LINGUET, SIMON-NICOLAS-HENRI

born July 14, 1736, Reims, Fr. died June 27, 1794, Paris French journalist and lawyer whose delight in taking views opposing everyone else's earned him exiles, imprisonment, and finally the guillotine. He attended the Collge de Beauvais, winning the three highest prizes there in 1751. Received at first into the ranks of the Philosophes, he soon went over to their opponents and thenceforth attacked whatever was considered modern and enlightened. His early writings include Histoire du sicle d'Alexandre le Grand (1762), in which he declared that Nero caused far fewer deaths than Alexander, and Le Fanatisme des philosophes (1764), a violent attack on the most widely held doctrines of the Enlightenment. He was admitted as an advocate in the Paris Parlement in 1764, and his greatest masterpiece of pleading was his Mmoire of 1772 on behalf of the Comte de Morangis, accused of trying to defraud his creditors. His attacks on other lawyers, however, led to his expulsion from the bar in 1775. He went into exile, travelled in Switzerland, Holland, and England and launched the Annales politiques, civiles et littraires du XVIIIe sicle (177792). Soon after his return to France he began an attack on the Duc de Duras and was imprisoned in the Bastille (178082). On his release he went back to England, where he published Mmoires sur la Bastille (1783). Proceeding to Brussels, he obtained titles of nobility and 1,000 ducats from the Holy Roman emperor Joseph II; yet, in 1789 he argued in favour of the Belgian insurgents against Joseph's regime. During the French Revolution, Linguet presented several eloquent petitions, including one to the Constituent Assembly in defense of the inhabitants of San Domingo against the white tyrants in 1791. He retired to Marnes, near Ville d'Avray, in 1792. Arrested there, he was eventually tried and condemned to death in Paris for having flattered the despots of Vienna and London. Among his more important works are the following: Thorie des lois civiles (1767), an attack on Montesquieu; Histoire impartiale des Jsuites (1768); and Histoire des rvolutions de l'empire romain (2nd ed., 176668).