in the MS. of Jean d’Outremeuse’s Mireur des istores, was discovered in 1847; and the whole of his chronicle, preserved in the library of Châlons-sur-Marne, was edited in 1863 by L. Polain. Jean Lebel gives as his reason for writing a desire to replace a certain misleading rhymed chronicle of the wars of Edward III. by a true relation of his enterprises down to the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War. In the matter of style Lebel has been placed by some critics on the level of Froissart. His chief merit is his refusal to narrate events unless either he himself or his informant had witnessed them. This scrupulousness in the acceptance of evidence must be set against his limitations. He takes on the whole a similar point of view to Froissart’s; he has no concern with national movements or politics; and, writing for the public of chivalry, he preserves no general notion of a campaign, which resolves itself in his narrative into a series of exploits on the part of his heroes. Froissart was considerably indebted to him, and seems to have borrowed from him some of his best-known episodes, such as the death of Robert the Bruce, Edward III. and the countess of Salisbury, and the devotion of the burghers of Calais. The songs and virelais, in the art of writing which he was, according to Hemricourt, an expert, have not come to light.
See L. Polain, Les Vraies Chroniques de messire Jehan le Bel (1863); Kervyn de Lettenhove, Bulletin de la société d’émulation de Bruges, series ii. vols. vii. and ix.; and H. Pirenne in Biographie nationale de Belgique.
LEBER, JEAN MICHEL CONSTANT (1780–1859), French
historian and bibliophile, was born at Orléans on the 8th of
May 1780. His first work was a poem on Joan of Arc (1804);
but he wrote at the same time a Grammaire général synthétique,
which attracted the attention of J. M. de Gérando, then
secretary-general to the ministry of the interior. The latter
found him a minor post in his department, which left him leisure
for his historical work. He even took him to Italy when Napoleon
was trying to organize, after French models, the Roman states
which he had taken from the pope in 1809. Leber however did
not stay there long, for he considered the attacks on the temporal
property of the Holy See to be sacrilegious. On his return to
Paris he resumed his administrative work, literary recreations
and historical researches. While spending a part of his time
writing vaudevilles and comic operas, he began to collect old
essays and rare pamphlets by old French historians. His office
was preserved to him by the Restoration, and Leber put his
literary gifts at the service of the government. When the question
of the coronation of Louis XVIII. arose, he wrote, as an answer
to Volney, a minute treatise on the Cérémonies du sacre, which
was published at the time of the coronation of Charles X. Towards
the end of Villèle’s ministry, when there was a movement
of public opinion in favour of extending municipal liberties,
he undertook the defence of the threatened system of centralization,
and composed, in answer to Raynouard, an Histoire critique
du pouvoir municipal depuis l’origine de la monarchie jusqu’à
nos jours (1828). He also wrote a treatise entitled De l’état
réel de la presse et des pamphlets depuis François I er jusqu’à
Louis XIV. (1834), in which he refuted an empty paradox
of Charles Nodier, who had tried to prove that the press had
never been, and could never be, so free as under the Grand
Monarch. A few years later, Leber retired (1839), and sold to
the library of Rouen the rich collection of books which he had
amassed during thirty years of research. The catalogue he made
himself (4 vols., 1839 to 1852). In 1840 he read at the Académie
des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres two dissertations, an “Essai
sur l’appréciation de la fortune privée au moyen âge,” followed by
an “Examen critique des tables de prix du marc d’argent depuis
l’époque de Saint Louis”; these essays were included by the
Academy in its Recueil de mémoires présentés par divers savants
(vol. i., 1844), and were also revised and published by Leber
(1847). They form his most considerable work, and assure him
a position of eminence in the economic history of France. He
also rendered good service to historians by the publication of
his Collection des meilleures dissertations, notices et traités relatifs
à l’histoire de France (20 vols., 1826–1840); in the absence of
an index, since Leber did not give one, an analytical table of
contents is to be found in Alfred Franklin’s Sources de l’histoire
de France (1876, pp. 342 sqq.). In consequence of the revolution
of 1848, Leber decided to leave Paris. He retired to his native
town, and spent his last years in collecting old engravings.
