Charles Jean Marie Félix, Marquis de La Valette (25 November 1806 – 2 May 1881) was a French politician and diplomat.

Career

Charles de La Valette was Minister of the Interior and of Foreign Affairs in the government of Emperor Napoleon III. He was French Ambassador to Constantinople from 1851-53, before the Crimean War, then served as a government minister, before a posting to the Vatican (an ancestral family member Jean Parisot de Valette had been Grand Master of the Order of Malta). An Anglophile, he finally returned to London in an official capacity as French Ambassador from 1869 to 1870.

Personal life

The Marquis married firstly Maria Garrow Birkett at London in 1828. Maria, a daughter of the late Daniel Birkett, Esq., of Isleworth, died in 1831, aged 24. In 1842, he married secondly to Adeline Fowle Welles (1799–1869), the widow of a Boston banker Samuel Welles, who died in 1841. After twenty-seven years of marriage, Adeline died in 1869. He married thirdly, in 1871, Georgiana Gabrielle de Flahaut, third daughter of Charles, Comte de Flahaut and Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, and an younger sister of Emily Petty-Fitzmaurice, Marchioness of Lansdowne.

Honours