François Blondel
His father was François-Guillaume Blondel, who studied law in Toulouse and bought the position of avocat du roi in Ribemont after receiving his degree in 1624.
Although his father François-Guillaume was not born a nobleman, he was able to purchase (or inherit via his wife's relations) two close by seigneuries, Gaillardon in 1620 and Les Croisettes before 1635, and was the mayor of Ribemont several times in the 1630s and 1640s.
In 1640 Cardinal Richelieu entrusted Blondel with diplomatic missions in Portugal, Spain and Italy, which gave him an opportunity to study at first hand the fortification systems of those nations.
[4] Richelieu named Blondel sub-lieutenant of one of his galleys, La Cardinale, aboard which he participated in the attack on the port of Tarragona and served for a time as governor at Palamos.
They frame the central portal, strikingly surmounted by a life-sized equestrian statue of the previous seigneur, Philibert de La Guiche.
[8] In 1652 Blondel became the tutor of the son of the Secretary of State for foreign affairs, Loménie de Brienne, with whom he made the Grand Tour : Langres — Besançon — Basel — Alsace (Brisach) — Strasbourg (where he inspected the mechanism of the famous clock) — Philippsburg — Mannheim — Mayence — The Hague — Hamburg — Lübeck — Kiel — Denmark — Sweden (Stockholm, Uppsala) — Finland — Estonia (Riga) — Königsberg — Dantzig — Cracow — Pressburg — Vienna — Prague — Vence — Rome — Florence — Toulon.
In the course of his travels he encountered Paul Wurz, occasioning the correspondence that resulted in Blondel's first publication, a mathematical pamphlet entitled Epistola ad P. W. [Paulum Wurzium], which discussed the breaking resistance of beams.
In 1659, on a voyage to Constantinople he saw an aqueduct "in a place that one calls Belgrade, which by its grandeur, its height and the magnificence of its structure, cedes nothing to that of the Pont du Gard.
The following year, 1664, Colbert named him Ingénieur du Roy pour la Marine, which occasioned his supervision of harbour fortifications in Normandy (Cherbourg, Le Havre), in Brittany and in the Antillies (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue), where he witnessed at first hand the prodigious effects of a hurricane at the island of Saint-Christophe, and where he found the materials for numerous memoires presented to the Académie des Sciences.
