Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot was a French mathematician, physicist, politician and a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution.
31 Facts About Lazare Carnot
2.
Lazare Carnot oversaw the reorganization of the army, imposed discipline, and significantly expanded the French force through the imposition of mass conscription.
3.
Lazare Carnot became one of the five initial members of the Directory but was ousted after the Coup of 18 Fructidor in 1797 and went into exile.
4.
Lazare Carnot was exiled after the second Bourbon Restoration and died in Magdeburg, Prussia in 1823.
5.
Lazare Carnot is remembered for developing the Carnot wall, a system of fortification that became widely employed in continental Europe during the 19th century.
6.
Lazare Carnot held a strong belief in stoic philosophy and was deeply influenced by Roman civilization.
7.
Lazare Carnot was sent by his father to the Aumont residence to further his education.
8.
Lazare Carnot obtained a commission as a lieutenant in Louis Joseph, Prince of Conde's engineer corps.
9.
Lazare Carnot spent the last few months of 1792 on a mission to Bayonne, organizing the military defense effort in an attempt to ward off any possible attacks from Spain.
10.
Lazare Carnot was friendly with Johan Valckenaer who tried to hasten the invasion of the Dutch Republic.
11.
Lazare Carnot took refuge in Geneva, and there in 1797 issued his La metaphysique du calcul infinitesimal.
12.
Lazare Carnot was the first to execute the modern waging of war with mass armies and strategic planning realized by the Revolution.
13.
Lazare Carnot developed innovative defensive designs for forts, including the Carnot wall, called after him.
14.
The basic idea was to have a massive army separated into several units that could move more quickly than the enemy and attack from the flanks rather than head on, which had led to resounding defeats before Lazare Carnot was elected to the Committee of Public Safety.
15.
Once the problem of troop numbers had been solved, Lazare Carnot turned his administrative skills to the supplies that this massive army would need.
16.
Lazare Carnot quickly organized the army and helped to turn the tide of the war.
17.
Lazare Carnot met Robespierre for the first time in Arras where he was assigned for military duty and shortly after Robespierre finished his legal studies.
18.
Lazare Carnot was not an official member of the radical group and therefore took on his own independent beliefs in regards to many issues.
19.
Shortly after Robespierre's fall, Lazare Carnot was charged for his role during the time but the charges were quickly dismissed when he became a member of the Directory.
20.
In 1795, Lazare Carnot appointed Napoleon Bonaparte as general in chief of the Army of Italy.
21.
Lazare Carnot is known to be the only member of the Directory to have supported Napoleon during this time.
22.
Probably in response to the fall of the fortress of Vlissingen to the British during the Walcheren Campaign in 1809, Napoleon employed Lazare Carnot to write a treatise describing how fortifications could be improved, for the use of the Ecole militaire de Metz.
23.
In 1812, Lazare Carnot returned to office in defense of Napoleon during the disastrous invasion of Russia and was assigned the defense of Antwerp against the Sixth Coalition.
24.
Lazare Carnot surrendered only at the demand of the Count of Artois, who was the younger brother of Louis XVIII and later Charles X Lazare Carnot was later made a Count of the Empire by Napoleon as Lazare Nicolas Marguerite, Comte Carnot.
25.
Lazare Carnot then proved that this ratio is invariant for the four points obtained by cutting four lines of a pencil of lines with different secants.
26.
Lazare Carnot lived in Warsaw, Congress Poland, and then moved to the Kingdom of Prussia, where he died in the city of Magdeburg.
27.
Lazare Carnot's remains were interred at the Pantheon in 1889, at the same time as those of Theophile Corret de la Tour d'Auvergne, Jean-Baptiste Baudin, and Francois Severin Marceau-Desgraviers.
28.
Lazare Carnot survived all the phases of the French Revolution, from its beginnings in 1789 until the fall of Napoleon in 1815.
29.
Lazare Carnot penned a proposal for the new Constitution which included the "Declaration of the Duties of the Citizens" that held that there should be not only education but military service for all citizens of France between the ages of twenty and twenty-five.
30.
Lazare Carnot's essay Principes fondamentaux de l'equilibre et du mouvement 1803 was a further revision and expansion of the earlier work.
31.
Lazare Carnot's name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.