Charles Matthieu Isidore Decaen

Charles Mathieu Decaen

Charles Matthieu Isidore Count of Decaen (born April 13, 1769 in Creuilly near Caen ; † September 9, 1832 in Deuil-la-Barre (Val-d'Oise)) was a French Général de division .

During the siege of Mainz (1793) he served in Kléber's general staff , but then specifically against the Vendéer . Promoted to Général de brigade in 1796 , he was commissioned under Moreau's command to prepare a passage across the Rhine near Strasbourg , crossed the river under violent grape fire, took a battery and directed it against the enemy.

As the leader of the avant-garde , he decided Ettlingen's day (July 10, 1796). When Moreau withdrew , he commanded the rearguard. Promoted to general de division in 1800 , he took Munich by a coup d'état, decided the victory of Hohenlinden and in 1802 became captain general of the French islands of Ile de France and Bourbon in the Indian Ocean, which he defended against the English until 1810. It was only through his capitulation that the English seafarer Matthew Flinders , who had been illegally imprisoned by him for almost six and a half years, was freed.

Returning to France, he was given command of the army in Catalonia , where he forced the English to lift the siege of Tarragona . For this he was raised to count. After defeating the English at the Ordal and Villafranca passes on September 12 and 13, 1813, he withdrew to France and tried in vain to save Bordeaux . After the emperor's abdication, he joined Louis XVIII. on.

When Napoleon I returned from Elba in 1815, Decaen was governor of the 11th division in Bordeaux and tried to maintain the rule of the Bourbons , but soon found himself abandoned by his troops and took command of the 10th military division from Napoleon. After the Battle of Waterloo , he was arrested under the law of October 23, but released by the king's orderly. He remained without military use.

Decaen was brought back into service under the July Monarchy. He was given the chairmanship of a commission that examined the claims of those officers who (like him) had received no use during the Restoration . He died of a violent stroke on November 9, 1832. A law specially enacted in 1835 granted his widow a pension of CHF 3,000.

literature

• Louis Edmond Gautier, Biographie du général Decaen , Caen, A. Hardel, 1850
• Archives nationales (CARAN) - Service Historique de l'Armée de Terre - Fort de Vincennes - Dossier SHAT Côte: 7 Yd 354
• Dictionnaire biographique des généraux & amiraux français de la Révolution et de l'Empire (1792–1814) Editeur: Librairie G. Saffroy, 1934, 2 vol. Paris pp. 301-303