Academic literature on the topic 'Louis Malesherbes'

Abstract Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (1721–94) was a minister for Louis XVI twice and his second ministry coincided with the pre-revolutionary crisis of 1787–8. He wrote long contemporaneous memoranda for the king that were in the family archives, unavailable until 2010 when they were published. He was a well-placed and acute observer seen here discussing and analysing policy. This article considers how his writings can help us to understand the characteristics of the crisis and the strategies of the ministry, the opposition of the parlementaires, and the way political mismanagement deepened the implications of an escalating and increasingly unmanageable situation for the monarchy. Malesherbes offers an insider’s understanding of the importance of public opinion to the reform agenda, and throws new light on the parlementaires’s call for the Estates-General. The article is a lengthy analysis of newly available primary sources.

This chapter describes how Napoleon's measures repudiated the unconditional emancipation of September 27, 1791. Napoleon reverted to a conditional emancipation reminiscent of Jean-François Reubell's punitive legislation of September 28, 1791. He drew on ancien régime precedents. The questions his commissioners drafted echoed those of the Malesherbes Commission (1787). The third article of the legislation of March 17, 1808, that came to be known as the Infamous Decree resembled Louis XVI's 1784 lettres patentes for the Jews of Alsace. In preparing the third article, Napoleon's ministers in fact consulted Joseph II's edicts. It had been no accident, then, that Napoleon said he was convening an “Estates General” for the Jews: for the Jews of Alsace, he had effaced the Revolution's “romance,” turning the clock back to May of 1789 to treat them as foreigners. In fact, the administrative location of the new Consistoire embodied this indeterminate status. If the Jews were a religious group, they should have been under the jurisdiction of the Minister of Cults, if a foreign group, then under the Ministry of the Interior. The legislation placed them under both ministries. The ambiguity of emancipation could not have been more manifest.