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Jean Marie Pardessus

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JEAN MARIE PARDESSUS (1772-1853), French lawyer, was born at Blois on the 11th of August 1772. He was educated by the Oratorians, and then studied law, at first under his father, a lawyer at the Presidial, who was a pupil of Robert J. Pothier. In 1796, after the Terror, he married, but his wife died at the end of three years. He was thus a widower at the age of twenty-seven, but refused to remarry and so give his children a step-mother. He wrote a Traite des servitudes (1806), which went through eight editions, then a Traite du contrat et des lettres de change (1809), which pointed him out as fitted for the chair of commercial law recently formed at the faculty of law at Paris. The emperor, however, had insisted that the position should be open to competition. Pardessus entered (181o) and was successful over two other candidates, Andre M. J. J. Dupin and Persil, who afterwards became brilliant lawyers. His lectures were published under the title Cours de droit commercial (4 vols., 1813-1817). In 1815 Pardessus was elected deputy for the department of Loir-et-Cher, and from 1820 to 1830 was constantly re-elected; then, however, he refused to take the oath of allegiance to Louis Philippe, and was deprived of his office. After the publication of the first volume of his Collection des lois maritimes anterieures au xviiii e siecle (1828) he was elected a member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. He continued his collection of maritime laws (4 vols., 1828-1845), and published Les Us et coutumes de la mer (2 vols., 1847). He also brought out two volumes of Merovingian diplomas ( Diplomata, chartae, epistolae, leges, 1843-1849); vols. iv. - vi. of the Table chronologique des diplomes; and vol. xxi. of Ordonnances des rois de France (1849), preceded by an Essai sur l'ancienne organisation judiciaire, which was reprinted in part in 1851. In 1843 Pardessus published a critical edition of the Loi salique, followed by 14 dissertations, which greatly advanced the knowledge of the subject. He died at Pimpeneau near Blois on the 27th of May 1853.

See notices in Journal gineral de l'instruction publique (July 27, 1853), in the Bibliotheque de l'ecole des chartes (3rd series, 1854, v. 453), and in the "Histoire de l'academie des inscriptions et belles lettres" (vol. xx. of the Memoires de l'academie, 1861).