French statesman, known as the organizer of victory during the Revolutionary Wars, born in Nolay, E France. He entered the army as an engineer, and became a member of the Legislative Assembly (1791). He survived the Terror, and became one of the Directors (1795), but in 1797, suspected of Royalist sympathies, he escaped to Germany. Back in Paris, he became minister of war (1800), and helped to organize the Italian and Rhenish campaigns. He commanded at Antwerp in 1814, and during the Hundred Days was minister of the interior.
Comte Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot (May 13, 1753—August 2, 1823) was a French politician, engineer, and mathematician.
Life
Education and early life
Born in Nolay, Carnot was educated in Burgundy and obtained a commission in the engineer corps of the Prince de Condé.
Political career
On the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, Carnot entered political life.
The creation and victories of the French Revolutionary Army were largely due to his powers of organization and enforcing discipline, with successes both in the actual theatre of operations and in obtaining fresh recruits by compulsion: the levée en masse, which amounted to a one-off conscription. It added significantly to discontent with the course of the Revolution in still Bourbon-loyalist areas — such as the Vendée, which broke out in open revolt — but the government of the time considered it a success, and Carnot became known as the Organizer of Victory.
He had taken no steps to oppose the Reign of Terror, but he, along with other technocrats on the committee like Robert Lindet and Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, turned on Maximilien Robespierre and his allies during the Thermidorian Reaction.
With the establishment of the Directory in 1795, Carnot became one of the initial directors. After Letourneur had been replaced by another close collaborator of Carnot, François de Barthélemy, both of them, alongside many deputies in the Council of Five Hundred ousted in the Fructidor coup d'état of (September 4, 1797), engineered by Generals Napoleon Bonaparte (originally, Carnot's protégé) and Pierre François Charles Augereau.
In 1800 he was appointed Minister of War by Bonaparte, and served in that office at the time of the Battle of Marengo.
Retirement
However, his republican convictions were inconsistent with high office under the First French Empire, and he resigned from public life - although he was later made a Count of the Empire by Napoleon as Lazare Nicolas Marguerite, comte Carnot.
During the Hundred Days, he served as Minister of the Interior for Napoleon, and was exiled as a regicide during the White Terror after the Second Restoration. Carnot's remains were interred at the Panthéon in 1889, at the same time as those of Marie Victor de La Tour-Maubourg, Jean-Baptiste Baudin, and François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers.
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