(invasion of Austria) he commanded the detached left wing of Bonaparte’s army in Tirol, and fought his way through the mountains to rejoin his chief in Styria. He subsequently held various commands in Holland, on the Rhine and in Italy, where up to January 1799 he commanded in chief. Resigning the post in consequence of a dispute with the civil authorities, Joubert returned to France and married (June) Mlle de Montholon. But he was almost immediately summoned to the field again. He took over the command in Italy from Moreau about the middle of July, but he persuaded his predecessor to remain at the front and was largely guided by his advice. The odds against the French troops in the disastrous campaign of 1799 (see French Revolutionary Wars) were too heavy. Joubert and Moreau were quickly compelled to give battle by their great antagonist Suvorov. The battle of Novi was disastrous to the French arms, not merely because it was a defeat, but above all because Joubert himself was amongst the first to fall (Aug. 15, 1799). Joubert died before it could be shown whether his genius was of the first rank, but he was at any rate marked out as a future great captain by the greatest captain of all ages, and his countrymen intuitively associated him with Hoche and Marceau as a great leader whose early death disappointed their highest hopes. After the battle his remains were brought to Toulon and buried in Fort La Malgue, and the revolutionary government paid tribute to his memory by a ceremony of public mourning (Sept. 16). A monument to Joubert at Bourg was razed by order of Louis XVIII., but another memorial was afterwards erected at Pont de Vaux.
See Guilbert, Notice sur la vie de B. C. Joubert; Chevrier, Le Général Joubert d’après sa correspondance (2nd ed. 1884).
JOUBERT, JOSEPH (1754–1824), French moralist, was born
at Montignac (Corrèze) on the 6th of May 1754. After completing
his studies at Toulouse he spent some years there as a teacher.
His delicate health proved unequal to the task, and after two
years spent at home in study Joubert went to Paris at the beginning
of 1778. He allied himself with the chiefs of the philosophic
party, especially with Diderot, of whom he was in some
sort a disciple, but his closest friendship was with the abbé de
Fontanes. In 1790 he was recalled to his native place to act
as juge de paix, and carried out the duties of his office with great
fidelity. He had made the acquaintance of Mme de Beaumont
in a Burgundian cottage where she had taken refuge from the
Terror, and it was under her inspiration that Joubert’s genius
was at its best. The atmosphere of serenity and affection with
which she surrounded him seemed necessary to the development
of what Sainte-Beuve calls his “esprit ailé, ami du ciel et des
hauteurs.” Her death in 1803 was a great blow to him, and his
literary activity, never great, declined from that time. In 1809,
at the solicitation of Joseph de Bonald, he was made an inspector-general
of education, and his professional duties practically
absorbed his interests during the rest of his life. He died on the
3rd of May 1824. His manuscripts were entrusted by his widow
to Chateaubriand, who published a selection of Pensées from
them in 1838 for private circulation. A more complete edition
was published by Joubert’s nephew, Paul de Raynal, under the
title Pensées, essais, maximes et correspondance (2 vols. 1842).
A selection of letters addressed to Joubert was published in 1883.
Joubert constantly strove after perfection, and the small quantity
of his work was partly due to his desire to find adequate and
luminous expression for his discriminating criticism of literature
and morals.
If Joubert’s readers in England are not numerous, he is well known at second hand through the sympathetic essay devoted to him in Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (1st series). See Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vol. i.; Portraits littéraires, vol. ii.; and a notice by Paul de Raynal, prefixed to the edition of 1842.
JOUBERT, PETRUS JACOBUS (1834–1900), commandant-general
of the South African Republic from 1880 to 1900, was
born at Cango, in the district of Oudtshoorn, Cape Colony, on
the 20th of January 1834, a descendant of a French Huguenot
who fled to South Africa soon after the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes by Louis XIV. Left an orphan at an early age, Joubert
migrated to the Transvaal, where he settled in the Wakkerstroom
district near Laing’s Nek and the north-east angle of
Natal. There he not only farmed with great success, but turned
his attention to the study of the law. The esteem in which his
shrewdness in both farming and legal affairs was held led to his
election to the Volksraad as member for Wakkerstroom early in
the sixties, Marthinus Pretorius being then in his second term of
office as president. In 1870 Joubert was again elected, and the
use to which he put his slender stock of legal knowledge secured
him the appointment of attorney-general of the republic, while
in 1875 he acted as president during the absence of T. F. Burgers
in Europe. During the first British annexation of the Transvaal,
Joubert earned for himself the reputation of a consistent irreconcilable by refusing to hold office under the government, as Paul Kruger and other prominent Boers were doing. Instead of
accepting the lucrative post offered him, he took a leading part
in creating and directing the agitation which led to the war of
1880–1881, eventually becoming, as commandant-general of the
Boer forces, a member of the triumvirate that administered the
provisional Boer government set up in December 1880 at
Heidelberg. He was in command of the Boer forces at Laing’s
Nek, Ingogo, and Majuba Hill, subsequently conducting the
earlier peace negotiations that led to the conclusion of the
Pretoria Convention. In 1883 he was a candidate for the presidency
of the Transvaal, but received only 1171 votes as against
3431 cast for Kruger. In 1893 he again opposed Kruger in the
contest for the presidency, standing as the representative of the
comparatively progressive section of the Boers, who wished in
some measure to redress the grievances of the Uitlander population
which had grown up on the Rand. The poll (though there
is good reason for believing that the voting lists had been manipulated by Kruger’s agents) was declared to have resulted in
7911 votes being cast for Kruger and 7246 for Joubert. After
a protest Joubert acquiesced in Kruger’s continued presidency.
He stood again in 1898, but the Jameson raid had occurred meantime
and the voting was 12,858 for Kruger and 2001 for Joubert.
Joubert’s position had then become much weakened by accusations
of treachery and of sympathy with the Uitlander agitation.
He took little part in the negotiations that culminated in the
ultimatum sent to Great Britain by Kruger in 1899, and though
he immediately assumed nominal command of the operations
on the outbreak of hostilities, he gave up to others the chief share
in the direction of the war, through his inability or neglect to
impose upon them his own will. His cautious nature, which had
in early life gained him the sobriquet of “Slim Piet,” joined to
a lack of determination and assertiveness that characterized his
whole career, led him to act mainly on the defensive; and the
strategically offensive movements of the Boer forces, such as
Elandslaagte and Willow Grange, appear to have been neither
planned nor executed by him. As the war went on, physical
weakness led to Joubert’s virtual retirement, and, though two
days earlier he was still reported as being in supreme command,
he died at Pretoria from peritonitis on the 28th of March 1900.
Sir George White, the defender of Ladysmith, summed up
Joubert’s character when he called him “a soldier and a gentleman,
and a brave and honourable opponent.”
JOUFFROY, JEAN (c. 1412–1473), French prelate and diplomatist, was born at Luxeuil (Haute-Saône). After entering
the Benedictine order and teaching at the university of Paris
from 1435 to 1438, he became almoner to Philip the Good, duke
of Burgundy, who entrusted him with diplomatic missions in
France, Italy, Portugal and Castile. Jouffroy was appointed
abbot of Luxeuil (1451?) bishop of Arras (1453), and papal
legate (1459). At the French court his diplomatic duties
brought him to the notice of the dauphin (afterwards Louis XI.).
Jouffroy entered Louis’s service, and obtained a cardinal’s hat
(1461), the bishopric of Albi (1462), and the abbacy of St Denis
(1464). On several occasions he was sent to Rome to negotiate
the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction and to defend the
interests of the Angevins at Naples. Attached by King Louis
to the sieur de Beaujeu in the expedition against John V., count
