Life
Walewski was born at Walewice, near Warsaw, in Poland. At fourteen, he refused to enter the Russian army, escaping to London and thence to Paris, where the French government refused to extradite him to the Russian authorities. Louis Philippe sent him to Poland in 1830, where he was entrusted by the leaders of the Polish November 1830-31 Uprising with a mission to London.
After the fall of Warsaw, he took out letters of naturalization in France and entered the French army, seeing some service in Algeria as Captain in the French Foreign Legion and the Chasseurs d'Afrique. In 1837 he resigned his commission and began to write for the stage and for the press. He is said to have collaborated with the elder Dumas in Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle, and a comedy of his, L'Ecole du monde, was produced at the Theâtre Français in 1840.
In that year his paper, Le Messager des chambres, was taken over by Thiers, who sent him on a mission to Egypt, and under the Guizot ministry he was sent to Buenos Aires to co-operate with the British minister Lord Howden (Sir J Caradoc). The accession of Louis Napoleon to the supreme power in France guaranteed his career. He was sent as envoy extraordinary to Florence, to Naples and then to London, where he announced the coup d'état to Palmerston.
In 1855, Walewski succeeded Drouyn de Lhuys as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and acted as French plenipotentiary at the Congress of Paris the next year. As foreign minister, Walewski was an advocate for the entente with Russia, but also an opponent of the Emperor's adventurous policy in Italy, which led to war with Austria in 1859. When he left the Foreign Office in 1860 it was to become minister of state, an office which he held until 1863. Senator from 1855 to 1865, he entered the Corps Législatif in 1865, and was installed, by the emperor's interest, as president of the Chamber. A revolt against his authority two years later sent him back to the Senate. He was created a duke in 1866, was a member of the Académie des beaux-arts, and was awarded a grand cross of the Légion d'honneur.
Alexandre Walewski died of a stroke at Strasbourg on the 27 October 1868 and was interred in Paris' Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Read more about this topic: Count Alexandre Joseph Colonna-Walewski
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labor be?”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“Oh! what a poor thing is human life in its best enjoyments!—subjected to imaginary evils when it has no real ones to disturb it! and that can be made as effectually unhappy by its apprehensions of remote contingencies as if it was struggling with the pains of a present distress!”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.”
—Gail Sheehy (20th century)