Charles-François Lebrun

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles-François Lebrun was born on the 19th of March 1739 in Saint-Sauveur-Lendelin, a small town in the Manche region of France, and he would live to see nearly every form of government his country could devise. Monarchy, republic, consulate, empire, and restoration. He outlasted them all, dying on the 16th of June 1824. How does a man who translated Homer survive the guillotine? How does a constitutional monarchist end up as Napoleon's Third Consul? And how does someone who privately resisted imperial autocracy still accept the title of Duke of Piacenza? Those are the questions that run through Lebrun's remarkable life.

• 2. A Lawyer Among Philosophers

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  In 1762, Lebrun made his first appearance as a lawyer in Paris, having studied philosophy at the Collège de Navarre. It was during the early 1760s that he fell under the influence of Montesquieu and developed a lasting admiration for the British constitutional model. He traveled through the Southern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic before arriving in Great Britain, where he sat in the galleries and watched the debates unfold in the London Parliament. That experience shaped a political temperament that would remain essentially moderate for the rest of his life. By 1766, he held the post of censeur du Roi, and two years later he was appointed Inspector General of the Domains of the Crown. He had arrived at the center of the royal administration.

• 3. Downfall and Retreat

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  Chancellor René Nicolas de Maupéou chose Lebrun as one of his chief advisers, and Lebrun threw himself into Maupéou's prolonged struggle against the parlements. When Maupéou fell in 1774, Lebrun fell with him. Rather than seeking another patron, he turned to literature. That same year, he published a translation of Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, and in 1776 he completed a translation of the Iliad. He retreated to his property in Grillon and attempted to live out the philosophical ideals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. When Jacques Necker led the royal cabinet, Lebrun was occasionally consulted on financial matters, but he was never offered a senior appointment. The years before the Revolution passed in a kind of cultivated waiting.

• 4. Revolution and Its Dangers

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  In 1789, the year the Revolution began, Lebrun published La voix du Citoyen, in which he both recognized the upheaval's historical weight and predicted the direction events would take. He sat in the Estates-General as a deputy for the Third Estate in the bailiwick of Dourdan and took the Tennis Court Oath before the National Constituent Assembly. He professed Liberalism and proposed financial legislation without attaching himself to any single faction. Even after Louis XVI's flight to Varennes in June 1791, Lebrun held to constitutional monarchy, which made him a target for Jacobin suspicion. When the 1791 Constitution barred all former Constituent Assembly members from the incoming Legislative Assembly, he became instead president of the directory of Seine-et-Oise. He resigned on the 7th of August 1792. Three days later, the storming of the Tuileries Palace set France on the path to the Republic and the National Convention.

• 5. Surviving the Terror

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  During the Reign of Terror, Lebrun was arrested twice. In September 1793, a representative on mission named Joseph Augustin Crassous secured his release. The paradox came the following June, in 1794, when Crassous ordered his second arrest. Lebrun was now threatened with the guillotine. He was saved by a relative who stole the record of his prosecution, creating enough of a bureaucratic delay for the Thermidorian Reaction to arrive and render the charge moot. It was survival by paperwork, by the accidental courage of a family member whose name the sources do not record. In 1795, now free and elected to the Council of Ancients under the Directory, Lebrun voted against prosecuting Jacobins, the very faction that had twice tried to destroy him, positioning himself as an advocate for national reconciliation.

• 6. Third Consul

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  Napoleon Bonaparte's 18 Brumaire coup fell on the 9th and the 10th of November 1799, and Lebrun emerged from the upheaval as Third Consul of the French Republic. The role gave him a direct hand in reorganizing the national finances and in administering France's départements. In 1803, he was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and the following year Napoleon named him Arch-Treasurer of the French Empire. From 1805 to 1806, he served as governor-general of Liguria and completed its annexation into France. Then, from 1811 to 1813, he governed part of the annexed Netherlands, reorganizing the départements of Zuyderzée and Bouches-de-la-Meuse. He was assisted in that task by Antoine de Celles and Goswin de Stassart. The man who had once retreated to Grillon to read Rousseau now administered swaths of a continental empire.

• 7. Reluctant Duke, Lasting Peer

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  Lebrun opposed Napoleon's restoration of the noblesse, and in 1808, only with reluctance, accepted the title of duc de Plaisance. It was a rare form of hereditary honour described as a duché grand-fief, a title that would eventually be extinguished in 1926. When the Bourbon Restoration arrived in April 1814, Lebrun had not actively supported Napoleon's deposition, but he accepted the change as a settled fact. Louis XVIII made him a Peer of France. Then the Hundred Days came, and Lebrun accepted from Napoleon the post of grand maître de l'Université. That decision cost him his seat in the House of Peers when the Bourbons returned in 1815. He was recalled to the chamber four years later, in 1819, and died five years after that in Sainte-Mesme, a commune then in Seine-et-Oise and now part of Yvelines. The duché grand-fief he had accepted so unwillingly outlived him by more than a century.