Jean-Baptiste Guillaume Joseph Marie Anne Séraphin, 1st Count of Villèle (14 April 177313 March 1854), better known simply as Joseph de Villèle (; ), was a French statesman who served as the Prime Minister of France from 1821 to 1828. He was a leader of the Ultra-royalist faction during the Bourbon Restoration.
Youth
Joseph de Villèle was born on 14 April 1773 in Toulouse. He was brought up to go into the navy, and he joined the "Bayonnaise" at Brest in July 1788. He served in the West and East Indies. Arrested in the Isle of Bourbon (now Réunion) under the Reign of Terror, he was freed by the Thermidorian Reaction (July 1794). In 1796 he helped oust Baco and Burnel, who had come to the island to enforce the 1794 abolition of slavery. He acquired a plantation and sixty slaves, and in 1799 he married the daughter of M. Desbassyns de Richemont, whose estates he had managed.
Villèle served in the Colonial Assembly from 1799-1803.
The arrival of General Decaen, appointed by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, restored security to the island, and five years later Villèle, who had now accumulated a large fortune, returned to France. He was mayor of his commune, and a member of the council of the Haute-Garonne under the Empire.
The Bourbon Restoration (1815–1830)
At the Bourbon Restoration of 1814 he at once declared for the royalist principles. He was mayor of Toulouse in 1814–15 and deputy for the Haute-Garonne in the ultra-royalist Chambre introuvable of 1815.