Lazare Carnot
Lazare Nicolas Marguerite, Comte Carnot was a French mathematician, physicist, military officer, politician and a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution. His military reforms, which included the introduction of mass conscription, were instrumental in transforming the French Revolutionary Army into an effective fighting force.
Carnot was elected to the National Convention in 1792, and a year later he became a member of the Committee of Public Safety, where he directed the French war effort as one of the Ministers of War during the War of the First Coalition. He oversaw the reorganization of the army, imposed discipline, and significantly expanded the French force through the imposition of mass conscription. Credited with France's renewed military success from 1793 to 1794, Carnot came to be known as the "Organizer of Victory".
Increasingly disillusioned with the radical politics of the Montagnards, Carnot broke with Maximilien Robespierre and played a role in the latter's overthrow on 9 Thermidor and subsequent execution. He became one of the five initial members of the Directory but was ousted after the Coup of 18 Fructidor in 1797 and went into exile.
Following Napoleon's rise to power, Carnot returned to France and in 1800 was briefly Minister of War. A fervent Republican, he chose to withdraw from public life after Napoleon's coronation as Emperor. In 1812, he returned to serve under Napoleon and oversaw the defense of Antwerp against the Sixth Coalition, and during the Hundred Days he was Napoleon's Minister of the Interior. Carnot was exiled after the second Bourbon Restoration and died in Magdeburg, Prussia in 1823.
In addition to his political career, Carnot was also an eminent mathematician. His 1803 Géométrie de position is considered a pioneering work in the field of projective geometry. He is also remembered for developing the Carnot wall, a system of fortification that became widely employed in continental Europe during the 19th century.
Education and early life
Carnot was born on 13 May 1753 in the village of Nolay, in Burgundy, as the son of a local judge and royal notary, Claude Carnot and his wife, Marguerite Pothier. He was the second oldest of seven children. At the age of fourteen, Lazare and his brother were enrolled at the Collège d'Autun, where he focused on the study of philosophy and the classics. He held a strong belief in stoic philosophy and was deeply influenced by Roman civilization. When he turned fifteen, he left school in Autun to strengthen his philosophical knowledge and study under the Society of the Priests of Saint Sulpice. During his short time with them, he studied logic, mathematics and theology under the Abbé Bison.Impressed with Lazare's work as a scholar, the recommended a military career for the youngster. Carnot was soon sent by his father to the Aumont residence to further his education. Here, he was enrolled in M. de Longpré's pension school in 1770 until he was ready to enter one of two prestigious engineering and artillery schools in Paris. A year later, in February 1771, he was ranked the third highest among twelve who were chosen out of his class of more than one hundred who took the entrance exams. It was at this point when he entered the École royale du génie de Mézières, appointed as a second lieutenant. Studies at the Mézières included geometry, mechanics, geometrical designing, geography, hydraulics and material preparation. On 1 January 1773 he graduated the school, ranked as a first lieutenant. He was eighteen years old.
Carnot obtained a commission as a lieutenant in Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé's engineer corps. At this moment, he made a name for himself both in the line of theoretical engineering and in his work in the field of fortifications. While in the army, stationed in Calais, Cherbourg and Béthune, he continued his study of mathematics. In December 1783, he received a promotion to the rank of captain.
In 1784 he published his first work Essay on Machines, which contained a statement that foreshadowed the principle of energy as applied to a falling weight, and the earliest proof that kinetic energy is lost in the collision of imperfectly elastic bodies. This publication earned him the honor of the Académie des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Dijon. Another turning point was his essay on Vauban in which he praised the engineer on his works while at the same time developing his own career as a writer/engineer. Vauban's work had a profound effect on his work as a general and engineer. In 1786 he became acquainted with Robespierre, a lawyer in Arras, in the local literary club. In 1788 he returned to Béthune, where he was imprisoned with a lettre de cachet, because of a broken promise to marry a woman from Dijon. After his release he was stationed in Aire-sur-la-Lys and married Sophie Dupont from Saint-Omer in May 1791. For two months he served as president of the local literary society.
