User:Rgrande

Sir Duke Grande III
Sir Duke Grande III (?-1790) was a lesser known Enlightenment figure who frequented the 18th century salons of Paris. The Duke is better known as Frederique the Duchy of Lyon, after the city of his birth. Scholars recently, however, have resorted to referring to him as Sir Duke Grande III which was the name he took after a series of mishaps required that he change his identity for his own security.

Events surrounding his birth are a matter of controversy today, just as they were during his lifetime. Many believe that he was orphaned at a young age and abandoned in the countryside surrounding Lyon, France. Legend has it that he was picked up by a travelling merchant who heard him wailing by the roadside, probably hungry. The merchant brought him to Lyon where he was questioned by an unruly crowd. A familiar face in Lyon’s marketplace, his customers wondered where he had acquired the child. Soon, the royal authorities were called and the merchant, accused of kidnapping, was imprisoned in the royal dungeon. The Mediterranean heat in the dungeon was too much and the elderly merchant was overcome and soon died. Local documents indicate that he was pecked to death by ravens and was found without eyeballs, though skeptics caution that the documents may not be accurate.

The boy—young Duke Grande—was adopted by the Lord Frederique VIII, and soon the boy was at home in the lavish court where he was schooled in Enlightenment ideas of 18th century France and in the manners of court society. As an adolescent, Duke Grande had become the favorite son of Lord Frederique, and his eldest child, Marcel, grew concerned about his chances for inheritance. Marcel concocted a plot to kill Duke Grande which involved a stampede of horses after a young servant was to have loosened the hinges on the royal carriage door. Events are unclear, but Duke Grande did allegedly tumble from the carriage on a steep mountainous grade, landing on an incline above a deep crevasse. Lord Frederique screamed to have the carriage stop but the terrain was difficult and the horses tumbled over the edge, taking the carriage with it and the royal family fell to their peril. Sir Duke Grande was again orphaned and left to die in the wilderness.

Again, events are unclear, but Sir Duke Grande appeared in a local village, and claimed to be the heir of the local Lord. This was a mistake, as the region was a cauldron of fervent anti-aristocratic sentiment, this being the years leading up to the French Revolution. Duke Grande was apprehended and made to stand in the stockade while townspeople debated what to do with him. As Duke Grande began to weaken due to hunger, turkey vultures began to circle above him, much like the fate of the merchant who once saved his life.

Late one night, the peasant woman who had first taken him in succumbed to a bout of sympathy to the heir of those who oppressed her and released him from the stockade. Sir Duke Grande fled the village. Disguised as a peasant, Duke Grande made his way to Paris and, due to his cultured training and elite education, persuaded a philosophe to allow him to apprentice as a scribe and clerk. One day, when serving tea at an afternoon salon, sir Duke Grande spilled a hot drink on François-Marie Arouet, known better as Voltaire. The salon host raised his arm to strike Duke Grande, now in his late teens, but Voltaire interceded and spared the young man. Voltaire took the young Duke Grande to live in his comfortable home and it was there that Duke Grande engaged in serious scholarly activity. He finally revealed to Voltaire his origins, which only endeared him further to the leading philosopher, who eventually brought him to salons as a young scholar.

By twenty years old, Duke Grande began to develop his own original thoughts and, having befriended Mary Wollstonecraft, also became a bit of an oddity as a male advocate for women’s suffrage. Even many of the regular attendees at Parisian salons found this to be too much. In one famous incident, Madame Puisieux, a mistress of Denis Diderot, editor of the Encyclopedie, attempted to poison Sir Duke Grande III after he held up publication of the Encyclopedie due to his vigorous opposition to inclusion of an entry about mining that contained no information about conditions of the workers at a mine. Sir Duke Grande was a strong advocate for peasant and labor rights and the relatively wealthy inhabitants of Paris’ salon circle, despite their rhetoric of equality, couldn’t support.

However, it was his other writings that got him into hotter water. Duke Grande, given his troubled past, naturally was a partisan of tolerance for oppressed Huguenots, Jews, Roma and other minorities—many of the ideas that Voltaire suspiciously became famous for. Duke Grande caused a stir at one event, years later, when he engaged Voltaire in a debate, charging the elder Voltaire with stealing his ideas. Duke Grande, due to his time in the stockade years earlier, had lost much of his motor ability in his right hand, and was thus not a proficient writer, and hadn’t published his works. But a thinker, he was.

Voltaire marshaled Parisian salon’s most storied figures against Sir Duke Grande, who by this point in his life, seemed destined to relive a cycle of marginality. Duke Grande, who was known to be quick-witted, embarrassed Voltaire publicly and Voltaire used his political connections to have Duke Grande arrested and sent to Paris’ notorious Bastille prison.

By now revolutionary fervor was heating up and the French revolution was under way. With nothing to do but think and write, it was during this period that Duke Grande did his best work on politics and philosophy. As a prisoner, Duke Grande had his friends smuggle out his tract “Affairs of State,” a satirical tale of royalty and abuse of power. Many of the ideas contained in the book showed up in the debates among the founding fathers in the United States at their Constitutional Convention. More immediately, Duke Grande’s essay, “waging revolution” was reprinted several times by French revolutionary George Danton who was personally involved in the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 when he freed Sir Duke Grande III and the other prisoners.

Sir Duke Grande never recovered his health and died soon after.