Part 26

DUPONT DE L'EURE, JACQUES CHARLES (1767-1855), French lawyer and statesman, was born at Neubourg (Eure), in Normandy, on the 27th of February 1767. In 1789 he was an advocate at the parlement of Normandy. During the republic and the empire he filled successively judicial offices at Louviers, Rouen and Evreux. He had adopted the principles of the Revolution, and in 1798 he commenced his political life as a member of the Council of Five Hundred. In 1813 he became a member of the Corps Legislatif. During the Hundred Days he was vice-president of the chamber of deputies, and when the allied armies entered Paris he drew up the declaration in which the chamber asserted the necessity of maintaining the principles of government that had been established at the Revolution. He was chosen one of the commissioners to negotiate with the allied sovereigns. From 1817 till 1849 he was uninterruptedly a member of the chamber of deputies, and he acted consistently with the liberal opposition, of which at more than one crisis he was the virtual leader. For a few months in 1830 he held office as minister of justice, but, finding himself out of harmony with his colleagues, he resigned before the close of the year and resumed his place in the opposition. At the revolution of 1848 Dupont de l'Eure was made president of the provisional assembly as being its oldest member. In the following year, having failed to secure his re-election to the chamber, he retired into private life. He died in 1855. The consistent firmness with which he adhered to the cause of constitutional liberalism during the many changes of his times gained him the highest respect of his countrymen, by whom he was styled the Aristides of the French tribune.

DU PONT DE NEMOURS, PIERRE SAMUEL (1739-1817), French political economist and statesman, was born at Paris on the 14th of September 1739. He studied for the medical profession, but did not enter upon practice, his attention having been early directed to economic questions through his friendship with Francois Quesnay, Turgot and other leaders of the school known as the Economists. To this school he rendered valuable service by several pamphlets on financial questions, and numerous articles representing and advocating its views in a popular style in the _Journal de l'agriculture, du commerce, et des finances_, and the _Ephemerides du citoyen_, of which he was successively editor. In 1772 he accepted the office of secretary of the council of public instruction from Stanislas Poniatowski, king of Poland. Two years later he was recalled to France by the advent of his friend Turgot to power. After assisting the minister in his wisely-conceived but unavailing schemes of reform during the brief period of his tenure of office, Du Pont shared his dismissal and retired to Gatinais, in the neighbourhood of Nemours, where he employed himself in agricultural improvements. During his leisure he wrote a translation of Ariosto (1781), and _Memoires sur la vie de Turgot_ (1782). He was drawn from his retirement by C.G. de Vergennes, minister of foreign affairs, who employed him in 1782 in negotiating, with the English commissioner Dr James Hutton, for recognition of the independence of the United States (1782), and in preparing a treaty of commerce with Great Britain (1786). Under Calonne he became councillor of state, and was appointed commissary-general of commerce.

During the Revolution period he advocated constitutional monarchy, and was returned as deputy by the Third Estate of the _bailliage_ of Nemours to the states-general, and then to the Constituent Assembly, of which he was elected president on the 16th of October 1790. But his conservative opinions rendered him more and more unpopular, and after the 10th of August 1792, when he took the side of the king, he was forced to lie concealed for some weeks in the observatory of the Mazarin College, from which he contrived to escape to the country. During the time that elapsed before he was discovered and arrested he wrote his _Philosophie de l'univers_. Imprisoned in La Force (1794), he was one of those who had the good fortune to escape the guillotine till the death of Robespierre set them free. As a member of the Council of Five Hundred, Du Pont carried out his policy of resistance to the Jacobins, and made himself prominent as a member of the reactionary party. After the republican triumph on the 18th Fructidor (4th of September) 1797 his house was sacked by the mob, and he himself only escaped transportation to Cayenne through the influence of M.J. Chenier. In 1799 he found it advisable for his comfort, if not for his safety, to emigrate with his family to the United States. Jefferson's high opinion of Du Pont was shown in using him in 1802 to convey to Bonaparte unofficially a threat against the French occupation of Louisiana; and also, earlier, in requesting him to prepare a scheme of national education, which was published in 1800 under the title _Sur l'education nationale dans les Etats-Unis d'Amerique_. Though the scheme was not carried out in the United States, several of its features have been adopted in the existing French code. On his return to France in 1802 he declined to accept any office under Napoleon, devoted himself almost exclusively to literary pursuits, and was elected to the _Institut_. On the downfall of Napoleon in 1814 Du Pont became secretary to the provisional government, and on the restoration he was made a councillor of state. The return of the emperor in 1815 determined him to quit France, and he spent the close of his life with his younger son, Eleuthere Irenee (1771-1834), who had established a powder manufactory in Delaware. He died at Eleutherian Mills near Wilmington, Delaware, on the 6th of August 1817.

