BOISSARD, JEAN JACQUES (1528-1602), French antiquary and Latin poet, was born at Besançon. He studied at Louvain; but, disgusted by the severity of his master, he secretly left that seminary, and after traversing a great part of Germany reached Italy, where he remained several years and was often reduced to great straits. His residence in Italy developed in his mind a taste for antiquities, and he soon formed a collection of the most curious monuments from Rome and its vicinity. He then visited the islands of the Archipelago, with the intention of travelling through Greece, but a severe illness obliged him to return to Rome. Here he resumed his favourite pursuits with great ardour, and having completed his collection, returned to his native country; but not being permitted to profess publicly the Protestant religion, which he had embraced some time before, he withdrew to Metz, where he died on the 30th of October 1602. His most important works are: Poemata (1574); Emblemata (1584); Icones Virorum Illustrium (1597); Vitae et Icones Sultanorum Turcicorum, &c. (1597); Theatrum Vitae Humanae (1596); Romanae Urbis Topographia (1597-1602), now very rare; De Divinatione et Magicis Praestigiis (1605); Habitus Variarum Orbis Gentium (1581), ornamented with seventy illuminated figures.
BOISSIER, MARIE LOUIS ANTOINE GASTON (1823-1908), French classical scholar, and secretary of the French Academy, was born at Nimes on the 15th of August 1823. The Roman monuments of his native town very early attracted Gaston Boissier to the study of ancient history. He made epigraphy his particular theme, and at the age of twenty-three became a professor of rhetoric at Angoulême, where he lived and worked for ten years without further ambition. A travelling inspector of the university, however, happened to hear him lecture, and Boissier was called to Paris to be professor at the Lycée Charlemagne. He began his literary career by a thesis on the poet Attius (1857) and a study on the life and work of M. Terentius Varro (1861). In 1861 he was made professor of Latin oratory at the Collège de France, and he became an active contributor to the Revue des deux mondes. In 1865 he published Cicéron et ses amis (Eng. trans, by A.D. Jones, 1897), which has enjoyed a success such as rarely falls to the lot of a work of erudition. In studying the manners of ancient Rome, Boissier had learned to re-create its society and to reproduce its characteristics with exquisite vivacity. In 1874 he published La Religion romaine d’Auguste aux Antonins (2 vols.), in which he analysed the great religious movement of antiquity that preceded the acceptance of Christianity. In L’Opposition sous les Césars (1875) he drew a remarkable picture of the political decadence of Rome under the early successors of Augustus. By this time Boissier had drawn to himself the universal respect of scholars and men of letters, and on the death of H.J.G. Patin, the author of Études sur les tragiques grecs, in 1876, he was elected a member of the French Academy, of which he was appointed perpetual secretary in 1895.
His later works include Promenades archéologiques: Rome et Pompéi (1880; second series, 1886); L’Afrique romaine, promenades archéologiques (1901); La Fin du paganisme (2 vols., 1891); Le Conjuration de Catilina (1905); Tacite (1903, Eng. trans, by W.G. Hutchison, 1906). He was a representative example of the French talent for lucidity and elegance applied with entire seriousness to weighty matters of literature. Though he devoted himself mainly to his great theme, the reconstruction of the elements of Roman society, he also wrote monographs on Madame de Sévigné (1887) and Saint-Simon (1892). He died in June 1908.
