François Gabriel de Bray
François Gabriel de Bray KmstkNO (25 December 1765 – 3 September 1832) was a French diplomat, botanist and man of letters.
Biography
François Gabriel de Bray was born at Rouen, Kingdom of France, the son of Pierre Augustin Camille Debray and Anne Le Faon de la Trémissinière.[lower-alpha 1] He went into exile in the Kingdom of Bavaria after 1789 to escape the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.
François Gabriel de Bray was appointed Chamberlain to the King of Bavaria, then Minister Plenipotentiary in Russia, Saint Petersburg, Paris and Vienna. A subject of the King of Bavaria, he became a naturalised Bavarian. He is known in Germany as Franz Gabriel von Bray.
As ambassador of the Kingdom of Bavaria to St Petersburg in 1809, at the court of Emperor Alexander I, he came into contact with another Savoyard, Count Joseph de Maistre, Minister Plenipotentiary of the King of Sardinia at the Russian court, and engaged in philosophical conversations with him. De Bray became the third person to set sail on the Neva in the summer, whom the philosopher De Maistre referred to anonymously as the ‘chevalier de B***’ in his book St Petersburg Dialogues.
He was a learned botanist: in association with Count von Sternberg and David Heinrich Hoppe, he became one of the first members of the Regensburg Botanical Society. He studied the amaranth family at length and published the identifications and classifications of new species.
Bray became an honorary member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1808[lower-alpha 2] and of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1822. The alpine cress, which Hoppe had discovered in the Grossglockner region, was named Braya alpina in Bray's honour. A bust of Bray was made by Thorvaldsen.
He died in Irlbach at the age of 66, leaving a distinguished family in Germany. He was the father of Otto von Bray-Steinburg, President of the Bavarian Council of Ministers, who headed the Bavarian delegation that negotiated the attachment of the Kingdom of Bavaria to the German Empire at Versailles in 1871.
Works
- Mémoire sur la Livonie (1814)
- Essai critique sur l'histoire de la Livonie, suivi d'un tableau sur l'état actuel de cette province (1817; 3 volumes)
- Essai d'un exposé géognostico-botanique de la flore du monde primitif (1820; with Kaspar Maria von Sternberg, Jacob Sturm & Joh Dan Preussier)
- Voyage pittoresque dans le Tyrol, aux Salines de Salzbourg et de Reichenhall, et dans une partie de la Bavière (1825)
- Quelques considérations politiques sur la révolte des provinces belges en 1789 et 1790 (1908)
- Mémoires du comte de Bray, ministre et ambassadeur de S.M. Maximilien premier, roi de Bavière, auprès des cours de Saint-Petersbourg, Londres, Berlin, Paris et Vienne. (La Révolution française et la politique des Puissances européennes) (1911; preface by Ernest Daudet)
Notes
Footnotes
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- Aretin, Karl Otmar von (1955). "Bray, Francois Gabriel Graf." In: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB). 2. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 563–64.
- Hellmann, Manfred (1978). Ein bayerischer Diplomat als Geschichtsschreiber Livlands. München: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschafte.
- Kreitmaier, Georges (1965). Franz-Gabriel von Bray, diplomat und naturforscher. Staubing: Humanitisches Gymasium.
External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Franz Gabriel Bray. |
- Works by François Gabriel de Bray at Gallica
- Works by François Gabriel de Bray at Biodiversity Heritage Library
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- Pages with reference errors
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- Botanists with author abbreviations
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- 176 births
- 1832 deaths
- 19th-century French botanists
- 19th-century French diplomats
- 19th-century French male writers
- 19th-century French memoirists
- Commanders Grand Cross of the Order of the Polar Star
- Diplomats of Bavaria
- French travel writers
- Honorary members of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences
- Members of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
- Members of the Bavarian Reichsrat
- People from Rouen
- Recipients of the Order of St. Anna
