Alexandre de Laborde

ComteLouis-Joseph-Alexandre de Laborde (17 September 1773 – 20 October 1842) was a French antiquary, liberal politician and writer, a member of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques (1832), under the rubric political economy.

Born in Paris, Laborde was the fourth son of the famous banker of Spanish extraction, Jean-Joseph de Laborde, who was guillotined during the Reign of Terror. Young Laborde had been dispatched to Vienna by his father at the outbreak of the French Revolution; there he joined the Austrian army, in which he was named an officer, 10 December 1789, at the age of seventeen, by personal intervention of the Emperor Joseph II. At first stationed at Olmuz (Moravia), he was named captain in a regiment of light cavalry in October 1791, and saw action against the Revolutionary French forces the following year along the frontiers of the Austrian Netherlands and Luxembourg, where he distinguished himself by his generosity towards his compatriots who had been taken prisoner or wounded. In 1795 he took a long leave, first to join his widowed mother and sister in Switzerland, then, to see his brother in London. He reentered the Austrian army among Kinsky's hussars, and reached the rank of squadron leader.

Then he travelled through Germany, Holland and Italy before he was able to arrange to be de-listed from among the proscribed emigrés at the peace of Campoformio (1797), which enabled him to return to France. Under Talleyrand, who took him under his protection, he entered the French foreign office of the counter-revolution that the Consulat represented.

In 1800 he was an attaché of Lucien Bonaparte's embassy in Madrid that concluded with the Treaty of Aranjuez in March 1801 and returned with him. At Méréville Lucien met Laborde's beautiful mistress Alexandrine Jacob de Bleschamp, fell completely in love with her and married her in June 1803, occasioning a long-lasting chill in Laborde's relations with Napoleon, whose dynastic aspirations did not include the daughter of an agent de change for sister-in-law and who suspected Laborde of complicity in the liaison. Laborde took advantage of some enforced leisure to assemble a team of artists and writers— among whom his friend Chateaubriand— to see through the press two massive works on Spain, the Itinéraire descriptif de l'Espagne (1809, five volumes and an atlas) and the Voyage pittoresque et historique en Espagne (1807–1818, four volumes in-folio); the Voyage pittoresque, realised with care and containing some nine hundred engravings, proved a serious drain on his finances. It appeared just at the moment the Peninsular Campaigns of 1808 interfered with markets; pressed with obligations to his family, whom he supported in considerable style, he decided to re-enter the Napoleonic administration and was appointed that year auditeur to the Conseil d'État, at that time a form of initial training for the upper levels of the Empire's bureaucracy scarcely suited to Laborde's prominence and expertise, but the emperor took him as a knowledgeable aide in Madrid, made his wife a dame d'honneur to Empress Joséphine, and then, satisfied with Laborde's role, made him a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1809 and created him a comte de l'Empire on 9 January 1810.

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