Discover

'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 (notably by Jules Ferry).

Contents

Death and memory

Family

References

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, he supposedly shot himself in the head. Other sources states that this was a set up, the real murderer having fled to England where he died years later. The true reasons of the death of Le Peletier may remain a mystery (related to a plot involving Spain), but the recuperation of it by the Revolution is none : he was quickly presented to the People of France as the first martyr of Revolution, a label strongly tied to his name until now.
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 possibly destroyed by his daughter. Though missing, this painting (today known by a drawing made by a pupil of David) incarnates an extremely important and symbolic moment in French art history, because it is considered by scholars as the first completed official painting of the French Revolution, a rehearsal in a way of what ''The Death of Marat'' (also by David) would later achieve. The missing painting has recently been interpretated as a revolutionair saint Sebastian inspired by a roman model, showing the difficulty of erasing traditions in the process of producing new icons for the masses, achieving as well a complex regeneration of the self not only valid for Lepeletier, but for David himself, and making by this means a dream of so many revolutionairs come true : being more Romans than the antique Romans of the Republic (an ideal Lepeletier pursued through his actions as a man of the law since 1789 if not before).
Le Peletier was buried 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.

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 the first "adopted child" of the French nation. She is the ancestor of the writer and academician Jean d'Ormesson.

References

★

★ DÉY, M., ''Histoire de la Ville et du Comté de Saint-Fargeau'', Auxerre, 1856

★ HERISSAY, Jacques, ''L'assassinat de Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, 20 janvier 1793'', Paris, ed. Emile Paul, 1934

★ BATICLE, Jeannine, ''La seconde mort de Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau. Recherches sur le sort du tableau de David'' in ''Bulletin de la Société Française d’Histoire de l’Art'', 1988, Paris, 1989, pp. 131-145

★ SIMON, Robert, ''David’s Martyr-Portrait of Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau and the conundrums of Revolutionary Representation'' in ''Art History'', vol.14, n°4, December 1991, pp.459-487

★ MARTUCCI, Roberto,'' En attendant Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau'' in ''Annales historiques de la Révolution française'', 2002, n°2, pp.77-104

★ VANDEN BERGHE Marc, PLESCA, Ioana, ''Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau sur son lit de mort par Jacques-Louis David : saint Sébastien révolutionnaire, miroir multiréférencé de Rome'', Brussels, 2005 - text online on www.art-chitecture.net/publications.php[1]

★ www.repeinture.com (dedicated to the repainting of the missing picture by David, project in process) [2]