Nicolas-Joseph Beaurepaire

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Nicolas Beaurepaire, lieutenant-colonel in the one he Battalion de Maine-et-Loire (1792), paintings by Raymond Quinsac Monvoisin in the "Musée de l'Histoire de France" (Versailles)

Nicolas-Joseph Beaurepaire (born January 7, 1740 in Coulommiers , † September 2, 1792 in Verdun ) was a French officer and governor of the Verdun fortress.

biography

Beaurepaire entered military service in the royal army of the Ancien Régime in 1757 . On August 19, 1776, he married in Joué Étiau in the Maine-et-Loire department Marie-Anne Charlotte Banchereau-Dutail. In 1786 he was promoted to captaincy and in 1791 resigned in Anjou .

He gave up this retirement when he became lieutenant colonel and battalion commander in a volunteer regiment in the Mayenne et Loire department in September of the same year .

At the beginning of May 1792 he belonged to the "1 er régiment de volontaires de Mayenne-et-Loire" (1st Mayenne and Loire Volunteer Regiment) in Verdun . Beaurepaire had already lost a quarter of his men to desertion upon his arrival , but immediately began organizing the defense after assuming command.

On August 29, 1792, the siege of Verdun by the Prussians began with 60,000 men and 40 cannons under Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel . On August 31, a parliamentarian asked the city to surrender. On September 2nd, against the resistance of Beaurepaire, the city council decided to surrender. One of the reasons was probably that a relief army from Paris was unable to arrive before Verdun within two days. Beaurepaire then left the council meeting and was found dead a short time later. He was probably killed by a shot from his own pistol, but it is uncertain whether he fired it himself or someone else. In any case, the circumstances of his death could not be clarified. After the city was surrendered, his men took his body to Sainte-Menehould , where the deputy Joseph Delaunay immediately began to create the legend: Beaurepaire killed himself:

«… En présence des fonctionnaires publics lâches et parjures»

"... in the face of cowardly and perjured officials"

The revolutionary literature of France also immediately dealt with this topic, demanding and resolving that the body should be transferred to the Panthéon . In retrospect, however, this turned out to be impossible, as the body could no longer be found.

Statue of Nicolas-Joseph Beaurepaire on the Pont de Verdun in Angers

Honors

  • A monument by Nicolas-Joseph Beaurepaire, (designed by Maximilien Louis Bourgeois * 1839, † 1901) stands on the Pont de Verdun (Verdun Bridge), one of the bridges in Angers . Another monument by the same artist in Coulommiers disappeared in the turmoil of the Second World War .
  • Beaurepaire is one of the 558 officers who are immortalized on the pillars of the Arc de Triomphe . He was given the honorable title "mort pour la France" (fallen for France).

literature

  • Célestin Port: Dictionnaire historique geographique et biographique de Maine-et-Loire. Volume 1: Préliminaires A – C. J.-B. Dumoulin, Paris 1874, pp. 266-267 ( archive.org ). - The original edition and the second expanded edition, reprinted from 1965 to 1996 (Beaurepaire, pp. 304–305).
  • Gilles Houdry: Le héros de Verdun. In: Généalogie Briarde. No. 43, 2000, pp. 7-11, ISSN  0987-707X ( philippe.houdry.free.fr ).

Footnotes

  1. ↑ temporary name for the Maine-et-Loire department
  2. ↑ other sources speak of 55,000 men
personal data
SURNAME Beaurepaire, Nicolas-Joseph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French officer and governor of the Verdun fortress
DATE OF BIRTH January 7, 1740
PLACE OF BIRTH Coulommiers
DATE OF DEATH September 2, 1792
Place of death Verdun