French scholar who carried out a major compilation of the annals of French history in England.

Sent to search English archives at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Bréquigny returned with copies of 70,000 documents, largely bearing on the history of the western French provinces that had been under English rule in the Middle Ages. These documents were bound into a collection of 109 volumes in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. In 1777 Bréquigny was elected to the Académie Française, just after beginning work on another massive project—a collection of documents on Chinese history, letters, and art, of which 14 volumes appeared before the work was interrupted by the French Revolution.