The American Cyclopædia (1879)/Gasparin, Adrien Étienne Pierre, count de

GASPARIN. I. Adrien Étienne Pierre, count de, a French statesman and agriculturist, born in Orange, June 29, 1783, died there, Sept. 7, 1862. He entered the army, but was soon compelled by illness to give up military life. After the revolution of 1830 he was made successively prefect of the departments of Loire and Isère, and in 1831 of Rhône; and for his promptness in suppressing an insurrection at Lyons in 1834 he was raised to the peerage. He became minister of the interior in 1836, and gave his attention especially to prison reforms and the establishment of hospitals. He occupied the same position in the short-lived cabinet of March, 1839. In 1848 he accepted the management of the national agricultural institute at Versailles, which was abolished in 1852. He published a large number of papers and several extended works on agricultural subjects, the principal of which is Cours d'agriculture (5 vols., Paris, 1843-'9). II. Agénor Étienne, count de, a French publicist, son of the preceding, born in Orange, July 10, 1810, died in Geneva, May 14, 1871. He was employed in the ministries of public instruction and the interior, under Guizot and his father, and in 1842 was elected to the chamber of deputies for Bastia, Corsica. He was a conservative, but advocated parliamentary reform, the emancipation of slaves in the colonies, and the rights of the Protestant church, of which he was a member. His independence was not relished by the government; and his sympathy for Protestantism not being shared by his constituents, he failed of reëlection to the chamber in 1846, and retired from political life. He was in the East when the revolution of 1848 took place. When solicited to declare himself in favor of the new constitution, he refused. His disapprobation of the form afterward given to the government by Louis Napoleon was even stronger, and he permanently removed to Switzerland. In the winter he resided near Geneva, and delivered courses of lectures on economical, historical, and religious subjects, many of which were subsequently published. During the civil war in the United States he published two works warmly sustaining the Union cause: Les États-Unis en 1861: un grand peuple qui se relève (1861), translated and published in New York under the title “The Uprising of a Great People: the United States in 1861;” and L'Amérique devant l'Europe (1862), translated under the title “America before Europe.” During the Franco-German war he addressed an appeal to the French people urging them not to persevere in it. His death was hastened by his exertions in the care of refugees from Bourbaki's army, whom he received into his house. Besides the works already mentioned, and numerous articles in the Journal des Débats and the Revue des Deux Mondes and other publications, he published De l'amortissement (1834); Esclavage et traite (1838); Intérêts généraux du protestantisme français (1843); Christianisme et paganisme (2 vols. 8vo, 1846); Des tables tournantes, du surnaturel en général et des esprits (2 vols. 12mo, 1854; translated into English); La question du Neufchâtel (1857); La famille, ses devoirs, ses joies et ses douleurs (2 vols. 12mo, 1865); and La liberté morale (1868). His Vie d'Innocent III. was published posthumously in 1873, and his Le bon vieux temps in 1874. — His wife, Valérie Boissier, born about 1815, has been conspicuous as an opponent of religious and social innovations, and has published several volumes of travels and works on religious subjects. Two of these obtained the prize of the academy: Le mariage au point de vue chrétien (1842; 3d ed., 1853), and II y a des pauvres à Paris et ailleurs (1846).