Rémusat, CHARLES (FRANÇOIS MARIE), COMTE DE, a French politician and littérateur, born at Paris, 14th March 1797, the son of Augustin Laurent, Comte de Rémusat (1762-1823), who was successively chamberlain to Napoleon and a prefect under the Restoration. His mother (née Claire Elizabeth Jeanne Gravier de Vergennes) was born in 1780, married in 1796, became dame du palais to Josephine, and died in 1821. Young Rémusat early developed Liberal ideas, and took eagerly to journalism. He signed the journalists' famous protest against the Ordinances of Polignac which brought about the July revolution, and was in October elected deputy for Tonlouse. He now allied himself with the Doctrinaire party, and in 1836 became under-secretary of state for the interior. In 1840, when the government passed into the hands of Thiers, Rémusat was made minister of the Interior, but soon resigned the office. He was exiled after the coup d'état of Louis Napoleon, and henceforward devoted himself to literary and philosophical studies, till, in August 1871, M. Thiers called him to hold the portfolio of Foreign Affairs, which he retained until 1873. He died June 6, 1875. Rémusat was long a well-known contributor to the Revue des Deux Mondes.
Among his writings are his Essais de Philosophie (1842); Abélard (1845); L'Angleterre au XVIIIe Siècle (1856); studies on St Anselm (1853), Bacon (1857), Channing (1857), John Wesley (1870), Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1874); Histoire de la Philosophie en Angleterre de Bacon à Locke (1875); and posthumously two philosophical dramas, Abélard and La Saint Barthélemy (1878), and Correspondance pendant les premières années de la Restauration (6 vols. 1883-87).
His mother's Mémoires (3 vols. 1879-80) and Lettres (2 vols. 1881), both of which have been translated into English, proved to be of the greatest interest, and threw a flood of light on the strange society of the First Empire and the character of Napoleon.