Jean-Victor Moreau

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Jean-Victor Moreau
Signature Jean-Victor Moreau.PNG
29-year-old Jean-Victor Moreau (1792)

Jean-Victor-Marie Moreau (born February 14, 1763 in Morlaix , Département Finistère , † September 2, 1813 in Laun , Bohemia ) was a French general at the time of the Revolution and the consulate and an opponent and rival of Napoleon Bonaparte .

Life

Moreau's March through Hell's Gorge in October 1796

Moreau was the son of a lawyer . He studied law in Rennes from 1778 and became a judicial officer there. When the First Coalition War broke out , he was elected leader of the volunteer battalion formed in Rennes, took part in the campaign of 1792 under Dumouriez , in 1793 led the attack on the Prussians near Pirmasens as Général de brigade , conquered in 1794 as Général de division Menen , forced Ypres to surrender , occupied Bruges , Ostend and Nieuport and commanded the right wing during the conquest of Holland under Pichegru in 1795 .

In 1796 he was given command of the Rhine and Moselle armies. He pushed Wurmser back to Mannheim , crossed the Rhine on June 24th at Kehl , defeated Latour on July 5th at Rastatt , the Archduke Karl on July 9th in the battle of Malsch , penetrated through the Black Forest on the right bank of the Danube to the Isar before, signed the Treaty of Pfaffenhofen with Bavaria on September 7th, but was then forced by the defeat and the withdrawal of Jourdan to back down as well.

On this masterfully managed retreat, facilitated by the disagreement of the opposing generals, he defeated the Austrians on October 2nd in the Battle of Biberach , went through the Hell Valley of the Black Forest and reached after having fought again with Archduke Karl on October 24th near Schliengen had the Rhine at the end of October. He crossed the river at Hüningen and maintained Breisach and Kehl until the beginning of 1797. In the same year he crossed the Rhine again and penetrated as far as Lichtenau , where on April 23rd he received the news of the peace preliminaries concluded in Leoben .

In 1796 Moreau had found treasonous correspondence between Condé and Pichegru in an Austrian baggage car , but kept it secret out of friendship with Pichegru. This fact now became known and prompted the Board of Directors to recall Moreau in September 1797. Nevertheless, at the end of 1798 he was appointed inspector général in the Italian army.

In April 1799, instead of General Barthélemy Louis Joseph Schérer , he took over the supreme command of the Italian army oppressed by Alexander Wassiljewitsch Suworow , led it from the Adda over the Ticino and then withdrew to the mountains near Genoa . From here he achieved his union with Jacques MacDonald , who was advancing with his troops from Naples . In August, Moreau was recalled. At the instigation of Barthélemy Catherine Joubert , who was to relieve him in command, he attended the battle of Novi on August 15 and, since Joubert had died at the beginning of the battle, again took over command. But he could no longer prevent the complete defeat of the French.

Napoleon

When he returned to Paris, he turned down Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès' request to take control of the dictatorship himself. Instead, he took part in the coup d'état of the 18th Brumaire , without realizing its consequences, and guarded the directors in the Palais Luxembourg . He then received supreme command of the Rhine Army and with Lazare-Nicolas-Marguerite Carnot set up a new army of 90,000 men, with which he crossed the Upper Rhine for the third time at the end of April 1800.

In May he drove the Austrians back under Paul von Kray through a series of lucky skirmishes near Stockach , Engen , Messkirch , Biberach an der Riss and Ulm , advanced across the Danube and made his way through victories in the battles near Höchstädt , Nordlingen and Oberhausen made the way to the Inn , whereupon the Austrians concluded the Parsdorf armistice with him on July 15th . But when the peace negotiations broke down in November, Moreau won the decisive victory at Hohenlinden on December 3, which opened the way to the heart of Austria and first brought about the Steyr armistice on December 25 and then the peace of Lunéville . The demarcation line was the river Erlauf near Scheibbs in western Lower Austria, about 50 kilometers east of Steyr.

