Pierre Paul Royer-Collard

Born June 21, 1763, in Sompuis; died Sept. 4, 1845, in Châteauvieux. French political figure and philosopher. Member of the Académie Française (1827).

In the first stage of the French Revolution, Royer-Collard was a member of the Paris Commune. After the popular uprising of Aug. 10, 1792, however, he broke with the revolutionary movement, remaining in hiding throughout the Jacobin dictatorship. Under the Directory he was a member of the Council of the 500. From 1798 to 1803 he was a member of a secret royalist council seeking to restore the Bourbons. From 1811 to 1814 he was a professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and from 1815 to 1820 presided over the university council. In 1815, Royer-Collard was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, where he headed a group of moderate bourgeois liberals known as the Doctrinaires. He presided over the Chamber of Deputies between 1828 and 1830.

An ideologist of the constitutional monarchy, Boyer-Collard helped organize the address of the Chamber to King Charles X in March 1830, which demanded the dissolution of the ultra-royalist cabinet of A. J. A. M. Polignac. He ceased his political activity after the July Revolution (1830).

Royer-Collard’s eclectic philosophical views, derived mainly from M. Maine de Biran and T. Reid, exerted an influence on V. Cousin.