DAUNOU, PIERRE CLAUDE FRANcOIS (1761 184o), French statesman and historian, born at Boulogne-sur Mer on Aug. 18,1761, was educated in the school of the Oratorians there and joined the order in Paris in 1777. He was professor in various seminaries from 178o till 1787, when he was ordained priest. Elected to the Convention by Pas-de-Calais, he associated himself with the Girondists, but strongly opposed the death sen tence on the king. He took little part in the struggle against the Mountain, but was involved in the overthrew of his friends, and was imprisoned for a year. In December 1794 he returned to the Convention, and was the principal author of the Constitution of the year III. It seems to have been due to his Girondist ideas that the Ancients were given the right of convoking the corps legislatif outside Paris, an expedient which made possible Napoleon's coup d'etat of the i8th and i9th Brumaire. The creation of the Insti tute was also due to Daunou, who drew up the plan for its or ganization. His energy was largely responsible for the suppression of the royalist insurrection of the i3th Vendemiaire, and the im portant place he occupied at the beginning of the Directory is in dicated by the fact that he was elected by twenty-seven depart ments as member of the Council of Five Hundred, and became its first president. He had himself set the age qualification of the directors at forty, and thus debarred himself as candidate, as he was only thirty-four. The direction of affairs having passed into the hands of Talleyrand and his associates, Daunou turned once more to literature, but in 1798 he was sent to Rome to organize the republic there, and again, almost against his will, he lent his aid to Napoleon in the preparation of the Constitution of the year VIII. He supported Napoleon's policy in the controversy with the Vatican in his Sur la puissance temporelle du Pape 0809). Still, he took little part in the new regime, with which at heart he had no sympathy, and turned more and more to literature. At the Restoration he was deprived of the post of archivist of the Em pire, which he had held from 1807, but from 1819 to 183o (when he again became archivist of the kingdom) he held the chair of history and ethics at the College de France. In 1839 he was made a peer. He died in 184o.
Daunou's lectures at the College de France, collected and pub lished after his death, fill twenty volumes (Cours &etudes his toriques, 1842-1846). They treat principally of the criticism of sources and the proper method of writing history, and occupy an important place in the evolution of the scientific study of history in France. Personally Daunou was reserved and somewhat austere, preserving in his habits a strange mixture of bourgeois and monk. His indefatigable work as archivist in the time when Napoleon was transferring so many treasures to Paris is not his least claim to the gratitude of scholars.
See Mignet, Notice historique sur la vie et les travaux de Daunou (1843) ; Taillandier, Documents biographiques sur Daunou 0847), including a full list of his works; Sainte-Beuve, Daunou in his Portraits Contemporains, t. iii. (unfavourable and somewhat unfair).