[1] See Vogt, _Physiologische Briefe_ (1845-1847); Moleschott, _Der
Kreislauf des Lebens_ (1852); Büchner, _Kraft und Stoff_ (1855).
LOUBET, ÉMILE FRANÇOIS (1838- ), 7th president of the French republic,
was born on the 30th of December 1838, the son of a peasant proprietor
at Marsanne (Drôme), who was more than once mayor of Marsanne. He was
admitted to the Parisian bar in 1862, and took his doctorate-in-law next
year. He was still a student when he witnessed the sweeping triumph of
the Republican party in Paris at the general election in 1863. He
settled down to the exercise of his profession in Montélimar, where he
married in 1869 Marie Louis Picard. He also inherited a small estate at
Grignan. At the crisis of 1870 he became mayor of Montélimar, and
thenceforward was a steady supporter of Gambetta's policy. Elected to
the Chamber of Deputies in 1876 by Montélimar he was one of the famous
363 who in June 1877 passed the vote of want of confidence in the
ministry of the duc de Broglie. In the general election of October he
was re-elected, local enthusiasm for him being increased by the fact
that the government had driven him from the mayoralty. In the Chamber he
occupied himself especially with education, fighting the clerical system
established by the Loi Falloux, and working for the establishment of
free, obligatory and secular primary instruction. In 1880 he became
president of the departmental council in Drôme. His support of the
second Jules Ferry ministry and his zeal for the colonial expansion of
France gave him considerable weight in the moderate Republican party. He
had entered the Senate in 1885, and he became minister of public works
in the Tirard ministry (December 1887 to March 1888). In 1892 President
Sadi Carnot, who was his personal friend, asked him to form a cabinet.
Loubet held the portfolio of the interior with the premiership, and had
to deal with the anarchist crimes of that year and with the great strike
of Carmaux, in which he acted as arbitrator, giving a decision regarded
in many quarters as too favourable to the strikers. He was defeated in
November on the question of the Panama scandals, but he retained the
ministry of the interior in the next cabinet under Alexandre Ribot,
though he resigned on its reconstruction in January. His reputation as
an orator of great force and lucidity of exposition and as a safe and
honest statesman procured for him in 1896 the presidency of the Senate,
and in February 1899 he was chosen president of the republic in
succession to Félix Fauré by 483 votes as against 279 recorded by Jules
Méline, his only serious competitor. He was marked out for fierce
opposition and bitter insult as the representative of that section of
the Republican party which sought the revision of the Dreyfus case. On
the day of President Faure's funeral Paul Déroulède met the troops under
General Roget on their return to barracks, and demanded that the general
should march on the Élysée. Roget sensibly took his troops back to
barracks. At the Auteuil steeplechase in June the president was struck
on the head with a cane by an anti-Dreyfusard. In that month President
Loubet summoned Waldeck-Rousseau to form a cabinet, and at the same time
entreated Republicans of all shades of opinion to rally to the defence
of the state. By the efforts of Loubet and Waldeck-Rousseau the Dreyfus
affair was settled, when Loubet, acting on the advice of General
Galliffet, minister of war, remitted the ten years' imprisonment to
which Dreyfus was condemned at Rennes. Loubet's presidency saw an acute
stage of the clerical question, which was attacked by Waldeck-Rousseau
and in still more drastic fashion by the Combes ministry. The French
ambassador was recalled from the Vatican in April 1905, and in July the
separation of church and state was voted in the Chamber of Deputies.
Feeling had run high between France and England over the mutual
criticisms passed on the conduct of the South African War and the
Dreyfus case respectively. These differences were composed by the
Anglo-French _entente_, and in 1904 a convention between the two
countries secured the recognition of French claims in Morocco in
exchange for non-interference with the English occupation of Egypt.
President Loubet was a typical example of the peasant-proprietor class,
and had none of the aristocratic, not to say monarchical, proclivities
of President Fauré. He inaugurated the Paris Exhibition of 1900,
received the tsar Nicholas II. in September 1901 and paid a visit to
Russia in 1902. He also exchanged visits with King Edward VII., with the
king of Italy and the king of Spain. The king of Spain's visit in 1905
was the occasion of an attempt on his life, a bomb being thrown under
his carriage as he was proceeding with his guest to the opera. His
presidency came to an end in January 1906, when he retired into private
life.
LOUDON, ERNST GIDEON, FREIHERR VON (1717-1790), Austrian soldier, was
born at Tootzen in Livonia, on the 2nd of February 1717. His family, of
Scottish origin,[1] had been settled in that country since before 1400.
