Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/243

 LAFFITTE

LA GEASSEEIE

and he was in 1789 appointed commander of the Paris National Guard. Lafayette was for a constitutional kingdom, and was compelled to leave France until 1799. He was inactive under Napoleon, but under the reactionary monarchy he sat on the ex treme left in the Chambre of Deputies (1818-24), holding his advanced and Deistic views to the end. In 1824-25 he visited America, and received a remarkable ovation. D. May 20, 1834.

LAFFITTE, Jacques, French states man. B. Oct 24, 1767. The son of a carpenter, he entered a bank as clerk and later was a member of the firm. In 1809 he was Eegent of the Bank of France, and in 1814 he became Governor of the Bank and President of the Chamber of Commerce. During the Eestoration he was an anti clerical member of the Chambre ; and he financed the Eevolution of 1830, and was appointed Minister of Finance and Premier. Laffitte, who in 1842 was President of the Chambre, stubbornly resisted reaction all his life. D. May 26, 1844.

LAFFITTE, Professor Pierre, French Positivist. B. Feb. 21, 1823. He was a teacher of mathematics at Paris who zealously supported Comte, and was made one of his executors. In the schism which followed the death of Comte, when Littre formed a Positivist school without ritual, Laffitte headed the orthodox Comtists. In 1892 he was appointed professor of the general history of science at the College de France. He wrote Les grands types de I humanite (2 vols., 1875) and other works. D. Jan. 4, 1903.

LAGARRIGUE, Jorge, M.D., Chilean Positivist. B. 1854. After studying law he turned to medicine, and graduated at Paris. There he became an ardent apostle of Positivism, and in 1883 returned to Chile to disseminate it. In 1886, however, he settled in Paris, and devoted himself to the Positivist cause there. He edited Comte s letters to Edger (1889), and wrote 413

La role de la France dans I histoire de I Tiumanite, Positivisme et Catholicisme, etc. D. 1894.

LAGARRIGUE, Juan Enrique, Chilean Positivist, brother of preceding. B. 1852. He was trained in law, and, visiting Paris in 1880, became a warm adherent of the Eeligion of Humanity. He has written La religion de la Humanidad (1893) and other Positivist works, besides a volume on Diderot and several Pacifist pamphlets.

LAGRANGE, Count Joseph Louis,

French mathematician. B. Jan. 25, 1736. Ed. Turin College. Lagrange made such astonishing progress in mathematics that at the age of nineteen he submitted to Euler the solution of the most difficult problems. Eecognized at once as a mathe matical genius, he was appointed professor of mathematics at Turin Artillery School in 1756, won the prize of the Paris Academy of Science in 1764 for research on the libration of the moon, and in 1766 succeeded Euler as Director of the Berlin Academy. He returned to Paris in 1787, and was professor at the Polytechnic School during the Eepublic, and head of the commission which installed the decimal system. Napoleon made him Count and Senator ; and even the Eestoration, which he detested alike on political and Eation- alist grounds, was compelled to respect one of the greatest mathematicians of his time. Lagrange was what we should now call Agnostic. D. Apr. 10, 1813.

LA GRASSERIE, Raoul de, French sociologist. B. June 13, 1839. Ed. Eennes. He practised as a barrister at Eennes, and was appointed judge at Loudeac, and after wards at Eennes. Privately he became a high authority on philology, and in later years on the sociological aspect of religion (Des religions comparers au point de vue sociologique, 1899). His Eationalism is also expressed in his poems (Homines et singes, 1889 ; Les contrastes, 1910, etc.), and he wrote on law and other subjects. La 414