Polignac, Jules-Auguste-Armand-Marie de

(1780-1847)

   political figure

   Born in Versailles to a leading aristocratic family, Jules-Auguste-Armand-Marie de Polignac was, early in his career, implicated in the georges cadoudal conspiracy against napoléon i and sentenced to two years imprisonment, but he was confined for several more. with his brothers, he succeeded in escaping (1813) and returned to France with the count d'Artois (the future charles x) in 1814, then spent time at Gand with the royal family during the hundred days. A supporter of the restoration of the monarchy and the ancien régime, and hostile to the liberal tendencies of the Charter of 1814, he was made a peer of France in 1920. Ambassador to Great Britain (1823-29), he took part in the negotiations that ended in the treaty of 1827 by which France, Great Britain, and Russia became the mediators between the ottoman sultan and Greece, which had become independent. After the fall of the liberal cabinet, Charles X named Polignac foreign minister (August 1829), then prime minister (November 1829), but he quickly became unpopular because of his authoritarian and reactionary policies. After launching the Algerian expedition (July 1830), the success of which did little to resolve his domestic political problems, Polignac and his ministry made the blunder, in the face of the liberal opposition's July 1830 election victory, to issue the Four Ordinances of Saint-Cloud, which brought about an uprising in Paris and the fall of King Charles X. The revolution broke out immediately, and Polignac was arrested and condemned by the Chamber of Peers to life imprisonment and the loss of his titles. Amnestied in 1836, he was banished and went to England, returning in 1845. Polignac wrote Considérations politiques (1832), Études historiques, politiques et morales (1845), and Réponse à mes adversaires (1845).