François Laurent (8 July 1810 – 11 February 1887) was a Luxembourgian historian and jurisconsult.

Life and works

He was born at Luxembourg City. He held a high appointment in the ministry of justice for some time before he became professor of civil law in the university of Ghent in 1836. His advocacy of liberal and anti-clerical principles both from his chair and in the press made him bitter enemies, but he retained his position until his death in 1887.

He treated the relations of church and state in L'Églisé et l'État (Brussels, 3 vols., 1858-1862; new and revised edition, 1865), and the same subject occupied a large proportion of the eighteen volumes of his chief historical work, Études sur l'histoire de l'humanité (Ghent and Brussels, 1855-1870), which aroused considerable interest beyond the boundaries of Belgium.

His fame as a lawyer rests on his authoritative exposition of the Code Napoleon in his Principes de droit civil français (Brussels, 33 vols., 1869-1878), and his Le droit civil international (Brussels, 8 vols., 1880-1881).

François Laurent le Vieux d'Arlandes (1742 – 1 May 1809) was a French marquis, soldier and a pioneer of hot air ballooning. He and Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier made the first manned free balloon flight on 21 November 1783, in a Montgolfier balloon.

D'Arlandes was born in Anneyron in the Dauphiné. He met Joseph Montgolfier at the Jesuit college of Tournon. He became an infantry officer in the French royal guard.

The first public demonstration of a balloon by the Montgolfier brothers took place in June 1783, and was followed by an untethered flight of a sheep, a cockerel and a duck from the front courtyard of the Palace of Versailles on 19 September. The French King Louis XVI decided that the first manned flight would contain two condemned criminals, but de Rozier enlisted the help of the Duchess de Polignac to support his view that the honour of becoming first balloonists should belong to someone of higher status, and d'Arlandes agreed to accompany him. The King was persuaded to permit d'Arlandes and de Rozier to become the first pilots.