Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/735

T P E T 703 on the Turks by Prince Eugene. During the. revolutionary struggles of 1848-49 the fortress was held by the insurgents for a short time. POTION DE VILLENEUVE, JEROME (1753-1794), was the son of a procureur at Chartres, where he was born in 1753. He himself became an avocat in his native place in 1778, and at once began to try to make a name in litera ture. His first printed work was an essay, Sur les Moyens de prevenir V Infanticide, which failed to gain the prize for which it was composed, but pleased Brissot so much that he printed it in vol. vii. of his Bibliotheque philosophique dts Legislateurs. Petion s next works, Les Lois Civiles, and Essai sur le Mariage, in which he advocated the marriage of priests, confirmed his position as a bold reformer, and when the elections to the States-General took place in 1789 he was elected a deputy to the Tiers Etat for Chartres. Both in the assembly of the Tiers Etat and in the Con stituent Assembly Petion showed himself a radical leader. He supported Mirabeau on 23d June, attacked the queen on 5th October, and was elected president on 4th December 1790. On 21st June 1791 he was chosen one of three commissioners appointed to bring back the king from Varennes. After the last meeting of the assembly on 30th September 1791 Robespierre and Petion were made the popular heroes and were crowned by the populace with civic crowns. Petion received a still further proof of the affection of the Parisians for himself on 14th November 1791, when he was elected second mayor of Paris in succession to Bailly. In his mayoralty he exhibited clearly his republican tendency and his hatred of the old monarchy, especially on 20th June 1792, when he allowed the mob to overrun the Tuileries and insult the royal family. For neglecting to protect the Tuileries he was suspended from his func tions by the Directory of the department of the Seine, but the leaders of the Legislative Assembly felt that Petion s cause was theirs, and rescinded the suspension on 13th July. On 3d August, at the head of the municipality of Paris, Petion demanded the dethronement of the king, and on 10th August, while the monarchy was falling with the Tuileries, he patiently underwent a form of detention in his own mairie. He was still mayor of Paris when the mas sacres of September in the prisons took place, and must bear the blame of not having endeavoured to interfere. He was elected to the Convention for Eure-et-Loir, and became its first president. Manuel then had the folly to propose that the president of the Assembly should have the same authority as the president of the United States ; his proposition Avas at once rejected, but Petion got the nickname of "Roi Petion," which contributed to his fall. His jealousy of Robespierre allied him to the Girondin party, as did also his assiduous attention at Madame Roland s salon. With the Girondins he voted for the king s death and for the appeal to the people, as one of them he was elected to the first committee of general defence in March 1793, as their representative he attacked Robespierre on 12th April, and it is no matter of wonder, therefore, that his name was among those of the twenty-two Girondin deputies proscribed on 2d June. Petion was one of those who escaped to Caen and raised the standard of provincial insurrection against the Convention ; and when the Norman rising failed he fled with Guadet, Buzot, Barbarous, Salle, and Louvet to the Gironde, and hid in a grotto at St Emilion. At last, but a month before Robespierre s fall in June 1794, the escaped deputies felt themselves tracked down, and deserted the grotto ; Louvet found his way to Paris, Salle and Guadet to Bordeaux, where they were soon taken ; Barbaroux committed suicide ; and the bodies of Petion and Buzot were found in a field, half-eaten by wolves. For Petion s published works, see the edition of his (Euvrcs, 3 vols., 1792 ; for his life, see the ridiculous eulogy in J. J. Regnault- "Warin s Vie de Petion, 1792, and Memoircs inedits de Petion et Memoircs de Buzot et de Barbarous, with an introduction by 0. A. Dauban, 1866 ; and for his last days and death, see C. Vatel, Char lotte Corday et les Girondins, 3 vols., 1872. PETIS DE LA CROIX, FRANCOIS (c. 1653-1713), the best representative of Oriental learning in France during the last decades of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, was born in Paris about 1653. He was son of the Arabic interpreter of the French court, and inherited this office at his father s death in 1695, after wards transmitting it to his own son, Alexandre Louis Marie. At an early age he was sent by Colbert to the East ; during the ten years he spent in Syria, Persia, and Turkey he mastered Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and also collected rich materials for future writings. 1 He found, besides, opportunity to equip himself for those diplomatic missions which the French Government entrusted to him soon after his return to Paris in 1680. Having served a short time as secretary to the French ambassador in Morocco, he accompanied as interpreter the French forces sent against Algiers, and greatly contributed to the satis factory settlement of the treaty of peace between the two countries, which was drawn up by himself in Turkish and ratified in 1684. In a similar capacity he conducted the negotiations with Tunis and Tripoli in 1685 and those with Morocco in 1687 ; and the zeal, tact, and linguistic knowledge he manifested in these and other transactions with Eastern courts were at last rewarded in 1692 by his appointment to the Arabic chair in the College Royal de France, which he filled until his death in 1713. He published Conies Turcs, Paris, 1707, and Les Mille et un Jours, 5 vols., Paris, 1710-12, and proved his acquaintance with the Armenian and Ethiopia languages (a powerful impulse to the study of the latter having been given just at that time by the masterly works of Hiob Ludolf) in his Armenian Dictionary and his Account of Ethiopia. But the lasting monument of his literary fame, the one standard work that has outlived many generations and still keeps a distinct merit of its own, is his excellent French version of Sharaf-uddi n AH Yazdi s Zafarndma, or History of Timur (completed 828 A.H. ; 1425 A.D.), which was given to the world nine years after his death, 1722 (4 vols., Paris ; translated into English by J. Darby, London, 1723). This work, renowned throughout the East as a model of elegant style, and one of the rare specimens of a fairly critical history Persia can boast of, was compiled under the auspices of Mirza Ibrahim Sultan, the son of Shah Rukh and grandson of the great Ti nuir himself. This prince collected all the official records of Timur s reign, both in Turkish and Persian, collated and revised them, and had then an accurate text drawn up by his secretaries, which was turned by Sharaf-uddin into elegant and refined language and revised by Ibrahim Sultan himself (see Rieu s Cat. Persian MSS. in the Brit. Mus., i. p. 173 sq.}. The only error committed by Petis de la Croix in his otherwise very correct translation is that he erroneously ascribed the important share which Ibrahim Sultan had in the Zafarndma to Timur himself. PETITION is an application for redress by a person aggrieved to an authority capable of relieving him. It may be made in the United Kingdom to the crown or its delegate, or to one of the houses of parliament. The right of petitioning the crown was recognized in directly as early as Magna Charta in the famous clause, Nidli vendemus, nidli negabimus ant diferemus, rectum aut justitiam, and directly at various periods later, e.g., in the articles of the Commons assented to by Henry IV., by which the king was to assign two days in the week for petitions, it being an honourable and necessary thing that his lieges who desired to petition him should be heard (Sot. Parl, 8 Hen. IV., p. 585). The case of the seven bishops in 1688 confirmed the right, and finally the Bill of Rights in 1689 declared "that it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal." Petitions to the crown appear to have been at first for the redress of 1 Many of these as the account of Jerusalem, Modern and Ancient, the Travels through Syria and Persia, the Antiquities and Monuments of Egypt, the translations of Pseudo-Wakidi s Conquest of Syria and of Il aji Khalfa s Dictionary, and the History of the Ottoman Empire still remain in manuscript.