Alexandre de Laborde

Young Laborde had been dispatched to Vienna by his father at the outbreak of the French Revolution; there he joined the Austrian army, in which he was named an officer, 10 December 1789, at the age of seventeen, by personal intervention of the Emperor Joseph II.

At first stationed at Olmuz (Moravia), he was named captain in a regiment of light cavalry in October 1791, and saw action against the Revolutionary French forces the following year along the frontiers of the Austrian Netherlands and Luxembourg, where he distinguished himself by his generosity towards his compatriots who had been taken prisoner or wounded.

It appeared just at the moment the Peninsular Campaigns of 1808 interfered with markets; pressed with obligations to his family, whom he supported in considerable style, he decided to re-enter the Napoleonic administration and was appointed that year auditeur to the Conseil d'État, at that time a form of initial training for the upper levels of the Empire's bureaucracy scarcely suited to Laborde's prominence and expertise, but the emperor took him as a knowledgeable aide in Madrid, made his wife a dame d'honneur to Empress Joséphine, and then, satisfied with Laborde's role, made him a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1809 and created him a comte de l'Empire on 9 January 1810.

On his return to France, as Maître des requêtes he was put in charge of the commission to settle the accounts of the Grande Armée then placed at the head of the service of bridges and highways of the département de la Seine (1812), in which capacity he made a number of suggestions for practical improvements— public baths, stone sidewalks, fire stations— that came to fruition later.

Laborde conceived the project of compiling a complete inventory of the archaeological heritage of France and obtained from the Minister of the Interior, the comte de Montalivet, permission to circulate a request for collaboration among the prefects of départements: the initiative was fruitless in the face of official apathy, both during the Empire and under the Restoration, but it served as a precedent for the appointment in 1834 of Prosper Mérimée as inspector-general of historical monuments.

From 1818 to 1824, he served in the National Assembly, where he opposed the reinstallation of Ferdinand VII to the throne of Spain at the time of Trocadero (1823), with the eventual result that he found the leisure for a four-year tour of Italy, Greece, Turkey, Palestine and Egypt in the company of his son Léon de Laborde.