1828. In reward of his services he was named by the emperor count of Erivan, and received a million of roubles and a diamond mounted sword. From Persia he was sent to Turkey in Asia, and, having captured in rapid succession the principal fortresses, he was at the end of the campaign made a field marshal at the age of forty-seven. In 1830 he subdued the mountaineers of Daghestan. In 1831 he was entrusted with the command of the army sent to suppress the revolt of Poland, and after the fall of Warsaw, which gave the death-blow to Polish independence, he was raised to the dignity of prince of Warsaw, and created viceroy of the kingdom of Poland. On the outbreak of the insurrection of Hungary in 1848 he was appointed to the command of the Russian troops sent to the aid of Austria, and finally compelled the surrender of the Hungarians at Világos. In April 1854 he again took the field in command of the army of the Danube, but on the 9th of June, at Silistria, where he suffered defeat, he received a contusion which compelled him to retire from active service. He died on the 13th (1st) of February 1856 at Warsaw, where in 1860 a memorial was erected to him. He held the rank of field marshal in the Prussian and Austrian armies as well as in his own service.
See Tolstoy, Essai biographique et historique sur le feld-maréchal Prince de Varsovie (Paris, 1835); Notice biographique sur le Maréchal Paskévitch (Leipzig, 1856); and Prince Stcherbatov’s Life (St Petersburg, 1888–1894).
PASLEY, SIR CHARLES WILLIAM (1780–1861), British
soldier and military engineer, was born at Eskdale Muir, Dumfriesshire,
on the 8th of September 1780. In 1796 he entered
the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich; a year later he gained
his commission in the Royal Artillery, and in 1798 he was
transferred to the Royal Engineers. He was present in the
defence of Gaeta, the battle of Maida and the siege of Copenhagen.
In 1807, being then a captain, he went to the Peninsula,
where his knowledge of Spanish led to his employment on the
staff of Sir David Baird and Sir John Moore. He took part in
the retreat to Corunna and the Walcheren Expedition, and
received a severe wound while gallantly leading a storming
party at Flushing. During his tedious recovery he employed
himself in learning German. He saw no further active service,
the rest of his life being devoted to the foundation of a complete
science of military engineering and to the thorough organization
and training of the corps of Royal Engineers. He was so successful
that, though only a captain, he was allowed to act for two
years as commanding royal engineer at Plymouth and given a
special grant. The events of the Peninsular War having emphasized
the need of a fully trained engineer corps, Pasley’s views
were adopted by the war office, and he himself placed at the
head of the new school of military engineering at Woolwich.
This was in 1812, and Pasley was at the same time gazetted
brevet major. He became brevet lieutenant-colonel in 1813 and
substantive lieutenant-colonel in 1814. The first volume of his
Military Instruction appeared in 1814, and contained a course
of practical geometry which he had framed for his company at
Plymouth. Two other volumes completing the work appeared
by 1817, and dealt with the science and practice of fortification,
the latter comprising rules for construction. He published a
work on Practical Architecture, and prepared an important
treatise on The Practical Operations of a Siege (1829–1832), which
was translated into French (1847). He became brevet colonel
in 1830 and substantive colonel in 1831. From 1831–1834 the
subject that engaged his leisure was that of standardization of
coins, weights and measures, and he published a book on this
in 1834. In 1838 he was presented with the freedom of the city
of London for his services in removing sunken vessels from the
bed of the Thames near Gravesend; and from 1839 to 1844 he
was occupied with clearing away the wrecks of H.M.S. “Royal
George” from Spithead and H.M.S. “Edgar” from St Helens.
All this work was subsidiary to his great work of creating a
comprehensive art of military engineering. In 1841 on promotion
to the rank of major-general he was made inspector-general
of railways. In 1846 on vacating this appointment he was made
a K.C.B., and thenceforward up to 1855 was chiefly concerned
with the East India Company’s military academy at Addiscombe.
