(_PARTLY FROM THE FRENCH._)
The late French premier, was the son of a rich merchant at Grenoble,
where he was born October 12, 1777. At an early age he entered the
army: he served in the Italian campaigns of 1799 and 1800, in the
staff of the Military Engineers. On the death of his father, however,
he quitted the service and devoted himself wholly to commercial
pursuits. In 1802, he opened a bank at Paris, and subsequently,
establishments for cotton-spinning and sugar-refining, and a steam
flour mill, all of which were eminently successful, and contributed
to the formation of his immense fortune. He first became known to the
public in 1816, by a pamphlet against the foreign loan system, which
was equally remarkable for its clearness of argument and profound
knowledge of finance. In 1817, he was elected one of the Deputies for
the Department of the Seine, and from that time until the revolution
of 1830, he continued the firm opponent of every ministerial
encroachment on the rights and privileges of the people. He
particularly distinguished himself by his hostility to the Villele
administration; himself supporting almost singly the whole burden of
the opposition to the famous budget of Villele, which he disputed,
item by item, with talent and perseverance worthy of entering the
lists with the distinguished financier to whom he was opposed. When
M. de Polignac became President of the Council, the opposition of M.
Perier assumed a more violent character, and he was pre-eminent
among the 221 deputies who voted the address which led to the fatal
ordonnances of July. When the revolution broke out, he at once avowed
himself the advocate of the popular cause, and opened his house as the
place of meeting of the deputies, who assembled to protest against the
illegality of the proceedings of the Crown. Firmly, however, attached
to the principles of constitutional opposition, and shrinking,
therefore, from the probable effects of a revolution, he was one of
the last to abandon the hope that his infatuated sovereign would open
his eyes to the gulf on the brink of which he was standing, and by a
timely revocation of the ordonnances, prevent the necessity of the
extreme measure of an appeal to arms, and a consequent change of
dynasty. When these became inevitable, M. Perier attached himself
firmly to the work of consolidating the new throne of Louis Philippe,
and reassembling those elements of order and stability which the
convulsion of July had scattered, but not annihilated. On the
dissolution of the ministry of M. Lafitte, M. Casimir Perier was
called to the head of the government, and immediately entered into the
system of conservative policy, which he continued until the close of
his career. The last time he took any important part in the debates
of the Chamber of Deputies was on the 20th of March, when he made an
ingenious defence of the conduct of government with respect to the
events of Grenoble. His last appearance in the Chamber was on the 29th
of March, when he merely brought in several private bills. On the
3rd of April he was attacked by the cholera, and, although the
indefatigable care bestowed on him by his medical attendants had more
than once apparently eradicated the disease, his frame, enfeebled by
a long standing internal complaint, as well as by his intense and
incessant application, was unable to resist the violence of the
disease, and, after several relapses, he at length sunk under his
sufferings, on the morning of the 16th of May, 1832.
As an orator M. Perier was energetic and impassioned: the natural
warmth of his temper, added to the irritability produced by illness,
frequently imparted a _brusque_ acerbity to his style, which injured
both the oratorical and moral effect of his eloquence; but his
reasoning was forcible, and his manner commanding and effective. "It
is not our province," says the editor of the Journal, whence these
particulars have been chiefly obtained, "to examine the merits or
demerits of his political system: recorders of, not actors in, the
great political struggle in which France is engaged, we have too
often had occasion to quote the enthusiastic eulogiums and unmeasured
invectives heaped upon him by different parties, to render it
necessary to repeat here, that he possessed the strongest proofs
against the reproach of mediocrity ever being applicable to him."