Abstract
Pierre LeBrun was born in 1754 in Noyon in the French province of Picardy near the Franco-Belgian frontier, the son of a poor churchwarden.1 Despite his humble beginnings, he was early recognized as an outstanding student, and by 1766 the local cathedral awarded him a scholarship to attend the prestigious Collège of Louis-le-Grand in Paris. There he achieved great academic distinction in the classics, mathematics, and the sciences and eagerly discussed the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and the authors of the Encyclopédie, absorbing the Enlightenment ideas that would drive his future career as a journalist, political activist, and statesman. In this heady environment, LeBrun also became acquainted with such other future revolutionaries as Maximilien Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, and Stanislas Fréron. After his graduation, LeBrun first pursued a career in mathematics and astronomy at the Royal Observatory in Paris. In 1779, however, for reasons unknown, he abruptly enlisted in the French army—an apparently unhappy choice, as after two years he deserted.
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Notes
LeBrun was not illegitimate, as Frederick Masson claims in Le Département des affaires étrangères pendant la Revolution 1787–1804 (Paris, 1877), 162. According to the Noyon archives, LeBrun was baptized 28 August 1754, “son of Mister Christophe-Pierre Tondu, churchwardern, and Elisabeth-Rosalie LeBrun.” Becoming a Liégeois citizen, he changed his name to Tondu-LeBrun and later dropped the Tondu. G. de Froidcourt, “Les Réfugiés Liégeois à Paris en 1793 et Pierre LeBrun,” Le vieux-Liège 114, no. 5 (1956): 55.
Henri Pirenne, Early Democracies in the Low Countries, trans. J. V. Saunders (New York: 1913), 239–40 ; Paul Harsin, La Revolution Liégeoise de 1789 (Brussels, 1954), 1–23; Suzanne Tassier, Les democrats Belges de 1789 (Brussels, 1930).
Henri Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique (Brussels, 1926), 343.
M. H. Francotte, “Essai historique sur la propagande des encyclopédistes français dans la principauté de Liège,” in Mémoires couronnés et autres mémoires publiés (Brussels, 1880), 30:113–47, 154, 220–64.
In general, the democratic movement and the rising opposition to privilege were influenced by the ideas of Locke, Rousseau, Diderot and others, but it was the revolutionary events in America, the United Provinces, and France that best publicized the ideal of popular sovereignty. See R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton, 1959). For more on the conceptions of democracy and rights as understood in Liège at the time, see Pirenne, Early Democracies, and Harsin, La Révolution Liégeoise.
G. de Froidcourt, François-Charles comte de Velbruck (Liège, 1936), 135.
Register of the Correspondence of the Journal général de l’Europe came from the archives of the Société Typographique founded in 1785 by LeBrun in Herve, Belgium, and was photocopied from a copy found in a Belgian bookstore (Pierre M. Gason, Aubel). Register, J. J. Smits to M. Dejoye, 4 June 1785; LeBrun to M. Leclerc, 5 August 1789.
M. Thiry, “Une carrière de journaliste au pays de Liège, P. M. H. LeBrun et le journal de Havre,” La Vie Wallonne, 14 (1954): 375–92, 15 (1955):11–28, 43–54, 80–92. The complete collection of the Journal général, from 2 June 1785 to 26 August 1792, is contained in forty-seven volumes in the Bibliothèque Nationale (hereafter BN).
See also J. R. Censer and J. D. Popkin, eds., Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley, 1987); K. M. Baker et al. (eds.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 1. (Oxford, 1987).
See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Berger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, 1989); James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001).
Miles to Pitt, 13 November 1786, in William Miles, The Correspondence of William Augustus Miles on the French Revolution, ed. Charles Miles (London, 1890), 1:23–24. Miles’s correspondence offers an important firsthand account and insight into the British view of many of these events.
M. Puttemans, La censure dans les Pays-Bas Autrichiens (Brussels, 1935), 290.
The legislative proceedings of the French revolutionary government, including debates, committee reports, decrees, and correspondence, referred to in these chapters can be found in Archives parlementaires, Ière série, ed. Jérome Mavidel Émile Laurent et. (Paris, 1862–1913). The responses of the Assembly to these overtures are also discussed in A. Borgnet, Histoire des Belges à la fin du dix-huitième siècle (Brussels, 1844), 215–16.
Ferdinand Henaux, Histoire du Pays de Liège (Liège, 1872–74; 3rd ed., 1958).
Correspondence between the various ministers and rulers concerning these conferences can be found in J. P. L. van de Spiegel, Résumé des négociations qui accompagnerènt la révolution des Pays-Bas Autrichiens avec des pièces justicatives (Amsterdam, 1841).
See H. V. Evans, “The Nootka Sound Controversy in Anglo-French Diplomacy,” Journal of Modern History 46 (December 1974): 609–40.
L. P. Gachard, ed., Documents politiques et diplomatiques sur la révolution belge de 1790 (Brussels, 1834), 312–14.
André Lasseray, “Les corps Belges et Liégeois aux armées de la République,” Revue d’histoire moderne 4 (1919):161–95.
Maret published Manifeste des Belges et Liégeois unis a Paris and a laudatory review in Le Moniteur, 29 February 1792.
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© 2008 Patricia Chastain Howe
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Howe, P.C. (2008). Pierre LeBrun and the Liégeois Revolution, 1754–1792. In: Foreign Policy and the French Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616882_2
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