BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Benoist La Forte was a government administrator in France's newly
nationalized gunpowder industry during the period of the Revolution. Born in
Grenoble in 1761, he gave up practicing law in 1784 in order to study the
manufacture of gunpowder under the Commission of gunpowder ( Regie des poudres et salpêtres ), the governmental body
which had supplanted the private monopoly in 1775. Beginning in 1786 La Forte
held a series of government posts: he served briefly as comptroller for the
departement of Montpellier, and then as
commissaire at Clermont-Ferrand, a post he held
through July 1787. In August of that year he was named commissaire des poudres et salpêtres for La Rochelle,
remaining there until November 1793, when the Regie des
poudres and the Comite de Salut Public
appointed him Inspector and then, in An III,
Inspector General for Vaucluse and neighboring departements . La Forte's promotion to Inspector
occurred around the same time that the Regie ,
renamed l'Agence des poudres et salpêtres , was
undergoing substantial reforms in order to meet the demands of the Revolution
and the European war. On December 4, 1793, the National Convention, on the
recommendation of the Comite de Salut Public ,
inaugurated a program of highly regulated de-centralization which required all
Frenchmen to participate in the production of gunpowder according to fixed
guidelines. The recently-annexed territory that became the
departement of Vaucluse in 1793, rich in
saltpetre and furnished with several functional powder mills, promised to be an
especially exploitable area of France, and La Forte, apparently a valued
administrator, was named inspector for Vaucluse and given wide-ranging powers,
which increased in the following year. La Forte remained Inspector General
until May 1797 when, despite the protests of his superiors, he resigned his
post.
