Louis Charles Auguste Le Tonnelier, Baron de Breteuil, Baron de Preuilly (7 March 1730 – 2 November 1807) was a French aristocrat, diplomat and statesman. He was the last chief minister of the Bourbon Monarchy, appointed by King Louis XVI only one hundred hours before the storming of the Bastille.
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Soldier and ambassador
Breteuil was born in 1730 at the Château d'Azay-le-Ferron (Indre) into a well-connected aristocratic family: one of his relations was confessor to the king's cousin and another was the famed mathematician and linguist Émilie, marquise du Châtelet-Laumont. He received an excellent education in Paris and later joined the army, where he fought in the Seven Years' War. In 1758 he left the army and joined the French Foreign Ministry. He was quickly appointed French ambassador to the Archbishop-elector of Cologne, where he proved to have valuable diplomatic skills. Two years later in 1760 he was sent to St Petersburg as the French ambassador to Imperial Russia, where he arranged to be temporarily absent from his post at the time of the palace revolution by which Catherine II was placed on the throne. In 1763 he was sent to Stockholm (Sweden), and subsequently represented his government at Vienna in 1770 (Habsburg monarchy), in 1773 Naples (Kingdom of Naples), and again at Vienna until 1783.