Lazare Carnot

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Lazare Carnot

Lazare Carnot
Born May 13, 1753
Nolay, Côte-d'Or
Died August 2, 1823
Nationality France

Lazare Nicolas Marguerite, Comte Carnot (May 13, 1753—August 2, 1823), the Organizer of Victory in the French Revolutionary Wars, was a French politician, engineer, and mathematician.

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[edit] Education and early life

Born in Nolay, Côte-d'Or, Carnot was educated in Burgundy at the Collège d’Autun, an artillery and engineering prep school. He graduated from Mezieres School of Engineering, where he had met and studied with Benjamin Franklin[1], at the age of twenty and obtained commission as a lieutenant in the Prince of Condé’s engineer corps. Although in the army, he continued his study of mathematics. 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 of the fact that kinetic energy is lost in the collision of imperfectly elastic bodies. This publication earned him the honour of admittance to a literary society. In that same year, he also received a promotion to the rank of captain.

[edit] Political career

On the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, Carnot entered political life. He became a delegate to the Legislation in 1791. While a member of the Legislative Assembly, Carnot was elected to the Committee for Public Instruction. Carnot believed all citizens should be educated and 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 in eighteenth century France.

When the Legislative Assembly dissolved, Carnot was then elected to the National Convention in 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 King Louis XVI, although he had been absent for the debates surrounding the king’s trial.

On August 14, 1793 he was elected to the Committee of Public Safety where he took charge of the military situation as one of the Ministers of War.

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 conscription: the levée en masse. 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 5 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.

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. His and Étienne-François Letourneur's moderation was viewed as weakness, and it probably contributed to France's failure to capitalize[citation needed] on the Treaty of Campo Formio. 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 Fructidor coup d'état of (September 4, 1797), engineered by Generals Napoleon Bonaparte (originally, Carnot's protégé) and Pierre François Charles Augereau. He took refuge in Geneva, and there in 1797 issued his La métaphysique du calcul infinitésimal.

In 1800 he was appointed Minister of War by Bonaparte, and served in that office at the time of the Battle of Marengo. In 1802, he voted against the establishment of Napoleon's Consular powers for life.

[edit] 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.

In 1803 he produced his Géométrie de position. This work deals with projective rather than descriptive geometry, it also contains an elaborate discussion of the geometrical meaning of negative roots of an algebraic equation. Carnot returned to office in defense of Napoleon during the disastrous invasion of Russia; he was assigned the defence of Antwerp against the Sixth Coalition - he only surrendered on the demand of the Count of Artois, who was the younger brother of Louis XVIII and later Charles X.

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 during the reign of Louis XVIII. He lived in Warsaw, and moved to Prussia, where he died in the city of Magdeburg. 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.

[edit] Impact

Carnot was able to survive and maintain a place of power during all the phases of the French Revolution, from its beginnings in 1789 until the fall of Napoleon in 1815. On the social and political front, Carnot was the author of many reforms that he thought to be for the good of the Republic. One of these was the proposal for compulsory public education for all citizens. He also penned a proposal for the new Constitution which included the “Declaration of the Duties of the Citizens” that held that there should be not only education but military service for all citizens of France between the ages of twenty and twenty-five.[2] These proposals were in accordance with the Revolutionaries thinking of the times which held that men and women should be honored through ability and intelligence rather than through birthright, even though Carnot himself was nobly born. If not for this style of thinking, Napoleon Bonaparte may not have risen to the power he became as it was Carnot who had first promoted Bonaparte from Captain to General.[3]

But perhaps his greatest achievements, in deference to the French Revolution itself, were those of a military nature. If not for Carnot, the modern waging of war with mass armies and strategic planning would not exist.[4] As a military engineer, Carnot favored fortresses and defensive strategies,[5] but with the constant invasions 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 1793-1794. [6]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 would lead to slaughter and defeat. 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. He also created a new political strategy based on disrupting communication between enemy nations of England and Austria while concentrating attack effort on England. Carnot’s military influence and authority were eventually used to bring about the downfall of Robespierre.[7]

[edit] Famous offspring

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Dino De Paoli, Lazare Carnot's Grand Strategy for Political Victory. Executive Intelligence Review. 1996.
  2. ^ Dino De Paoli, Lazare Carnot's Grand Strategy for Political Victory. Executive Intelligence Review. 1996.
  3. ^ R.R. Palmer, The Twelve Who Ruled. Princeton: Princeton University Press.1941.
  4. ^ Dino De Paoli, Lazare Carnot's Grand Strategy for Political Victory. Executive Intelligence Review. 1996.
  5. ^ R.R. Palmer, The Twelve Who Ruled. Princeton: Princeton University Press.1941.
  6. ^ S.J. Watson. Carnot.London:The Bodley Head.1954.
  7. ^ Dino De Paoli, Lazare Carnot's Grand Strategy for Political Victory. Executive Intelligence Review. 1996.
  • W. W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics (4th Edition, 1908)

[edit] External links

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