Political career
In September 1791 he became a delegate for Pas-de-Calais to the Legislature. While a member of the Legislative Assembly, Carnot was elected to the Committee of Public Instruction. He believed that all citizens should be educated. As a member of that committee, he wrote a series of reforms for the teaching and educational systems, but they were not implemented due to the violent social and economic climate of the Revolution.After the Legislative Assembly was dissolved, Carnot was elected to the National Convention in September 1792. He spent the last few months of 1792 on a mission to Bayonne, organizing the military defense effort in an attempt to ward off any possible attacks from Spain. Upon returning to Paris, Carnot voted for the death of Louis XVI, although he had been absent for the debates surrounding his trial. By mid-February Carnot proposed that annexation be undertaken on behalf of French interests whether or not the people to be annexed so wished. Following the king's veto of the Assembly's efforts to suppress nonjuring priests on 27 May, on a proposal of Carnot and Servan in the Assembly to raise a permanent militia of volunteers on 8 June, and the reinstatement of Brissotin ministers dismissed on 18 June, the monarchy faced an abortive demonstration of 20 June.
On 14 August 1793 Carnot was elected to the Committee of Public Safety, where he took charge of the military situation as one of the Ministers of War. He was friendly with Johan Valckenaer who tried to hasten the invasion of the Dutch Republic.
With the establishment of the Directory in 1795, Carnot became one of the five initial directors. For the first year, the Directors did well working harmoniously together as well as with the Councils. However, difference of political views led to a schism between Carnot and Étienne-François Letourneur, followed by François de Barthélemy, on the one side, and the triumvirate of Paul François Jean Nicolas, vicomte de Barras, Jean-François Rewbell and Louis Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux on the other side. Carnot and Barthélemy supported concessions to end the war, and hoped to oust the triumvirate and replace them with more conservative men. After Letourneur had been replaced by another close collaborator of Carnot, François de Barthélemy, both of them, alongside many deputies in the Council of Five Hundred, were ousted in the Coup of 18 Fructidor, engineered by Generals Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles-Pierre Augereau. Carnot took refuge in Geneva, and there in 1797 issued his La métaphysique du calcul infinitésimal.
Military accomplishments
The creation of the French Revolutionary Army was largely due to his powers of organization and enforcing discipline. In order to raise more troops for the war, Carnot introduced conscription: the levée en masse approved by the National Convention was able to raise France's army from 645,000 troops in mid-1793 to 1.5 million in September 1794. He was the first to execute the modern waging of war with mass armies and strategic planning realized by the Revolution. As a military engineer, Carnot favored fortresses and defensive strategies. He developed innovative defensive designs for forts, including the Carnot wall, named after him. However, with the constant invasions he decided to take his strategic planning to an offensive strike. From his intellect sprang the maneuvers and organization that turned the tides of war from 1793 to 1794.The basic idea was to have a massive army separated into several units that could move more quickly than the enemy and attack from the flanks rather than head on, which had led to resounding defeats before Carnot was elected to the Committee of Public Safety. This tactic was extremely successful against the more traditional tactics of existing European armies. It was his initiative to train the conscripts in the art of war and to place new recruits with experienced soldiers rather than having a massive volunteer army without any real idea of how to wage battle.
File:Lazare Carnot Wattignies.jpg|thumb|right|An 1893 depiction by Georges Moreau de Tours of Carnot at the Battle of Wattignies a century earlier
Once the problem of troop numbers had been solved, Carnot turned his administrative skills to the supplies that this massive army would need. Many of the munitions and supplies were in short supply: copper was lacking for guns so he ordered church bells seized in order to melt them down; saltpeter was lacking and he called chemistry to his aid; leather for boots was scarce so he demanded and secured new methods for tanning. He quickly organized the army and helped to turn the tide of the war. It added significantly to discontent with the course of the Revolution in still Bourbon-loyalist areas—such as the Vendée, which had broken out in open revolt five months earlier—but the government of the time considered it a success, and Carnot became known as the Organizer of Victory. In autumn 1793, he took charge of French columns on the Northern Front, and contributed to Jean-Baptiste Jourdan's victory in the Battle of Wattignies.