of Lille. In other memoirs, among which may be mentioned those on the Cretaceous rocks of the Ardennes and of the Basin of Oviedo, Spain; on the (Devonian) Calcaire d’Erbray; on the Palaeozoic rocks of Brittany and of northern Spain; and on the granitic and metamorphic rocks of Brittany, Dr Barrois has proved himself an accomplished petrologist as well as palaeontologist and field-geologist. In 1881 he was awarded the Bigsby medal, and in 1901 the Wollaston medal by the Geological Society of London. He was chosen member of the Institute (Academy of Sciences) in 1904.
BARROS, JOÃO DE (1496–1570), called the Portuguese Livy, may be said to have been the first great historian of his country. Educated in the palace of King Manoel, he early conceived the idea of writing history, and, to prove his powers, composed, at the age of twenty, a romance of chivalry, the Chronicle of the Emperor Clarimundo, in which he is said to have had the assistance of Prince John, afterwards King John III. The latter, on ascending the throne, gave Barros the captaincy of the fortress of St George of Elmina, whither he proceeded in 1522, and he obtained in 1525 the post of treasurer of the India House, which he held until 1528. The pest of 1530 drove him from Lisbon to his country house near Pombal, and there he finished a moral dialogue, Rhopica Pneuma, which met with the applause of the learned Juan Luis Vives. On his return to Lisbon in 1532 the king appointed Barros factor of the India and Mina House—positions of great responsibility and importance at a time when Lisbon was the European emporium for the trade of the East. Barros proved a good administrator, displaying great industry and a disinterestedness rare in that age, with the result that he made but little money where his predecessors had amassed fortunes. At this time, John III., wishful to attract settlers to Brazil, divided it up into captaincies and gave that of Maranhão to Barros, who, associating two partners in the enterprise with himself, prepared an armada of ten vessels, carrying nine hundred men, which set sail in 1539. Owing to the ignorance of the pilots, the whole fleet suffered shipwreck, which entailed serious financial loss on Barros, yet not content with meeting his own obligations, he paid the debts of those who had perished in the expedition. During all these busy years he had continued his studies in his leisure hours, and shortly after the Brazilian disaster he offered to write a history of the Portuguese in India, which the king accepted. He began work forthwith, but, before printing the first part, he again proved his pen by publishing a Portuguese grammar (1540) and some more moral Dialogues. The first of the Decades of his Asia appeared in 1552, and its reception was such that the king straightway charged Barros to write a chronicle of King Manoel. His many occupations, however, prevented him from undertaking this book, which was finally composed by Damião de Goes (q.v.). The Second Decade came out in 1553 and the Third in 1563, but the Fourth and final one was not published until 1615, long after the author’s death. In January 1568 Barros retired from his remunerative appointment at the India House, receiving the rank of fidalgo together with a pension and other pecuniary emoluments from King Sebastian, and died on the 20th of October 1570. A man of lofty character, he preferred leaving his children an example of good morals and learning to bequeathing them a large pecuniary inheritance, and, though he received many royal benefactions, they were volunteered, never asked for. As an historian and a stylist Barros deserves the high fame he has always enjoyed. His Decades contain the early history of the Portuguese in Asia and reveal careful study of Eastern historians and geographers, as well as of the records of his own country. They are distinguished by clearness of exposition and orderly arrangement. His style has all the simplicity and grandeur of the masters of historical writing, and the purity of his diction is incontestable. Though, on the whole, impartial, Barros is the narrator and apologist of the great deeds of his countrymen, and lacks the critical spirit and intellectual acumen of Damião de Goes. Diogo do Couto continued the Decades, adding nine more, and a modern edition of the whole appeared in Lisbon in 14 vols. in 1778–1788. The title of Barros’s work is Da Asia de João de Barros, dos feitos que os Portuguezes fizeram no descubrimento e conquista dos mares e terras do Oriente, and the edition is accompanied by a volume containing a life of Barros by the historian Manoel Severim de Faria and a copious index of all the Decades. An Italian version in 2 vols. appeared in Venice in 1561–1562 and a German in 5 vols. in 1821. Clarimundo has gone through the following editions: 1522, 1555, 1601, 1742, 1791 and 1843, all published in Lisbon. It influenced Francisco de Moraes (q.v.); cf. Purser, Palmerin of England, Dublin, 1904, pp. 440 et seq.
The minor works of Barros are described by Innocencio da Silva: Diccionario Bibliographico Portuguez, vol. iii. pp. 320-323 and vol. x. pp. 187-189, and in Severim de Faria’s Life, cited above. A compilation of Barros’s Varia was published by the visconde de Azevedo (Porto, 1869). (E. Pr.)
BARROT, CAMILLE HYACINTHE ODILON (1791–1873), French politician, was born at Villefort (Lozère) on the 19th of September 1791. He belonged to a legal family, his father, an advocate of Toulouse, having been a member of the Convention who had voted against the death of Louis XVI. Odilon Barrot’s earliest recollections were of the October insurrection of 1795. He was sent to the military school of Saint-Cyr, but presently removed to the Lycée Napoleon to study law and was called to the Parisian bar in 1811. He was placed in the office of the conventionel Jean Mailhe, who was advocate before the council of state and the court of cassation and was proscribed at the second restoration. Barrot eventually succeeded him in both positions. His dissatisfaction with the government of the restoration was shown in his conduct of some political trials. For his opposition in 1820 to a law by which any person might be arrested and detained on a warrant signed by three ministers, he was summoned before a court of assize, but acquitted. Although intimate with Lafayette and others, he took no actual share in their schemes for the overthrow of the government, but in 1827 he joined the association known as Aide-toi, le ciel t'aidera. He presided over the banquet given by the society to the 221 deputies who had signed the address of March 1830 to Charles X., and threatened to reply to force by force. After the ordinances of the 26th of July 1830, he joined the National Guard and took an active part in the revolution. As secretary of the municipal commission, which sat at the hôtel-de-ville and formed itself into a provisional government, he was charged to convey to the chamber of deputies a protest embodying the terms which the advanced Liberals wished to impose on the king to be elected. He supported the idea of a constitutional monarchy against the extreme Republicans, and he was appointed one of the three commissioners chosen to escort Charles X. out of France. On his return he was nominated prefect of the department of the Seine. His concessions to the Parisian mob and his extreme gentleness towards those who demanded the prosecution of the ministers of Charles X. led to an unflattering comparison with Jérôme Pétion under similar circumstances. Louis Philippe’s government was far from satisfying his desires for reform, and he persistently urged the “broadening of the bases of the monarchy,” while he protested his loyalty to the dynasty. He was returned to the chamber of deputies for the department of Eure in 1831. The day after the demonstration of June 1832 on the occasion of the funeral of General Lamarque, he made himself indirectly the mouthpiece of the Democrats in an interview with Louis Philippe, which is given at length in his Mémoires. Subsequently, in pleading before the court of cassation on behalf of one of the rioters, he secured the annulling of the judgments given by the council of war. The death of the duke of Orleans in 1842 was a blow to Barrot’s party, which sought to substitute the regency of the duchess of Orleans for that of the duke of Nemours in the event of the succession of the count of Paris. In 1846 Barrot made a tour in the Near East, returning in time to take part a second time in the preliminaries of revolution. He organized banquets of the disaffected in the various cities of France, and demanded electoral reform to avoid revolution. He did not foresee the strength of the outbreak for which his eloquence had prepared the way, and clung to the programme of 1830. He tried to support the regency of the duchess in the chamber on the 24th of February, only to find that the time was past for
