Maurice Jean Marie Burrus (8 March 1882 – 5 December 1959) was an Alsatian tobacco magnate, politician and philatelist. Originally from Alsace but residing in Switzerland, he was a deputy in the French parliament during the 1930s. His stamp collection was considered one of the greatest ever assembled and included some of the world's rarest stamps. Early life Maurice Burrus was born in Sainte-Croix-aux-Mines on March 8, 1882, to a family of tobacco industrialists. The family was based in the Alsace area, where they owned a chateau named after themselves. The family moved to Switzerland after the French government created a monopoly on the manufacture of tobacco products under Napoleonic laws. He was educated at Dole, in the Collège Stanislas de Paris and later in Hanover where he studied banking and learnt German before returning to Sainte-Croix-aux-Mines where he took over the running of the family tobacco factory. He also travelled to the United States, Canada, Mexico and Asia Minor. Later life During World War I his anti-German sentiment was displayed by refusing to supply the German armies with tobacco, an act that got him a prison sentence of eight months and exiled from Alsace where his property was seized and sold. For this he received the French Médaille de la Fidélité. He was also awarded the Croix de guerre and the Médaille des Proscrits d'Alsace (Exiles from Alsace medal). He died in Lausanne in 1959. Politics Between 1932 and 1942, Burrus was a Deputy for Haut-Rhin in the French Parliament of the French Third Republic, first as an independent left party member until 1936 and then with the Independents of Popular Action. Philately Burrus began to collect stamps at the age of seven after old family mail found in their attics spurred his interest. In collecting, Burrus was a completist and he had the funds to allow him to be so. In a 1922 issue of The Philatelic Magazine he suggested that a collector's aim was: He owned some of the rarest and most expensive stamps known, such as the 1886 Dominican 6 pence Queen Victoria stamp with a "one penny" overprint error and an 1851 New Carlisle Postmaster's Provisional on cover that sold in 2010 for €280,000. In 1923 he acquired the only complete known unused sheet of 20 of the 1850 “Dreier Sachsen” (Saxony) stamps previously in the collection of Philipp von Ferrary and sold it prior