He died at Orléans on the 22nd of December 1859.
In 1832 he had been elected as a member of the Société des Antiquaires de France, and in the Bulletin of this society (vol. i., 1860) is to be found the most correct and detailed account of his life’s works.
LEBEUF, JEAN (1687–1760), French historian, was born on
the 7th of March 1687 at Auxerre, where his father, a councillor
in the parlement, was receveur des consignations. He began his
studies in his native town, and continued them in Paris at
the Collège Ste Barbe. He soon became known as one of the
most cultivated minds of his time. He made himself master
of practically every branch of medieval learning, and had a
thorough knowledge of the sources and the bibliography of his
subject. His learning was not drawn from books only; he was
also an archaeologist, and frequently went on expeditions in
France, always on foot, in the course of which he examined the
monuments of architecture and sculpture, as well as the libraries,
and collected a number of notes and sketches. He was in
correspondence with all the most learned men of the day. His
correspondence with Président Bouhier was published in 1885
by Ernest Petit; his other letters have been edited by the
Société des sciences historiques et naturelles de l’Yonne (2 vols.,
1866–1867). He also wrote numerous articles, and, after his
election as a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
(1740), a number of Mémoires which appeared in the
Recueil of this society. He died at Paris on the 10th of April
1760. His most important researches had Paris as their subject.
He published first a collection of Dissertations sur l’histoire civile et ecclésiastique de Paris (3 vols., 1739–1743), then an Histoire de la ville et de tout le diocèse de Paris (15 vols., 1745–1760), which is a mine of information, mostly taken from the original sources. In view of the advance made by scholarship in the 19th century, it was found necessary to publish a second edition. The work of reprinting it was undertaken by H. Cocheris, but was interrupted (1863) before the completion of vol. iv. Adrien Augier resumed the work, giving Lebeuf’s text, though correcting the numerous typographical errors of the original edition (5 vols., 1883), and added a sixth volume containing an analytical table of contents. Finally, Fernand Bournon completed the work by a volume of Rectifications et additions (1890), worthy to appear side by side with the original work.
The bibliography of Lebeuf’s writings is, partly, in various numbers of the Bibliothèque des écrivains de Bourgogne (1716–1741). His biography is given by Lebeau in the Histoire de l’Académie royale des Inscriptions (xxix., 372, published 1764), and by H. Cocheris, in the preface to his edition.
LE BLANC, NICOLAS (1742–1806), French chemist, was
born at Issoudun, Indre, in 1742. He made medicine his profession
and in 1780 became surgeon to the duke of Orleans, but
he also paid much attention to chemistry. About 1787 he was
attracted to the urgent problem of manufacturing carbonate
of soda from ordinary sea-salt. The suggestion made in 1789
by Jean Claude de la Métherie (1743–1817), the editor of the
Journal de physique, that this might be done by calcining with
charcoal the sulphate of soda formed from salt by the action of
oil of vitriol, did not succeed in practice because the product
was almost entirely sulphide of soda, but it gave Le Blanc, as
he himself acknowledged, a basis upon which to work. He soon
made the crucial discovery—which proved the foundation of the
huge industry of artificial alkali manufacture—that the desired
end was to be attained by adding a proportion of chalk to the
mixture of charcoal and sulphate of soda. Having had the
soundness of this method tested by Jean Darcet (1725–1801),
the professor of chemistry at the Collège de France, the duke of
Orleans in June 1791 agreed to furnish a sum of 200,000 francs for
the purpose of exploiting it. In the following September Le
Blanc was granted a patent for fifteen years, and shortly afterwards
a factory was started at Saint-Denis, near Paris. But it had not
long been in operation when the Revolution led to the confiscation
of the duke’s property, including the factory, and about the same
time the Committee of Public Safety called upon all citizens
who possessed soda-factories to disclose their situation and
capacity and the nature of the methods employed. Le Blanc
