Jean-Louis Giraud Soulavie

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File:Jean-Louis Giraud-Soulavie, 1792.png
Engraving by Nicolas-François-Joseph Masquelier, 1792

Jean-Louis Giraud Soulavie (8 July 1752 – 11 March 1813) was a French geographer, geologist, volcanologist, diplomat and historian.

He is remarkable for being the author of one of the only descriptions of the effects on the climate in France of the eruption in Iceland in June 1783 of the Laki volcano, which sent such a large quantity of dust and nitrates into the sky over Europe that the general temperature dropped by several degrees, causing an ice age and a very serious famine.

He took an active part in the French Revolution and remained famous for having published a number of apocryphal books, memoirs and correspondence, most often with the aim of slandering the institutions and personalities of the Old Regime.

Biography

Giraud Soulavie was born in Largentière into a rural bourgeois family from Antraigues. Soulavie studied in Avignon at the Collège Saint-Nicolas and at the Saint-Esprit seminary (1771–1776). Ordained a priest in 1776, he became curate at Antraigues, then parish priest of Sept-Vents (1787), in the Diocese of Bayeux, and vicar general of the Diocese of Châlons (1788), where he did not live.

File:Soulavie Chart.jpg
Soulavie's chart of plant altitudinal distributions was among the first to illustrate a transverse section of plant distribution by altitude[1]

He published studies of natural history, his major work being a Histoire naturelle de la France méridionale planned in seven volumes (1780-1784); it earned him the title of corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions of Paris, as well as of the Academies of Saint Petersburg and Hesse-Cassel. However, he estimated in this work the age of the Earth at several hundred million years, the most enormous figure advanced until then. Dividing the history of sedimentary terrain into five epochs, he sketches a transformist theory of the flora and fauna which, under the influence of the environment, diversify, become more complex and transform themselves. Soulavie's work was violently denounced by the abbot Barruel, who published Les Helviennes ou Lettres provinciales in 1781 to ridicule his ideas.[2]

In 1784, the Church, considering that the work contradicted the literal reading of the Bible, ordered him to give up geology, and the publication of the last two volumes was forbidden.[3] A great collector of manuscripts and prints, he then abandoned scientific works from 1785 to publish, between 1789 and 1792, and again from 1799, compilations or editions of more or less authentic memoirs.

Soulavie's work influenced the thinking of Benjamin Franklin.[4] He was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1786.[5]

During the Revolution, having embraced the new ideas, he became a member of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution and, while occupied with literary works, published political articles in various newspapers. He published two articles in the Moniteur to contest the King's right to war and peace (July 2, 1790) and to accuse the abbot of Cîteaux of having made one of his monks, Dom Patouillot, a historian of his order whom he had met at the abbey of Les Chambons in 1776, disappear since January 1780 and lock him up in a cage (July 4). In January 1791, he wrote the address presented to the National Assembly by the priests of Saint-Sulpice who had taken an oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.[6]

Related to Chabot, Bazire, Abbé Grégoire and Collot d'Herbois, he married on May 31, 1792, by a simple private contract, Marie-Madeleine, daughter of the lawyer and notary Urbain Mayaud and Madeleine Tarbouillet born in Largentière on December 12, 17745. When the parish priest refused, one of the vicars of the Bishop of Calvados, Fauchet, gave his nuptial blessing the same day. The couple officialized this union before the public officer of the commune of Carrouge on the 1st Brumaire year II.

On May 25, 1793, he was appointed by the Executive Council as resident of the French Republic in Geneva and in Valais, where he arrived on July 3. He was in constant communication with the Geneva revolutionary Jacques de Grenus, who advocated the annexation of Geneva to France.[7]

In October 1793, the pastor Étienne Salomon Reybaz, minister of Geneva in Paris, and a delegation of Genevans came to complain about Soulavie to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and obtained the support of Hébert and Chaumette, who denounced him, on November 8, at the tribune of Jacobins.[8] He was dismissed on December 6 by order of the Committee of Public Safety. However, the execution of this decree was suspended on the representations of Barère, and he remained in office.

