BASSVILLE (BASSEVILLE), NICOLAS-JEAN-HUGON DE

BASSVILLE (BASSEVILLE), NICOLAS-JEAN-HUGON de. - French diplomat and publicist, born in Abbeville in Picardy on 7 Feb. 1753, died in Rome on 13 Jan. 1793. Having abandoned ecclesiastical studies at the outbreak of the French Revolution, he turned to political journalism and then, in 1792, to diplomacy. As secretary of the embassy in Naples, he arrived in Rome on 13 Nov. of the same year with the task of bending the Holy See to the will of the government in Paris, which had recently enacted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. He proved unequal to the mission entrusted to him, not least because the Roman populace, resistant to any revolutionary propaganda, was at that time deeply agitated over the fate of Louis XVI and the Church in France, loyal to the Pope and distinctly anti-Jacobin. The order received from Naples to replace the Bourbon arms on the embassy with republican ones, and worse still, BASSVILLE’s appearance in a carriage along the Corso—crowded with Sunday promenaders—wearing a tricolor cockade, provoked a riot near S. Lorenzo in Lucina. Taking refuge, battered, in a building on Via dell’Impresa, he was set upon by the enraged crowd and seriously wounded in the abdomen; he died the next day in a nearby police station, reconciled with the Church. Pius VI showed loving care for his widow and children. Yet the tragic incident was widely exploited by Paris to the detriment of the Pope’s spiritual and temporal interests. Vincenzo Monti drew inspiration from it for his canticle In morte di U. B., or Bassvilliana.