Louis François Auguste Cauchois-Lemaire (August 28, 1789 – August 9, 1861),
French journalist, was born in
Paris.
Towards the end of the
First Empire he was proprietor of the
Journal de la littérature et des arts, which he transformed at the Restoration into a political journal of Liberal tendencies, the
Nain jaune, in which
Louis XVIII himself had little satirical articles secretly inserted. After the return from
Elba the
Nain jaune became
Bonapartist and fell into discredit. It was suppressed at the second Restoration.
Cauchois-Lemaire then threw himself impetuously into the Liberal agitation, and had to take refuge in
Brussels in 1816, and in the following year at the Hague, whence he was expelled for publishing an
Appel à l'opinion publique et aux Etats-Généraux en faveur des patriotes français.
Returning to France in 1819, he resumed the struggle against the ultra-royalist party with such temerity that he was condemned to one year's imprisonment in 1821 and fifteen months imprisonment in 1827. After the
revolution of July 1830 he refused a pension of 6000 francs offered to him by
King Louis Philippe, on the ground that he wished to retain his independence even in his relations with a government which he had helped to establish.
He made a bitter attack upon the
Perier ministry in his journal
Bon sens, and in 1836 was one of the founders of a new opposition journal, the
Siècle. He soon, however, abandoned journalism for history and, having no private means, in 1840...
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