BOISSONADE DE FONTARABIE, JEAN FRANÇOIS (1774-1857), French classical scholar, was born at Paris on the 12th of August 1774. In 1792 he entered the public service during the administration of General Dumouriez. Driven from it in 1795, he was restored by Lucien Bonaparte, during whose time of office he served as secretary to the prefecture of the Upper Marne. He then definitely resigned public employment and devoted himself to the study of Greek. In 1809 he was appointed deputy professor of Greek at the faculty of letters at Paris, and titular professor in 1813 on the death of P.H. Larcher. In 1828 he succeeded J.B. Gail in the chair of Greek at the Collège de France. He also held the offices of librarian of the Bibliothèque du Roi, and of perpetual secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions. He died on the 8th of September 1857. Boissonade chiefly devoted his attention to later Greek literature: Philostratus, Heroica (1806) and Epistolae (1842); Marinus, Vita procli (1814); Tiberius Rhetor, De Figuris (1815); Nicetas Eugenianus, Drosilla et Charicles (1819); Herodian, Partitiones (1819); Aristaenetus, Epistolae (1822); Eunapius, Vitae Sophistarum (1822); Babrius, Fables (1844); Tzetzes, Allegoriae Iliados (1851); and a Collection of Greek Poets in 24 vols. The Anecdota Graeca (1829-1833) and Anecdota Nova (1844) are important for Byzantine history and the Greek grammarians.
A selection of his papers was published by F. Colincamp, Critique littéraire sous le premier Empire (1863), vol. i. of which contains a complete list of his works, and a “Notice Historique sur Monsieur B.,” by Naudet.
BOISSY D’ANGLAS, FRANÇOIS ANTOINE DE (1756-1828), French statesman, received a careful education and busied himself at first with literature. He had been a member of several provincial academies before coming to Paris, where he purchased a position as advocate to the parlement. In 1789 he was elected by the third estate of the sénéchaussée of Annonay as deputy to the states-general. He was one of those who induced the states-general to proclaim itself a National Assembly on the 17th of June 1789; approved, in several speeches, of the capture of the Bastille and of the taking of the royal family to Paris (October 1789); demanded that strict measures be taken against the royalists who were intriguing in the south of France, and published some pamphlets on finance. During the Legislative Assembly he was procureur-syndic for the directory of the department of Ardeche. Elected to the Convention, he sat in the centre, “le Marais,” voting in the trial of Louis XVI. for his detention until deportation should be judged expedient for the state. He was then sent on a mission to Lyons to investigate the frauds in connexion with the supplies of the army of the Alps. During the Terror he was one of those deputies of the centre who supported Robespierre; but he was gained over by the members of the Mountain hostile to Robespierre, and his support, along with that of some other leaders of the Marais, made possible the 9th Thermidor. He was then elected a member of the Committee of Public Safety and charged with the superintendence of the provisioning of Paris. He presented the report supporting the decree of the 3rd Ventose of the year III. which established liberty of worship. In the critical days of Germinal and of Prairial of the year III. he showed great courage. On the 12th Germinal he was in the tribune, reading a report on the food supplies, when the hall of the Convention was invaded by the rioters, and when they withdrew he quietly continued where he had been interrupted. On the 1st Prairial he presided over the Convention, and remained unmoved by the insults and menaces of the insurgents. When the head of the deputy, Jean Féraud, was presented to him on the end of a pike, he saluted it impassively. He was reporter of the committee which drew up the constitution of the year III., and his report shows keen apprehension of a return of the Reign of Terror, and presents reactionary measures as precautions against the re-establishment of “tyranny and anarchy.” This report, the proposal that he made (August 27, 1795) to lessen the severity of the revolutionary laws, and the eulogies he received from several Paris sections suspected of disloyalty to the republic, resulted in his being obliged to justify himself (October 15, 1795). As a member of the Council of the Five Hundred he became more and more suspected of royalism. He presented a measure in favour of full liberty for the press, which at that time was almost unanimously reactionary, protested against the outlawry of returned émigrés, spoke in favour of the deported priests and attacked the Directory. Accordingly he was proscribed on the 18th Fructidor, and lived in England until the Consulate. In 1801 he was made a member of the Tribunate, and in 1805 a senator. In 1814 he voted for Napoleon’s abdication, which won for him a seat in the chamber of peers; but during the Hundred Days he served Napoleon, and in consequence, on the second Restoration, was for a short while excluded. In the chamber he still sought to obtain liberty for the press—a theme upon which he published a volume of his speeches (Paris, 1817). He was a member of the Institute from its foundation, and in 1816, at the reorganization, became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. He published in 1819-1821 a two-volume Essai sur la vie et les opinions de M. de Malesherbes.