Claude Hochet — Wikipedia

Claude Jean-Baptiste Hochet was born in Paris the November 24, 1772 , and dies the October 3, 1857 At the Château de la Thibaudière in Anjou. He worked for several newspapers during the revolutionary period and the Empire in parallel with important functions at the Council of State, of which he became the secretary general between 1816 and 1839. He is also a friend of Madame de Staël, by Benjamin Constant , of Julie Talma, Abel-François Villemain and Prosper of Barante, and a member of the Coppet group. It is best known through the necrological notice which appears in the Deposit Journal October 10, 1857 and by the letters which he exchanged in particular with M ^me of Staël and Constant.

Hochet made brilliant studies at the Harcourt college before leaving for the army in 1793, when he was assigned to the battalion known as Tuileries. Imprisoned under the terror until the fall of Robespierre, he met in prison Jean Charles de Lacretelle and Etienne-Augustin de Wailly, future translator of Horace. According to the author of the necrological notice of Deposit Journal , Hochet would have left this detention a story that he never had published, but that he had his loved ones read.

Introduced since then in the literary circles of Paris where he is appreciated for his mind and his eloquence, he became a journalist, with the Bertin (Louis-François and Pierre Louis), Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard, Pauline de Meulan (first wife de Guizot) and Lacretelle, but often does not sign its articles. He writes for example the reports of the works of M ^me Staël Literature , in the Deposit Journal , or Delphine , in the Publicist ; At the same time, it translates The art of War de Machiavelli (1799), published in 1806 the Letters from Madame la Marquise du Châtelet to the Count of Argental and in 1814 a brochure on the Council of State ^{[ first ]} .
Hochet entered it in 1799 as secretary of the interior section, chaired by Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély. In 1806, he passed secretary of the litigation committee, chaired by the Minister of Justice. He held these functions until 1815 or 1816, where he became secretary general of the Council of State. At the Restoration, he retained this position, one of the most important in the administration, and he was maintained in 1830.

HOCHET has acquired a certain fortune by his marriage; His brother-in-law Louis Boigues, is an industrialist in the Nièvre, of which he was a deputy in the House between 1828 and 1838. His other brother-in-law was Hippolyte François Jaubert, a politician who was, among other things, the Minister of Public Works. The eldest son of Claude J.-B. Hochet, Prosper, replaces his father, after his resignation, as secretary general of the Council of State in 1839 or 1842. His other son, Jules (1813-1867), continues industrial activities from his father. Hochet had lost her eldest daughter when she was fifteen and her wife two years before her own death. When he died in 1857, he has two girls left.

Dedicated friend, of good company, linked with many personalities of the restoration and the monarchy of July, renowned for his qualities as an observer, his impartiality, his moderation, his decline but also his indiscretions, Hochet lived voluntarily withdrawn and ignored public. In addition, as he did not sign his articles, like the archives of the State Council where he made most of his career burned in 1871, and since his personal papers were dispersed, Hochet remains a relatively unknown character.

He is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery ( 22 ^{It is}  division) ^{[ 2 ]} .

Since at least 1797, he knows Madame de Staël, with whom he has a friendship relationship that could have compromised his place in the Council of State since Germaine will quickly become persona non grata in Napoleonic France. This friendship is not free from a few temporary arguments, but it is sustainable despite the risks involved in HOCHET.

His position in Paris allows him to play the intermediaries between the personalities of the Coppet group, and he notably seeks to appease the disputes that sometimes arise among them. It is considered to be “one of the essential elements for its cohesion and its survival when its members are dispersed everywhere in Europe. […] His central position put him in the same way to know the sentimental fluctuations within the Coppet group ” ^{[ 3 ]} , which he observes in particular during a stay at the Château de Coppet during the summer of 1805; He is then witness to procrastination and sentimental relations agitated between Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël. The introductory remarks he wrote in the introduction to its edition of Letters from Madame du Châtelet can thus be understood as well as a historical reminder of the relations between Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire as as a barely veiled allusion to the tumultuous relations of Germaine de Staël and Constant ^{[ 4 ]} .
It is essentially by the correspondence that we know with these two personalities that Claude Hochet is mentioned today.

Journal of political and literary debates , October 10, 1857, necrological notice of Claude Hochet by Saint-Marc Girardin

[collective], The bosses of the Second Empire – Burgundy , Paris -Le Mans, Picard Publisher – Editions Cénomane, 1991.