Charles-François Frérot d'Abancourt

Charles-François Frérot d'Abancourt (born May 26, 1756 in Soissons , † January 17, 1801 in Munich ) was a French military and engineering geographer .

Life

Charles-François Frérot d'Abancourt was commissioned in April 1777 with the land survey of the plain of the municipality of Aléria in Corsica and its surroundings. After his return in November 1777 he designed maps and plans as part of a collaboration with the geographer Beaurain, which should serve to illustrate Turenne's last four campaigns . In December 1779 he was accepted among the engineer-geographers entrusted with foreign affairs and in August 1785 on the orders of King Louis XVI. sent to Constantinople to lead an engineering school there. He stayed in the Ottoman Empire until February 1788 , where he was part of the French military mission led by Major André-Joseph Lafitte-Clavé . He returned to France with a valuable collection of plans and military drawings, the archives of which had been entrusted to him. In June 1788 he became a supernumerar in the corps of military engineer-geographers and received a lieutenant's license in the garrison battalion of the royal infantry regiment.

After the outbreak of the French Revolution , Abancourt became an engineer-geographer in the constitutional committee of the constituent assembly in September 1789 and was supposed to participate in the division of France into departments. With Jean-Louis Dupain-Triel he published the work Recherches géographiques sur les hauteurs des plaines du royaume, sur les mers et leurs côtés… (Paris, 1791). After the end of the activity of the Constituent Assembly (September 1791) he took over the management of the graphic department of the land registry . From June 1794, by order of the Welfare Committee , he acted as director of the newly founded Agence des cartes of the commission for public works, whose unrealistic goal was the collection of all geographical documents existing in France in a central archive. Two and a half months later, the Agence des cartes was incorporated into the Dépôt de la Guerre , of which Abancourt became deputy director in November 1795.

In July 1796 Abancourt received the patent of a captain of the infantry and entered the general staff in the first military division. In June 1797 he again took over the post of deputy director of the Dépôt de la Guerre and was in charge of its topographical department. He was appointed adjudant-général in May 1798, then in March 1799 in the General Staff of the Danube Army and appointed head of its topographical office. He later switched to the Rhine Army. In the latter positions he made a valued general map of Switzerland and a map of Bavaria . The latter was barely completed when Abancourt died in Munich in early 1801 at the age of only 44.

literature

• L. Hennet: Abancourt (Charles-François Frérot d '). In: Dictionnaire de Biographie Française (DBF). Volume 1 (1932), Col. 21f.