Louis Michel le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau
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Louis Michel le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau (sometimes rendered as Louis Michel Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau; May 29, 1760 – January 20, 1793) was a French politician.
He was born in Paris. He belonged to a well-known family, his great-grandfather, Michel Robert Le Peletier des Forts, count of Saint-Fargeau, having been Controller-General of Finances. He inherited a great fortune, and soon became president of the parlement of Paris and in 1789 he was a deputy of the noblesse to the States-General.
At this time, he shared the conservative views of the majority of his class; but by slow degrees his ideas changed and became very advanced. On July 13, 1789 he demanded the recall of Necker, whose dismissal by the king had aroused great excitement in Paris; and in the Constituent Assembly he had moved the abolition of the death penalty, of the galleys and of branding, and the substitution of beheading for hanging. This attitude won him great popularity, and on June 21, 1790 he was made president of the Constituent Assembly. He remained in this position until July 5, 1790.
During the existence of the Legislative Assembly, he was president of the general council for the Yonne département, and was afterwards elected by this département as a deputy to the Convention. Here he was in favor of the trial of Louis XVI by the assembly and voted for the death of the king.
Towards the end of his life, Le Peletier interested himself in the question of public education; he left fragments of a plan, the ideas contained in which were borrowed in later schemes.
[edit] Death and memory
The vote for the death of the king, together with his ideas in general, won him the hatred of the royalists, and on January 20, 1793, the eve of the execution of the king, he was assassinated in a restaurant of the Palais Royal at Paris by Philippe Nicolas Marie de Pâris, a member of the Garde du Corps. His assassin fled to Normandy, where, on the point of being discovered, shot himself in the head.
The Convention honored Le Peletier with a magnificent funeral, with his body being diplayed at Place Vendôme. The painter Jacques-Louis David represented his death in a famous picture, which was later destroyed by his daughter. Le Peletier was interred in the Panthéon in Paris in 1793. His body was removed by his family on February 14, 1795.
The station Saint-Fargeau of the Paris Métro is named after him.
[edit] Family
Le Peletier had a brother, Felix (1769-1837), well known for his advanced ideas. Another brother was Amédée Louis Michel Lepeletier de Saint Fargeau (1770-1845), entomologist. His daughter, Suzanne Louise, was "adopted" by the French nation.
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
