Youth in France
Peyret was born in Serres Castet, Canton Morlaàs, in the department of Basses-Pyrénées, today Pyrénées-Atlantiques, the son of Alexis Agustin Peyret and Cecile Angelique Vignancour. He entered the Royal College of Pau at the age of ten. In 1844, at the age of eighteen, he earned a bachelor's degree in science and letters. He avoided compulsory military service by hiring a paid substitute to serve in his place. He went on to study law at the Collège de France, where his professors included the philosopher Edgar Quinet and the historian Jules Michelet. He became involved with political radicalism, writing editorials in support of republicanism, democracy, anticlericalism, and socialism, and of the Revolutions of 1848 in particular. He was tried for his activities, but acquitted of wrongdoing.
In the 1852 election, Peyret stood as a candidate for the Department of Basses-Pyrénées. Following the electoral landslide of the Bonapartists and the establishment of the Second Empire under Napoleon III, Peyret left the country
Read more about this topic: Alejo Peyret
Famous quotes containing the words youth and/or france:
“Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The anarchy, assassination, and sacrilege by which the Kingdom of France has been disgraced, desolated, and polluted for some years past cannot but have excited the strongest emotions of horror in every virtuous Briton. But within these days our hearts have been pierced by the recital of proceedings in that country more brutal than any recorded in the annals of the world.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)