BASSVILLE or BASSEVILLE, NICOLAS JEAN HUGON DE (1753-1793), French journalist and diplomatist, was born at Abbeville Feb. 7, 1753. At the outbreak of the Revo lution he became editor of the Mercure international. Then, through the Girondist minister Lebrun-Tondu, he entered the diplomatic service, went in May, 1792, as secretary of legation to Naples and was shortly afterwards sent, without official status, to Rome. His conduct in Rome, reflecting as it did his extreme revo lutionary views, enraged the Roman populace; a riot broke out on Jan. and Bassville, who was driving with his family to the Corso, was dragged from his carriage and so roughly handled that he died. The responsibility for the murder was laid by the Convention on the pope. In 1797 by an article of the treaty of Tolentino the papal government agreed to pay 30o million francs to the French government as compensation. The poet Vincenzo Monti, in his epic Bassvilliani, described the soul of Bassville looking down on the revolutionary scene as a penance before entering Paradise. Bassville wrote Memoires historiques, critiques et politiques sur la Revolution de France (Paris 1790; English trans. London, 1790).
See F. Masson, Les Diplomates de la Revolution (1882) ; Silvagni, La Corte e la Societa romans nei secoli XVIII. e XIX. (1881).