His father was a lieutenant-colonel, retired on a meagre pension from
the Swedish service, and the boy was sent in 1732 into the Russian army
as a cadet. He took part in Field Marshal Münnich's siege of Danzig in
1734, in the march of a Russian corps to the Rhine in 1735 and in the
Turkish war 1738-1739. Dissatisfied with his prospects he resigned in
1741 and sought military employment elsewhere. He applied first to
Frederick the Great, who declined his services. At Vienna he had better
fortune, being made a captain in Trenck's free corps. He took part in
its forays and marches, though not in its atrocities, until wounded and
taken prisoner in Alsace. He was shortly released by the advance of the
main Austrian army. His next active service, still under Trenck, was in
the Silesian mountains in 1745, in which campaign he greatly
distinguished himself as a leader of light troops. He was present also
at Soor. He retired shortly afterwards, owing to his distaste for the
lawless habits of his comrades in the irregulars, and after long waiting
in poverty for a regular commission he was at last made a captain in one
of the frontier regiments, spending the next ten years in half-military,
half-administrative work in the Carlstadt district. At Bunich, where he
was stationed, he built a church and planted an oak forest now called by
his name. He had reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel when the
outbreak of the Seven Years' War called him again into the field. From
this point began his fame as a soldier. Soon promoted colonel, he
distinguished himself repeatedly and was in 1757 made a
General-feldwacht-meister (major-general of cavalry) and a knight of the
newly founded order of Maria Theresa. In the campaign of 1758 came his
first opportunity for fighting an action as a commander-in-chief, and he
used it so well that Frederick the Great was obliged to give up the
siege of Olmütz and retire into Bohemia (action of Dom-stadtl, 30th of
June). He was rewarded with the grade of lieutenant-field-marshal and
having again shown himself an active and daring commander in the
campaign of Hochkirch, he was created a Freiherr in the Austrian
nobility by Maria Theresa and in the peerage of the Holy Roman Empire by
her husband the emperor Francis. Maria Theresa gave him, further, the
grand cross of the order she had founded and an estate near Kuttenberg
in Bohemia. He was placed in command of the Austrian contingent sent to
join the Russians on the Oder. At Kunersdorf he turned defeat into a
brilliant victory, and was promoted Feldzeugmeister and made
commander-in-chief in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. In 1760 he destroyed
a whole corps of Frederick's army under Fouqué at Landshut and stormed
the important fortress of Glatz. In 1760 he sustained a reverse at
Frederick's hands in the battle of Liegnitz (Aug. 15th, 1760), which
action led to bitter controversy with Daun and Lacy, the commanders of
the main army, who, Loudon claimed, had left his corps unsupported. In
1761 he operated, as usual, in Silesia, but he found his Russian allies
as timid as they had been after Kunersdorf, and all attempts against
Frederick's entrenched camp of Bunzelwitz (see SEVEN YEARS' WAR) failed.
He brilliantly seized his one fleeting opportunity, however, and stormed
Schweidnitz on the night of Sept. 30/October 1st, 1761. His tireless
activity continued to the end of the war, in conspicuous contrast with
the temporizing strategy of Daun and Lacy. The student of the later
campaigns of the Seven Years' War will probably admit that there was
need of more aggressiveness than Daun displayed, and of more caution
than suited Loudon's genius. But neither recognized this, and the last
three years of the war are marked by an ever-increasing friction between
the "Fabius" and the "Marcellus," as they were called, of the Austrian
army.
After the peace, therefore, when Daun became the virtual
commander-in-chief of the army, Loudon fell into the background. Offers
were made, by Frederick the Great amongst others, to induce Loudon to
transfer his services elsewhere. Loudon did not entertain these
proposals, although negotiations went on for some years, and on Lacy
succeeding Daun as president of the council of war Loudon was made
inspector-general of infantry. Dissensions, however, continued between
Loudon and Lacy, and on the accession of Joseph II., who was intimate
with his rival, Loudon retired to his estate near Kuttenberg. Maria
Theresa and Kaunitz caused him, however, to be made commander-in-chief
in Bohemia and Moravia in 1769. This post he held for three years, and
at the end of this time, contemplating retirement from the service, he
settled again on his estate. Maria Theresa once more persuaded him to
remain in the army, and, as his estate had diminished in value owing to
agrarian troubles in Bohemia, she repurchased it from him (1776) on
generous terms. Loudon then settled at Hadersdorf near Vienna, and
shortly afterwards was made a field-marshal. Of this Carlyle (_Frederick
the Great_) records that when Frederick the Great met Loudon in 1776 he
deliberately addressed him in the emperor's presence as "Herr
Feldmarschall." But the hint was not taken until February 1778.
In 1778 came the War of the Bavarian Succession. Joseph and Lacy were
now reconciled to Loudon, and Loudon and Lacy commanded the two armies
in the field. On this occasion, however, Loudon seems to have in a
measure fallen below his reputation, while Lacy, who was opposed to
Frederick's own army, earned new laurels. For two years after this
Loudon lived quietly at Hadersdorf, and then the reverses of other
generals in the Turkish War called him for the last time into the field.
Though old and broken in health, he was commander-in-chief in fact as
well as in name, and he won a last brilliant success by capturing
Belgrade in three weeks, 1789. He died within the year, on the 14th of
July at Neu-Titschein in Moravia, still on duty. His last appointment
was that of commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Austria, which had
been created for him by the new emperor Leopold. Loudon was buried in
the grounds of Hadersdorf. Eight years before his death the emperor
Joseph had caused a marble bust of this great soldier to be placed in
the chamber of the council of war.
His son JOHANN LUDWIG ALEXIUS, Freiherr von Loudon (1762-1822) fought in
the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars with credit, and rose to the rank
of lieutenant-field-marshal.
See memoir by v. Arneth in _Allgemeine deutsche Biographie_, s.v.
"Laudon," and life by G. B. Malleson.