Jean-Joseph Abeille
Jean Joseph André Abeille (5 April 1756 – 17 February 1842) was a merchant, ship-owner and counter-revolutionary from Marseille.
Contents
Biography
Ancien régime
Born in La Ciotat to a ship's captain and merchant father, Jean-Joseph Abeille joined, at the age of fifteen, a relative in Saint-Domingue, where he became a plantation owner and merchant. He founded a trading house in Port-au-Prince. In 1781, he returned to Marseille, founded a company there and, the following year, chartered a hundred ships.
French Revolution
In 1789, he was an extraordinary deputy of the Chamber of Commerce before the King and the States General, in charge of representing the trade of Marseille. In 1790, he married Elisabeth Bérard du Pithon, daughter of Marguerite-Victoire Magnan and Jean-François Bérard du Pithon, an important landowner in Saint-Domingue. Their son, Auguste Abeille du Rivoire, ship-owner and deputy mayor of Marseille, was created a Roman count by Pope Pius IX in 1852.
In 1793, he was a member of the royalist committee that raised Marseille against the Convention. He was elected member of the Commission of the Five (with Castelanet, Peloux, Raymond fils aîné and Pierre Laugier) which was invested with unlimited powers by a general assembly of all the authorities of the department. On August 21 of the same year, he negotiated with the English admiral Samuel Hood, who was blockading the coast, the delivery of Marseille and obtained a pass for wheat ships to supply the city.
Emigration
After the fall of Toulon to the Republican troops led by General Carteaux, he was forced to emigrate to Italy.
The Grand Master of the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, Emmanuel de Rohan-Polduc, thanked him in recognition of the services that Abeille had rendered to the Order, in particular by writing a memoir in 1790.[1]
Obtaining his removal from the list of emigrants, he returned to Marseille. His family remained in Tuscany until 1800.
In 1804, he was appointed president of the Commission of the Hospices of Marseille and, in 1807, he joined the Academy of Marseille, which he presided over in 1816. He was also a member of the electoral college of the Bouches-du-Rhône department.
Restoration
He received the decoration of the Lily in 1814 and the Knight's Cross of the Order of Saint Louis in 1824.
Works
- Essai sur nos colonies et sur le rétablissement de Saint Domingue, ou considérations sur leur législation, administration, commerce et agriculture (1805).
- Mémoire au Roi (1814)
- Relation des Evénements de Marseille et de Toulon en 1793 (1814).
Notes
- ↑ Émile Perrier, Les bibliophiles et les collectionneurs provençaux anciens et modernes: arrondissement de Marseille. Barthelet et Cie (1897), p. 1.
References
- Abeille Jean, (1989). "Un 'Gentilhomme d’Affaires' Provençal aux XVIIIe et XIXe Siècles. Jean Joseph André Abeille, 1756-1843", Marseille, No. 154, p. 36–41.
- Badet, Claude, ed. (1989). Marseille en Révolution. Marseille: Editions Rivages.
- Belmonte, Cyril (2017). Les Patriotes et les Autres: L'Arrière-pays Marseillais en Révolution. Aix: Presses Universitaires de Provence.
- Boulanger, Patrick (1996). Marseille, Marché International de l'Huile d'Olive: Un Produit et des Hommes de 1725 à 1825. Marseille: Institut Historique de Provence.
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