His family continued to conduct the powder-mills, which brought them considerable wealth. The business was subsequently converted into the E. I. Du Pont de Nemours Powder Company. His grandson, Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont (1803-1865), played a conspicuous part as a U.S. naval officer in the American Civil War. His great-grandson, Henry Algernon Du Pont (b. 1838), president of the Wilmington & Northern railway, was a soldier in the Civil War, and afterwards a United States senator.

Du Pont's most important works, besides those mentioned above, were his _De l'origine et des progres d'une science nouvelle_ (London and Paris, 1767); _Physiocratie, ou constitution naturelle du gouvernement le plus avantageux au genre humain_ (Paris, 1768); and his _Observations sur les effets de la liberte du commerce des grains_ (1760). They are gathered together in vol. ii. of the _Collection des economistes_ (1846). See notices of his life (1818) by Silvestre and Baron de Gerando; also Schelle, _Du Pont de Nemours et l'ecole physiocratique_ (1888).

DUPORT, ADRIEN (1759-1798), French politician, was born in Paris. He became an influential advocate in the parlement, becoming prominent in opposition to the ministers Calonne and Lomenie de Brienne. Elected in 1789 to the states-general by the _noblesse_ of Paris, he soon revealed a remarkable eloquence. A learned jurist, he contributed during the Constituent Assembly to the organization of the judiciary of France. His report of the 29th of March 1790 is especially notable. In it he advocated trial by jury; but he was unable to obtain the jury system in civil cases. Duport had formed with Barnave and Alexandre de Lameth a group known as the "triumvirate," which was popular at first. But after the flight of the king to Varennes, Duport sought to defend him; as member of the commission charged to question the king, he tried to excuse him, and on the 14th of July 1791 he opposed the formal accusation. He was thus led to separate himself from the Jacobins and to join the Feuillant party. After the Constituent Assembly he became president of the criminal tribunal of Paris, but was arrested during the insurrection of the 10th of August 1792. He escaped, thanks probably to the complicity of Danton, returned to France after the 9th of Thermidor of the year II., left it in exile again after the republican _coup d'etat_ of the 18th of Fructidor of the year V., and died at Appenzell in Switzerland in 1798.

See F.A. Aulard, _Les Orateurs de la Constituante_ (2nd ed., Paris, 1905, 8vo).

DUPORT, JAMES (1606-1679), English classical scholar, was born at Cambridge. His father, John Duport, who was descended from an old Norman family (the Du Ports of Caen, who settled in Leicestershire during the reign of Henry IV.), was master of Jesus College. The son was educated at Westminster and at Trinity College, where he became fellow and subsequently vicemaster. In 1639 he was appointed regius professor of Greek, in 1664 dean of Peterborough, and in 1668 master of Magdalene College. He died at Peterborough on the 17th of July 1679. Throughout the troublous times of the Civil War, in spite of the loss of his clerical offices and eventually of his professorship, Duport quietly continued his lectures. He is best known by his _Homeri gnomologia_ (1660), a collection of all the aphorisms, maxims and remarkable opinions in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, illustrated by quotations from the Bible and classical literature. His other published works chiefly consist of translations (from the Bible and Prayer Book into Greek) and short original poems, collected under the title of _Horae subsecivae_ or _Stromata_. They include congratulatory odes (inscribed to the king); funeral odes; _carmina comitialia_ (tripos verses on different theses maintained in the schools, remarkable for their philosophical and metaphysical knowledge); sacred epigrams; and three books of miscellaneous poems (_Sylvae_). The character of Duport's work is not such as to appeal to modern scholars, but he deserves the credit of having done much to keep alive the study of classical literature in his day.

The chief authority for the life of Duport is J.H. Monk's "Memoir" (1825); see also Sandys, _Hist. Class. Schol._ (1908), ii. 349.

