LACRETELLE, PIERRE LOUIS DE (1751-1824), French politician and writer, was born at Metz on the 9th of October 1751. He practised as a barrister in Paris; and under the Revolution was elected as a député suppléant in the Constituent Assembly, and later as deputy in the Legislative Assembly. He belonged to the moderate party known as the “Feuillants,” but after the 10th of August 1792 he ceased to take part in public life. In 1803 he became a member of the Institute, taking the place of La Harpe. Under the Restoration he was one of the chief editors of the Minerve française; he wrote also an essay, Sur le 18 Brumaire (1799), some Fragments politiques et littéraires (1817), and a treatise Des partis politiques et des factions de la prétendue aristocratie d’aujourd’hui (1819).
His younger brother, Jean Charles Dominique de Lacretelle, called Lacretelle le jeune (1766-1855), historian and journalist, was also born at Metz on the 3rd of September 1766. He was called to Paris by his brother in 1787, and during the Revolution belonged, like him, to the party of the Feuillants. He was for some time secretary to the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, the celebrated philanthropist, and afterwards joined the staff of the Journal de Paris, then managed by Suard, and where he had as colleagues André Chénier and Antoine Roucher. He made no attempt to hide his monarchist sympathies, and this, together with the way in which he reported the trial and death of Louis XVI., brought him in peril of his life; to avoid this danger he enlisted in the army, but after Thermidor he returned to Paris and to his newspaper work. He was involved in the royalist movement of the 13th Vendémiaire, and condemned to deportation after the 18th Fructidor; but, thanks to powerful influence, he was left “forgotten” in prison till after the 18th Brumaire, when he was set at liberty by Fouché. Under the Empire he was appointed a professor of history in the Faculté des lettres of Paris (1809), and elected as a member of the Académie française (1811). In 1827 he was prime mover in the protest made by the French Academy against the minister Peyronnet’s law on the press, which led to the failure of that measure, but this step cost him, as it did Villemain, his post as censeur royal. Under Louis Philippe he devoted himself entirely to his teaching and literary work. In 1848 he retired to Mâcon; but there, as in Paris, he was the centre of a brilliant circle, for he was a wonderful causeur, and an equally good listener, and had many interesting experiences to recall. He died on the 26th of March 1855. His son Pierre Henri (1815-1899) was a humorous writer and politician of purely contemporary interest.
J. C. Lacretelle’s chief work is a series of histories of the 18th century, the Revolution and its sequel: Précis historique de la Révolution française, appended to the history of Rabaud St Étienne, and partly written in the prison of La Force (5 vols., 1801-1806); Histoire de France pendant le XVIIIe siècle (6 vols., 1808); Histoire de l’Assemblée Constituante (2 vols., 1821); L’Assemblée Législative (1822); La Convention Nationale (3 vols., 1824-1825); Histoire de France depuis la restauration (1829-1835); Histoire du consulat et de l’empire (4 vols., 1846). The author was a moderate and fair-minded man, but possessed neither great powers of style, nor striking historical insight, nor the special historian’s power of writing minute accuracy of detail with breadth of view. Carlyle’s sarcastic remark on Lacretelle’s history of the Revolution, that it “exists, but does not profit much,” is partly true of all his books. He had been an eyewitness of and an actor in the events which he describes, but his testimony must be accepted with caution.
LACROIX, ANTOINE FRANÇOIS ALFRED (1863- ), French mineralogist and geologist, was born at Mâcon, Saône et Loire, on the 4th of February 1863. He took the degree of D. ès Sc. in Paris, 1889. In 1893 he was appointed professor of mineralogy at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, and in 1896 director of the mineralogical laboratory in the École des Hautes Études. He paid especial attention to minerals connected with volcanic phenomena and igneous rocks, to the effects of metamorphism, and to mineral veins, in various parts of the world, notably in the Pyrenees. In his numerous contributions to scientific journals he dealt with the mineralogy and petrology of Madagascar, and published an elaborate and exhaustive volume on the eruptions in Martinique, La Montagne Pelée et ses éruptions (1904). He also issued an important work entitled Mineralogie de la France et de ses Colonies (1893-1898), and other works in conjunction with A. Michel Lévy. He was elected member of the Académie des sciences in 1904.
LACROIX, PAUL (1806-1884), French author and journalist, was born in Paris on the 27th of April 1806, the son of a novelist. He is best known under his pseudonym of P. L. Jacob, bibliophile, or “Bibliophile Jacob,” suggested by the constant interest he took in public libraries and books generally. Lacroix was an extremely prolific and varied writer. Over twenty historical romances alone came from his pen, and he also wrote a variety of serious historical works, including a history of Napoleon III., and the life and times of the Tsar Nicholas I. of Russia. He was the joint author with Ferdinand Séré of a five-volume work, Le Moyen Âge et La Renaissance (1847), a standard work on the manners, customs and dress of those times, the chief merit of which lies in the great number of illustrations it contains. He also wrote many monographs on phases of the history of culture. Over the signature Pierre Dufour was published an exhaustive Histoire de la Prostitution (1851-1852), which has always been attributed to Lacroix. His works on bibliography were also extremely numerous. In 1885 he was appointed librarian of the Arsenal Library, Paris. He died in Paris on the 16th of October 1884.
LACROMA (Serbo-Croatian Lokrum), a small island in the Adriatic Sea, forming part of the Austrian kingdom of Dalmatia, and lying less than half a mile south of Ragusa. Though barely 1¼ m. in length, Lacroma is remarkable for the beauty of its subtropical vegetation. It was a favourite resort of the archduke Maximilian, afterwards emperor of Mexico (1832-1867), who restored the château and park; and of the Austrian crown prince Rudolph (1857-1889). It contains an 11th-century Benedictine monastery; and the remains of a church, said by a very doubtful local tradition to have been founded by Richard I. of England (1157-1199), form part of the imperial château.
See Lacroma, an illustrated descriptive work by the crown princess Stéphanie (afterwards Countess Lónyay) (Vienna, 1892).