Pierre Guillaume Gratien

Pierre Guillaume Gratien (born January 1, 1764 in Paris , † April 24, 1814 in Piacenza ) was a French general .

Life

Gratien had been a soldier in a dragoon regiment since 1787 and made a rapid career after the French Revolution . In 1791 he was captain in command of a Paris battalion and in 1792 in the First Coalition War he was lieutenant-colonel in the Northern Army under Dumouriez . Because of bravery in the fight with Dutch and Anglo-Hanoverian troops at Lincelles in the Austrian Netherlands on August 16, 1793 he was promoted to Général de brigade . Embarked in Brest under General Lazare Hoche , he took part in the failed crossing to Ireland in December 1796 . In 1800 Napoléon had chosen him to occupy the colony of Louisiana, which had been ceded by Spain . However, the expedition did not materialize and Gratien was assigned to the army of the Batavian Republic , Kingdom of Holland from June 1806 .

During the Fourth Coalition War in 1806 he was at the head of Dutch troops in the occupation of northern Germany. Assigned to fight the Schill Free Corps , he went through it again from April 1809 until the victory on May 31 in Stralsund . Then he stepped into during the fifth coalition war in Saxony invading Austrians under Karl Friedrich at the end opposite until the Znojmo ceasefire on July 15 this fighting ended. Gratien remained unsuccessful in the subsequent pursuit of the Austrian allied Duke Friedrich Wilhelm von Braunschweig , who, in his own opinion, was not affected by the armistice and made his way to the North Sea.

In 1810 and 1811, Gratien fought in Spain and Portugal . When the Grande Armée marched into Russia in 1812, he led a French division (Holland was annexed by France in 1810). Due to illness, Gratien resigned from the army in January 1813, but appeared again in June as Général de division on the Italian theater of war . Injured in the fighting for Bassano in October 1813 and later ill, he died in a hospital in Piacenza.

Honors

His name is entered on the triumphal arch in Paris in the 7th column.

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• Keyword Pierre Guillaume Gratien in: Charles Mullié, Biographie des célébrités militaires des armées de terre et de mer de 1789 à 1850 , 1852