This act was never forgiven by Marmont’s countrymen. On the restoration of the Bourbons he was indeed made a peer of France and a major-general of the royal guard, and in 1820 a knight of the Saint Esprit and a grand officer of the order of St Louis; but he was never trusted. He was the major-general of the guard on duty in July 1830, and was ordered to put down with a strong hand any opposition to the ordinances (see [France]). Himself opposed to the court policy, he yet tried to do his duty, and only gave up the attempt to suppress the revolution when it became clear that his troops were outmatched. This brought more obloquy upon him, and the duc d’Angoulême even ordered him under arrest, saying, “Will you betray us, as you betrayed him?” Marmont did not betray them; he accompanied the king into exile and forfeited his marshalate thereby. His desire to return to France was never gratified and he wandered in central and eastern Europe, settling finally in Vienna, where he was well received by the Austrian government, and strange to say made tutor to the duke of Reichstadt, the young man who had once for a few weeks been styled Napoleon II. He died at Venice on the 22nd of March 1852.
Much of his time in his last years was spent upon his Mémoires, which are of great value for the military history of his time, though they must be read as a personal defence of himself in various junctures rather than as an unbiased account of his times. They show Marmont, as he really was, an embittered man, who never thought his services sufficiently requited, and above all, a man too much in love with himself and his own glory to be a true friend or a faithful servant. His strategy indeed tended to become pure virtuosity, and his tactics, though neat, appear frigid and antiquated when contrasted with those of the instinctive leaders, the fighting generals whom the theorists affect to despise. But his military genius is undeniable, and he was as far superior to the mere theorist as Lannes and Davout were to the pure divisionnaire or “fighting” general.
His works are Voyage en Hongrie, &c. (4 vols., 1837); Voyage en Sicile (1838); Esprit des institutions militaires (1845); César; Xenophon; and Mémoires (8 vols., published after his death in 1856). See the long and careful notice by Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, vol. vi.
MARMONTEL, JEAN FRANÇOIS (1723-1799), French writer, was born of poor parents at Bort, in Cantal, on the 11th of July 1723. After studying with the Jesuits at Mauriac, he taught in their colleges at Clermont and Toulouse; and in 1745, acting on the advice of Voltaire, he set out for Paris to try for literary honours. From 1748 to 1753 he wrote a succession of tragedies which,[1] though only moderately successful on the stage, secured the admission of the author to literary and fashionable circles. He wrote for the Encyclopédie a series of articles evincing considerable critical power and insight, which in their collected form, under the title Éléments de Littérature, still rank among the French classics. He also wrote several comic operas, the two best of which probably are Sylvain (1770) and Zémire et Azore (1771). In the Gluck-Piccini controversy he was an eager partisan of Piccini with whom he collaborated in Didon (1783) and Pénélope (1785). In 1758 he gained the patronage of Madame de Pompadour, who obtained for him a place as a civil servant, and the management of the official journal Le Mercure, in which he had already begun the famous series of Contes moraux. The merit of these tales lies partly in the delicate finish of the style, but mainly in the graphic and charming pictures of French society under Louis XV. The author was elected to the French Academy in 1763. In 1767 he published a romance, Bélisaire, now remarkable only on account of a chapter on religious toleration which incurred the censure of the Sorbonne and the archbishop of Paris. Marmontel retorted in Les Incas (1778) by tracing the cruelties in Spanish America to the religious fanaticism of the invaders.
He was appointed historiographer of France (1771), secretary to the Academy (1783), and professor of history in the Lycée (1786). In his character of historiographer Marmontel wrote a history of the regency (1788) which is of little value. Reduced to poverty by the Revolution, Marmontel in 1792 retired during the Terror to Evreux, and soon after to a cottage at Abloville in the department of Eure. To that retreat we owe his Mémoires d’un père (4 vols., 1804) giving a picturesque review of his whole life, a literary history of two important reigns, a great gallery of portraits extending from the venerable Massillon, whom more than half a century previously he had seen at Clermont, to Mirabeau. The book was nominally written for the instruction of his children. It contains an exquisitely drawn picture of his own childhood in the Limousin; its value for the literary historian is very great. Marmontel lived for some time under the roof of Mme Geoffrin, and was present at her famous dinners given to artists; he was, indeed, an habitué of most of the houses where the encyclopaedists met. He had thus at his command the best material for his portraits, and made good use of his opportunities. After a short stay in Paris when elected in 1797 to the Conseil des Anciens, he died on the 31st of December 1799 at Abloville.
See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, iv.; Morellet, Éloge (1805).
[1] Denys le Tyran (1748); Aristomène (1749); Cléopâtre (1750); Héraclides (1752); Egyptus (1753).