Jean-Andoche Junot

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean-Andoche Junot met Napoleon Bonaparte because of his handwriting. At the Siege of Toulon in late 1793, a young captain needed a man who could write a clear letter, and Junot stepped forward. Moments later a cannonball narrowly missed him, and Junot responded with jokes. Napoleon remembered him for it. That brief encounter planted the seed of a friendship that would define both men's lives, take a French army to the edges of Portugal, and end in a Burgundian farmhouse under circumstances almost too strange to believe. What drove a Burgundian law clerk to become one of the most decorated soldiers of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars? How did a man Napoleon trusted and feted fail so spectacularly to earn a marshal's baton? And what happened in the years after Lisbon to send him spiraling toward destruction?

• 2. The Volunteer

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  On the 14th of July 1790, Junot stood in Paris for the Fete de la Federation, the great national celebration of the Revolution's first anniversary. He had been born in Bussy-le-Grand, Burgundy, on the 25th of September 1771, the fifth son of a bourgeois family. His education took him from Montbard to Chatillon, where he made a lifelong friend in Auguste de Marmont, and then to Dijon to study law. He was working as a law clerk in Chaumont when the Revolution ignited, and he embraced it without hesitation.

  On the 9th of July 1791, Junot helped found his hometown's National Guard and served as captain of its 1st company. He soon enlisted as a grenadier in the 2nd Battalion of Volunteers of Cote-d'Or. Sent to the Army of the North at the start of the War of the First Coalition, he suffered his first battle wound on the 11th of June 1792. His comrades had already given him a nickname: "the Tempest," or la Tempete. It fit. He was injured again on the 16th of May 1793 while serving in the Army of the Rhine, proving his willingness to absorb punishment that would stop most soldiers cold.

• 3. Bonaparte's Shadow

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  After Toulon, Bonaparte was made a general and Junot became his aide-de-camp. Political fortune briefly ran against both men. Bonaparte's ties to Augustin Robespierre cost him his position and landed him under house arrest. Junot and Marmont offered to break him out; Napoleon declined but turned to them for help once free. For a period, Junot, Marmont, and Bonaparte lived together in a rented room in Paris, three temporarily unemployed soldiers waiting for their moment.

  It came in 1795, when Junot joined Bonaparte in putting down the Royalist revolt of 13 Vendemiaire. The two then marched south together to the Army of Italy. In the Montenotte campaign of April 1796, Junot distinguished himself at the Battle of Millesimo and was rewarded with the rank of colonel. He also received the high honor of carrying the first Italian campaign standards back to the Directory in Paris. At the Battle of Lonato, he killed six enemy soldiers in hand-to-hand fighting and took three sabre cuts to the head. These were not ornamental wounds. Junot fought with a ferocity that made him both indispensable and physically fragile.

  The Egyptian campaign deepened the bond. Junot was among the first Napoleon told about the planned expedition to Egypt. In May 1798 he sailed from France aboard l'Orient, the flagship, alongside Bonaparte himself. He fought at the Battle of the Pyramids on the 21st of July 1798 and was promoted to brigade general on the 9th of January 1799.

• 4. Nazareth and the Duel

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  On the 8th of April 1799, outside Nazareth, Junot led the vanguard of Kleber's division against an Ottoman relief force five times larger during the siege of Acre. He retreated only after capturing five enemy standards and blocking the Ottomans from reaching the besieged city. The action earned him recognition throughout the army.

  Then came the duel. General Francois Lanusse had insulted Bonaparte, and Junot initiated a confrontation. He was badly injured. Loyalty to Napoleon had driven him into harm's way again, this time not from enemy fire but from a fellow French officer. In October 1799 a British ship captured him while he was returning to France. Aboard that vessel, he met Horatio Nelson.

  By the time Junot finally arrived in France, on the 14th of June 1800, Napoleon was winning the Battle of Marengo that same day. Within months, Junot married Laure Martin de Permond, a woman long connected to the Bonaparte family. Napoleon paid most of the wedding costs, provided a dowry for Laure, and gave lavish gifts. Under the Consulate, Junot occupied an orbit of extreme excess: he was reported to throw money from windows and eat three hundred oysters a day. He was made a general of division on the 20th of November 1801. He served as Military Governor of Paris from 1803 to 1804, then briefly as ambassador to Portugal, before racing back to fight at Austerlitz on the 2nd of December 1805.

