MONTOR, JEAN-ALEXIS-FRANÇOIS ARTALIO de. — French diplomat and writer, born on 21 July 1772 in Paris, died there on 12 November 1849. Attached to the French legation in Stockholm in 1792, he then joined the royalist army of émigrés commanded by the prince of Condé. Sent to Rome on a mission, he became attached to Italy, formed friendships with many people, and acquired an uncommon knowledge of men and affairs. After the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire (1799), although remaining attached to the Bourbons, he entered the service of the new regime and became first secretary of the French legation in Rome, under Cacault.
Chargé d’affaires in Tuscany in 1806, he was recalled to Paris the following year and, having been appointed imperial censor, took advantage of this position to devote himself to writing works of various kinds. Since he had been in Stockholm in 1792 when Gustavus III was assassinated, he used the event as the occasion to publish Histoire de l’assassinat de Gustave III, roi de Suède, par un officier polonais, témoin oculaire (Paris 1802). In 1808, under the pseudonym of “member of the Academy of Cortona,” he published a volume on Italian painting before Raphael, which subsequently went through two further editions (Considérations sur l'état de la peinture en Italie dans les quatre siècles qui ont précédé Raphaël, there 1808), and a book on the catacombs of Rome (Voyage dans les catacombes de Rome, there 1810), containing a partial translation of Bosio’s well-known volume. From 1811 to 1813, he also published a translation of the Divine Comedy. With the Restoration, he returned to the diplomatic service. Secretary of legation in Rome from 1814 to 1816, he returned there in 1819 and remained until 1830. At the fall of the Bourbons, he withdrew into private life, devoting himself exclusively to literature. He wrote extensively and, above all, published monographs on Popes Pius VII, Leo XII, and Pius VIII, whom he had personally known during his diplomatic activity in Rome (Histoire du pape Pie VII, 2 vols., Paris 1936; Histoire du pape Léon XII, 2 vols., there 1843; Histoire du pape Pie VIII, there 1844).