DUPPEL, a village of Germany, in the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein, opposite the town of Sonderburg (on the island of Alsen). (Pop. 600.) The position of Duppel, forming as it does a bridge-head for the defenders of the island of Alsen, played a conspicuous part in the wars between Denmark and the Germans. On the 28th of May 1848 the German federal troops were there defeated by the Danes under General Hedemann, and a second battle was fought on the 6th of June 1848. On the 13th of April 1849 an indecisive battle was fought between the federal troops under von Prittwitz and the Danes under von Bulow. The most important event in the military history of Duppel was, however, the siege by the Prussians of the Danish position in 1864. The flanks of the defenders' line rested upon the Alsen Sund and the sea, and it was strengthened by ten redoubts. A second line of trenches with lunettes at intervals was constructed behind the front attacked, and a small reduit opposite Sonderburg to cover the bridges between Alsen and the mainland. The Prussian siege corps was commanded by Prince Frederick Charles (headquarters, Duppel village), and after three weeks' skirmishing a regular siege was begun, the batteries being opened on the 15th of March. The first parallel was completed fifteen days later, the front of attack being redoubts II. to VI., forming the centre of the Danish entrenchments on the road Duppel-Sonderburg. The siege was pushed rapidly from the first parallel and the assault delivered on the 18th of April, against the redoubts I. to VI., each redoubt being attacked by a separate column. The whole line was carried after a brief but severe conflict, and the Prussians had penetrated to and captured the reduit opposite Sonderburg by 2 P.M. The loss of the Danes, half of whose forces were not engaged, included 1800 killed and wounded and 3400 prisoners. This operation was followed by the daring passage of the Alsen Sund, effected by the Prussians in boats almost under the guns of the Danish war-ships, and resulting in the capture of the whole island of Alsen (June 29th, 1864). After being still further strengthened and linked with similar defences at Sonderburg, the Duppel entrenchments were abandoned in 1881 in favour of landward fortifications around Kiel.

See R. Neumann, _Uber den Angriff der Duppeler Schanzen in der Zeit vom 15. Marz bis 18. April 1864_ (Berlin, 1865); and _Der deutschdanische Krieg 1864_, published by the Prussian General Staff (Berlin, 1887).

DU PRAT, ANTOINE (1463-1535), chancellor of France and cardinal, was born at Issoire on the 17th of January 1463. He began life as a lawyer, and rose rapidly in the legal hierarchy owing to the influence of his cousin Antoine Bohier, cardinal archbishop of Bourges. The first office which he held was that of lieutenant-general in the _bailliage_ of Montferrand; in 1507 he became first president of the parlement of Paris. Louise of Savoy had employed him as her adviser in her affairs, and had made him tutor to her son. When Francis I. ascended the throne he made Du Prat chancellor of France, in which capacity he played an important part in the government. It was he who negotiated with Leo X. concerning the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction and the establishment of a concordat. After the meeting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520) he was engaged in unsuccessful negotiations with Wolsey. During the regency of Louise of Savoy he, together with Florimond Robertet, was at the head of affairs. He took an active part in the suit brought by Louise of Savoy against the Constable de Bourbon, and in 1532 completed the work of uniting Brittany to France. After the death of his wife in 1507 Du Prat had taken orders; he received the bishoprics of Valence, Die, Meaux and Albi, and the archbishopric of Sens (1525); in 1527 he became cardinal, and in 1530 papal legate. He was a determined adversary of the Reformation. He died on the 9th of July 1535.

See the marquis Du Prat, _Vie d'Antoine Du Prat_ (Paris, 1857).

DUPRE, JULES (1812-1889), French painter, was one of the chief members of the Barbizon group of romantic landscape painters. If Corot stands for the lyric and Rousseau for the epic aspect of the poetry of nature, Dupre is the exponent of her tragic and dramatic aspects. He was the son of a porcelain manufacturer, and started his career in his father's works, whence he went to his uncle's china factory at Sevres. After studying for some time under Diebold, a painter of clock faces, he had to pass through a short period of privation, until he attracted the attention of a wealthy patron, who came to his studio and bought all the studies on the walls at the price demanded by the artist--20 francs apiece. Dupre exhibited first at the Salon in 1831, and three years later was awarded a second-class medal. In the same year he came to England, where he was deeply impressed by the genius of Constable. From him he learnt how to express movement in nature; and the district of Southampton and Plymouth, with its wide, unbroken expanses of water, sky and ground, gave him good opportunities for studying the tempestuous motion of storm-clouds and the movement of foliage driven by the wind. He received the cross of the Legion of Honour in 1848. Dupre's colour is sonorous and resonant; the subjects for which he showed marked preference are dramatic sunset effects and stormy skies and seas. Late in life he changed his style and gained appreciably in largeness of handling and arrived at greater simplicity in his colour harmonies. Among his chief works are the "Morning" and "Evening" at the Louvre, and the early "Crossing the Bridge" in the Wallace Collection.

