Charles Cousin-Montauban

Charles-Guillaume-Marie-Apollinaire-Antoine Cousin-Montauban, comte de Palikao (born June 24, 1796 in Paris , † January 8, 1878 in Versailles ) was a French général de division and statesman. He was commander in chief of the French expeditionary force in China , which captured Beijing in 1860 , and from August 9 to September 4, 1870, Prime Minister and Minister of War of the collapsing Second Empire .

Life

Comte de Palikao

Cousin-Montauban was the illegitimate son of the daughter of General de Launay de Picardois, who died in 1825. He joined the army in 1814, became a lieutenant in the 2 ^e régiment de cuirassiers (2nd cuirassier regiment) in 1818 , joined the artillery in 1824 and later joined the hunters and served in Algeria from 1831 to 1857 , where he repeatedly distinguished himself. In 1847 he took Abd el Kader prisoner as a colonel in a regiment of the Chasseurs d'Afrique . In 1851 he was Général de brigade , in 1855 Général de division , recalled to France in 1857 and appointed commander of the 21st division in Limoges .

In 1858 he was called to Rouen , where in the last days of 1859 he received the order of the emperor to take over the command of the French part of the united British-French expeditionary army, which was supposed to force China to comply with the agreement of Tianjin (Tientsin) (→ Second Opium War ). In 1860 he embarked there. He defeated the Chinese at Sinko on August 12, stormed Tangku, won, united with the English, at Tschangkiahuang (September 13) and on September 21 at Pa-li-ch'iao (French: Palikao), a city near Beijing. On October 12th, he took Beijing . The looting and pillage of the summer residence of the Emperor of China (in response to the torture and murder of British diplomats in the basement of this palace who were invited to sign a pseudo-contract), during which Cousin-Montauban was greatly enriched, led to worldwide outrage. When he returned to France, he was received as a hero. Napoleon III awarded him the title of senator and in 1862 the title of Count of Palikao. However , the corps législatif refused an annual grant of 50,000 francs because of the looting. Cousin-Montauban was held harmless by the payment of 600,000 francs from the Chinese war indemnity. In 1865 he took over command of the 4th Army Corps in Lyon , during whose training he showed extraordinary energy and organizational talent.

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out , he was not given a front-line command. Late in the evening of August 9, he was summoned to Paris by Prime Minister Émile Ollivier on the orders of Empress- Regent Eugenie and appointed Minister of War in place of Edmond Lebœuf during the ongoing deliberations of the Council of Ministers. Immediately afterwards, the entire previous government resigned, so that the general, who had hitherto been completely alien to politics, suddenly became the longest serving minister and, as such, headed the new, purely Bonapartist cabinet (the so-called Mameluke Ministry) in which he had already been negotiated in parliament even the Ministry of War took over. Although he immediately began with the reorganization of national defense and the establishment of new army corps with great success, he could no longer stop the collapse of the empire.

Ousted from office by the republican revolution, he fled to Belgium and retired into private life.

In 1871 he appeared before a parliamentary commission of inquiry and in the same year published the work Un ministère de la guerre de vingt quatrejours (Paris 1871), in which he presented his plan for the march of the Mac-Mahon army via Sedan to Metz , which he carried out during his brief Tried to force tenure, defended as the only means that could still have saved France.

Charles Guillaume Marie Cousin-Montauban died in Versailles on January 8, 1878.

Web links

Commons : Charles Cousin-Montauban  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wilhelm Oncken : The Age of Emperor Wilhelm. (Individual edition: ISBN 978-3-8460-3638-9 ) in: Oncken, W. (ed.): General History in Individual Representations , Fourth Main Department, Sixth Part, Volume 2, Berlin: Grote, 1890 and more, p. 110.

predecessor	Office	successor
Pierre Charles Dejean	Minister of War of France August 10, 1870 - September 4, 1870	Adolphe Le Flô