LEONARD

JOSEPH [L1;oN]

See also:

• LEONARD JOSEPH [L1;oN] FAUCHER (1803-1854)

FAUCHER (1803-1854)  , French politician and economist, was born at Limoges on the 8th of September 1803 . When he was nine years old the family removed to Toulouse, where the boy was sent to school . His parents were separated in 1816, and Leon Faucher, who resisted his father's attempts to put him to a trade, helped to support himself and his mother during the rest of his school career by designing embroidery and needlework . As a private tutor in Paris he continued his studies in the direction of archaeology and history, but with the revolution of 1830 he was drawn into active political journalism on the Liberal side . He was on the staff of the Temps from 183o to 1833, when he became editor of the Constitutionnel for a short time . A Sunday journal of his own, Le Bien public, proved a disastrous financial failure; and his political independence having caused his retirement from the Constitutionnel, he joined in 1834 the Courrier frangais, In 1174 a conspiracy for the restoration of the dynasty was organized by •Umarah of Yemen, a court poet, with the aid of eight officials of the government: it was discovered and those who were implicated were executed . Two persons claiming Fatimite descent took the royal titles al-Mo`tasim billah and al-I;Iamid lillah in the years 1175 and 1176 respectively; and as late as 1192 we hear of pretenders in Egypt . Some members of the family are traceable till near the end of the 7th century of Islam . The doctrines of the Fatimites as a sect, apart from their claim to the sovereignty in Islam, are little known, and we are not justified in identifying them with those of the Assassins, the Carrnathians or the Druses, though all these sects are connected with them in origin . A famous account is given by Maqrizi of a system of education by which the neophyte had doubts gently instilled into his mind till he was prepared to have the allegorical meaning of the Koran set before him, and to substitute some form of natural for revealed religion . In most accounts of the early days of the community it is stated that the permission of wine-drinking and licentiousness, and the community of wives and property formed part of its tenets . There is little in the recorded practice of the Fatimite state to confirm or justify these assertions; and they appear to have differed from orthodox Moslems rather in small details of ritual and law than in deep matters of doctrine .