DUPONT, PIERRE (1821-187o), French songwriter, the son of a blacksmith, was born at Lyons on April 23, 1821. He was brought up in the country by his godfather, a village priest, and apprenticed to a notary at Lyons. In 1839 he found his way to Paris, and some of his poems were inserted in the Gazette de France and the Quotidienne. Two years later he was saved from the conscription and enabled to publish his first volume, Les Deux Anges, through the exertions of a kinsman and of Pierre Lebrun. Gounod's appreciation of his peasant song, "J'ai deux grands boeufs dans mon etable" (1846), settled his vocation as a song writer. He had to engage Ernest Reyer to write down his airs. He sang his own songs, as they were composed, at the workmen's concerts in the Salle de la Fraternite du Faubourg Saint-Denis; the public performance of his famous Le Pain was forbidden; Le Chant des ouvriers was even more popular; and in 1851 he was condemned to seven years' exile. The sentence was cancelled, and for a time Dupont renounced politics. He died at Lyons on July 24, 187o. His songs have appeared in various forms, Chants et chansons (3 vols., with music, 1852-1854), Chants et poesies (7th ed., 1862), etc. Among the best-known are "Le Braconnier," "Le Tisserand," "La Vache blanche," and "La Chanson du ble." See Causeries du lundi, iv. ; Ch. Baudelaire, Notice sur P. Dupont (1849) ; Dechaut, Biographie de Pierre Dupont (1871) ; Ch. Lenient, Poesie patriotique en France (1889), ii. 352 et seq.
His cousin, PIERRE SAMUEL DU PONT (1870— ), having graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1890, engaged in manufacturing at Wilmington. He became chair man of the board of the E. I. du Pont de Nemours Powder com pany, and also chairman of the General Motors Corporation. The E. I. du Pont company, which originally confined its activities to the making of explosives, under his guidance engaged in the manufacture of artificial silk, motion-picture films, paints and varnishes.