Guillaume du Tillot

Léon Guillaume (du) Tillot (Bayonne, 22 May 1711 — Paris, 1774) was a French politician infused with liberal ideals of the Enlightenment, who from 1759 was the minister of the Duchy of Parma under Philip, Duke of Parma and his wife Princess Louise-Élisabeth of France. At a time when both Bourbon France and Bourbon Spain thought of Parma as a strategic point of interest, Tillot favoured French policies abroad and wide-ranging reforms within the Duchy of Parma. He was made marchese di Felino.

Tillot's career was of his own making. The son of a valet de chambre, he studied at the Collège des Quatre-Nations at Paris, then went to the court of Charles III of Spain; after Charles' departure to be King of Sicily, Tillot was attached to the household of Philippe de Bourbon, whose private secretary and treasurer he became. He organised fêtes for Philippe at Chambéry and elsewhere.

In June 1749, at Louis XV's request he left Paris for Parma, to serve as observer and councillor to Philippe, Louis's son-in-law, who was made Duke of Parma under terms of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748). The Duke immediately named him (29 June 1749), minister of finance (intendant général du coffre) conferring upon Tillot responsibilities for court spending, paymaster of salaries, overseer of the palaces, gardens, court theatre, spectacles and festivities.

In this role, Tillot promoted all forms of French musical theater at the court. He commissioned the "reform opera" Ippolito ed Aricia from Tommaso Traetta with a libretto based upon Abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin's libretto for Rameau's earlier opera Hippolyte et Aricie, which was in turn based on Racine's tragedy Phèdre. The opera premiered at the Teatro Ducale in Parma on 9 May 1759, and is still sometimes mounted.

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