Charles François Marie, Comte de Rémusat (13 March 1797 – 6 June 1875), was a French politician

Politician

A politician, political leader, or political figure is an individual who is involved in influencing public policy and decision making...

 and writer.

Biography

He was born in Paris. His father, Auguste Laurent, Comte de Rémusat, of a good family of Toulouse

Toulouse

Toulouse is a city in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern FranceIt lies on the banks of the River Garonne, 590 km away from Paris and half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea...

, was chamberlain to Napoleon Bonaparte, but acquiesced in the restoration and became prefect first of Haute Garonne, and then of Nord. Charles' mother was Claire Élisabeth Jeanne Gravier de Vergennes, Madame de Rémusat

Madame de Rémusat

Claire Élisabeth Jeanne Gravier de Vergennes de Rémusat . She married at sixteen, and was attached to the Empress Josephine as dame du palais in 1802....

, born in 1780. She married at sixteen, and was attached to the Empress Josephine

Joséphine de Beauharnais

Joséphine de Beauharnais was the first wife of Napoléon Bonaparte, and thus the first Empress of the French. Her first husband Alexandre de Beauharnais had been guillotined during the Reign of Terror, and she had been imprisoned in the Carmes prison until her release five days after Alexandre's...

 as dame du palais in 1802. Talleyrand was among her admirers, and she was generally regarded as a woman of great intellectual capacity and personal grace. After her death (1824), her Essai sur l'éducation des femmes was published and received academic approval, but it was not until her grandson, Paul de Rémusat

Paul de Rémusat

Paul de Rémusat , son of the French politician Charles de Rémusat, became a distinguished journalist and writer.He was for many years a regular contributor to the Revue des deux mondes. He stood for election in Haute-Garonne in 1869 in opposition to the imperial policy and failed, but was elected...

, published her Mémoires (3 vols., Paris, 1879–80), which followed by some correspondence with her son (2 vols., 1881), that justice could be done to her literary talent.

Claire's memoirs threw light not only on the Napoleonic court, but also on the youth and education of her son Charles. He developed political views more liberal than those of his parents, and, being brought up for a career in law, he published in 1820 a pamphlet on trial by jury

Trial by Jury

Trial by Jury is a comic opera in one act, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It was first produced on 25 March 1875, at London's Royalty Theatre, where it initially ran for 131 performances and was considered a hit, receiving critical praise and outrunning its...

. He was an active journalist, showing in philosophy and literature the influence of Victor Cousin

Victor Cousin

Victor Cousin was a French philosopher. He was a proponent of Scottish Common Sense Realism and had an important influence on French educational policy.-Early life:...

, and is said to have furnished to no small extent the original of Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....

's character, Henri de Marsay. He signed the journalists' protest against the Ordinances of July 1830, and in the following October was elected deputy for Haute Garonne.

Becoming a doctrinaire, he supported most of those measures of restriction on popular liberty which made the July monarchy unpopular with French Radicals. In 1836 he became for a short time undersecretary of state for the interior. He then became an ally of Adolphe Thiers

Adolphe Thiers

Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers was a French politician and historian. was a prime minister under King Louis-Philippe of France. Following the overthrow of the Second Empire he again came to prominence as the French leader who suppressed the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871...

, and in 1840 held the ministry of the interior for a brief period. In the same year he became an Academician. For the rest of Louis Philippe

Louis-Philippe of France

Louis Philippe I was King of the French from 1830 to 1848 in what was known as the July Monarchy. His father was a duke who supported the French Revolution but was nevertheless guillotined. Louis Philippe fled France as a young man and spent 21 years in exile, including considerable time in the...

's reign he was in opposition until he joined in his attempt at a ministry in the spring of 1848. During this time Rémusat constantly spoke in the chair here, but was still more active in literature, especially on philosophical subjects, the most remarkable of his works being his book on Pierre Abélard (2 vols., 1845). In 1848 he was elected, and in 1849 re-elected, for Haute Garonne, and voted with the Conservative side. He had to leave France after the coup d'état

Coup d'état

A coup d'état state, literally: strike/blow of state)—also known as a coup, putsch, and overthrow—is the sudden, extrajudicial deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to replace the deposed government with another body; either...

; nor did he re-enter political life during the Second Empire until 1869, when he founded a moderate opposition journal at Toulouse. In 1871 he refused the Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

 embassy offered him by , but in August he was appointed minister of foreign affairs in succession to Jules Favre

Jules Favre

Jules Claude Gabriel Favre was a French statesman. After the establishment of the Third Republic in September 1870, he became one of the leaders of the Opportunist Republicans faction.- Early life :...

. Although minister he was not a deputy, and on standing for Paris in September 1873 he was beaten by Désiré Barodet. A month later he was elected (having already resigned with ) for Haute Garonne by a great majority. He died in Paris.

During his abstention from politics Rémusat continued to write on philosophical history, especially English. Saint Anselme de Cantorbéry appeared in 1854; L'Angleterre au ... son temps, etc., in 1858; John Wesley in 1870; Lord Herbert de Cherbury in 1874; Histoire de la philosophie en Angleterre depuis Bacon jusqu'à Locke in 1875; besides other and minor works. He wrote well, was a forcible speaker and an acute critic; but his adoption of the indeterminate eclecticism of Victor Cousin

Victor Cousin

Victor Cousin was a French philosopher. He was a proponent of Scottish Common Sense Realism and had an important influence on French educational policy.-Early life:...

 in philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 and of the somewhat similarly indeterminate liberalism of in politics probably limited his powers, though both no doubt accorded with his critical and unenthusiastic turn of mind.

External links

• http://www.archive.org/stream/encyclopaediabri23chisrich#page/82/mode/2up