Under the July Monarchy Immediately after the July Revolution, Chasseloup-Laubat became
aide-de-camp of the commander of the
National Guard,
Marquis de La Fayette, and despite the change of regime he remained at the Conseil d'État and was promoted inside its inner hierarchy. In 1836, he was appointed as an assistant to
Jean-Jacques Baude, Royal commissary in
Algeria, and worked at
Alger, and then at
Tunis,
Bône and
Constantine. He was present at the failed
siege of Constantine by the French army in November 1836, before turning back to France and reassuming his functions at the Conseil d'État. In 1838 he was appointed a councillor at the Conseiller d'État. At the same time, he was also beginning a political career. On 3 September 1837, he was elected
deputy of
Charente-Inférieure, the
Department where was situated the family seat, the
château of La Gataudière, and he was reelected in November 1837, March 1839, July 1842 and August 1846. He took his seat with the Left Center and approved the government policy. He was also a member and then president of the
departmental council of the Charente-Inférieure.
Minister under the Second Empire and advocate of French colonialism . The
Revolution of 1848 was a momentary set-back for his career, but on 13 May 1849 he was elected again as a deputy for Charente-Inférieure. During the
Second Republic, he voted with the Conservatives of the
Party of Order and from 10 April to 26 October 1851 briefly served a first time as
Minister of Marine under the Presidency of
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. After the
coup d'état of December 1851, he was appointed a member of the consultative commission replacing the Chambre des Députés, and was one of the candidates of the government in Charente-Inférieure at the election of February 1852, where he was elected. As deputy to the
Legislative Body (a new lower chamber replacing the Chambre des Députés), he worked for the
restoration of the Empire, which was approved by referendum in November 1852. Nevertheless, in 1852 he was one of the members of the Legislative Body who took the liberty of criticizing the first budget of the new regime (they were called
les budgétaires), and the same year he publicly protested the confiscation of the properties of the
House of Orléans. He stayed a deputy until 1859, when he became a minister. On 25 May 1862, he was appointed a
Senator of the Empire, a position he retained until the fall of the Empire in 1870. Chasseloup-Laubat was an enthusiastic proponent of French
colonial imperialism. Member of the "Council of colonisation" which assisted the newly created
Ministry for Algeria and the Colonies, in March 1859 he was himself put at the head of the Ministry in replacement of
Prince Napoléon. Belonging to a generation of new politicians working to give a coherence to French colonial policy, he was one of the few ministers of Napoleon III who had not already held ministerial offices when the Second Empire was established. Just one month later, he personally visited Algeria, which he had known at the time of its conquest. He lost direct control over Algeria with the reestablishment of the function of
Governor General of Algeria, but immediately became Minister of Marine and the Colonies in November 1860 and held that position for an exceptionally long period (1860–1867), making him a key figure of French early colonial expansion. He worked in combination with his counterpart, Foreign Minister
Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys. He was Minister at the time of the
attacks on
Danang and
Saigon in
Vietnam led by
Charles Rigault de Genouilly and his successor Counter-Admiral
Théogène François Page. On 18 February 1859, the French conquered Saigon and three southern Vietnamese provinces. The Vietnamese government was forced to cede temporary control of those territories to France in June 1862. When in 1863 the Vietnamese diplomat
Phan Thanh Gian visited
Napoleon III on an embassy in Paris, Chasseloup-Laubat pressured Napoleon III to have him give up a promise he had made to return the territories captured by the French in exchange for a loose French
protectorate over the whole of Vietnam. He threatened Napoleon III with his resignation and that of the whole cabinet, forcing him to order the cancellation of the agreement in June 1864. Chasseloup-laubat conceived the idea of conquest in the Far east, and asserted in February 1863, "it is a real empire that we need to create for ourselves". In 1864, all the French territories in southern Vietnam were declared to be the new
French colony of Cochinchina. During his tenure as Minister of the Marine and the Colonies, he also modernised the French navy and inspired the creation at Brest of an institution for the orphans of the navy, placing it under the special protection of the Emperor. With the help of his wife, he was also an actor of the elaborate social life of the Second Empire, a period popularly referred to as the
fête impériale ("the Imperial festival"). On 13 February 1866, he gathered one of the most flamboyant receptions of the time, a masquerade ball during which, dressed as a Venetian noble, he received his 3000 guests (between whom the Emperor and the Empress) in the restored salons of the ministry,
Rue Royale. The climax of the reception, which lasted until half past six in the morning, was a "Cortege of the Nations". It was also a symbolic expression of the minister's political stance and of France's imperialist aspirations. Chasseloup-Laubat was recalled to the government on 17 July 1869, as Minister-President of the Conseil d'État, and took part to the constitutional changes which were expected to transform the Second Empire into a
parliamentary monarchy. However, after the collective resignation of the cabinet in December 1869,
Émile Ollivier did not include Chasseloup-Laubat in the new cabinet he formed on 2 January 1870. He remained a senator until the end of the Second Empire. After the fall of Napoléon III, Chasseloup-Laubat was elected once again a Deputy of Charente-Inférieure to the new National Assembly on 8 February 1871 and took his seat with the Orléanist parliamentary group,
Centre droit. He still played a minor role as rapporteur of the law on the organisation of the army in 1872, and died one year later in Paris. He is buried at the
Père Lachaise Cemetery. ==Private life==