He was promoted lieutenant-general in 1851, made
colonel commandant of the Royal Engineers in 1853, and general
in 1860. He died in London on the 19th of April 1861. His
eldest son, Major-General Charles Pasley (1824–1890), was a
distinguished Royal Engineer officer.
Amongst Pasley’s works, besides those mentioned, were separate editions of his Practical Geometry Method (1822) and of his Course of Elementary Fortification (1822), both of which formed part of his Military Instruction; Rules for Escalading Fortifications not having Palisaded Covered Ways (1822; new eds. 18115 and 1854); descriptions of a semaphore invented by himself in 1804 (1822 and 1823); A Simple Practical Treatise on Field Fortification (1823); and Exercise of the Newdecked Pontoons invented by Lieutenant- Colonel Pasley (1823).
PASQUIER, ÉTIENNE (1529–1615), French lawyer and man
of letters, was born at Paris, on the 7th of June 1529 by his own
account, according to others a year earlier. He was called to
the Paris bar in 1549. In 1558 he became very ill through eating
poisonous mushrooms, and did not recover fully for two years.
This compelled him to occupy himself by literary work, and
in 1560 he published the first book of his Recherches de la France.
In 1565, when he was thirty-seven, his fame was established by
a great speech still extant, in which he pleaded the cause of the
university of Paris against the Jesuits, and won it. Meanwhile
he pursued the Recherches steadily, and published from time to
time much miscellaneous work. His literary and his legal
occupations coincided in a curious fashion at the Grands Jours of
Poitiers in 1579. These Grands Jours (an institution which fell
into desuetude at the end of the 17th century, with bad effects
on the social and political welfare of the French provinces) were
a kind of irregular assize in which a commission of the parlement
of Paris, selected and dispatched at short notice by the king,
had full power to hear and determine all causes, especially those
in which seignorial rights had been abused. At the Grands Jours
of Poitiers of the date mentioned, and at those of Troyes in
1583, Pasquier officiated; and each occasion has left a curious
literary memorial of the jests with which he and his colleagues
relieved their graver duties. The Poitiers work was the celebrated
collection of poems on a flea (see Southey’s Doctor). In
1585 Pasquier was appointed by Henry III. advocate-general
at the Paris cours des comptes, an important body having
political as well as financial and legal functions. Here he
distinguished himself particularly by opposing, sometimes
successfully, the mischievous system of selling hereditary places
and offices, which more perhaps than any single thing was the
curse of the older French monarchy. The civil wars compelled
Pasquier to leave Paris and for some years he lived at Tours,
working steadily at his great book, but he returned to Paris in
Henry IV.’s train in March 1594. He continued until 1604 at
his work in the chambre des comptes; then he retired. He
survived this retirement more than ten years, producing much
literary work, and died after a few hours’ illness on the 1st of
September 1615.
In so long and so laborious a life Pasquier’s work was naturally considerable, and it has never been fully collected or indeed printed. The standard edition is that of Amsterdam (2 vols, fol., 1723). But for ordinary readers the selections of Leon Feugere, published at Paris (2 vols. 8vo, 1849), with an elaborate introduction, are most accessible. As a poet Pasquier is chiefly interesting as a minor member of the Pleiade movement. As a prose writer he is of much more account. The three chief divisions of his prose work are his Recherches, his letters and his professional speeches. The letters are of much biographical interest and historical importance, and the Recherches contain in a somewhat miscellaneous fashion invaluable information on a vast variety of subjects, literary, political, antiquarian and other.
PASQUIER, ÉTIENNE DENIS, Duke (1767–1862), French
statesman, was born on the 22nd of April 1767. Descended
from a family which had long been distinguished at the bar and in connexion with the parlements of France, he was destined for the legal profession and was educated at the college of Juilly. He then became a counsellor of the parlement of Paris, and witnessed many of the incidents that marked the growing hostility between that body and Louis XVI. in the years preceding the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. His views
