Agathon Guynement de Keralio
Agathon Guynement, chevalier de Keralio , also spelled Guinement (* March 23, 1723 in Rennes , France , † February 23, 1788 in Forbach , County Forbach), was a French officer , prince educator of the Palatinate-Zweibrücken and inspector of all 13 French military schools under Louis XVI. With the rank of maréchal de camp , he retired from active military service in 1783 and became private secretary of Marianne Camasse, Countess von Forbach .
Life
Early military career in the Ancién regime
Guynement de Keralio was the third eldest son of the lower Breton service nobility François Fiacre Guynement, seigneur de Keralio, inspector of the dioceses of Rennes and Nantes, and his wife Rose-Marguerite Bodin. Like his brothers Félix-François-Germain (1714–1734), Auguste-Guy (1715–1805) and Louis-Félix (1731–1793) he was sent on a career as an officer. At the age of 15 he began on April 8 in 1738 as a volunteer his military training in the Régiment d'Anjou , a French infantry regiment of the ancien régime , where he on October 27 to a second lieutenant , and on April 19, 1739 to lieutenant was promoted . During the War of the Austrian Succession , his regiment took part in the occupation of Prague . He suffered a leg injury in the Battle of Madonna dell'Olmo. On September 27, 1747 he was appointed captain in the function of an aide major . In the position of adjutant he was stationed from September 1752 in the garrison of Nancy , where he was decorated on March 7, 1754 as a knight of the Ordre royal et militaire de Saint-Louis . On July 8, 1756 he was given command of one of four brigades of the Corps des Grenadiers de France and fought in the Seven Years' War in the battles near Halstenbeck , Krefeld and Minden , where a brother was seriously injured as a captain in the same unit. On November 1, 1759 he was promoted to major in the staff of the Corps des Grenadiers de France . On June 30, 1760, Victor-François de Broglie appointed him commandant of Marburg . On May 19, 1761 Broglie transferred him to the rank of colonel in the Régiment d'Aquitaine .
Prince educator of the Palatinate-Zweibrücken family
Around 1764, Duke Christian IV of Pfalz-Zweibrücken and his brother Friedrich Michael von Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler commissioned him with the education of Princes Karl August and Max Joseph , who had moved to the top of the Palatinate and Bavarian succession after June 29, 1761 the Hereditary Prince Franz Ludwig Joseph, the only son of the Palatinate Elector Karl Theodor , died shortly after his birth in Schwetzingen. Since the Palatinate Electress Elisabeth Auguste no longer gave birth and the Elector of Bavaria, Maximilian III. Joseph , the last male representative of his Bavarian line, even without a male heir, the dynastic focus of the Wittelsbach family was directed particularly towards the princes of the Pfalz-Zweibrücken family branch.
Guynement de Keralio worked in Paris until 1766 , then until 1772 in Mannheim and Strasbourg as a prince educator, a function that he carried out for the princes of Pfalz-Zweibrücken alongside other teachers, including Pierre de Salabert . In his enlightened style of upbringing, Guynement de Keralio, as a teacher and as a fatherly friend, aimed above all at building the character of the princes. On the one hand, he instilled in them a sense of their high dynastic and political responsibility; on the other hand, he emphasized the importance of religious virtues, while he valued less the learning of courtly manners. For his services to the upbringing of princes, Karl Theodor decorated him with the Grand Cross of the Order of Hubert .
Inspector of the French military schools
After returning to France, Louis XV raised him . Knight of the Ordre de Saint-Michel and promoted him on December 9, 1773 to deputy inspector of the École militaire in Paris. From March 3, 1776, he served as inspector of all 13 French military academies. From 1777 he had an intensive correspondence with Benjamin Franklin , who was then working as a diplomat of the United States in Paris. On April 1, 1780, Louis XVI appointed him . to the Maréchal de camp, after he had already promoted him to the Brigadier des armées du roi on March 1 of the same year . In 1782, Guynement de Keralio campaigned for the career of the young Napoleon Bonaparte by enabling him, despite his young age at the time, to switch to the École militaire in Paris in 1784. In 1783, Guynement de Keralio retired with a pension of £ 6,000.
Private secretary at the court of the Countess von Forbach
As a pensioner he lived at the court of Forbach, Lorraine, until his death . There he served the Countess von Forbach , the morganatic widow of Duke Christian IV of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, who died in 1775, as private secretary.
Marriage and offspring
Guynement de Keralio was married to the actress Marie-Nicole Rivet, a daughter of the royal master upholsterer Jaques Rivet. The marriage had three living sons and two grandchildren by 1788. In 1810, Napoleon Bonaparte remembered his late sponsor and granted his widow a pension of 3,000 livres.
literature
- Kéralio (Agathon-Guynement, de) . In: P. Levot: Biography Bretonne. Ecueil de notices de tout les Bretons . Paris 1852, Volume 2, P. 2 ( Google Books ).
- Annie Geffroy: Les cinq frères Keralio . In: Dix-huittième siècle , issue 1/2008, no. 40, pp. 69-77 ( online ).
Web links
- Agathon Guynement de Kéralio , genealogical data sheet on the portal gw.geneanet.org
Individual evidence
- ↑ Katharina Weikl: Crisis without an alternative? The end of the Old Reich in 1806 as perceived by the southern German imperial princes . Frank & Timme, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-86596-095-5 , p. 46 ( Google Books )
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Guynement de Keralio, Agathon |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Guinement de Keralio, Agathon |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French officer and inspector of military schools |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 23, 1723 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rennes , France |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 23, 1788 |
| Place of death | Forbach , Forbach County |