FAUCHET, Claude (1530-1601), French historian and antiquary, was born at Paris in 1530. Of his early life few particulars are known. He applied himself to the study of the early French chroniclers, and proposed to publish extracts which would throw light on the first periods of the monarchy. During the civil wars he lost a large part of his books and manuscripts in a riot, and was compelled to leave Paris. He then settled at Marseilles. Attaching himself afterwards to Cardinal de Tournon, he accompanied him in 1554 to Italy, whence he was several times sent on embassies to the king, with reports on the siege of Siena. His services at length procured him the post of president of the chambre des monnaies, and thus enabled him to resume his literary studies. Having become embarrassed with debt, he found it necessary, at the age of seventy, to sell his office; but the king, amused with an epigram, gave him a pension, with the title of historiographer of France. Fauchet has the reputation of an impartial and scrupulously accurate writer; and in his works are to be found important facts not easily accessible elsewhere. He was, however, entirely uncritical, and his style is singularly inelegant. His principal works treat of Gaulish and French antiquities, of the dignities and magistrates of France, of the origin of the French language and poetry, of the liberties of the Gallican church, &c. A collected edition was published in 1610. Fauchet took part in a translation of the Annals of Tacitus, which appeared in 1582. He died at Paris about the close of 1601....
FAUCHET, Claude (1744-1793), the Abbé Fauchet, a French constitutional bishop, and a noted actor in the Revolution, was born at Dornes, in the department of Nièvre, September 22, 1774. He devoted himself to the service of the church, passed through the usual course of studies, and was rapidly promoted. Before he was thirty years of age he made his mark as an orator in a panegyric of St Louis, delivered before the French Academy. For some time he was engaged as tutor to the children of the marquis of Choiseul, a brother of the famous minister of Louis XVI.; and he was afterwards nominated grand-vicar of the archbishop of Bourges, preacher to the king, and abbé of Montfort-Lacarre in Brittany. The influence of the new philosophy was clearly seen in his discourses, and the political tone of his sermon, Discours sur les moeurs rurales, at the festival of La Rosiere at Surènes, especially exposed him to censure. As he was proof against remonstrance, he was deprived of his office as preacher to the king. This occurred in 1788; and when in the following year the Revolution broke out, Abbé Fauchet was ready to fight with the foremost in the great cause. His speeches fired the primary assemblies and the sections of Paris, and on the memorable 14th of July he was one of those who led the people to the attack on the Bastille, displaying, it is said, not only courage under fire, but skill worthy of an accomplished officer. He was elected a member of the commune of Paris, figured in the clubs, blessed the tricolor flag for the National Guard, and by all means helped forward with a passionate zeal the revolutionary movement. He contributed to the reorganization of the church by his Discours sur la religion nationale; and in May 1791 he was appointed constitutional bishop of Calvados. During the same period he had delivered three discourses on liberty, a discourse on the harmony of religion and liberty, tbe funeral oration of the Abbé de l’Épée, and an Éloge civique of Franklin. The last of these was spoken in the rotunda of the corn-market in the course of the festivities of the federation in July 1790. In these pieces the swift progress of the Revolution was reflected in a growing intensity of sympathy and enthusiasm on the part of the orator; and hostility to the church carried him well nigh to a denial of the faith of which he was a minister. In the winter of 1790-91 Fauchet organized, in the precincts of the Palais Royal, his “Cercle Social,” with regenerative intent, to be carried out chiefly by means of fluent oratory. He presided in the meetings under the self-assumed title of “Procureur général de la Vérité.” Condorcet was one of his coadjutors, and “ten thousand persons of respectability” flocked to hear them,—a noisy and phantasmal affair, which came to a speedy end. In 1791 Fauchet was elected deputy to the legislative assembly, and afterwards to the convention. He wrote in favour of an agrarian law, voted against payment of priests who refused the oath to the constitution, and was one of the first to submit to the decree for suppression of ecclesiastical costume. The excesses of the Jacobins, however, alarmed him, and he began to incline towards the Girondists. On the trial of the king he spoke earnestly and courageously against the proposal to put him to death, and voted for the appeal to the people, imprisonment, and banishment. The execution of the king drove him still nearer to the party of the Girondists, and thus made him an object of the wrath of the Mountain. His name was one of those included in the proscription list, but he continued to act as secretary of the assembly till May 31, 1793, when the decree of accusation against the Girondists was passed. On the 18th July he was accused, not only as a Girondist, but also, and without ground, as an accomplice of Charlotte Corday, the murderer of Marat. He was sent to the Conciergerie, was condemned with the Girondist deputies by the revolutionary tribunal on October 30, and with them executed on the 31st.
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