Edmond Jean François Barbier

Edmond Jean François Barbier (16 January 1689 – 29 January 1771) was a French jurisconsult of the parliament and author of a historical journal of the time of Louis XV in the Kingdom of France.

Biography Edmond Jean François Barbier was born in Paris on 16 January 1689 and lived in the center of old Paris in the . His father and grandfather had been lawyers at the , and he was also admitted as a consulting lawyer to the on July 30, 1708. Unlike his father, Barbier does not appear to have pled a single case. Nevertheless, his scholarly work was highly regarded by his contemporaries, including Marc Pierre de Voyer de Paulmy, Count of Argenson and the de Nicolay family.

Barbier is most well known for writing , a detailed daily account of events in Paris that he kept for forty-five years, from 1718 to 1763. He began his journal on 27 April 1718, when he witnessed a devastating fire on the Petit Pont linking the left bank of the and wrote about it when he returned home. is a seminal historic record of 18th-century life in Paris, consisting of 5000 handwritten pages of news that Barbier witnessed firsthand or learned about through rumor or print. It has several years of overlap with Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon's , which ended in 1723, and it came before Louis Petit de Bachaumont's , which started in 1762. It is also contemporary to Siméon-Prosper Hardy's journal.

The events that Barbier describes in his chronicles sometimes differ from descriptions of the same events written in secret police gazettes. For example, on 16 January 1726, Barbier recounts how a soldier escaped by jumping from Pont Neuf into the Seine and was rescued and hidden by witnesses. However, the police described this event as happening three days earlier and claimed that the soldier was delivered.