François-Emmanuel Guignard, comte de Saint-Priest
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François-Emmanuel Guignard, chevalier, then comte de Saint-Priest (March 12, 1735 - 1821), French politician and diplomat.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early career
Born in Grenoble, he was admitted a chevalier of the Order of Malta at five years of age, and at fifteen entered the army. He left active service in 1763 with the rank of colonel, and for the next four years represented the court of France in Portugal.
Saint-Priest was sent in 1768 to the Ottoman Empire, where he remained, with one short interval break, 1785, and married Wilhelmina von Ludolf, daughter of the Neapolitan ambassador. His Mémoires sur l'ambassade de France en Turquie et le commerce des Français dans le Levant, prepared during a visit to France, were only published in 1877, when they were edited by Charles Schefer. Besides these, he wrote an Examen des assemblés provinciales (1787).
[edit] Revolution and exile
After a few months spent at the court of the Hague, he joined the ministry of Jacques Necker as minister without portfolio, and, in Necker's second cabinet (1789), was secretary of the royal household and minister of the interior.
During the French Revolution, he became a special object of the popular hatred because he was alleged to have replied to women begging for bread: "You had enough while you had only one king; demand bread of your twelve hundred sovereigns". Nevertheless, he held office until December 1790. Shortly after his resignation he went to Stockholm, where his brother-in-law was ambassador of the Habsburg Monarchy.
In 1795 he joined the Louis Stanislas Xavier, comte de Provence at Verona, as émigré minister of the House of Bourbon. He accompanied the exiled court to Blankenburg and Mittau, retiring in 1808 to Switzerland. After vainly seeking permission to return to France, he was expelled from Switzerland, and wandered about Europe until the Bourbon Restoration.
[edit] Family
His eldest son, Guillaume Emmanuel (1776 - 1814) became major-general in the Russian service, and served in the Napoleonic campaigns of Alexander I. He died in Laon.
The second, Armand Emmanuel Charles (1782-1863), became civil governor of Odessa, and married Princess Sophie Galitzin; their son Alexis Guignard, comte de Saint Priest was noted in literary circles.
The third son of François, Emmanuel Louis Marie de Guignard, vicomte de Saint Priest (1789-1881), was a godson of Marie Antoinette. Like his older brother, Guilliame Emmanual, he took part in the invasion of France in 1814. Upon the completion of his military service years later, he became a diplomat and a leader of Legitimist society in Paris.
His nephew, Louis-Alexandre de Launay, comte d'Antraigues (1753-1812), was a famous pamphleteer, diplomat, spy and political adventurer during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Initially a supporter of the liberal ideas of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, both of whom he had studied with, he turned against the Revolution with the arrest of Thomas de Mahy, Marquis de Favras in 1789. When Favras was executed in February, 1790, d'Antraigues fled France and became an émigré. Later, he became a secret agent for both Louis XVIII and Alexander I. He was murdered in Great Britain in 1812 under mysterious circumstances.
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
