Louis de Friant

Louis de Friant

Louis Friant, comte de l'Empire (born September 18, 1758 in Morlancourt on the Somme , †  June 24, 1829 at Gailonnet Castle in Seraincourt near Meulan , Seine-et-Oise ) was a French general de division of the Napoleonic Wars .

Life

Louis de Friant first joined the army between 1781 and 1787 and served in the National Guard from 1789. In 1792 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel of the 9th Paris battalion (" Bataillon de l'Arsenal ") and served from 1792 to 1794 on the Moselle . In October 1794 he took part in the siege of Maastricht and in April 1795 in the siege of Luxembourg . Under Bernadotte he served in the Italian Army. He then fought in Egypt , where he was able to distinguish himself several times and was subsequently promoted to Général de brigade on September 6, 1800 and was finally appointed governor of Alexandria . At the end of 1801 he returned to France with the rest of the Orient Army.

On August 30, 1805, he was given command of the 2nd Division of the 3rd Corps under his brother-in-law Marshal Davout . After a forced march of 112 kilometers in just 44 hours, the Friant division fought in the Battle of the Three Emperors of Austerlitz , and Friant became a member of the Legion of Honor on December 27, 1805 . In the association of the III. Corps under Marshal Davout, he took part in the Battle of Auerstedt in 1806 and in February 1807 in the Battle of Preussisch Eylau .

On October 5, 1808, Napoleon I made him comte de l'Empire. In the following years Friant took part in the campaign against Austria, where he was wounded in the battle of Wagram . During the Russian campaign in 1812 he was also wounded several times (near Smolensk and on the Moscow River ), after which he had to return to France. As chamberlain, he accompanied Napoleon to Saxony in 1813 . In the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig he commanded the 1st Infantry Division of the Old Guard . Elevated to Peer of France in June 1815 , he suffered another war wound as commandant of the Old Guard near Waterloo before retiring from the army on September 4, 1815 at the age of 57.

family

Louis comte de Friant was the brother-in-law of Marshal Louis Nicolas Davout , Duke of Auerstädt and Prince of Eggmühl . Friant was with Charlotte, geb. Leclerc, sister of Davout's wife Aimée Leclerc , married. Since Charlotte and Aimée Leclerc's brother Charles Victoire had married Emmanuel Leclerc in 1797 to Napoleon's sister Pauline Bonaparte and was married to her until his death in 1802, Friant could even boast a - albeit distant - relationship with the Bonapartes.

Honors

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

literature

• Jean Baptiste Pierre Julien de Concelles: Dictionnaire historique et biographique des généraux françaises . (1820)
• David Chandler: Dictionary of the Napoleonic Wars . (2002)
• Frédéric Hulot: Le Maréchal Davout . (2003)
• Hans Eggert von der Lühe, Militair-Conversations-Lexikon: F, G and H , Volume 3 p.205