DU PONT DE NEMOURS, PIERRE SAMUEL (1739-1817), French political economist and statesman, was born at Paris on the 14th of September 1739. He studied for the medical profession, but did not enter upon practice, his attention having been early directed to economic questions through his friendship with François Quesnay, Turgot and other leaders of the school known as the Economists. To this school he rendered valuable service by several pamphlets on financial questions, and numerous articles representing and advocating its views in a popular style in the Journal de l’agriculture, du commerce, et des finances, and the Éphémérides du citoyen, of which he was successively editor. In 1772 he accepted the office of secretary of the council of public instruction from Stanislas Poniatowski, king of Poland. Two years later he was recalled to France by the advent of his friend Turgot to power. After assisting the minister in his wisely-conceived but unavailing schemes of reform during the brief period of his tenure of office, Du Pont shared his dismissal and retired to Gâtinais, in the neighbourhood of Nemours, where he employed himself in agricultural improvements. During his leisure he wrote a translation of Ariosto (1781), and Mémoires sur la vie de Turgot (1782). He was drawn from his retirement by C.G. de Vergennes, minister of foreign affairs, who employed him in 1782 in negotiating, with the English commissioner Dr James Hutton, for recognition of the independence of the United States (1782), and in preparing a treaty of commerce with Great Britain (1786). Under Calonne he became councillor of state, and was appointed commissary-general of commerce.
During the Revolution period he advocated constitutional monarchy, and was returned as deputy by the Third Estate of the bailliage of Nemours to the states-general, and then to the Constituent Assembly, of which he was elected president on the 16th of October 1790. But his conservative opinions rendered him more and more unpopular, and after the 10th of August 1792, when he took the side of the king, he was forced to lie concealed for some weeks in the observatory of the Mazarin College, from which he contrived to escape to the country. During the time that elapsed before he was discovered and arrested he wrote his Philosophie de l’univers. Imprisoned in La Force (1794), he was one of those who had the good fortune to escape the guillotine till the death of Robespierre set them free. As a member of the Council of Five Hundred, Du Pont carried out his policy of resistance to the Jacobins, and made himself prominent as a member of the reactionary party. After the republican triumph on the 18th Fructidor (4th of September) 1797 his house was sacked by the mob, and he himself only escaped transportation to Cayenne through the influence of M.J. Chénier. In 1799 he found it advisable for his comfort, if not for his safety, to emigrate with his family to the United States. Jefferson’s high opinion of Du Pont was shown in using him in 1802 to convey to Bonaparte unofficially a threat against the French occupation of Louisiana; and also, earlier, in requesting him to prepare a scheme of national education, which was published in 1800 under the title Sur l’éducation nationale dans les États-Unis d’Amérique. Though the scheme was not carried out in the United States, several of its features have been adopted in the existing French code. On his return to France in 1802 he declined to accept any office under Napoleon, devoted himself almost exclusively to literary pursuits, and was elected to the Institut. On the downfall of Napoleon in 1814 Du Pont became secretary to the provisional government, and on the restoration he was made a councillor of state. The return of the emperor in 1815 determined him to quit France, and he spent the close of his life with his younger son, Eleuthère Irénée (1771-1834), who had established a powder manufactory in Delaware. He died at Eleutherian Mills near Wilmington, Delaware, on the 6th of August 1817.
His family continued to conduct the powder-mills, which brought them considerable wealth. The business was subsequently converted into the E.I. Du Pont de Nemours Powder Company. His grandson, Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont (1803-1865), played a conspicuous part as a U.S. naval officer in the American Civil War. His great-grandson, Henry Algernon Du Pont (b. 1838), president of the Wilmington & Northern railway, was a soldier in the Civil War, and afterwards a United States senator.
Du Pont’s most important works, besides those mentioned above, were his De l’origine et des progrès d’une science nouvelle (London and Paris, 1767); Physiocratie, ou constitution naturelle du gouvernement le plus avantageux au genre humain (Paris, 1768); and his Observations sur les effets de la liberté du commerce des grains (1760). They are gathered together in vol. ii. of the Collection des économistes (1846). See notices of his life (1818) by Silvestre and Baron de Gerando; also Schelle, Du Pont de Nemours et l’école physiocratique (1888).
DUPORT, ADRIEN (1759-1798), French politician, was born in Paris. He became an influential advocate in the parlement, becoming prominent in opposition to the ministers Calonne and Loménie de Brienne. Elected in 1789 to the states-general by the noblesse of Paris, he soon revealed a remarkable eloquence. A learned jurist, he contributed during the Constituent Assembly to the organization of the judiciary of France. His report of the 29th of March 1790 is especially notable. In it he advocated trial by jury; but he was unable to obtain the jury system in civil cases. Duport had formed with Barnave and Alexandre de Lameth a group known as the “triumvirate,” which was popular at first. But after the flight of the king to Varennes, Duport sought to defend him; as member of the commission charged to question the king, he tried to excuse him, and on the 14th of July 1791 he opposed the formal accusation. He was thus led to separate himself from the Jacobins and to join the Feuillant party. After the Constituent Assembly he became president of the criminal tribunal of Paris, but was arrested during the insurrection of the 10th of August 1792. He escaped, thanks probably to the complicity of Danton, returned to France after the 9th of Thermidor of the year II., left it in exile again after the republican coup d’état of the 18th of Fructidor of the year V., and died at Appenzell in Switzerland in 1798.
See F.A. Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Constituante (2nd ed., Paris, 1905, 8vo).
DUPORT, JAMES (1606-1679), English classical scholar, was born at Cambridge. His father, John Duport, who was descended from an old Norman family (the Du Ports of Caen, who settled in Leicestershire during the reign of Henry IV.), was master of Jesus College. The son was educated at Westminster and at Trinity College, where he became fellow and subsequently vicemaster. In 1639 he was appointed regius professor of Greek, in 1664 dean of Peterborough, and in 1668 master of Magdalene College. He died at Peterborough on the 17th of July 1679. Throughout the troublous times of the Civil War, in spite of the loss of his clerical offices and eventually of his professorship, Duport quietly continued his lectures. He is best known by his Homeri gnomologia (1660), a collection of all the aphorisms, maxims and remarkable opinions in the Iliad and Odyssey, illustrated by quotations from the Bible and classical literature. His other published works chiefly consist of translations (from the Bible and Prayer Book into Greek) and short original poems, collected under the title of Horae subsecivae or Stromata. They include congratulatory odes (inscribed to the king); funeral odes; carmina comitialia (tripos verses on different theses maintained in the schools, remarkable for their philosophical and metaphysical knowledge); sacred epigrams; and three books of miscellaneous poems (Sylvae). The character of Duport’s work is not such as to appeal to modern scholars, but he deserves the credit of having done much to keep alive the study of classical literature in his day.
The chief authority for the life of Duport is J.H. Monk’s “Memoir” (1825); see also Sandys, Hist. Class. Schol. (1908), ii. 349.