Joseph Foullon de Doué

Joseph-François Foullon de Doué (25 June 1715 – 22 July 1789) was a French politician and a Controller-General of Finances under Louis XVI. A deeply unpopular figure, he has the ignominious distinction of being the first recorded person to have been lynched à la lanterne.

Quotes

• Que le peuple était trop heureux de pouvoir brouter l’herbe.
  • The people should be too happy if they had only grass to eat.
  • Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, vol. 1, bk. 3, ch. 9

About

• A la lanterne!
  • To the lamp-post with him!
  • Lynch-law cry of the French Revolution, first heard at the summary execution of the detested minister Foulon (Bureau des Conseillers d’Etat) on 22 July 1789, at the Place de la Gréve. The street-lamps then hung from a stout horizontal stanchion in the wall, like a sign-board, thus suggesting a ready-made gibbet (rope and all) for stringing up an offender. "Pendu," the infuriated mob shouted, "Pendu sur-le-champ!" and hanged he was, and his head promenaded afterwards on a pike with a symbolical bunch of hay stuffed into the mouth. Next day (23 July) Barnave, defending the assassination in the National Assembly, asked "Le sang qui vient de se répandre était-il done si pur?" ("Was it quite innocent, then, the blood that has just been shed?")—a remark which was remembered against the speaker, and risposted to his face at his own guillotinement four years later (29 November 1793).
  • N. J. Hugou, Mémoires Historiques de la Révolution, vol. 4 (Paris, 1790), pp. 24–40; Edouard Fournier, L'Esprit dans l'histoire, 5th ed. (1883), pp. 367–8; R. Alexandre, Musée de la Conversation, 3rd ed. (1897), pp. 466–7; S. B. N. Chamfort, Œuvres Choisies, in the Bibliotheque Nationale Series, vol. 3 (Paris, 1890), pp. 147–9; W. F. H. King, Classical and Foreign Quotations, 3rd ed. (1904), no. 72

• Does everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the famished people that they might eat grass, and who died, and went to Hell?
  • Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), bk. 2, ch. 22