Lunéville
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Lunéville is a commune in the northeastern French department of Meurthe-et-Moselle.
It is a subprefecture of the department and lies on the river Meurthe at its confluence with the Vezouze.
History
[[File:Eglise Saint Jacques Lunéville.jpg|thumb|left|Église Saint-Jacques in Lunéville, established by Stanislaus I of Poland in 1745.]] Lunéville was a renowned resort in the 18th century, known as the capital of Lorraine. The grand Château de Lunéville, built in 1702 for Leopold, Duke of Lorraine to replace an older palace, was the residence of the duke of Lorraine until the duchy was annexed by France in 1766. The château was designed in the style of Versailles to satisfy Leopold's wife, Élisabeth Charlotte d'Orléans, the niece of Louis XIV, and became known as the "Versailles of Lorraine". It includes a chapel designed by Germain Boffrand. Leopold and his wife were the parents of Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine and Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor (through him they were the grandparents of Marie Antoinette).
The last duke of Lorraine was Stanislaus I, the former king of Poland. A devout Catholic, an author and a philanthropist, Stanislaus had a church built and several follies in his gardens for the amusement and education of visiting Polish nobility and followers of the Enlightenment. The more famous visitors to his court were Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Morellet, and Montesquieu. After the death of his father-in-law in 1766, Louis XV of France annexed the duchy and turned the castle into a barracks, but much of the original construction has survived, and what remains is open to the public and the château's intricate parterre gardens, designed by Yves Hours (a pupil of André Le Nôtre) in 1711 and Louis de Nesle in 1724, are a public park today.
It was over the nearby Parroy Forest, directly east of Lunéville, only some 11 months after the outbreak of World War I, that the first aerial victory by a fighter aircraft armed with a synchronised machine gun occurred on July 1, 1915, as Lieutenant Kurt Wintgens of the German Army air force forced down an Aeronautique Militaire Morane-Saulnier L parasol monoplane. Neither member of the French air crew was seriously wounded, while the French aircraft's Gnome Lambda engine received multiple hits to disable the aircraft.
Notable people
- Stanisław I Leszczyński (1677–1766), King of Poland 1704-1709, 1733-1736 (reigned as Stanislaus I), then Duke of Lorraine until his death at Lunéville where he spent 30 years in exile.
- Muller Frères, an art nouveau glass production company
- Georges de La Tour lived in Lunéville for much of his career.
Lunéville was the birthplace of :
- Nicolas Beatrizet, 16th century engraver
- Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine, 1712
- François Nicolas Benoît, Baron Haxo, 1774 June 24
- René Basset (1855–1924), orientalist
- Marie Bobillier (1858–1918), musicologist
- Louis Émile Gratia (1878–1962), musicologist
- Henri Basset (1892–1926), son of the above, linguist and historian
- André Basset (1895–1956), younger brother of the above, linguist, orientalist
- Jean Bastien-Thiry, (1927–1963), attempted assassination of president de Gaulle
See also
