Hippolyte de Bray (Napoleon's World)

Hippolyte de Bray (November 1, 1829 - October 3, 1880) was a French politician and lawyer best known for serving as the State Minister of the French Empire from 1875 to 1880, when he was assassinated in Vienna at a state dinner. A reformer and (for his time) liberal, de Bray continued the expansion of the French economy in the 1870's and maintained his predecessor's policy of planned economic policies. He was shot by an anarchist in Vienna during a dinner, drastically changing policies of security surrounding French political figures and martyring him. Ten years after his death, his younger brother Jean Poul de Bray became State Minister, and was also assassinated.

While his views are mostly irreconcilable with the modern French left, he still remains a popular figure amongst French left-wing circles and is regarded as the intellectual father of French leftism by adherents of that ideology, although historians debate whether de Bray's sympathies would align with their agenda.