Auguste de Marmont

• 1. Introduction

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  Auguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont was a man the French came to despise, not for losing battles, but for ending one. Born on the 20th of July 1774 in Châtillon-sur-Seine, he rose from the son of a minor nobleman to become one of Napoleon's closest friends and ultimately one of his marshals. He governed whole provinces, built public works that outlasted him, and fought across a continent. Yet when children in the streets of Venice spotted an old man shuffling by, they pointed and whispered a single verdict: "There goes the man who betrayed Napoleon."

  How does a soldier who fought from Egypt to Spain, from Dalmatia to the gates of Paris, end up with his very name turned into a French verb meaning "to betray"? The answer involves a friendship that stretched across decades, a catastrophic wound at Salamanca, a secret agreement with the Allies in 1814, and a revolution in 1830 that finished what the first betrayal had started. Marmont died in Venice in March 1852, the last living Napoleonic marshal, and carried his reputation with him to the end.

• 2. Friendship That Made a Career

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  Marmont's father brought him to Dijon to study mathematics, hoping the artillery would suit him. It was there he first encountered Napoleon Bonaparte, a meeting that would shape everything that followed. The acquaintance deepened when Marmont served under Napoleon at Toulon, and what began as a professional connection grew into genuine intimacy.

  Marmont became General Bonaparte's aide-de-camp. He stayed close during the periods of disgrace and uncertainty, accompanying his chief to Italy and then to Egypt. That loyalty earned him successive promotions. He was present at the coup of the 18th Brumaire in 1799 and organized the artillery for the Italian campaign. His performance at the Battle of Marengo earned him the rank of general of division on the spot.

  By 1804 he held the title of grand officer of the Legion of Honour. The one appointment that stung was the one that never came: when Napoleon created his first marshals, Marmont's name was absent from the list. He was, by his own account, greatly disappointed. The slight would linger. When he finally received the baton after Wagram, Napoleon's private remark to him cut just as deep: "Between ourselves, you have not done enough to justify entirely my choice." French soldiers gave each other a verdict of their own, saying that of the three marshals created after Wagram, MacDonald was France's choice, Oudinot was the army's choice, and Marmont was friendship's choice.

• 3. Governor of Dalmatia

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  For five years beginning around 1805, Marmont governed Dalmatia as both its military and civil administrator. He took possession of the region after receiving command of a corps, which had performed well at Ulm, and then occupied the Republic of Ragusa. It was this posting that gave him his permanent title: Duke of Ragusa, conferred in 1808.

  His rule there left a mark that outlasted the empire. Great public works went up across the region, and the memories of the local people reportedly preserved his name in a favorable light long after the Napoleonic order had collapsed.

  When the War of the Fifth Coalition broke out, Marmont moved fast. He defeated an Austrian holding force in the Dalmatian Campaign of May 1809 and captured the opposing commander. He then drove north through frequently roadless country, what the military historian John Elting would later call "a remarkable 300-mile march, scattering two Austrian forces." He reached Ljubljana in early June, defeated Ignaz Gyulai's corps at Graz, and arrived in time to fight alongside Napoleon at Wagram on the 5th and the 6th of July. The battle's aftermath went less well: his corps found itself in a compromising position during the pursuit of Archduke Charles and was rescued only when Napoleon arrived with heavy reinforcements. It was that mixture of initiative and sloppiness that would define his military record.

• 4. Spain and Salamanca

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  In May 1811, an urgent summons arrived. Marmont was to replace the disgraced André Masséna in command of the French army in northern Spain. He arrived to find the army in poor shape and the British under Wellington pressing hard.

  His first notable action was the relief of Ciudad Rodrigo, described as a great feat given the British presence in the theater. Marmont had studied Wellington's approach to war with unusual care, refusing to offer battle unless the terrain favored him. For a time this produced a series of maneuvers in which Marmont held the initiative. He understood the importance of coordinating with the other French marshals in Spain, which was a rarer quality than it sounds among commanders who often treated the peninsula as their private domain.

  The Battle of Salamanca in 1812 ended all of that. Wellington ordered his cavalry to charge Marmont's unsuspecting left flank. The attack caught the French off-guard and delivered a decisive defeat. Marmont was struck by shrapnel very early in the fighting, wounded gravely in his right arm and side. His deputy, Comte Jean-Pierre François Bonet, was also hit. Command passed to Bertrand Clauzel, and Marmont was carried from the field and sent back to France to recover. He never commanded in Spain again.

• 5. The Surrender of Paris

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  By April 1813, Napoleon had restored Marmont to corps command, and he fought at Lützen, Bautzen, and Dresden across that brutal campaign. Through 1814, as the Allies pushed toward Paris, Marmont's forces fought a fighting retreat, inflicting heavy casualties even as they gave ground, finally holding the commanding position at Essonne.

  It was there that Marmont made the decision that would define his legacy. He had concluded that the war was lost and that continuing it served no purpose. He contacted the Allied commanders and negotiated a secret agreement. Then, as the Allies closed on Montmartre, Marmont marched his forces alongside marshals Mortier and Moncey to a position where they were quickly surrounded and surrendered.

  The act ended the campaign. It may also have shortened a war that would have been lost regardless. But among Bonapartists, and in French society more broadly, the secret contact with the enemy read as treachery pure and simple. The title he had held with pride for years became something else: the verb "raguser," derived from "Ragusa," his ducal name, entered common French speech as a word for betrayal. His own name had been transformed into an insult.

• 6. A Second Betrayal, A Third Exile

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  Marmont stayed loyal to the Bourbon king Louis XVIII through the Hundred Days when Napoleon returned, a choice that put him on the opposite side from most of his old comrades. After Waterloo, he voted in favor of the execution of Marshal Ney. He was made a Peer of France and a major-general of the Royal Guard. In 1820, he received both a knighthood of the Order of the Holy Spirit and a grand officership of the Order of Saint Louis.

  In July 1830, he commanded the royalist garrison in Paris when the July Revolution broke out. He was ordered to suppress it with a firm hand. He opposed the court's underlying policy, but he tried to carry out his orders nonetheless. His troops were outmatched, and the revolution proved impossible to stop. Charles X, in disgrace and preparing to flee, accused Marmont of failing him deliberately, asking: "Will you betray us, as you betrayed him?"

  Marmont accompanied Charles into exile and forfeited his marshal's rank. His works offer one window into the years that followed: a travel account of Hungary published in 1837, a record of Sicily published in 1838, a study of military institutions published in 1845, and finally his Mémoires in eight volumes, published after his death in 1856, which scholars of the period have valued for their close view of the military history of the era. Strangely, the Austrian government received him warmly in Vienna. Stranger still, he was appointed tutor to the Duke of Reichstadt, the young man who had briefly been styled Napoleon II. He never returned to France.