LAGRANGE-CHANCEL (CHANCEL) , FRANcOIS JOSEPH French dramatist and satirist, was born at Perigueux. He was an extremely precocious boy, and at Bor deaux, where he was educated, he produced a play when be was nine years old. Five years later his mother took him to Paris, where he found a patron in the princesse de Conti, to whom he dedicated his tragedy of Jugurtha or, as it was called later, Ad herbal (1694). Racine had given him advice and was present at the first performance, although he had long lived in complete retirement. Other plays followed: Oreste et Pylade (1697), Me leagre (1699), Amasis (I7oi), and Ino et Melicerte (1715). La grange was in high favour at court, Becoming maitre d'hôtel to the duchess of Orleans. This prosperity ended with the publication in 1720 of his Philippiques, odes accusing the regent, Philip, duke of Orleans, of the most odious crimes. Lagrange might have escaped the consequences of this libel but for the bitter enmity of a former patron, the duc de La Force. He found sanctuary at Avignon, but
was enticed beyond the boundary of the papal jurisdiction, when he was arrested and sent as a prisoner to the isles of Sainte Mar guerite. He escaped to Sardinia and thence to Spain and Holland, where he produced his fourth and fifth Philippiques. On the death of the Regent he was able to return to France. He was part author of a Histoire de Perigord left unfinished, and made a further contribution to history, or perhaps, more exactly, to romance, in a letter to Elie Freron on the identity of the Man with the Iron Mask. He died at Perigueux at the end of Dec. 1758.
He had collected his own works (5 vols., 1758) some months before his death. His most famous work, the Philippiques, was edited by M. de Lescure in 1858, and a sixth philippic by M. Diancourt in 1886.