Lazare Carnot

Lazare Carnot (born May 13, 1753, Nolay, Burgundy, France—died August 2, 1823, Magdeburg, Prussian Saxony [Germany]) was a French statesman, general, military engineer, and administrator in successive governments of the French Revolution. As a leading member of the Committee for General Defense and of the Committee of Public Safety (1793–94) and of the Directory (1793–97), he helped mobilize the Revolutionary armed forces and matériel.

Education and training

The son of a lawyer, Carnot studied at the Collège d’Autun and subsequently at the small seminary in the same town. After attending the artillery and engineering preparatory school in Paris from 1769 to 1771, he was graduated from the Mézières school of engineering, in January 1773, with the rank of lieutenant. In 1780 he was admitted to a literary society and in 1784 became known for a eulogy of Sébastian Le Prestre de Vauban, the French military engineer, which received an award from the Dijon Academy. In 1787 he was elected a member of the Arras Academy, the director of which at that time was Maximilien Robespierre, who was to be a leading figure in the Revolution.

When the Revolution broke out in 1789, Carnot was still a captain, a rank he had received in 1784. In 1791 he was elected deputy from Pas-de-Calais to the Legislative Assembly. As a member of the diplomatic and public education committees, Carnot did not distinguish himself; but on August 11, 1792, the day after the attack on the royal palace of the Tuileries in Paris, he was sent to the Army of the Rhine to report what had occurred.

In September 1792 Carnot was elected representative from Pas-de-Calais to the National Convention—the assembly elected under the influence of the fall of the monarchy—and at the end of the month was sent, with two other representatives, on a mission to Bayonne to organize the defense against a possible attack from Spain.

Since he was absent from Paris until the beginning of January 1793, Carnot did not take part in debates accompanying Louis XVI’s trial. He did, however, take part in the decisive votes, in which he voted against an appeal to the people and in favour of the king’s death. He thus indicated that he had been won over to the position of the Jacobins—the radicals—even though by temperament and inclination he was a man of the independents of the centre.

As a member of the Committee of War, Carnot was assigned to the Committee for General Defense, a predecessor of the Committee of Public Safety, which was to act as the executive branch throughout the republic. In this capacity Carnot presented various reports to the Convention, particularly one on March 9, 1793, which resulted in the dispatch of 82 representatives into the provincial départements to expedite the conscription of 300,000 men. Carnot himself was sent into the départements of the Nord and of Pas-de-Calais and at the end of March to the Army of the North. He remained with the Army of the North until August 1793, establishing his mastery in military operations as well as in the command of men. He reorganized the army, reestablished discipline, and took part, musket in hand, in the attack and capture of Furnes.

Political rise and fall

On August 14, 1793, the Convention appointed Carnot a member of the Committee of Public Safety. Shortly after, he set out again for the Army of the North, while the enemy besieged Maubeuge. This mission ended in the victory of Wattignies on October 16, 1793, and in the raising of the siege of Maubeuge. Once again Carnot, at the side of the generals, led the attack and entered the recaptured town alongside them. At the end of the month, he resumed his seat on the Committee of Public Safety.

From then on, Carnot devoted himself to the work of the Committee, concentrating on the conduct of military operations, although he did not entirely divorce himself from general policy. From the very start Carnot demanded that the ancient tactic of line combat be abandoned, advocating instead attack by masses concentrated at decisive points; eventually his views were adopted by the entire Committee. Carnot took a dominant part in the development of campaign plans, which were discussed by the entire Committee.

Beginning in May 1794, dissensions arose within the Committee of Public Safety between Carnot and Robespierre and Louis de Saint-Just, all of whom were of equally authoritarian and unyielding temperament. Carnot, basically a conservative, did not approve of the egalitarian aims of the social policy of Robespierre and his followers. If he did not play a decisive role during the coup of 9 Thermidor, year II (July 27, 1794), which overthrew Robespierre and marked the end of the Reign of Terror, Carnot must at least have approved of the fall of Robespierre.

Subsequently, however, Carnot’s role began to diminish. He continued to occupy himself with directing military operations for another few months, but he soon had to defend himself against attacks by the executors of the Thermidorian coup, aimed without distinction against all former members of the Committee of Public Safety. Thus, in March 1795, in an attempt to dissociate himself from his former colleagues, he claimed that each of them was responsible only for the duty with which he was charged and that the signatures to decrees regarded as reprehensible were only a formality. Yet Carnot did not succeed in silencing the charges. In May 1795, when an obscure deputy demanded the arrest of all the members of the former committees and named Carnot, he was saved by another deputy who shouted, “He organized the victory.”

Carnot was elected to the Directory, the French government from 1795 to 1799, the executive branch of which consisted of five directors; and he became even more conservative than before. When the elections of the spring of 1797 brought in a royalist majority, Carnot bowed to the results, so that during the coup d’état of 18 Fructidor, year V (September 4, 1797), which quashed the elections, he had to flee in order to escape arrest. He crossed into Germany and settled in Nürnberg.

After the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire, year VII (November 9, 1799), which brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power as first consul of France, Carnot returned. He was minister of war for a few months in 1800 but resigned. Appointed in 1802 a member of the Tribunat, a body chosen by the Senate to debate legislation, he fought the authoritarian development of the consular regime, opposed the institution of the Legion of Honour, voted against bestowing on Napoleon the consulate for life, and courageously opposed the establishment of the empire under Napoleon. He continued, however, to hold a seat on the Tribunat until that assembly was suppressed in 1807, when he withdrew from public life.

The allied invasion of 1814 forced him out of retirement. Napoleon appointed him governor of the town of Antwerp, where he remained until after the fall of the empire. Carnot sided with the Restoration under Louis XVIII, but in July 1814 he published his Mémoire au roi en juillet 1814, in which he denounced the excesses of the reaction under the Bourbon king. During the Hundred Days, when Napoleon attempted to reestablish his power, Carnot served as minister of the interior, and, after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Carnot encouraged him to resist, but in vain. The Second Restoration marked the end of Carnot’s political career.

In July 1815 Carnot was exiled from France. He left Paris in October and settled at Warsaw in January 1816. In August 1816 Carnot left Warsaw for Magdeburg, where he died seven years later.

The Third Republic, eager to acquire ancestors, exalted Carnot’s memory, consecrating him as “the Organizer of Victory.” When his grandson, Sadi Carnot, nephew of the scientist Sadi Carnot, was president of the republic, the ashes of Lazare Carnot were placed in the Panthéon in Paris. Carnot was indeed “the Organizer of Victory” but only in collaboration with the other members of the Committee of Public Safety, with whom he shared responsibility for the Terror as well. For although the Committee of Public Safety was able to raise, equip, arm, and feed 14 armies and lead them to victory, it succeeded only by means of a mass levy, mass requisitions, and nationalization of military production—measures that were based on the revolutionary government’s use of force, that is, an authority relying on the Terror. The characterization of Lazare Carnot as “the Organizer of Victory” is a legend created by the victors of the Thermidor coup, who, holding those vanquished in the coup responsible for the Terror, surrounded the survivors with all the brilliance of the victory.