farm rented by his father at Monsheim, and occasionally publishing criticisms of public affairs, until the February revolution of 1848 and its echoes in Germany recalled him to active political life. For a short while he was at the head of the new Hessian administration; but his ambition was to share in the creation of a united Germany. At the Heidelberg meeting and the preliminary convention (Vorparlament) of Frankfort he deeply impressed the assemblies with the breadth and moderation of his views; with the result that when the German national parliament met (May 18), he was elected its first president. His influence was at first paramount, both with the Unionist party and with the more moderate elements of the Left, and it was he who was mainly instrumental in imposing the principle of a united empire with a common parliament, and in carrying the election of the Archduke John as regent. With the growing split between the Great Germans (Grossdeutschen), who wished the new empire to include the Austrian provinces, and the Little Germans (Kleindeutschen), who realized that German unity could only be attained by excluding them, his position was shaken. On the 15th of December, when Schmerling and the Austrian members had left the cabinet, Gagern became head of the imperial ministry, and on the 18th he introduced a programme (known as the Gagernsche Programm) according to which Austria was to be excluded from the new federal state, but bound to it by a treaty of union. After a severe struggle this proposal was accepted; but the academic discussion on the constitution continued for weary months, and on the 20th of May, realizing the hopelessness of coming to terms with the ultra-democrats, Gagern and his friends resigned. Later on he attempted to influence the Prussian Northern Union in the direction of the national policy, and he took part in the sessions of the Erfurt parliament; but, soon realizing the hopelessness of any good results from the vacillating policy of Prussia, he retired from the contest, and, as a major in the service of the Schleswig-Holstein government, took part in the Danish War of 1850. After the war he retired into private life at Heidelberg. In 1862, misled by the constitutional tendency of Austrian politics, he publicly declared in favour of the Great German party. In 1864 he went as Hessian envoy to Vienna, retiring in 1872 when the post was abolished. He died at Darmstadt on the 22nd of May 1880.
Maximilian, Freiherr von Gagern (1810–1889), the youngest son, was born at Weilburg on the 26th of March 1810. Up to 1848 he was a government official in Nassau; in that year he became a member of the German national parliament and under-secretary of state for foreign affairs. Throughout the revolutionary years he supported his brother’s policy, became a member of the Erfurt parliament, and, after the collapse of the national movement, returned to the service of the duchy of Nassau. In 1855 he turned Roman Catholic and entered the Austrian service as court and ministerial councillor in the department of foreign affairs. In 1871 he retired, and in 1881 was nominated a life member of the Upper Chamber (Herrenhaus). He died at Vienna on the 17th of October 1889.
See Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, Band viii. p. 301, &c. (1878) and Band xlix. p. 654 (1904).
GAHANBAR, festivals of the ancient Avesta calendar celebrated by the Parsees at six seasons of the year which correspond with the six periods of creation: (1) Maidhyozaremaya (mid spring), (2) Maidhyoshema (midsummer), (3) Paitishahya (season of corn), (4) Ayathrema (season of flocks), (5) Maidhyarya (winter solstice), (6) Hamaspathmaedha (festival of sacrifices).
GAIGNIÈRES, FRANÇOIS ROGER DE (1642–1715), French genealogist, antiquary and collector, was the son of Aimé de Gaignières, secretary to the governor of Burgundy, and was born on the 30th of December 1642. He became écuyer (esquire) to Louis Joseph, duke of Guise, and afterwards to Louis Joseph’s aunt, Marie of Guise, by whom in 1679 he was appointed governor of her principality of Joinville. At an early age he began to make a collection of original materials for history generally, and, in particular, for that of the French church and court. He brought together a large collection of original letters and other documents, together with portraits and prints, and had copies made of a great number of the most curious antiquarian objects, such as seals, tombstones, stained glass, miniatures and tapestry. In 1711 he presented the whole of his collections to the king. The bulk of them is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, and a certain number in the Bodleian library at Oxford.
See G. Duplessis, Roger de Gaignières (Paris, 1870); L. Delisle, Cabinet des manuscrits, t. i. pp. 335-356; H. Bouchot, Les Portraits aux crayon des XVI e et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1884); Ch. de Grandmaison, Gaignières, ses correspondants et ses collections de portraits (Niort, 1892).
GAIL, JEAN BAPTISTE (1755–1829), French hellenist, was born in Paris on the 4th of July 1755. In 1791 he was appointed deputy, and in 1792 titular professor at the Collège de France. During the Revolution he quietly performed his professional duties, taking no part in politics, although he possessed the faculty of ingratiating himself with those in authority. In 1815 he was appointed by the king keeper of Greek MSS. in the royal library over the heads of the candidates proposed by the other conservators, an appointment which made him many enemies. Gail imagined that there was an organized conspiracy to belittle his learning and professional success, and there was a standing quarrel between him and his literary opponents, the most distinguished of whom was P. L. Courier. He died on the 5th of February 1829. Without being a great Greek scholar, Gail was a man of unwearied industry, whose whole life was devoted to his favourite studies, and he deserves every credit for having rescued Greek from the neglect into which it had fallen during the troublous times in which he lived. The list of Gail’s published works filled 500 quarto pages of the introduction to his edition of Xenophon. The best of these is his edition of Theocritus (1828). He also wrote a number of elementary educational works, based on the principles of the school of Port Royal. His communications to the Académie des Inscriptions being coldly received and seldom accorded the honour of print, he inserted them in a vast compilation in 24 volumes, which he called Le Philologue, containing a mass of ill-digested notes on Greek grammar, geography, archaeology, and various authors.
See “Notice historique sur la vie et les ouvrages de J. B. G.,” in Mém. de l’Acad. des Inscriptions, ix.; the articles in Biographie universelle (by A. Pillon) and Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyclopädie (by C. F. Bähr); a list of his works will be found in J. M. Quérard, La France littéraire (1829), including the contents of the volumes of Le Philologue.
GAILLAC, a town of south-western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Tarn, on the right bank of the Tarn, 15 m. W. of Albi on the railway from that city to Toulouse. Pop. (1906) town, 5388; commune, 7535. The churches of St Michel and St Pierre, both dating from the 13th and 14th centuries, have little architectural importance. There are some interesting houses, one of which, the Maison Yversen,
of the Renaissance, is remarkable for the rich carving of its doors. The public institutions include the sub-prefecture, a tribunal of first instance, and a communal college. Its industries include the manufacture of lime and wooden shoes, while dyeing, wood-sawing and flour-milling are also carried on; it has a considerable trade in grain, flour, vegetables, dried plums, anise, coriander, &c., and in wine, the white and red wines of the arrondissement having a high reputation. Gaillac grew up round the Benedictine abbey of St Michel, founded in the 10th century.
GAILLARD, GABRIEL HENRI (1726–1806), French historian, was born at Ostel, Picardy, in 1726. He was educated for the bar, but after finishing his studies adopted a literary career, ultimately devoting his chief attention to history. He was already a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres (1760), when, after the publication of the three first volumes of his Histoire de la rivalité de la France et d’Angleterre, he was elected to the French Academy (1771); and when Napoleon created the Institute he was admitted into its third class (Académie française) in 1803. For forty years he was the intimate friend of Malesherbes, whose life (1805) he wrote. He died at St Firmin, near Chantilly, on the 13th of February 1806. Gaillard is painstaking and impartial in his statement of facts,
