Louis Legendre
Louis Legendre (22 May 1752 – 13 December 1797) was a French politician of the Revolution period.
Early activities
Born at
He was present in the crowd that demanded the removal of
It was alleged that the day before the execution, on 20 January, he made a motion in the tribune of the Jacobins that the body of the ex-king be divided into 84 pieces so that one could send one to each of the 84 departments of the Republic.[1]
Convention and Terror
Deputy for the
With Louis Louchet and Jean-François Delacroix, he was again on mission to Rouen, and was accused by Hébert of supporting the Royalists. Legendre also supported Danton in early March 1794, but ultimately sided with Robespierre after the latter threatened him with the guillotine.
Reaction and Directory
From that moment until July, he remained inactive. On 27 July, the start of the
He was elected president of the convention, and helped bring about the impeachment of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the perpetrator of mass executions by drowning (noyades) of royalist sympathizers. He was subsequently elected a member of the Council of Ancients. During the French Directory, Legendre was elected to the Council of Five Hundred, but was already suffering from dementia.
Mistaken identity
For two centuries, until the recent discovery of the error in 2005, books, paintings and articles have incorrectly printed a side-view portrait of Louis Legendre as that of the French mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752–1833). The error arose from the fact that the sketch was labelled simply "Legendre". The error was only corrected when an 1820 book containing the sketches of seventy-three famous French mathematicians was discovered in 2008.[2]
References
- ^ assemblee-nationale.fr, French National Assembly, On prétendit que la veille de l'exécution, le 20 janvier, il fit à la tribune des Jacobins la motion que le corps de l'ex-roi fût divisé en 84 morceaux afin qu'on pût en envoyer un à chacun des 84 départements de la République.
- ^ a b Duren, Peter (December 2019). "Changing Faces: The mistaken portriate of Legendre" (PDF). Notice of the AMS. Retrieved 29 February 2020.
Additional sources
- public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Legendre, Louis". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 16 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 376. In turn, it cites as reference:
- François Victor Alphonse Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Legislative et de la Convention (2nd ed., Paris, 1906, 2 vols.), and "Correspondance de Legendre" in the Histoire politique de la Révolution française (vol. xl., 1901).
- Duren, Peter (December 2009). "Changing Faces: The Mistaken Portrait of Legendre" (PDF). Notices of the AMS. 56 (11): 1440–1443, 1455.
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