Denounced to the Convention after the 9th of Thermidor as a supporter of Robespierre, he was dismissed by the Committee of Public Safety on 22 Fructidor year II (8 September 1794); his successor, Pierre Adet, arrived in Geneva on 19 September 1794, with an order to have him arrested. Soulavie was locked up in the castle of Tournai then, the following day, he is expelled towards France, bound and garroted, and taken towards Paris under the guard of four gendarmes, where he is incarcerated in the house Talaru. After his departure, the insurgent clubs of Geneva plundered his house. Released in 1795, he sued Jean Baptiste Treilhard, one of those who had ordered his arrest, for damages for the way his papers and effects had been seized. Judged in cassation on 13 Messidor year VII (July 1, 1799), the procedure iwas denounced.

On 6 Germinal year IV (26 March 1796), after having established a deed of cohabitation, Soulavie had a new marriage deed drawn up with his wife before the registrar of the 11th arrondissement of Paris. On the following 24 Messidor (12 July) a daughter was born. In the year VI, Soulavie bought a house in Paris, rue de Verneuil, for 40 000 francs.

After the 18 brumaire, the consuls Sieyès and Roger Ducos have his name placed on a list of deportation, but Bonaparte, who had known him during his mission in Genoa, opposes this measure, and from then on, Soulavie can quietly devote himself to his literary works, which occupy him entirely until the time of his death.

He saved and collected numerous documents on his century: memoirs, pseudo-memoirs, correspondences, treaties, etc. a large number of works. We owe him editions of various memoirs of famous people, including those of Marshal de Richelieu, Maurepas, for example, sometimes partly apocryphal. He is famous for having collected, in addition to numerous prints, more than thirty pieces and pamphlets on the revolutionary period. In his will, deposited with Oudinot-Février, notary in the rue du Bac, he left his daughter an inheritance of several hundred thousand francs, in addition to his private hotel in the rue de Verneuil and his collection.[9]

His widow remarried on October 19, 1816.

Works

  • Histoire naturelle de la France méridionale (1780–1784; 7 volumes)
  • Chronologie physique des éruptions des volcans éteints de la France méridionale: depuis celles qui avoisinent la formation de la terre, jusques à celles qui sont décrites dans l'histoire (1781)
  • Correspondance du cardinal de Tencin, ministre d’État, et de Madame de Tencin sa sœur, avec le duc de Richelieu, sur les intrigues de la Cour de France depuis 1742 jusqu’en 1757, et surtout pendant la faveur des dames de Mailly, de Vintimille, de Lauraguais, de Châteauroux et de Pompadour (in fact 385 pages which go until 1744; the 15 remaining pages were never published; with Jean-Benjamin de Laborde)
  • Histoire de la convocation et des élections aux États-Généraux en 1789, pour servir de préliminaire à l'histoire de la révolution (1790; 1791)
  • Mémoires historiques et politiques du règne de Louis XVI depuis son mariage jusqu'à sa mort (1801; 6 volumes)
  • Mémoires historiques et anecdotes de la cour de France pendant la faveur de la marquise de Pompadour (1802)
  • Histoire de la décadence de la monarchie française (1803; 3 volumes of text + 1 Atlas)
  • La Chronique scandaleuse de Philippe duc d’Orléans (1809)

Notes

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Gohau, Gabriel (1987). Une Histoire de la Géologie. Paris: La Découverte, p. 145.
  3. ↑ Minois, Georges (1991). L'Église et la science, histoire d'un malentendu, 2. Paris: Fayard, pp. 139–40.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Golay, Éric (2001). Quand le peuple devint roi. Genève: Éditions Slatkine, p. 483.
  8. ↑ Guérin, Daniel (1968). La Lutte de classes, sous la Première République, 1793-1797. Paris: Gallimard, p. 439. See also Bossut, Nicole (1998). Chaumette, porte-parole des sans-culottes. Éditions du CTHS, p. 441.
  9. ↑ Bergeron, Louis; Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret (1978). Grands notables du Premier Empire: notices de biographie sociale, 1. Centre national de la recherche scientifique, p. 110.

References

  • Aufrère, Léon (1952). Soulavie et son secret. Un conflit entre l’actualisme et le créationnisme. Le temps géomorphologique. Paris: Hermann.
  • Chevalier, Michel (1986). "L'abbé Soulavie, précurseur ardéchois de la géographie moderne (1752–1813)," Revue du Vivarais, Vol. XC, No. 2, pp. 81–100.
  • Mazon, Albin (1893). Histoire de Soulavie (naturaliste, diplomate, historien). Paris: Librairie Fischbacher.

External links

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