Camille de Tournon

Comte (Philippe-Marcellin) Camille de Tournon-Simiane (1778 – 18 June 1833) was a French bureaucrat, a chambellan of Napoleon I who served the Emperor as Prefect of Rome (6 September 1809 – 19 January 1814), and with the Bourbon Restoration served as Prefect of the Gironde at Bordeaux (25 July 1815 – 4 February 1822) and briefly of the Rhône at Lyon (1822 – January 1823).

Born at Apt, Vaucluse, he was at first intended for the navy, but the Revolution intervened. He emigrated and after his return devoted seven years to polishing his interrupted studies, beginning his public career modestly in 1802 as secretary to the commission that was charged with working out the Napoleonic Code rural. As an auditeur to the Council of State, 1806, he was sent to the Département du Rhin, which was being reorganized as a department integral to France. Refusing to desert his post with the Austrian advances of 1809 he was taken prisoner (11 June) and transported to Hungary; after two months he was released and presented at Schönbrunn to Napoleon, who charged him with presenting a dossier on the Habsburg strengths. On the basis of the swiftly accomplished report he was made Prefect of Rome (6 September).

In the absence of the Pope, the Papal States had been incorporated as an integral part of France. By a decree of the Emperor, 1811, one million francs were provided to finance excavation and conservation works at Rome, of which Tournon-Simiane was in charge. Conservation works in the Roman forums from the Campidoglio to the Colosseum, were published in his Etudes Statistiques, 1831, in which he provided an account of the aims and scope of excavations undertaken during his administration, contrasting it with the wholesale pillaging that had taken place in 1798, under the terms of the Treaty of Tolentino.

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