Bassville (Basseville), Nicolas-Jean-Hugon de

BASSVILLE (BASSEVILLE), NICOLAS-JEAN-HUGON de. - French diplomat and publicist, b. at Abbeville in Picardy on 7 Feb. 1753, d. at Rome on 13 Jan. 1793. Having abandoned his ecclesiastical studies, at the outbreak of the French Revolution he devoted himself to political journalism, then moved into diplomacy in 1792. Embassy secretary at 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 Paris government, which had recently issued the civil constitution of the clergy. He was unable, however, to prove himself equal to the mission entrusted to him, also because the mood of the Roman people, resistant to any attempt at revolutionary propaganda, was in those days more anxious than ever about the fate of Louis XVI and of the Church in France, faithful to the Pontiff, and clearly anti-Jacobin. The order received from Naples to replace the Bourbon coats of arms of the embassy with the republican ones, and worse still the fact that B. had shown himself with others in a carriage along the Corso, crowded with the Sunday promenade, wearing tricolour cockades, provoked a riot near S. Lorenzo in Lucina. Having taken refuge, battered, in a tenement block in Via dell'Impresa, he was gravely wounded by a knife in the belly when the enraged crowd broke in, and he died the next day in a nearby police station, reconciled with the Church. Pius VI lovingly cared for his widow and orphans. But the mournful incident was widely exploited by Paris to the detriment of the Pontiff's spiritual and temporal interests. Vincenzo Monti drew inspiration from it for the poem In morte di U. B., or Bassvilliana.

Paolo Dalla Torre