Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier

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Choiseul-Gouffier

Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul (27 September 1752,

Académie française, he served as French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1784 until the fall of the French monarchy and a scholar of ancient Greece
.

Biography

Right from his studies at the

duc de Choiseul. Another friend was Talleyrand
, with whom he participated in court intrigues and by whom he was dissuaded from taking up the religious life.

In 1776, he left for Greece on board the frigate Atalante, commanded by

Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1782, then a member of the Académie française in 1783. He was ambassador to Constantinople from 1784 to 1791, taking advantage of this chance to discover Greece. In Constantinople he gathered about him a semi-formal academy where gentlemen engaged in recording the beauties and treasures of the city gathered.[1]

Choiseul-Gouffier at the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, where members of his entourage study archeological findings on site, 1787, painted by Louis-François Cassas

Choiseul-Gouffier visited Athens, where he coveted the

Musée du Louvre, whilst an Apollo previously owned by him is now in the British Museum
.

The

Imperial Public Library of Russia. Empress Catherine the Great became friends with him and gave him lands and a domain in what is now Lithuania. (His descendants lived in Lithuania until 1945 when, hunted by the Communists, the last of the Choiseul-Gouffiers fled to Switzerland
and died there in 1949.)

He only returned to France upon

Peer of France upon the Bourbon Restoration
. Excluded from the Académie française for having emigrated, he regained his seat in 1816. The third volume of his Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce was published posthumously in 1822.

Works

He published his impressions as Voyage Pittoresque en Grèce (Brussels 1782), often reprinted, and republished as late as 1842, as Voyage pittoresque dans l’Empire Ottomane. It presented many little known monuments, set in an idealised Greece crushed by Ottoman domination and desiring to rediscover and reawaken its liberty. This romantic vision of modern-day Greece was taken apart by several other travellers at the start of the 19th century. Like them, he suggested one should go see these sites in person to better comprehend the ancient authors, walking round sites with their texts in one's hand, "to feel more live the different beauties of the pictures traced by Homer, by seeing the images he had in his eyes" ("pour sentir plus vivement les beautés différentes des tableaux tracés par Homère en voyant les images qu'il avait eues sous les yeux"). His narrative allowed his readership to get to know previously unknown regions of Greece, such as the Cyclades. He asked his protégé, the painter Lancelot-Théodore Turpin de Crissé, to produce the engravings for the second volume.

His other works include a Dissertation sur Homère, a

Bosphore de Thrace
.

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier.
  • "Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier", in Marie-Nicolas Bouillet et Alexis Chassang (dir.), Dictionnaire universel d'histoire et de géographie, 1878
  • Biography, from the Académie française site
  • Elisabeth A. Fraser, Mediterranean Encounters: Artists Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774-1839, Penn State University Press, 2017.
    ISBN 978-0-271-07320-0
Notes
  1. ^ (in French) Chantal Grell, "Les ambiguités du philhellenisme: L'ambassade du comte de Choiseul-Gouffier auprès de la sublime porte (1784-1792)" Dix-huitième siècle, 27 (1995) pp 223-235.
Diplomatic posts
Preceded by
François Emmanuel Guignard
Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire

1784–1792 		Succeeded by
Charles Louis Huguet

in name only
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