Louis-Alexandre de Launay, comte d'Antraigues

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Emmanuel Henri Louis Alexandre De Launay, comte d'Antraigues (December 25, 1753—July 22, 1812) was a French pamphleteer and political adventurer, the nephew of François-Emmanuel Guignard, comte de Saint-Priest (one of the last ministers of Louis XVI).

[edit] Early life and Revolution

He was a cavalry captain at the Palace of Versailles but was dissatisfied with the army and left it, traveling extensively, especially in the Levant. On his return to Paris, he entered the circles of philosophes and artists, visited Voltaire in Ferney for three months, but was more influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - with whom he became somewhat intimate.

De Launay published a Mémoire sur les Etats Généraux ("Dissertation on the Estates-General", 1788), was elected a deputy by the noblesse of Vivarais, took the Tennis Court Oath, and subsequently joined the National Constituent Assembly as a supporter of the French Revolution. However, he suddenly changed his vision completely, becoming a defender of the Bourbon Monarchy and, after taking part in the Marquis de Favras conspiracy in 1790, an émigré.

In the years previous he had been one of the first to identify the Third Estate as "the nation". In a famous passage he wrote:

The Third Estate is the People and the People is the foundation of the State; it is in fact the State itself... It is in the People that all national power resides and it is for the People that all states exist^[1]

[edit] Diplomat, conspirator, and spy

He was the secret agent of the comte de Provence, future King Louis XVIII, with different courts of Europe, and at the same time received money from the courts he visited. He published a number of pamphlets (Des monstres ravagent partout, Point d'accommodement, etc.).

In the Republic of Venice, where he was attaché to the Spanish, then to the Imperial Russian legation. After becoming involved in negotiations with General Charles Pichegru over the betrayal of the French Republic, he was arrested in Trieste by the French Directory (1797), but escaped to Russia.

Sent as Russian attaché to the Kingdom of Saxony, he published a violent pamphlet against Napoleon Bonaparte and the Empire, and was expelled by the Saxon government. He then went to London, and it was universally believed that he betrayed the secret articles of the Treaty of Tilsit to the British cabinet, but his biographer, Leonce Pingaud, contests this. In 1812 he and his wife Madame Saint-Huberty, an opera singer, were assassinated with a stiletto at their house in Barnes by an Italian servant whom they had dismissed. It has never been known whether the murder was committed from private or political motives.

[edit] References

1. ^ quoted in Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, New York, Knopf, 1989, p. 290, 300-1

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain. In turn, it cites as references:
  • Édouard de Goncourt, La Saint-Huberty et l'opéra au XVIIIe siècle
  • Leonce Pingaud, Un Agent secret sous la révolution et l'empire, le comte d'Antraigues (Paris, 1893)
  • H. Vaschalde, Notice bibliographique sur Louis Alexandre de Launay, comte d'Antraigues, sa vie et ses œuvres