DUPONT, Pierre (1821—1871), a French song-writer of great popularity, the son of a workman of Provins, was born at Lyons, his mother’s native city, but brought up from childhood under the care of an elderly cousin who occupied the position of priest of Roche-Taillée-sur-Saône. From the seminary of Largentières, where his education was completed, he passed to the uncongenial drudgery of a lawyer’s and banker’s office; in 1839 found his way to Paris, and got some of his poems inserted in the Gazette de France and the Quotidienne ; and two years later was saved from the conscription and enabled to publish his first volume— Les deux Anges— through the exertions of a Provins kinsman and M. Lebrun. The prize founded by M. de Maillé La Tour-Landry was awarded to him in 1842, and he was employed for some time in connection with the Academy’s great dictionary. The thought of trying his fortune as a writer for the stage was taking shape in his mind, when in 1847 the success of his peasant song Pai deux grands boeufs dans mon étable opened up another prospect of fame; and from that date to his death he confined himself mainly, though not exclusively, to the cultivation of his lyrical faculty. Accompanied, as they often were, by airs of his own invention, many of his songs became in the widest sense popular, and were equally welcome in the workshop and the drawing-room. His sympathies were much less, however, with the drawing-room than the workshop; and in 1851 he paid the penalty of having become the poet laureate of the socialistic aspirations of the time by being condemned to seven years of exile from France. The sentence was cancelled, and the poet withdrew for a season from participation in politics. He died at Paris in 1871. His lyrical poems may very ...

DUPONT DE L’EURE, Jacques Charles (1767-1855), a French lawyer and statesman, was born at Neubourg, in Normandy, on the 27th February 1767. In 1789 he was an advocate at the Parliament of Normandy. During the republic and the empire he filled successively judicial offices at Louviers, Rouen, and Evreux. He had adopted the principles of the Revolution, andin 1798 he commenced his political life as a member of the Council of Five Hundred. In 1813 he became a member of the Corps Legislatif. During the Hundred Days he was vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies, and when the allied armies entered Paris he distinguished himself by the firmness with which he asserted the necessity of maintaining the principles of government that had been established at the Revolution. A resolution to that effect which he moved in the chamber was adopted, and he was chosen one of the commissioners to negotiate with the allied sovereigns. From 1817 till 1849 he was uninterruptedly a member of the Chamber of Deputies, and he acted consistently with the liberal opposition, of which at more than one crisis he was the virtual leader. For a few months in 1830 he held office as minister of justice, but, finding himself out of harmony with his colleagues, he resigned before the close of the vear and resumed his place in the opposition. At the revolution of 1848 Dupont de ΓEure was made president of the provisional government as being its oldest member. In the following year, having failed to secure his re-election to the chamber, he retired into private life. He died in 1855 at the age of eighty-eight. The consistent firmness with which he adhered to the cause of constitutional liberalism during the many changes of his times gained him the highest respect of his countrymen, by whom he was styled ...

DUPONT DE NEMOURS, Pierre Samuel (1739- 1817), a French political economist and statesman, was born at Paris on the 14th December 1739. He studied for the medical profession, but did not enter upon practice, his attention having been early directed to economic questions through his friendship with Quesnay, Turgot, and other leaders of the school known as the Economists. To this school he rendered valuable service by several pamphlets on financial questions, and numerous articles representing and advocating its views in a popular style in the Journal de ΓAgriculture, du Commerce, et des Finances, and the Ephemerides du Citoyen, of which he was successively editor. In 1772 he accepted the office of secretary of the Council of Publip Instruction from Stanislas Poniatowski, king of Poland. Two years later he was recalled to his native country by the advent of his friend Turgot to power. After assisting the minister in his wisely-conceived but unavailing schemes of reform during the brief period of his tenure of office, Dupont shared his dismissal and retired to Gâtinais, in the neighbourhood of Nemours, where he employed himself in agricultural improvements. During his leisure he wrote a translation of Ariosto (1781), and Mémoires sur la vie de Turgot (1782). He was drawn from his retirement by Vergennes, who employed him in preparing, along -with the English commissioner Dr James Hutton, the treaty for the recognition of the independence of the United States (1782), and a treaty of commerce with Great Britain (1786). Under Calonne he was admitted to the Council of State, and appointed commissary-general of commerce. During the Revolution period he advocated reform and constitutional monarchy as against the views of the extreme republicans, and was therefore destined for ...