French jurist and politician
Isaac Rene Guy Le Chapelier
(12 June 1754 ? 22 April 1794) was a French jurist and politician of the
Revolutionary period
.
Biography
[
edit
]
Le Chapelier was born in
Rennes
in
Brittany
, where his father was
batonnier
of the corporation of lawyers, a title equivalent to President of the
Bar
. He entered the law profession, and was a noted
orator
. In 1775, Le Chapelier was initiated as a
freemason
at the
Grand Orient de France
.
[1]
In 1789 he was elected as a deputy to the
Estates General
by the
Third Estate
of the
senechaussee
of Rennes. He adopted radical opinions. His influence in the
National Constituent Assembly
was considerable:
[2]
he served as president 3?17 August 1789, presiding over the famous all-night session of 4?5 August, during which
feudalism was abolished in France
, and in late September 1789 was added to the
Constitutional Committee
, where he drafted much of the
Constitution of 1791
.
Le Chapelier introduced a motion in the
National Assembly
which prohibited
guilds
,
trade unions
, and
compagnonnage
,
and which also abolished the
right to strike
. The law did not "abolish the right to strike", no right to not turn up for work and not be dismissed, had ever existed in French law, a "right" that did not exist, and had never existed, can not have been "abolished" by the law of 1791. Le Chapelier and other Jacobins interpreted demands by
Paris
workers for higher wages as contrary to the new principles of the Revolution. The measure was enacted law on 14 June 1791 in what became subsequently known as the
Le Chapelier Law
.
The law effectively barred guilds and trade unions in France until 1864. There had been an effort, by Turgot, to abolish the compulsory guilds (producer cartels) in 1776 - but it did not go into effect. The Estates General proclaimed against the guilds on August 4, 1789 - but the end of these compulsory producer cartels did not come till 1791.
In May, 1789, when the
Estates General
were still meeting, Le Chapelier was one of the founders of the
Breton Club
,
[2]
a collection of deputies initially all hailing from his home province of
Brittany
, but which in the weeks to come drew all sorts of deputies sharing a more radical ideology. After the
October Days
(5?6 October) and the
National Assembly
's move to Paris, the Breton Club rented a
Dominican
monastery and became the
Jacobin Club
, of which Le Chapelier was the first president.
Like many radical deputies, Le Chapelier wished for the central role played by such popular societies early in the French Revolution to come to an end with the settling of the state and the pending promulgation of a new constitution. This conviction was increased by the
Champs de Mars Massacre
of 17 July 1791. Within days, Le Chapelier joined the mass exodus of moderate deputies abandoning the Jacobin club in favour of a new organisation, the
Patriotic Society of 1789
and later the
Feuillant club
.
Le Chapelier, in his capacity as chairman of the Constitutional Committee, presented to the National Assembly in its final sessions a law restricting the rights of popular societies to undertake concerted political action, including the right to correspond with one another. It passed 30 September 1791. By the virtue of obeying this law, the moderate Feuillants embraced obsolescence; the radical Jacobins, by ignoring it, emerged as the most vital political force of the
French Revolution
. The popular society movement, largely founded by Le Chapelier, was thus inadvertently radicalised contrary to his original intentions.
During the
Reign of Terror
, as a suspect for having had links with the
Feuillants
, he temporarily
emigrated
to
Great Britain
, but returned to France in 1794, in an unsuccessful effort to prevent the confiscation of his assets. He was arrested, and
guillotined
in Paris on the same day as
Guillaume-Chretien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes
.
In popular culture
[
edit
]
He is a character in
Rafael Sabatini
's historical novels
Scaramouche
(1921) and
Scaramouche the King-Maker
(1931).
Bibliography
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
Kerjan, Daniel (2018-01-17),
"Chapitre 3. Les francs-macons rennais et la Revolution de 1789: mythe et realite"
,
Rennes: les francs-macons du Grand Orient de France: 1748-1998: 250 ans dans la ville
, Memoire commune, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, pp. 67?83,
ISBN
978-2-7535-6569-2
, retrieved
2020-10-27
- ^
a
b
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the
public domain
:
Chisholm, Hugh
, ed. (1911). "
Le Chapelier, Isaac Rene Guy
".
Encyclopædia Britannica
. Vol. 16 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 353?354.
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