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Up for sale a RARE! "1st Count of Villèle" Joseph de Villèle Signed Document.
ES-3282
Joseph, count de Villèle, (born April 14, 1773, Toulouse,
Fr.—died March 13, 1854, Toulouse), French conservative politician and prime minister
during the reign of Charles X.
Villèle was educated for the navy, made his
first voyage in July 1789, and served in the West and East Indies.
In 1807 he returned to France after having amassed a considerable fortune during his
travels. He was elected mayor of his commune near Toulouse (1808) and mayor of
Toulouse (1815) as well as a deputy in the intransigently royalist chamber of
1815–16. From 1813 he was a member of the royalist secret society Les
Chevaliers de la Foi (The Knights of the Faith), and he sat on the extreme
right with the ultra-royalists. In 1820 he was made a minister without
portfolio. He resigned in July 1821, but in the following December, after the
fall of the government of the Duc de Richelieu, Villèle returned as minister of
finance and soon became the real head of the Cabinet. He was backed at court by
intimates of King Louis XVIII, who in 1822 created him comte
and made him premier. Villèle muzzled the opposition by imposing stringent
censorship on the press (1822). In 1825, after the stubbornly reactionary
Charles X had succeeded to the throne, Villèle’s government provided a long-sought
indemnity for the émigrés who had lost their estates in the Revolution,
financing it by lowering the rate of interest paid on government bonds. Though
the measure was unfair to the bondholders, by satisfying the claims of the
émigrés it had the salutary effect of ending the uncertainty over the legal
ownership of the lands confiscated during the Revolution. During Villèle’s
administration the more conservative Catholic elements had great influence,
especially in the universities, from which they purged professors with liberal
views. All these policies were highly controversial and divisive, but particularly damaging to Villèle was his
disregard, perhaps at the insistence of Charles X, of the widespread sentiment in favour of some sort of constitution. When in the
elections of 1827 he failed to obtain a rightist majority, he resigned (January
1828), and Charles replaced him with the vicomte de Martignac, a centrist, in a
futile effort to appease public discontent. Villèle took no
further part in politics.