LOUVER, Louvre or Luffer, in architecture, the lantern built upon the roof of the hall in ancient times to allow the smoke to escape when the fire was made on the pavement in the middle of the hall. The term is also applied to the flat overlapping slips of wood, glass, &c., with which such openings are closed, arranged to give ventilation without the admission of rain. Openings fitted with louvers are now utilized for the purposes of ventilation in schools and manufactories.
The word has been derived from the French l’ouvert, the “open” space. This, Minsheu’s guess, is now generally abandoned. The Old French form, of which the English is an adaptation, was lover or lovier. The medieval Latin lodium, lodarium, is suggested as the ultimate origin. Du Cange (Glossarium, s.v. “lodia”) defines it as lugurium, i.e. a small hut. The English form “louvre” is due to a confusion with the name of the palace in Paris. The origin of that name is also unknown; louverie, place of wolves, is one of the suggestions, the palace being supposed to have originally been a hunting-box (see [Paris]).
LOUVET, JEAN (c. 1370-c. 1440), called the president of Provence, occupied the position of president of the Chambre des Comptes at Aix in 1415. Towards the end of that year he went to Paris with Louis II. of Anjou, king of Sicily, attached himself to the dauphin Charles, and after having been chief steward of the household to Queen Isabella he turned against her. He was one of the principal agents of the Armagnac party, and became the most influential adviser of Charles VII. during the first years of his reign. But his rapacity gained him enemies, and when the constable Arthur, earl of Richmond, attained a preponderating influence over Charles VII. Louvet retired to his captaincy of Avignon. He still remained a personage of importance in his exile, and played an influential part even in his last years.
See Vallet de Viriville in the Nouvelle Biographie générale, and G. du Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Claries VII. (1881-1891).
(J. V.*)
LOUVET DE COUVRAI, JEAN BAPTISTE (1760-1797), French writer and politician, was born in Paris on the 12th of June 1760, the son of a stationer. He became a bookseller’s clerk, and first attracted attention with a not very moral novel called Les Amours du chevalier de Faublas (Paris, 1787-1789). The character of the heroine of this book, Lodoïska, was taken from the wife of a jeweller in the Palais Royal, with whom he had formed a liaison. She was divorced from her husband in 1792 and married Louvet in 1793. His second novel, Émilie de Varmont, was intended to prove the utility and necessity of divorce and of the marriage of priests, questions raised by the Revolution. Indeed all his works were directed to the ends of the Revolution. He attempted to have one of his unpublished plays, L’Anobli conspirateur, performed at the Théâtre Français, and records naïvely that one of its managers, M. d’Orfeuil, listened to the reading of the first three acts “with mortal impatience,” exclaiming at last: “I should need cannon in order to put that piece on the stage.” A “sort of farce” at the expense of the army of the émigrés, La Grande Revue des armées noire el blanche, had, however, better success: it ran for twenty-five nights.
Louvet was, however, first brought into notice as a politician by his Paris justifié, in reply to a “truly incendiary” pamphlet in which Mounier, after the removal of the king to Paris in October 1789, had attacked the capital, “at that time blameless,” and argued that the court should be established elsewhere. This led to Louvet’s election to the Jacobin Club, for which, as he writes bitterly in his Memoirs, the qualifications were then “a genuine civisme and some talent.” A self-styled philosophe of the true revolutionary type, he now threw himself ardently into the campaign against “despotism” and “reaction,” i.e. against the moderate constitutional royalty advocated by Lafayette, the Abbé Maury and other “Machiavellians.” On the 25th of December 1791 he presented at the bar of the Assembly his Pétition contre les princes, which had “a prodigious success in the senate and the empire.” Elected deputy to the Assembly for the department of Loiret, he made his first speech in January 1792. He attached himself to the Girondists, whose vague deism, sentimental humanitarianism and ardent republicanism he fully shared, and from March to November 1792 he published, at Roland’s expense, a bi-weekly journal-affiche, of which the title, La Sentinelle, proclaimed its mission to be to “enlighten the people on all the plots” at a time when, Austria having declared war, the court was “visibly betraying our armies.” On the 10th of August he became editor of the Journal des débats, and in this capacity, as well as in the Assembly, made himself conspicuous by his attacks on Robespierre, Marat and the other Montagnards, whom he declares he would have succeeded in bringing to justice in September but for the poor support he received from the Girondist leaders. It is more probable, however, that his ill-balanced invective contributed to their ruin and his own; for him Robespierre was a “royalist,” Marat “the principal agent of England,” the Montagnards Orleanists in masquerade. His courageous attitude at the trial of Louis XVI., when he supported the “appeal to the people,” only served still further to discredit the Girondists. He defended them, however, to the last with great courage, if with little discretion; and after the crisis of the 31st of May 1793 he shared the perils of the party who fled from Paris (see Girondists). His wife, “Lodoïska,” who had actively cooperated in his propaganda, was also in danger.