Louis Albert Guislain Bacler d'Albe
Louis Albert Guislain Bacler d'Albe ([ båk'laiʀ dålb ]) (born October 21, 1761 in Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise , † September 13, 1824 in Sèvres ), Baron de l'empire, was a French military topographer and Landscape painter. As head of the cartography unit of the French army and a member of the general staff, he accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte on all his campaigns through Europe. He created large-scale maps with high accuracy, on the basis of which the troop movements were represented and planned. As an artist, he created over 500 works of art with idyllic landscapes or heroic depictions of battles.
Life
family
Louis Albert Guislain Bacler d'Albe was born on October 21, 1761 in Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise, France . His parents were Philippe Albert Hector Bacler, quartermaster and treasurer of the Regiment Toul and Cécile Anne Delattre. He was married to Marie Marthe Alexandrine Godin and had three children: Joseph-Albert (* 1789), Alexandrine-Julie-Joséphine (* approx. 1790) and Louis-Marc (* 1805).
Early years
Bacler spent his childhood in Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise, Strasbourg and Grenoble . His father was an old artillery officer who instructed him early on to study mathematical sciences and the fine arts . When his father retired from the military in 1772, he took up a new position as postmaster in Amiens . At the local school Bacler received a good education with the teachers Jacques Delille and Nicolas-Joseph Sélis (1737-1802). When he was 15, Bacler worked as an employee in the main post office. In the following years he often stood in for his ailing father. But instead of pursuing a career as a scholar or as a successor to his father, he was drawn to the fine arts. So at the age of 20 he gave up his job at the post office and started traveling. His path led him through France, Switzerland and Italy. He was particularly fascinated by the Alps. He made numerous paintings and engravings of landscape views and dealt with geography. After his marriage to Marie, he settled in Sallanches on Mont Blanc for seven years from 1785 . From there he could reach places of interest to him without having to travel far.
Military career
The French Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars that followed also changed his life. Influenced by the revolutionary ideas, he gave up his favorite occupation and joined the 2nd Ariege Battalion on May 1, 1793 as a volunteer . In the same year took part in the siege of Toulon and Lyon and rose to the Capitaine of the artillery. Its commanding officer was Napoleon Bonaparte, who soon became aware of his special abilities. He used Bacler as a draftsman, responsible for the cartographic representation of the area reconnaissance. With this core task, Bacler became one of Napoleon's closest collaborators and confidants for almost two decades.
In 1794 he was entrusted with the reconnaissance of the coastal regions between Nice and Savona and later the further eastern Riviera . When Napoleon took command of the Italian army in Nice in March 1796, Bacler appointed him to his general staff and appointed him director of the topography unit. During the following Italian campaign , Bacler carried out the mapping of northern Italy required for the warfare. General Desaix described him at the time as a little dark man, handsome, pleasant, perfectly trained, enormously talented and a good draftsman.
After a successful campaign, Bacler became the head of the topographic office of the Cisalpine Republic in Milan . The lack of good maps prompted him to create a map of Italy. To do this, he used the measurements made during the war and other data that were accessible to him through the French military archive. In the following five years he created this map, which consists of 30 sheets with a uniform scale that can be joined together and depicts northern and central Italy as well as Dalmatia , Switzerland, parts of southern Germany and parts of France on around 3 by 3 meters . He also devoted himself to painting again. A number of battle pictures were created that describe the high points of the Italian campaign in great detail.
In 1798 Napoleon secretly prepared the Egypt expedition . He wrote to Bacler to recruit him for the company. Bacler's wife, however, withheld this letter and so Bacler missed a campaign by Napoleon for the only time.
In April 1799 Milan was taken by the Austrians. Some of the copper plates on the Italy map were looted. The Austrians offered Bacler to buy back the records. But when he could not raise the required money, he was threatened with culpable imprisonment. Bacler turned to Napoleon and asked him to give him the necessary money for the 10 years of loyal service that he had rendered so far and for his picture of the Battle of Arcole . Napoleon bought the painting from him. This is how Bacler saved his plates and his imposing battle painting (3.57 m wide and 1.91 m high) hangs today in the Palace of Versailles .
From Milan he went to Paris. There he worked with the rank of lieutenant colonel as a geography engineer in the French war depot . He completed his map of Italy and later added a second set of maps to southern Italy, Sicily and Malta. After completing this work, he began to publish a monthly in 1802, the Ménales pittoresques et historiques des paysagistes, for which he created copperplate engravings of works by other landscape painters and published them together with their biographies. After completing the first volume, however, he had to stop the project because he went back to war.
Bacler took part in Napoleon's campaigns in Spain in 1806, 1807 and 1808. Bacler's office was the starting point for all preparatory war planning. Before the campaigns, Napoleon studied the maps in the topography office with him. An anecdote has it that the cards were sometimes so big that both of them would work with them while lying on the table. It happened that they occasionally hit their heads.
In his position as head of the topography office, Bacler was involved in all planning on a daily basis during the campaigns and was constantly in direct contact with the general. “Call me the d'Albe” was an order to be heard at any time of the day or night when Napoleon wanted to get a cartographic overview. One of the regular occurrences was the fact that, usually at one or two o'clock in the night, the scouts arrived at headquarters to bring their reports. Bacler prepared a large table on which he laid out the best map of the respective theater of war. He carefully aligned the map, which was lit by 20 to 30 candles, with the compass. He drew rivers, mountains and borders in color and marked the locations of his own and enemy troops with colored flags on pins.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Joseph Thomas: Universal pronouncing dictionary of biography and mythology . tape 1 . JB Lippincott and co., Philadelphia 1870, OCLC 1073507 , p. 2345 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed October 19, 2011]).
- ↑ a b c Diégo Mané: Le général baron Bacler d'Albe . 2005 ( planete-napoleon.com [PDF; accessed November 23, 2011]).
- ↑ myheritage.at Bacler D'Albe queried on August 22, 2016
- ↑ Marcel Bayart: Il ya 250 ans, Bacler d'Albe général d'Empire et cartographe naissait à Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise. (No longer available online.) In: L'Abeille de la Ternoise. October 22, 2011, archived from the original on December 30, 2011 ; Retrieved October 26, 2011 (French, The article contains a copy of Louis Bacler d'Albe's death certificate). 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.
- ↑ Sergej Michajlovič Gorjainov, Léon Clément Hennet, Emmanuel Martin: Lettres interceptées par les Russes durant la Campagne de 1812 . La Sabretache, Paris 1913, p. 440 (French, limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed October 25, 2011]).
- ^ A b Jean Baptiste Modeste Eugène Vachée: Napoleon at work . Adam and Charles Black, London 1914 (English, French: Napoléon en campagne . Translated by G. Frederic Lees).
- ^ Louis Charles Antoine Desaix de Veygoux , Arthur Chuquet : Journal de voyage du Général Desaix, Suisse et Italie (1797) . 2nd Edition. Plon-Nourrit, 1907, p. 305 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed November 20, 2011]).
- ↑ Card reviews . Carté générale du théatre de la guerre en Italy et dans les Alpes… In: F. Von Zach (ed.): General geographical ephemeris . Written by a society of scholars. tape 4 . Industrie-Comptoir, Weimar 1799 ( full text in the Google book search [accessed on November 27, 2011]).
Web links
- Pictures from souvenirs pittoresques du Général Bacler d'Albe in the VIATIMAGES portal of the University of Lausanne.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bacler d'Albe, Louis Albert Guislain |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French military topographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 21, 1761 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise , France |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 13, 1824 |
| Place of death | Sèvres , France |