Note 36 — Chapter III

Known at first as the Comte de Chinon, and subsequently, up to the death of his father in 1791, as the Duc de Fronsac, Armand Emmanuel Sophie Septimanie, Duc de Richelieu, and grandson of the famous marshal, was born in 1776, and died in 1822. He was the First Gentleman of the Chamber of Louis XVI. at the moment the Revolution broke out. He emigrated and entered the service of Catherine II., and distinguished himself under Suvaroff at the siege of Ismaël, and subsequently commanded an army corps under Condé before Valenciennes in 1793. Having returned to Russia, where they gave him a cavalry regiment, he fell into disgrace during the reign of Paul I., and went back to France in 1801. He declined, however, to renounce foreign military service, and was compelled to leave; when he placed himself at the disposal of Alexander I., who appointed him Governor of Odessa. His services to New Russia in general, and to Odessa in particular, are well known; but on the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814, he re-entered France with them and had a peerage conferred upon him, while at the same time he was appointed First Gentleman of the Chamber. During the Hundred Days he followed Louis XVIII. to Ghent, then at the second Restoration was given the Presidency of the Council (Premiership) with the portfolio of Foreign Affairs. He rendered eminent services, in using his credit with Alexander I., by reducing the War Indemnity, and the occupation of France by foreign troops from seven years to five. When he resigned the Ministry in 1818, the Chambers voted him an income of fifty thousand francs as a national reward; he employed those sums for the foundation of an asylum for the aged at Bordeaux. In 1820, after the assassination of the Duc de Berry and the disgrace of Decazes, he once more accepted the Presidency of the Council, but his difficulties with the Chambers made him resign in 1821. He died in the following year, universally esteemed and regretted. He had been a member of the Académie Française since 1816. Several memoirs of recent works have contributed much to bring his figure into relief: the Mémoires of General Comte de Rochechouart; Le Duc de Richelieu, by M. R. de Cisternes; Louis XVIII. et le Duc Decazes, by M. Ernest Daudet, etc.