1841) , who had been widowed since 1786 . Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours married the literarily educated woman on September 27, 1795. She had three children from her first marriage to Pierre Poivre : Marie Poivre (1768–1787), François Julienne Ile-de-France Poivre (1770–1845) and Sarah Poivre (1773-1814).

Later a member of the Council of the Ancients ( Conseil des Anciens , see also Directional Constitution ), he had to seek asylum in the United States as a fierce opponent of the Jacobin faction and only returned after the coup d'état of 18th Brumaire VIII , i.e. after November 9th 1799, returned to France, where he took over the management of several non-profit institutions, namely that of the Bank of the Chamber of Commerce.

In 1802, Pierre Samuel du Pont was won over to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase ( vente de la Louisiane ), a process that enabled the USA to acquire the former Louisiana colony from France in 1803 . President Thomas Jefferson initially had constitutional and political concerns. The French Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was also strictly against the sale because he saw it as an end to the French secret plans to take over North America. Du Pont was living in the US again at the time and had close ties to both Jefferson and influential political circles in France. During a private stay in France, he contacted Napoléon Bonaparte .

After his overthrow, he became secretary of the Provisional Government in 1814 and then of Louis XVIII. appointed to the State Council , but went back to America when Napoleon returned, where he settled with his sons on the Delaware . Generally respected, Pierre Samuel du Pont died in 1817.

His second son, Victor Marie du Pont de Nemours (1767-1827), completed a diplomatic career and worked, among other things, as consul of France in the United States. His third son, Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, founded the EI du Pont de Nemours and Company .

plant

  • Philosophy de l'univers (3rd edition, Paris 1799).
  • Most of the papers scattered in periodicals etc. appeared collectively as Opuscules morales et philosophiques (Paris 1805; some of them in the 2nd volume of the Collection des principaux économistes , ibid. 1846).
  • He published the Œuvres de Turgut (Paris 1809, 9 vols.).

literature

  • Gustav Schelle: Du Pont de Nemours et l'ecole physiocratique. Paris 1888.
  • James J. MacLain: The Economic Writings of Du Pont de Nemours. Cranbury / New Jersey, London 1977.

Web links

Commons : Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Genealogy of the parents
  2. Biography on the Dupont company website
  3. Genealogy of the first wife
  4. Overview of the family
  5. Jacek Jedruch: Constitutions, elections, and Legislatures of Poland, 1493-1977: a guide to Their history. University Press of America. (1982). P. 164. Retrieved August 13, 2011.
  6. ^ Louis-Gabriel Michaud: Bibliography universelle, ancienne et modern. (1843), Vol. 12, pp. 33-34.
  7. Genealogy by Marie Francoise Robin and Pierre Poivre, p. 7 ( Memento of the original of October 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 160 kB) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / pierre-poivre.pagesperso-orange.fr
  8. Genealogy of the second wife .