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Rh in the MS. of Jean d’Outremeuse’s Mireur des istores, was discovered in 1847; and the whole of his chronicle, preserved in the library of Châlons-sur-Marne, was edited in 1863 by L. Polain. Jean Lebel gives as his reason for writing a desire to replace a certain misleading rhymed chronicle of the wars of Edward III. by a true relation of his enterprises down to the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War. In the matter of style Lebel has been placed by some critics on the level of Froissart. His chief merit is his refusal to narrate events unless either he himself or his informant had witnessed them. This scrupulousness in the acceptance of evidence must be set against his limitations. He takes on the whole a similar point of view to Froissart’s; he has no concern with national movements or politics; and, writing for the public of chivalry, he preserves no general notion of a campaign, which resolves itself in his narrative into a series of exploits on the part of his heroes. Froissart was considerably indebted to him, and seems to have borrowed from him some of his best-known episodes, such as the death of Robert the Bruce, Edward III. and the countess of Salisbury, and the devotion of the burghers of Calais. The songs and virelais, in the art of writing which he was, according to Hemricourt, an expert, have not come to light.

See L. Polain, Les Vraies Chroniques de messire Jehan le Bel (1863); Kervyn de Lettenhove, Bulletin de la société d’émulation de Bruges, series ii. vols. vii. and ix.; and H. Pirenne in Biographie nationale de Belgique.

 LEBER, JEAN MICHEL CONSTANT (1780–1859), French historian and bibliophile, was born at Orléans on the 8th of May 1780. His first work was a poem on Joan of Arc (1804); but he wrote at the same time a Grammaire général synthétique, which attracted the attention of J. M. de Gérando, then secretary-general to the ministry of the interior. The latter found him a minor post in his department, which left him leisure for his historical work. He even took him to Italy when Napoleon was trying to organize, after French models, the Roman states which he had taken from the pope in 1809. Leber however did not stay there long, for he considered the attacks on the temporal property of the Holy See to be sacrilegious. On his return to Paris he resumed his administrative work, literary recreations and historical researches. While spending a part of his time writing vaudevilles and comic operas, he began to collect old essays and rare pamphlets by old French historians. His office was preserved to him by the Restoration, and Leber put his literary gifts at the service of the government. When the question of the coronation of Louis XVIII. arose, he wrote, as an answer to Volney, a minute treatise on the Cérémonies du sacre, which was published at the time of the coronation of Charles X. Towards the end of Villèle’s ministry, when there was a movement of public opinion in favour of extending municipal liberties, he undertook the defence of the threatened system of centralization, and composed, in answer to Raynouard, an Histoire critique du pouvoir municipal depuis l’origine de la monarchie jusqu’à nos jours (1828). He also wrote a treatise entitled De l’état réel de la presse et des pamphlets depuis François I&#8202;er jusqu’à Louis XIV. (1834), in which he refuted an empty paradox of Charles Nodier, who had tried to prove that the press had never been, and could never be, so free as under the Grand Monarch. A few years later, Leber retired (1839), and sold to the library of Rouen the rich collection of books which he had amassed during thirty years of research. The catalogue he made himself (4 vols., 1839 to 1852). In 1840 he read at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres two dissertations, an “Essai sur l’appréciation de la fortune privée au moyen âge,” followed by an “Examen critique des tables de prix du marc d’argent depuis l’époque de Saint Louis”; these essays were included by the Academy in its Recueil de mémoires présentés par divers savants (vol. i., 1844), and were also revised and published by Leber (1847). They form his most considerable work, and assure him a position of eminence in the economic history of France. He also rendered good service to historians by the publication of his Collection des meilleures dissertations, notices et traités relatifs à l’histoire de France (20 vols., 1826–1840); in the absence of an index, since Leber did not give one, an analytical table of contents is to be found in Alfred Franklin’s Sources de l’histoire de France (1876, pp. 342 sqq.). In consequence of the revolution of 1848, Leber decided to leave Paris. He retired to his native town, and spent his last years in collecting old engravings. He died at Orléans on the 22nd of December 1859.

