Page:EB1911 - Volume 08.djvu/652

 middle of the 19th century, when his history was reconstructed from his works. He was a Norman by birth, probably a native of Coutances, where he exercised the functions of royal advocate of the bailliage and procurator of the university. He was educated at the university of Paris, where he heard St Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant. He was, nevertheless, no adherent of the scholastic philosophy, and appears to have been conversant with the works of Roger Bacon. Although he never held any important political office, he must have been in the confidence of the court when, in 1300, he wrote his anonymous Summaria, brevis et compendiosa doctrina felicis expedicionis et abbreviationis guerrarum et litium regni Francorum, which is extant in a unique MS., but is analysed by N. de Wailly in the Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes (2nd series, vol. iii.). In the contest between Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII. Dubois identified himself completely with the secularizing policy of Philip, and poured forth a series of anti-clerical pamphlets, which did not cease even with the death of Boniface. His Supplication du pueble de France au roy contre le pape Boniface le VIIIᵉ, printed in 1614 in ''Acta inter Bonifacium VIII. et Philippum Pulchrum'', dates from 1304, and is a heated indictment of the temporal power. He represented Coutances in the states-general of 1302, but in 1306 he was serving Edward I. as an advocate in Guienne, without apparently abandoning his Norman practice by which he had become a rich man. The most important of his works, his treatise De recuperatione terrae sanctae, was written in 1306, and dedicated in its extant form to Edward I., though it is certainly addressed to Philip. Dubois outlines the conditions necessary to a successful crusade—the establishment and enforcement of a state of peace among the Christian nations of the West by a council of the church; the reform of the monastic, and especially of the military, orders; the reduction of their revenues; the instruction of a number of young men and women in oriental languages and the natural sciences with a view to the government of Eastern peoples; and the establishment of Philip of Valois as emperor of the East. The king of France was in fact, when once the pope was deprived of the temporal power, to become the suzerain of the Western nations, and in a later and separate memoir Dubois proposed that he should cause himself to be made emperor by Clement V. His zeal for the crusade was probably subordinate to the desire to secure the wealth of the monastic orders for the royal treasury, and to transfer the ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the crown. His ideas on education, on the celibacy of the clergy, and his schemes for the codification of French law, were far in advance of his time. He was an early and violent “Gallican,” and the first of the great French lawyers who occupied themselves with high politics. In 1308 he attended the states-general at Tours. He is generally credited with Quaedam proposita papae a rege super facto Templariorum, a draft epistle supposed to be addressed to Clement by Philip. This was followed by other pamphlets in the same tone, in one of which he proposed that a kingdom founded on the property of the Templars in the East should be established on behalf of Philip the Tall.

 DUBOIS, a borough of Clearfield county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., 129 m. by rail N.E. of Pittsburg. Pop. (1890) 6149, (1900) 9375, of whom 1655 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 12,623. It is served by the Pennsylvania, the Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburg, and the Buffalo & Susquehanna railways. The borough is built on a small plateau surrounded by hills, on the west slope of the Alleghany Mountains, nearly 1400 ft. above sea-level. Its chief importance is as a coal and lumber centre; among its manufacturing establishments are blast furnaces, iron works, machine shops, railway repair shops, tanneries, planing mills, flour mills, locomotive works and a glass factory. Dubois was first settled in 1872, was named in honour of its founder, John Dubois, and was incorporated in 1881.

 DUBOIS-CRANCÉ, EDMOND LOUIS ALEXIS (1747–1814), French Revolutionist, born at Charleville, was at first a musketeer, then a lieutenant of the maréchaux, or guardsmen of the old régime. He embraced liberal ideas, and in 1789 was elected deputy to the states-general by the third estate of Vitry-le-François. At the Constituent Assembly, of which he was named secretary in November 1789, he busied himself mainly with military reforms. He wished to see the old military system, with its caste distinctions and its mercenaries, replaced by an organization of national guards in which all citizens should be admitted. In his report, on the 12th of December 1789, he gave utterance for the first time to the idea of conscription, which he opposed to the recruiting system of the old régime. His report was not, however, adopted. He succeeded in securing the Assembly’s vote that any slave who touched French soil should become free. After the Constituent, Dubois-Crancé was named maréchal de camp, but he refused to be placed under the orders of Lafayette and preferred to serve as a simple grenadier. Elected to the Convention by the department of the Ardennes, he sat among the Montagnards, but without following any one leader, either Danton or Robespierre. In the trial of Louis XVI. he voted for death without delay or appeal. On the 21st of February 1793 he was named president of the Convention. Although he was a member of the two committees of general defence which preceded that of public safety, he did not belong to the latter at its creation. But he composed a remarkable report on the army, recommending two measures which contributed largely to its success, the rapid advancement of the lower officers, which opened the way for the most famous generals of the Revolution, and the fusion of the volunteers with the veteran troops. In August 1793 Dubois-Crancé was designated “representative on mission” to the army of the Alps, to direct the siege of Lyons, which had revolted against the republic. Accused of lack of energy, he was replaced by G. Couthon. On his return he easily justified himself, but was excluded from the Jacobin club at the instance of Robespierre, before whom he refused to bend. Consequently he was naturally drawn to participate in the revolution of the 9th of Thermidor of the year II., directed against Robespierre. But he would not join the Royalist reaction which followed, and was one of the committee of five which had to oppose the Royalist insurrection of Vendémiaire (see ). It was also during this period that Dubois-Crancé was named a member of the committee of public safety, then much reduced in importance. After the Convention, under the Directory, Dubois-Crancé was a member of the Council of the Five Hundred, and was appointed inspector-general of infantry; then, in 1799, minister of war. Opposed to the coup d’état of the 18th of Brumaire, he lived in retirement during the Consulate and the Empire. He died at Rethel on the 29th of June 1814. His portrait stands in the foreground in J. L. David’s celebrated sketch of the “Oath of the Tennis Court.”

 DU BOIS-REYMOND, EMIL (1818–1896), German physiologist, was born in Berlin on the 7th of November 1818. The Prussian capital was the place both of his birth and of his life’s work, and he will always be counted among Germany’s great scientific men; yet he was not of German blood. His father belonged to Neuchâtel, his mother was of Huguenot descent, and he spoke of himself as “being of pure Celtic blood.” Educated first at the French college in Berlin, then at Neuchâtel, whither his father had returned, he entered in 1836 the university of Berlin. He seems to have been uncertain at first as to the bent of his studies, for he sat at the feet of the great ecclesiastical historian August Neander, and dallied with geology; but eventually he threw himself into the study of medicine, with such zeal and success as to attract the notice of the great teacher of anatomy and physiology, who was then making Berlin famous as a school for the sciences ancillary to medicine. Johannes Müller may be regarded as the central figure in the history of modern physiology.