Alexis Guignard, comte de Saint-Priest

Alexis Guignard, comte de Saint-Priest (27 April 1805 Saint Petersburg - 29 September 1851 Moscow) was a French diplomat and historian. He was the eleventh member elected to occupy seat 4 of the Académie française in 1849.

Guignard was the son of an émigré French nobleman Armand Charles Emmanuel Guignard, comte de Saint-Priest (1782-1863) and his Russian wife, Princess Sophie Galitzine. His grandfather, François-Emmanuel Guignard, comte de Saint-Priest, was one of the last ministers of Louis XVI of France.

Educated in Russia, where his father was the Governor of Podolia and Odessa, Guignard returned to France with his father in 1822. During the July Monarchy, he departed from the Legitimist tradition of his family, particularly that of his uncle Emmanuel Louis Marie de Guignard, vicomte de Saint Priest, to become a warm friend to King Louis-Philippe of France, whom he served between 1833 and 1838 as an ambassador in Brazil, Portugal and Denmark.

In the 1840s, Guignard made his mark as a historian and writer. His most important works were the Histoire de la royauté considérée dans ses origines jusqu'à la formation des principales monarchies de l'Europe (2 vols, 1842), the Histoire de la chute des Jésuites (1844) and the Histoire de la conquête de Naples (4 vols, 1847-1848).

Guignard died while on a visit to Moscow, on September 29, 1851.

References

• "Alexis Guignard de Saint-Priest (1805-1851)" (in French). Académie française. 2009. http://www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/base/academiciens/fiche.asp?param=393. Retrieved 2009-01-18. 
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

This article incorporates information from the revision as of January 2009 of the equivalent article on the French Wikipedia.