BODE, Tun BARONS DE, a family of doubtful natinnalitv, best. known in England in connection with a claim for indemnity frequently brought before parlia:nent. The first member of the family connected with England was CIZARLES A. L. F. nn B., a baron of the Holy Roman empire. He was born at Neuhof, in Germany, in 1741, and became an officer in the regiment of Nassau, which, although in the service of France, con sisted exclusively of Germans. The baron had landed pruperty in Germany, and remained German when he married a Miss lannersley, an Englishwoman. Two years afterwards, a son was born of the marriage at Locksley, in Staffordshire, named CLEMENT J. P. P. de B., who returned when a child with his parents to the continent. In 1787, baron Charles purchased an estate in Lower Alsace, held under German feudal tenures, in terms of the treaty of Munster, and thither he to reside. The revo lution, however, broke out, and in 1791, the baron considered it prudent publicly to surrender his estates to his son. Two years later, the family was obliged to emigrate, and the property was confiscated. After leaving France, baron Charles boOght a fief held of the archbishop of Cologne, and he died a German in 1797. Clement, his son, became an officer in the Russian artillery, married a Russian, and, with his regiment, entered Paris in 1814. .After the peace, conventions were entered into, under which British residents who had suffered during the revolution by confiscation were to be indemnified. A large sum was handed over by France to England, to be divided among
the claimants, one of whom was baron Clement. The fact that he had been invested as proprietor of the estate in Alsace at the time of confiscation, that his mother was Eng lish, and that he had been born in England, secured at first a recognition of his claim to the extent of making it an item of the calculation for fixing the amount of the indem nity; but it was afterwards repudiated, oit the ground, that baron Clement was not an English subject at the time of confiscation, and that lie had sustained no loss through his connection with England. He died in 1840. His sou, BARON CLEMENT A. G. P. L.. took out letters of administration to his father, and prosecuted the claim of his family; without, however, any success. He petitioned the house of commons in 1852, and his case was fully discussed. See J. Hodgkin's Case of the Baron de B. in its Pres•nt Aspect (1860). Baron Clement is naturalized as a British subject, and his married an Eng,lishwoman. He has acquired reputation as an eastern traveler, and is the translator of Bokhara, its Emir and People, from the Russian of Khanikoff (1845), and the author of Trarels in La 1171:Itall arul Arabistan (1845), and of an interesting Account of Daghestan and the Lesghi Tribes of the Eastern Caucasus, referred to with approbation by earl de Grey in his address to the geographical society in 18G0.