Claude-Emmanuel Joseph Pierre, Marquess of Pastoret was a French lawyer, author and politician.
Biography
Pastoret was elected member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettreson the strength of his "Zoroastre, Confucius et Mahomet comparés comme sectaires, legislateurs et moralistes". He was Venerable Master of "Les Neuf Sœurs" from 1788 till 1789. In 1790 Claude-Emannuel Pastoret, then president of the Parisian electoral body to the National Assembly, was offered the offices of Minister of Interior and Minister of Justice by the desperate King Louis XVI. He declined the honours and was elected "procureur géneral syndic du département de la Seine". It was in that capacity that he was responsible for the transformation of the église Sainte-Génevieve into a temple for the remains of great citizens of the new state were to be honoured: the Panthéon, Paris. In the National Assembly, he pleaded for the abolition of slavery and the secularisation of the civil state, but he was not a deputy. Elected to the Legislative Assembly by the electors of Paris, he was honoured as the first deputy to be elected President. It was common for intellectuals to be elected to public office, and he joined such noteworthies as Condorcet. He most frequently allied himself with the constitutionalist faction and was highly respected by the opponent Girondist faction. He would undertake a variety of projects during the course of the Assembly, including requesting repressive measures against émigrés, the abolition of the New Year address to the Crown and the deletion of the purely honorific designations. He voted for the abolition of the University of Paris and made a long speech to propose to raise a "statue of liberty" on the ruins of the Bastille. However, he realised, as time went by, that the reforms that he had been the first to demand increasingly threatened the royal authority he was trying to protect. Several times, he went up to the rostrum to separate the cause of Louis XVI from that of the advisors to the Crown, and he denounced the Protests of 20 June 1792. After the fall of the French Monarchy, to secure his own safety, he fled to Provence and then into the Savoy region, from where he returned only after the fall of Robespierre. Elected by Var to the Council of Five Hundred and called, a few days later, at the Institute, he took his place in the Council among the moderates when he spoke in favor of the freedom of the press, the fugitive priests and parents of émigrés. He also defended royalists and asked that for the remains of Montesquieu to be transferred to the Panthéon, proposed the closure of the popular societies and accused the Directors Barras, Rewbell and La Révellière of fomenting unrest and attracting the hatred of the people on the assembly. In 1795, he managed to cancel the condemnation to death in-absentia on his friend, the comte de Vaublanc,, because of his involvement in the royalist insurrection of 13 Vendémiaire IV. Under Napoleon's First French Empire, he worked on a university career. Under Louis XVIII, he was awarded a French peerage for his extensive work on the Constitutional Charter. In 1830, he refused to vow loyalty to Louis-Philippe and was deprived of all his functions. His written works include a "Traité des lois pénales and an impressive "Histoire de la législation.