Moreau then retired to his estate Grosbois. As he hated Napoleon for his republican attitude and his fame as a general equal to his own, he was arrested on February 4, 1804, after several accomplices in the investigation into the plot allegedly instigated by Pichegru and Georges Cadoudal against Napoleon had testified. He was arrested in the Temple and accused of wanting to make himself dictator in agreement with Pichegru in order to bring the Bourbons back to government. This allegation could never be proven. Moreau affirmed that he had never negotiated with the Bourbons. He also never wanted to usurp the dictatorship. Bonaparte had already offered him this before, and he turned it down even then.

He was acquitted on June 9th by seven votes to five, but Napoleon, who wanted to find him guilty, let the judges deal with Anne-Jean-Marie-René Savary, duc de Rovigo , until they sentenced him to two years in prison . Napoleon turned the sentence into exile, and Moreau embarked for the United States , where he settled in Morrisville , Pennsylvania , and spent the next few years fishing and hunting.

Back in Europe against Napoleon

In the spring of 1813 he accepted an invitation from the Russian tsar to fight with him against Napoleon, which he pronounced on the recommendation of an old acquaintance Moreau, who was then Crown Prince of Sweden, Jean-Baptiste Bernadottes . He landed in Gothenburg on July 26th and was appointed his adjutant general by Alexander I. However, he refused to take command of the allied Austrians, Russians and Prussians. The attack on Dresden took place against his will .

When he was speaking to the Tsar on the Räcknitzhöhe south of the city during the Battle of Dresden on August 27, a cannonball smashed both legs. After a makeshift medical treatment on the estate of the farmer Palitzsch in Kleinpestitz , the inevitable amputation was carried out a few kilometers away in the manor house of Schloss Nöthnitz , which was carried out by the Tsar's personal doctor, the Scot James Wylie . According to tradition, Moreau smoked cigars during the operation. Then he was brought to Bohemia via Dippoldiswalde and the Ore Mountains , where he died in Laun on September 2, 1813 at the age of 50.

Monuments

Louis XVIII later awarded his widow the title of marshal ( maréchale ) and had a monument erected in Paris in 1819. His wife's tomb is on the Cimetière de la Chartreuse in Bordeaux, where the heart of Moreau was also buried.

The monument ( coordinate ) erected in 1814 by the Russian Prince Repnin-Wolkonski near Räcknitz in Dresden only covers Moreau's two legs; his body was buried in Saint Petersburg . On the monument in Dresden is written " Moreau the hero fell here at Alexander's side on August XXVII MDCCCXIII" . The Dresden sculptor Christian Gottlieb Kühn created the iron helmet . Grouped around the monument are three oaks, planted in 1814, which are among the oldest memorial trees in Dresden .

meaning

Moreau was quite a "political general". He openly disapproved of the sole rule of his former comrade-in-arms Napoleon after his successful coup on November 9, 1799 ( 18th Brumaire VIII ). Moreau was a staunch Republican and also jealous of the successes of his happier, if more ruthless, colleague. Like Napoleon, Masséna , Soult , Ney and Jourdan , Hoche and Marceau, he was one of those revolutionary generals who quickly made a career in the newly founded People's Army and commanded divisions at the age of thirty. While Napoleon was working on his own legend after he came to power, Moreau's retreat and his counterattack against the Austrians chasing him near Biberach an der Riss in 1796 fell into oblivion.

Honors

His name is entered on the triumphal arch in Paris in the 13th column.

literature

  • John Philippart: Memoirs of General Moreau , Philadelphia 1816
  • Jean Victor Moreau: General Moreau's life and campaigns , Leipzig 1802 online in the Google book search

Web links

Commons : Jean-Victor Moreau  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. Grave No. 8, Le cimetière de la Chartreuse. (No longer available online.) City of Bordeaux brochure, p. 4 , archived from the original on July 14, 2014 ; Retrieved June 16, 2014 (French). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.bordeaux.fr