In 1832 he had been elected as a member of the Société des Antiquaires de France, and in the Bulletin of this society (vol. i., 1860) is to be found the most correct and detailed account of his life’s works.

LEBEUF, JEAN (1687–1760), French historian, was born on the 7th of March 1687 at Auxerre, where his father, a councillor in the parlement, was receveur des consignations. He began his studies in his native town, and continued them in Paris at the Collège Ste Barbe. He soon became known as one of the most cultivated minds of his time. He made himself master of practically every branch of medieval learning, and had a thorough knowledge of the sources and the bibliography of his subject. His learning was not drawn from books only; he was also an archaeologist, and frequently went on expeditions in France, always on foot, in the course of which he examined the monuments of architecture and sculpture, as well as the libraries, and collected a number of notes and sketches. He was in correspondence with all the most learned men of the day. His correspondence with Président Bouhier was published in 1885 by Ernest Petit; his other letters have been edited by the Société des sciences historiques et naturelles de l’Yonne (2 vols., 1866–1867). He also wrote numerous articles, and, after his election as a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1740), a number of Mémoires which appeared in the Recueil of this society. He died at Paris on the 10th of April 1760. His most important researches had Paris as their subject.

He published first a collection of Dissertations sur l’histoire civile et ecclésiastique de Paris (3 vols., 1739–1743), then an Histoire de la ville et de tout le diocèse de Paris (15 vols., 1745–1760), which is a mine of information, mostly taken from the original sources. In view of the advance made by scholarship in the 19th century, it was found necessary to publish a second edition. The work of reprinting it was undertaken by H. Cocheris, but was interrupted (1863) before the completion of vol. iv. Adrien Augier resumed the work, giving Lebeuf’s text, though correcting the numerous typographical errors of the original edition (5 vols., 1883), and added a sixth volume containing an analytical table of contents. Finally, Fernand Bournon completed the work by a volume of Rectifications et additions (1890), worthy to appear side by side with the original work.

The bibliography of Lebeuf’s writings is, partly, in various numbers of the Bibliothèque des écrivains de Bourgogne (1716–1741). His biography is given by Lebeau in the Histoire de l’Académie royale des Inscriptions (xxix., 372, published 1764), and by H. Cocheris, in the preface to his edition.

LE BLANC, NICOLAS (1742–1806), French chemist, was born at Issoudun, Indre, in 1742. He made medicine his profession and in 1780 became surgeon to the duke of Orleans, but he also paid much attention to chemistry. About 1787 he was attracted to the urgent problem of manufacturing carbonate of soda from ordinary sea-salt. The suggestion made in 1789 by Jean Claude de la Métherie (1743–1817), the editor of the Journal de physique, that this might be done by calcining with charcoal the sulphate of soda formed from salt by the action of oil of vitriol, did not succeed in practice because the product was almost entirely sulphide of soda, but it gave Le Blanc, as he himself acknowledged, a basis upon which to work. He soon made the crucial discovery—which proved the foundation of the huge industry of artificial alkali manufacture—that the desired end was to be attained by adding a proportion of chalk to the mixture of charcoal and sulphate of soda. Having had the soundness of this method tested by Jean Darcet (1725–1801), the professor of chemistry at the Collège de France, the duke of Orleans in June 1791 agreed to furnish a sum of 200,000 francs for the purpose of exploiting it. In the following September Le Blanc was granted a patent for fifteen years, and shortly afterwards a factory was started at Saint-Denis, near Paris. But it had not long been in operation when the Revolution led to the confiscation of the duke’s property, including the factory, and about the same time the Committee of Public Safety called upon all citizens who possessed soda-factories to disclose their situation and capacity and the nature of the methods employed. Le Blanc