This was a court which dealt with tax offences, but under its president Malesherbes it became perhaps the only French government institution to protect ordinary citizens against a corrupt state.
[3] Malesherbes himself was a keen botanist, but in the same year (1775) he was forced out of office because he published a scheme to reform the tax system.
With his private wealth and public income, L'Héritier was enabled to pursue his botanical interests as a wealthy amateur.
The most influential French botanists of the time - Jussieu, Adanson and others - advocated a more natural system of classification, meaning beauty.
L'Héritier soon clashed with them, although he was friends with other scholars such as Georges Cuvier, Pierre Marie Auguste Broussonet and André Thouin.
Through these contacts, he corresponded with other botanists such as Joseph Banks and James Edward Smith, in the Linnaean stronghold of England.
He immediately hurried home, packed the collection and left post-haste for England, while giving it out that he had gone to his country-house on holiday.
On his return to Paris he published (in 1789) Sertum Anglicum (An English Garland) which included some of the Dombey plants (but they were outnumbered by new species he found being cultivated in England).
As a magistrate of a respected court, and holding liberal political ideas himself, L'Héritier was at first not at risk when the French Revolution began in 1789.
In 1790, he was elected to the Academy of Sciences as an associate member in spite of de Jussieu, Adanson and Lamarck voting against him.
In late 1792, however, the Reign of Terror began and it is said that L'Héritier was imprisoned for a time, and in danger of execution, but some of his botanist friends got him released;[7] there is no independent confirmation of this.
On the evening of 16 August 1800, as he was walking home after working late at the Institute, he was attacked and murdered in the street by an unknown assailant.