New Dictionary of the French Revolution, A by Ballard Richard

Author:Ballard, Richard.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9780857733238
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Published: 2011-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Moore, Lucy, Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (London: HarperCollins, 2006).

Le Peletier, Louis-Michel, Marquis de Saint-Fargeau (1760–93)

Le Peletier ranks with Marat and Chalier as a Jacobin martyr. He voted for the king’s death, focusing the hatred of royalists upon himself. On the night before Louis XVI’s execution, a member of the royal bodyguard, Philippe de Pâris, found him in a restaurant in the Palais-Royal, killed him with his sabre without the rest of the diners noticing, and escaped from the room.44 The threat of counter-revolution was never far away.

Le Peletier came from a noble and wealthy family; his great-grandfather had been Controller-General of the Finances, he was president of the court of the Paris parlement, then its advocate general. He was elected to the Estates-General for the nobility of Paris-ville, but took his time over joining the thirds in the National Assembly. He became progressive in his views, proposing the abolition of the death penalty and the galleys in the Constituent Assembly. ‘Distanced by character and principle from extreme ideas, my system was that of conciliation which I did not believe was impossible,’ he commented.45 He took his turn as president of the assembly. Some called him the ‘Alcibiades’ of the Revolution.

Barred from the Legislative Assembly, Le Peletier was President of the Departmental Directory in the Yonne, and was a deputy for the same department in the National Convention. His interests included providing the new Republic with a uniform system of education in state schools for boys and girls alike, who would then imbibe the Revolution’s ideals.

Le Peletier was given a state funeral in the Pantheon after what amounted to a lying-in-state in the Place Vendôme on the pedestal where Louis XIV’s statue had been. Jacques-Louis David produced a portrait of him comparable with the one of Marat he was later to paint, but it was destroyed by his royalist daughter.

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