DUPUIS, CHARLES FRANCOIS (1742-1809), French scientific writer and politician, was born of poor parents at Trye-Chateau, between Gisors and Chaumont, on the 26th of October 1742. His father, who was a teacher, instructed him in mathematics and land-surveying. While he was engaged in measuring a tower by a geometrical method, the duc de la Rochefoucauld met him and was so taken by the lad's intelligence that he gave him a bursary in the college of Harcourt. Dupuis made such rapid progress that, at the age of twenty-four, he was appointed professor of rhetoric at the college of Lisieux, where he had previously passed as a licentiate of theology. In his hours of leisure he studied law, and in 1770 he abandoned the clerical career and became an advocate. Two university discourses which he delivered in Latin were printed, and laid the foundation of his literary fame. His chief attention, however, was devoted to mathematics, the object of his early studies; and for some years he attended the astronomical lectures of Lalande, with whom he formed an intimate friendship. In 1778 he constructed a telegraph on the principle suggested by Guillaume Amontons (q.v.), and employed it in keeping up a correspondence with his friend Jean Fortin in the neighbouring village of Bagneux, until the Revolution made it necessary to destroy his machine to avoid suspicion. About the same time Dupuis formed his theory as to the origin of the Greek months. He endeavoured to account for the want of any resemblance between the groups of stars and the names by which they are known, by supposing that the zodiac was, for the people who invented it, a sort of calendar at once astronomical and rural, and that the figures chosen for the constellations were such as would naturally suggest the agricultural operations of the season. It seemed only necessary, therefore, to discover the clime and the period in which the constellation of Capricorn must have arisen with the sun on the day of the summer solstice, and the vernal equinox must have occurred under Libra. It appeared to Dupuis that this clime was Upper Egypt, and that the perfect correspondence between the signs and their significations had existed in that country at a period of between fifteen and sixteen thousand years before the present time; that it had existed only there; and that this harmony had been disturbed by the effect of the precession of the equinoxes. He therefore ascribed the invention of the signs of the zodiac to the people who then inhabited Upper Egypt or Ethiopia. This was the basis on which Dupuis established his mythological system, and endeavoured to explain fabulous history and the whole system of the theogony and theology of the ancients. Dupuis published several detached parts of his system in the _Journal des savants_ for 1777 and 1781. These he afterwards collected and published, first in Lalande's _Astronomy_, and then in a separate volume in 4to, 1781, under the title of _Memoire sur l'origine des constellations et sur l'explication de la fable par l'astronomie_. The theory propounded in this memoir was refuted by J.S. Bailly in his _Histoire de l'astronomie_, but, at the same time, with a just acknowledgment of the erudition and ingenuity exhibited by the author.

Condorcet proposed Dupuis to Frederick the Great of Prussia as a fit person to succeed Thiebault in the professorship of literature at Berlin; and Dupuis had accepted the invitation, when the death of the king cancelled the engagement. The chair of humanity in the College of France having at the same time become vacant, it was conferred on Dupuis; and in 1788 he became a member of the Academy of Inscriptions. He now resigned his professorship at Lisieux, and was appointed by the administrators of the department of Paris one of the four commissioners of public instruction. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary troubles Dupuis sought safety at Evreux; and, having been chosen a member of the National Convention by the department of Seine-et-Oise, he distinguished himself by his moderation. In the third year of the republic he was elected secretary to the Assembly, and in the fourth he was chosen a member of the Council of Five Hundred. After Bonaparte's _coup d'etat_ of the 18th Brumaire he was elected by the department of Seine-et-Oise a member of the Legislative Body, of which he became the president. He was proposed as a candidate for the senate, but resolved to abandon politics, devoting himself during the rest of his life to his favourite studies.

In 1795 he published the work by which he is best known, entitled _Origine de tous les cultes, ou la religion universelle_ (3 vols. 4to, with an atlas, or 12 vols. 12mo). This work, of which an edition revised by P.R. Auguis was published in 1822 (10th ed., 1835-1836), became the subject of much bitter controversy, and the theory it propounded as to the origin of mythology in Upper Egypt led to the expedition organized by Napoleon for the exploration of that country. In 1798 Dupuis published an abridgment of his work in one volume 8vo, which met with no better success than the original. Another abridgment of the same work, executed upon a much more methodical plan, was published by M. de Tracy. The other works of Dupuis consist of two memoirs on the Pelasgi, inserted in the _Memoirs of the Institute_; a memoir "On the Zodiac of Tentyra," published in the _Revue philosophique_ for May 1806; and a _Memoire explicatif du zodiaque chronologique et mythologique_, published the same year, in one volume 4to. He died on the 29th of September 1809.