page_title: Pompone de Bellièvre
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Pompone de Bellièvre / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: Copper line engraving of Pompone de Bellièvre (c. 1527/1529-1607), Chancellor of France, c. 1760
context_page_description: Pompone de Bellièvre was a French magistrate, ambassador and statesman, ending his career as first president of the Parliament of Paris, from 1653 to 1657.
context_section_description: Bellièvre was the son, nephew, and grandson of eminent men. Both of his grandfathers, Pomponne de Bellièvre and Nicolas Brulart de Sillery (1544–1624), served as Chancellor of France. His father, Nicolas de Bellièvre (1583–1650), was Procureur général and also Président à mortier of the Parlement and one of the thirty Conseillers d'État of France.
  Bellièvre himself became the head of the magistracy of France, ambassador to England, and in his last years the first President of the Parlement of Paris. While Bellièvre was in England, Cardinal Mazarin gave him the hopeless task of making peace between King Charles I and the Long Parliament.
  Bellièvre married Marie de Bullion, lady of La Grange-au-Bois, daughter of Claude de Bullion, but they had no surviving children. His brother, Pierre de Bellièvre, seigneur of Grignon, abbé of Saint-Vincent de Metz, was French ambassador to Scotland during his own mission to England.
  Bellièvre became one of the greatest benefactors of the Hôpital général de Paris, founded in 1656. This was nearer to being a gigantic almshouse than to the modern concept of a hospital and set out to house the astonishing number of forty thousand Parisians, about a tenth of the city's population, the men at Bicêtre, and the women at La Salpêtrière. All of the poor were to be gathered together on clean premises, to be cared for, educated and given an occupation. The new institution benefited from huge donations from Fouquet, Mazarin and Bellièvre, but sadly it did not turn out as hoped.
  The biographer Louis Gabriel Michaud says of Bellièvre:
  This illustrious family was extinguished in the person of Pompone de Bellièvre, son of Nicolas and first President of the Parlement of Paris, who died in 1657 without posterity after having deployed great talents on diplomatic missions in Italy, England, and Holland. This worthy magistrate, enriched by his wife, who was the daughter of the Superintendent Bullion, lived in great magnificence, which did not prevent him from founding the General Hospital of Paris. Before this, the poor had lived and died deprived of all help, spiritual or temporal. They found both in this new refuge.
caption: Bellièvre's grandfather Pomponne de Bellièvre, Chancellor of France.
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