The following is a list of the works published by Dumont :—1. Voyages en France, en Italie, en Allemagne, à Malte, et en Turquie, Hague, 1699, 4 vols. 12mo; 2. Mémoires Politiques pour servir à la parfaite intelligence de l'histoire de la Paix de Ryswick, Hague, 1699, 4 vols. 12mo; 3. Recherches modestes des causes de la présente Guerre, en ’ce qui concerne les Provinces Unies, 1713, 12mo; 4. Recueil de Traités d’alliance, de paix, et de commerce entre les Rois, Princes, et États, depuis la Paix de Munster, Amsterdam, 1710, 2 vols. 12mo; 5. Soupirs de l'Europe à la vue du projet de paix contenu dans la harangue de la reine de la Grande-Bretagne, 1712, 12mo; 6. Corps Universel Diplomatique du Droit des Gens, contenant un Récueil des Traités de paix, d’alliance, etc., faits en Europe, depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à présent, Amsterdam, 1626, and following years, 8 vols, fol., continued after Dumont’s death by J. Rousset; and 7. Batailles gagnées par le Prince Eugène de Savoie, Hague, 1723. Dumont was also the author of Lettres Historiques contenant ce que se passe de plus important en Europe, 12mo. This periodical, which was commenced in 1692, and two volumes of which appeared annually, Dumont conducted till 1710, from which time it was continued by Basnage and others until 1728. The earlier volumes are much prized.

DUMONT, PierreÉtienne Louis (1759-1829), a political writer celebrated chiefly for his literary connection with Mirabeau and Jeremy Bentham, was born on the 18th July 1759 at Geneva, of which his family had been citizens of good repute from the days of Calvin. Shortly after his birth his father died, leaving a widow and four children wholly unprovided for. But the widow, though placed in such destitute circumstances, found means to send Étienne to the college of Geneva, where he distinguished himself both by his ability and by his independent spirit. In a short time he not only defrayed the cost of his own education, but even contributed to the support of the family, by acting as répétiteur, or private tutor to his comrades. Having completed his academical course, he took clerical orders; and in the year 1781 he was chosen one of the pastors of the city, where his talents as a preacher soon attracted general notice, and gave promise of his becoming one of the most brilliant and persuasive of pulpit orators. But the political troubles which disturbed Geneva in 1782 suddenly turned the course of his life into a different channel. He belonged to the liberals or democrats, and the triumph of the aristocratical party, through the interference of the courts of France and Sardinia, made residence in his native town impossible to him, though he was not among the number of the proscribed. He therefore became a voluntary exile, and went to join his mother and sisters at St Petersburg, a city to which many Genevese had resorted. In this he was probably influenced in part by the example of his townsman Lefort, who was the first tutor, minister, and general of the czar. At St Petersburg he filled for eighteen months with great acceptance the office of pastor of the French church. In 1785 he removed to London, Lord Shelburne, then a minister of state, having invited him to undertake the education of his sons. It was at the house of Lord Shelburne, afterwards marquis of Lansdowne, where he was treated as a friend or rather member of the family, that he became acquainted with some of the most illustrious men of the country, amongst whom may be mentioned Fox, Sheridan, Lord Holland, and Sir Samuel Romilly. With the last of these he formed a close and enduring friendship, which had an important influence on his life and pursuits.

In 1788 Dumont visited Paris in company with Romilly. During a sojourn of two months in that city he had almost daily intercourse with Mirabeau; and a certain affinity of talents and pursuits led to an intimacy between two persons diametrically opposed to each other in habits and in character. On his return from Paris Dumont formed that connection with Jeremy Bentham which exercised a powerful influence over his future opinions, and, as it were, fixed his career as a writer on legislation. Filled with admiration for the genius of Bentham, and profoundly impressed with the truth of his theory, and the important consequences to which it immediately led, Dumont made it one of the chief objects of his life to recast and edit the writings of the great English jurist in a form suitable for the ordinary reading public. This literary relationship was, according to Dumont’s own account, one of a somewhat peculiar character. All the fundamental ideas and most of the illustrative material were supplied in the manuscripts of Bentham; Dumont’s task was chiefly to abridge by striking out repeated matter, to supply laminae, to secure uniformity of style, and to improve the French. The following works of Bentham were published under the editorship of Dumont :— Traité de la Législation (1802), Théorie des peines et des Récompenses (1811), Tactique des Assemblées législatives (1815), Preuves Judiciaires (1823), and Organization Judiciaire et Codification (1828).

