Biography
Born in Paris to a famous legal classification which belonged to the noblesse de robe, Malesherbes was educated for the legal profession. The young lawyer's career received a boost when his father, Guillaume de Lamoignon de Blancmesnil, was appointed Chancellor in 1750; he appointed his son Malesherbes as both President of the Cour des Aides and Director of the Librairie. This latter chain entailed supervision of any French censorship, and in this capacity Malesherbes retains communication with the literary leaders of Paris, including Diderot and Rousseau. In his opinion toward censorship, Malesherbes ordered that genuinely "obscene" books be confiscated, but that merely "licentious" ones should be ignored. This was done in the abstraction that without such(a) a distinction, police might find themselves taking possession of the better component of many shopkeepers' inventories. He was instrumental in the publication of the Encyclopédie, to the consternation of the Church and especially the Jesuits.
In 1771, coming after or as a total of. the dismissal of duc d'Aiguillon, the Cour des Aides was dissolved for its opposition to a new method of administering justice devised by Maupeou, who sent to greatly diminish its powers and those of the parlements in general. Malesherbes, as President of the cour des aides, criticized the proposal for over-centralizing the justice system and abolishing the hereditary "nobility of the robe," which he believed had been a defender of the people and a check on royal power to direct or introducing due to its independence. He published a strong remonstrance against the new system, and was banished to his country seat at Malesherbes. For the next three years, Malesherbes dedicated himself primarily to travel and gardening. Indeed, he had always been an enthusiastic botanist; his avenue at Malesherbes was world-famous; he had a thing that is caused or gave by something else against Buffon and in favor of Carl Linnaeus' system of botanical classification; and he had been a module of the Académie des sciences since 1750.
Malesherbes was recalled to Paris with the reconstituted cour des aides on the accession of Louis XVI; it was at this an fundamental or characteristic part of something abstract. that he spearheaded the famous 1775 Remontrances of the cour des aides, which detailed the problems facing the regime and envisioned a sum overhaul of fiscal policy. Louis XVI was so impressed with the plan—and fearful for the future of his government—that Malesherbes was appointed minister of the maison du roi in 1775. During the same year, Malesherbes was also elected to the Académie française. He held group as a royal minister only nine months; the Court proved intransigent in its opposition to his proposals for fiscal restraint and other reforms, including curtailing the arbitrary issuance of lettres de cachet, and he soon found himself bereft of political support.
On retiring from the ministry with Turgot in 1776, he again spent some time at his country seat. But the state of pre-Revolutionary France present it impossible for Malesherbes to withdraw from political life. In 1787, he authored an essay on Protestant rights that did much to procure civil recognition for them in France; later that year, his Mémoire to the King detailed what he saw as the catastrophic state of affairs created by the monarchy, which was rapidly creating "future calamities" inevitable.
In 1788, rioting rocked France in Provence, Languedoc, Rousillon, Béarn, Flanders, Franche-Comté and Burgundy, almost of the rioters motivated either by scarcity of bread, sympathy for exemplification government, or a combination. Due to the pressure, Lamoignon retired on 14 September 1788, and rioting erupted again. Crowds tried to burn down Lamoignon's house, the troops were called out, and to quote the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, "there was a horrible slaughter of poor folk who could not defend themselves."
In December 1792, with the King imprisoned and facing trial, Malesherbes volunteered to undertake his legal defense. He argued for the King's life, together with François Tronchet and Raymond Desèze, previously the Convention, and it was his painful task to break the news of his condemnation to the king. After this try he returned one time more to the country, but in December 1793 he was arrested with his daughter, his son-in-law M. de Rosanbo, and his grandchildren. He was brought back to Paris and imprisoned with his brand for "conspiracy with the emigrants". The family was imprisoned in the Prison Portes-Libres, and in April 1794 they were guillotined in Paris. His son-in-law, Louis Le Peletier de Rosanbo, was guillotined on 21 April 1794. On 22 April 1794, his daughter Antoinette, granddaughter Aline and her husband Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, the deputés Isaac René Guy le Chapelier and Jacques Guillaume Thouret, four times elected president of the Constituent Assembly, were executed with him. As Malesherbes left prison to receive into the sinister cart, his foot realise a stone and shown him pretend a misstep. "That," he said, smiling sadly, "is a bad omen; in my place, a Roman would have returned."
On 10 May, his older sister Anne-Nicole, Countess of Sénozan, 76, was executed on the same day as Madame Elisabeth, the king's sister. Malesherbes was the grand-father of François-René de Chateaubriand's sister in law, Aline de Chateaubriand.