• 5. The March on Lisbon

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  Napoleon appointed Junot commander-in-chief of the Corps d'observation de la Gironde on the 29th of July 1807, with Portugal as its destination. The army assembled at Bayonne over the following two months, then gained a Spanish contingent under the Treaty of Fontainebleau, signed on the 27th of October 1807. Junot departed on the 17th of October leading approximately 26,500 soldiers on a hard overland march through Spain. His force crossed into Portugal at Segura on the 19th of November.

  Resistance was minimal. Junot seized Castelo Branco on the 20th of November and Abrantes two days later. On the 24th, he learned that Prince Joao, the regent and future King Joao VI, was preparing to flee with his mother Queen Maria I and the royal court. Junot entered Lisbon without a fight on the 30th of November, three days after the Portuguese royal family had sailed for Brazil.

  Napoleon rewarded him with the title Duke of Abrantes. But the expected promotion to Marshal of the Empire never came. Junot set up his headquarters at the Quintela Palace and began dismantling Portuguese civil order: he disbanded the Portuguese Army, conscripting around 9,000 soldiers into the Grande Armee's Portuguese Legion, dissolved local militias, proclaimed the dethronement of the House of Braganza, and confiscated royal assets. Resistance grew. After the Dos de Mayo Uprising in Madrid, Spanish troops withdrew. By June 1808, popular revolts had spread across Portugal. A British expeditionary force landed at the mouth of the Mondego river on the 1st of August. On the 21st of August, Junot was beaten at Vimeiro and cut off from France.

• 6. Cintra and Its Fallout

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  The Convention of Cintra rescued Junot from complete disaster. Its terms were generous to the French: he withdrew with his army's weapons, baggage, and the considerable loot they had gathered. The phrase he used to describe what he took out of Portugal became famous in Portuguese usage. Back in Britain, the Convention's terms caused widespread outrage.

  Junot returned to France in October 1808. Napoleon sent him to Spain, where he fought at the Second Siege of Zaragoza. In 1809 he served in the Grande Armee during the War of the Fifth Coalition but held no significant command and was defeated at Gefrees. He returned to the Iberian Peninsula in 1810 commanding the VIII Corps under Marshal Andre Massena. In 1811 he was shot in the face, suffering serious damage that required surgery. The complications from that wound were later cited as a contributing cause of his mental deterioration.

  The Russian campaign of 1812 offered what looked like a chance at redemption. Junot rejoined the army hoping to win back Napoleon's favor. At the Battle of Smolensk on the 17th of August, he was blamed for allowing the Russian army to escape. At Borodino on the 7th of September, he commanded the VIII Corps competently, but the Smolensk failure had already sealed his fate. Napoleon vowed never to grant him a marshal's baton. Junot blamed his rival Joachim Murat for placing the fault on him; the argument was never resolved.

• 7. The Final Collapse

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  In May 1813, Junot was appointed Governor of the Illyrian Provinces. His deterioration there was swift and complete. At a ball given by Auguste de Marmont in Ragusa, Junot appeared fully nude, wearing only his dancing shoes and his military decorations. On a separate occasion he set fire to his own residence and fled to live with a man described as a madman. These were not isolated incidents of excess; they were signs of a mind giving way.

  Doctors eventually attributed his condition to inflammation of the brain, most likely a long-term consequence of the many head injuries he had accumulated over twenty years. He was relieved of his post and sent to his father's house in Montbard, Burgundy, where his father, sisters, and brother-in-law Albert cared for him. In a moment of distress he threw himself from a window, breaking both legs. Convinced his legs had to be amputated, he found a pair of scissors when briefly left alone and mutilated himself. He died of the resulting infection on the 29th of July 1813, in Montbard.

  He was buried in Montbard cemetery. In 1898 a monument was erected there in his honour. A statue of Junot also stands on the north facade of the Louvre. His son Andoche Alfred Michel Junot, born in Ciudad Rodrigo in 1810, carried the Abrantes title after him and died in action at Solferino on the 24th of June 1859, a soldier's death his father might have recognized.