Frederic Cesar La Harpe, a Swiss statesman, born at Rolle in 1754, died in Lausanne, March 30, 1838. He was educated in democratic opinions, and began the practice of law, but, disliking the profession, was on the eve of going to the United States to enlist in the continental army, when he became preceptor of a young Russian nobleman, whom he accompanied to Italy. His success attracted the attention of the empress Catharine II., who called him to St. Petersburg, confided to his care her two grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, and gave him the grade of colonel. The republican preceptor subjected the young princes to severe training, and taught them principles and ideas which seldom find their way into courts. On the breaking out of the French revolution, he actively participated by his writings in the plans for reorganizing the Helvetian confederation so as to make it a single and undivided republic. The government at Bern having made this known to the empress, she dismissed him, with a pension for life. Leaving Russia in 1793, he went to Geneva, and then to Paris, where he secured the intervention of the directory, thus accomplishing the revolution of 1798 by which Switzerland was to become a democratic republic.

He became the controlling member of the Helvetic executive directory, and wielded with energy, and even violence, the power he had acquired through foreign arms; but his hopes were dispelled by the change in French policy after the 18th Brumaire. The Helvetian directory was dissolved, and La Harpe, suspected of conspiring against the new order of things, was arrested; but he escaped to Paris, and was told by Bonaparte that he had better leave Switzerland alone. He then retired to Plessis-Piquet, near Paris, where he devoted himself to agricultural pursuits, until the fall of the empire revived his hopes of his country's emancipation. In 1814 he received a visit from the emperor Alexander, who gave him the rank of general in the Russian army and bestowed upon him many distinguished favors. La Harpe resumed his influence over the mind of his former pupil; and if he could not prevail upon him to favor his democratic plans in regard to Switzerland, ho at least contributed to the preservation of that confederation, and to the liberation of his own canton of Vaud from the rule of Bern. After the treaty of Vienna he resided in Lausanne. He published a number of pamphlets expounding his plans for the reorganization of his country, and denouncing the misdeeds of its old governments.