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Biography

As of its studies with the college of Harcourt, it is impassioned for antiquities. It is then marked by frequent meetings with Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, the author of the Voyage of Anarcharsis , which it meets in his cousin the duke of Choiseul.

Friend of Talleyrand, it shares with him the intrigues of the court, and disadvises to him taking the religious route.

In 1776, it leaves for the Greece aboard the Atalante frigate, ordered by the marquis of Chabert, set on astronomy. With painters and architects, Choiseul-Gouffier then visits the south of the Peloponnese, the Cyclades and other islands of the Égée then minor Asia. On its return, it publishes the first volume of sound picturesque Voyage from Greece who gains a great success. The work has a political goal: To explain at sea the stakes Egée between the Sublime Door and Imperial Russia.

This publication facilitates its intellectual and political career: he becomes member of the Académie of the inscriptions and the humanities in 1782, then member of the French Academy in 1783. He is ambassador with Constantinople of 1784 with 1791 and benefits from it to continue its discovery of the Greece.

The French revolution changes the course of its destiny. Refusing to obey Convention, he refuses his recall in France of fear to be guillotine. Whereas its goods are seized in France, a second ambassador is sent to replace it. Choiseul Gouffier will hold the seat one year in its embassy.

In 1792, it emigrates in Russia where it is named director of the Academy of Arts and the imperial Libraries of Russia. The Empress Catherine II dedicates a great friendship to him and gives him grounds and a field in current the Lithuania. It returns in France only at the beginning of the Empire in 1802, after Napoleon had amnestied the exiled nobility. Finding his friend Talleyrand, there refuses to take part in the government of the Empire, and remains faithful to Louis XVIII. It publishes the second volume of picturesque sound Voyage from Greece in 1809 and is made build a house imitating the Érechthéion.

It is named even minister of state and France under the Restauration. Excluded from the French Academy to have emigrated, it finds its armchair in there 1816. The third volume of picturesque sound Voyage from Greece appears only after its death, in 1822.

Its descendants lived in Lithuania until 1945. Driven out by the Communists, the last of Choiseul Gouffier will come to die in Switzerland in 1949.

The picturesque Voyage from Greece

Choiseul-Gouffier presents to it, in addition to little known monuments, a Greece idealized, crushed by the Othoman domination and wishing to find his freedom for ressusciter. This romantic vision of modern Greece is shared by other many travellers of the beginning of the XIXe century. Like they, it proposes to go to see on the spot for better including/understanding the ancient authors by having their texts with the hand “to more highly feel the beauties different from the tables traced by Homère by seeing the images than it had had under the eyes. ” The account of Choiseul-Gouffier makes it possible to make known areas up to that point still unknown of Greece, such as for example the Cyclades. He had asked the painter that he protected, Lancelot Theodore Turpin de Crissé, to illustrate the second volume by the engraving of his drawings.

One finds among his Memories a Dissertation on Homère , a memory on the hippodrome of Olympie , and the Recherches on the origin of the Bosphorus of Thrace .

It left an invaluable collection of antiquities, acquired by the Musée of Louvre.

External bond

Biographical note of the French Academy

Partial source

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