LA VALETTE, CHARLES-JEAN-MARIE-FÉLIX, marquis of. – French politician and diplomat, born on 25 November 1806 at Senlis (Oise), died on 2 May 1881 in Parigi. A diplomat under Luigi Filippo, he was embassy secretary at Stoccolma in 1837, consul general at Alexandria in Egypt in 1841, and minister plenipotentiary at Cassel (Hesse). Elected deputy on 1 August 1846, he withdrew into private life in 1848. In 1851, the president of the Republic Luigi Napoleone Bonaparte appointed him minister at Constantinople and charged him with forcefully impressing upon the Sultan the necessity of satisfying the Catholics in the question of the Holy Places.
He immediately found himself in conflict with Tsar Nicola I himself, who directed the political action personally from Petersburg; and, given the acrimony that this conflict was assuming, the foreign minister Drouyn de Lhuys recalled La V. in March 1853. Appointed senator in June of the same year, he returned to Constantinople as ambassador in 1860. In December 1861, he succeeded the duke of Grammont as ambassador to the Holy See. La V. was indifferent in religious matters (Ideville, in his Journal, calls him outright a Voltairian); he had married a Protestant and made no secret of his determination to bring the Roman question to an end through energetic policy, fully satisfying the demands of the Kingdom of Italy. He bluntly set forth his government’s line of conduct, so that, in comparison with other heads of mission, he was not entirely unwelcome to Pius IX, who considered him «the only ambassador of France who had never deceived him». When minister Thouvenel fell, he left Rome and was replaced by La Tour d'Auvergne. Minister of the Interior from 1865 to 1867 and of Foreign Affairs from 1868 to 1869, he was appointed ambassador to London, where he remained until 3 January 1870.