In the summer of 1789, that season of promise and of hope, especially to a Genevese exile, Dumont suspended his labours in England in order to proceed to Paris along with his friend Duroverai, ex-attomey-general of the republic of Geneva. The object of the journey was to obtain through Necker, who had just returned to office, an unrestricted restoration of Genevese liberty, by cancelling the treaty of guarantee between France and Switzerland, which prevented the republic from enacting new laws without the consent of the parties to this treaty. The proceedings and negotiations to which this mission gave rise necessarily brought Dumont into connection with most of the leading men in the Constituent Assembly, and made him an interested spectator, sometimes even a participator, indirectly, in the events of the French Revolution.

The same cause also led him to renew his acquaintance with Mirabeau, whom he found occupied with his duties as a deputy, and with the composition of his journal, the Courier de Provence, in which he was assisted by Duroverai, Clavière, and other Genevese patriots. For a time Dumont took an active and very efficient part in the conduct of this journal, supplying it with reports as well as original articles, and also furnishing Mirabeau withspeeches to be delivered or rather read in the assembly, as related in his highly instructive and interesting posthumous work entitled Souvenirs sur Mirabeau (1832). In fact his friend George Wilson used to relate that one day, when they were dining together at a table d'hote at Versailles, he saw Dumont engaged in writing the most celebrated paragraph of Mirabeau’s address to Mie king for the removal of the troops. He also reported such of Mirabeau’s speeches as he did not write, embellishing them from his own stores, which were inexhaustible. But this co-operation, so valuable for Mirabeau, and so self-devoted on the part of Dumont, was destined soon to come to an end; for, being attacked in pamphlets as one of Mirabeau’s writers, he felt hurt at the notoriety thus given to his name in connection with a man occupying Mirabeau’s peculiar position, and resolved to return to England, which he accordingly did in 1791.

In the eventful years which followed he continued to live chiefly at Lansdowne House, or at Bowood, where the most remarkable men of Europe were frequent guests. Latterly, he formed an intimate friendship with Lord Holland, whom he Jιad known from childhood; and he became a member of the society of familiar friends, the habitual visitors at Holland House, where, during many years, celebrated guests were welcomed of every country, party, religion, and of every liberal profession or station. In 1801 Dumont travelled over various parts of Europe with Lord Henry Petty, afterwards marquis of Lansdowne, and brought back a fresher acquaintance with the mental occupations of the Continental nations, from whom England had for years been widely separated. But Dumont had then opened a new course of more serious occupations, in the editorship of the works of Bentham already mentioned. In 1801 he published the Traité de la Législation, the first fruits of his zealous labours to give order, clearness, and vivacity to the profound and original meditations of Bentham, hitherto praised .only by a very few patient readers, and but little better known, even by name, to the English than to the European public. In 1814 the restoration of Geneva to independence induced Dumont to return to his native place, and he soon became at once the leader and ornament of the supreme council. He devoted particular attention to the judicial and penal systems of his native state, and many improvements on both are due to him. At the time of his death, he was on the eve of proposing a complete code of law, by which he fondly hoped to make the legislation of Geneva an example to Europe. He died at Milan when on an autumn tour of relaxation in October 1829, in the seventy-first year of his age.

See Berthelot’s eloge in Bulk de lα Soc. de Géogr. 2d ser. t. xix.; Matterer, Notice nécrologique, &c., Paris, 1842; Isidore Lebrun, “Biographie,” &c., in Annales Maritimes, t. lxxviii.; De Barins, Vie, voyages, &c., Paris, 1844; Lesson. Notice histor., Rochefort, 1846.