[5] This latter office entailed supervision of all French censorship, and in this capacity Malesherbes maintained communication with the literary leaders of Paris, including Diderot and Rousseau.

[8] In 1771, following the dismissal of Choiseul late the preceding year and at the instigation of Madame du Barry and the duc d'Aiguillon,[9] the Cour des Aides was dissolved for its opposition to a new method of administering justice devised by Maupeou, who planned to greatly diminish its powers and those of the parlements in general.

[10] Malesherbes, as President of the cour des aides, criticized the proposal for over-centralizing the justice system and abolishing the hereditary "nobility of the robe," which he believed had been a defender of the people and a check on royal power due to its independence.

[13] Indeed, he had always been an enthusiastic botanist; his avenue at Malesherbes[14] was world-famous; he had written against Buffon and in favor of Carl Linnaeus' system of botanical classification;[15] and he had been a member of the Académie des sciences since 1750.

[19] He held office as a royal minister only nine months; the Court proved intransigent in its opposition to his proposals for fiscal restraint and other reforms, including curtailing the arbitrary issuance of lettres de cachet, and he soon found himself bereft of political support.

In 1787, he authored an essay on Protestant rights that did much to procure civil recognition for them in France;[21][22] later that year, his Mémoire to the King detailed what he saw as the catastrophic state of affairs created by the monarchy, which was rapidly making "future calamities" inevitable.

[23] In 1788, rioting rocked France in Provence, Languedoc, Rousillon, Béarn, Flanders, Franche-Comté and Burgundy, most of the rioters motivated either by scarcity of bread, sympathy for representative government, or a combination.

Crowds tried to burn down Lamoignon's house, the troops were called out, and to quote the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, "there was a horrible slaughter of poor folk who could not defend themselves.

On 22 April 1794, his daughter Antoinette, granddaughter Aline and her husband Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, the deputés Isaac René Guy le Chapelier and Jacques Guillaume Thouret, four times elected president of the Constituent Assembly, were executed with him.

[28][29] Although he believed hierarchy was natural and desirable, he was concerned about its distortionary effects on administration and justice;[3] indeed, he argued that the privileges of the nobility should be earned through service to France, not granted by birth.

[32] Although he believed that books attacking governmental authority and religion should be suppressed, Malesherbes also frequently overruled censors to permit the publication of philosophical works that had been flagged as dangerous.

[17]More recently, the French scholar François Moureau has critiqued this "hagiographic" tradition, emphasizing instead the contradictions in Malesherbes' career: he was shaped both by an openness to new Enlightenment ideas and by his commitment to fulfilling his role as a public servant within the Ancien Régime.