Louis François de Monteynard

de Monteynard

Louis François, marquis de Monteynard (born May 13, 1713 in La Pierre , † May 3, 1791 in Paris ) was a French military man and statesman.

At the age of fourteen he entered the Régiment de Royal Vaisseaux , which was commanded at that time by his cousin, the Chevalier de Marcieu. In this regiment he took part in all the great campaigns of Louis XV. part. He fought successfully on the battlefields in Italy , Austria , on the island of Menorca , in Germany and in the Netherlands . His career culminated in 1759 when he was appointed lieutenant général .

In 1771 he was chosen by Louis XV to replace the previous Minister of War (Secrétaire d'État à la Guerre), Étienne François, duc de Choiseul . In the three years of his ministerial office he launched a number of actions to improve the not exactly enviable lot of the soldiers. For this he was mentioned by Voltaire as an example for Europe in his Philosophical Dictionary.

De Monteynard was heavily involved in his home region, the Dauphiné . He was one of the co-founders of the people's library in Grenoble and defended this project before the king in 1771. In the same year, at the request of the patricians of Grenoble, he campaigned for the Dauphiné regional parliament to move from Valence to Grenoble. To this day, its deliberations take place in Grenoble City Hall. In 1773 he had the rectory of his home parish La Pierre rebuilt and a new church built and the associated cemetery set up.

In 1774 Monteynard was appointed governor general of Corsica . He was also the founder of the cavalry school of the French army in Saumur . From this, after the French Revolution, the Cadre Noir military sports squadron, which still exists today, emerged.

However , he never lived in the Cruzille Castle in Tencin , which he rebuilt in 1775 .

He died in Paris during the French Revolution.

Despite the legal bans on burials in churches passed in 1788, the poor in his neighborhood and former soldiers managed to bury the remains of the Marquis de Monteynard in the Church of the Jacobins (Èglise des Jacobins) in Toulouse .

Others

After Monteynard was Fort Monteynard named in the fortifications of Grenoble.

literature

• Bernard Perrin: Dans l'ombre de l'Histoire: Louis-François de Monteynard, an exemple pour l'Europe. Association L'ombre de l'Histoire, La Pierre 2001, ISBN 2-9516651-0-5 .