BASSVILLE (BASSEVILLE), NICOLAS-JEAN-HUGON DE

BASSVILLE (BASSEVILLE), NICOLAS-JEAN-HUGON de. — French diplomat and publicist, b. at Abbeville in Piccardia on 7 February 1753, d. in Rome on 13 January 1793. Having abandoned ecclesiastical studies, at the outbreak of the French Revolution he devoted himself to political journalism and then, in 1792, entered diplomacy. Embassy secretary at Naples, he arrived in Rome on 13 November of the same year with the task of bending the Holy See to the wishes of the government in Paris, which had recently promulgated the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. He nevertheless proved unequal to the mission entrusted to him, also because the mood of the Roman people, resistant to every attempt at revolutionary propaganda, was at that time more than usually anxious about the fate of Louis XVI and of the Church in France, faithful to the Pontiff, and decidedly anti-Jacobin. The order received from Naples to replace the Bourbon emblems of the embassy with republican ones, and, worse still, B.’s having appeared with others in a carriage along the Corso, crowded with Sunday strollers, wearing tricolour cockades, provoked a riot near S. Lorenzo in Lucina. Having taken refuge, battered, in a building on Via dell’Impresa, he was seriously wounded by a knife in the abdomen when the enraged crowd burst in, and died the following day at a nearby police station, reconciled with the Church. Pius VI took loving care of his widow and orphans. But the lamentable incident was extensively 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.