Jean Victor Marie Moreau

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean Victor Marie Moreau was born on the 14th of February 1763 in Morlaix, Brittany, and died on the 2nd of September 1813 in Louny, in one of history's stranger endings: shot down while standing beside a tsar, on a battlefield fighting against the country he had once served brilliantly. He had led French armies to celebrated victories. He had helped Napoleon Bonaparte seize power. He stood among the foremost French generals of his era. And yet he spent the last years of his life in Pennsylvania, fishing by the Delaware River, before returning to Europe to advise Napoleon's enemies on how to destroy him. How does a man travel that arc? What made Moreau, of all the revolutionary generals, the one Napoleon feared most? And what did it mean when the tsar, watching Moreau fall wounded at his side, turned to the Austrian foreign minister and said: "God has uttered his judgment. He was of your opinion"?

• 2. The Student Soldier

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  Moreau's father was a successful lawyer in Morlaix, and he had a clear plan for his son: study law at the University of Rennes. The young Moreau had other ideas. He never took his degree. Instead, he stayed among the students as their acknowledged hero and leader, turning them into a kind of informal army. Rennes was a particularly charged place for this. The city was the seat of the Parlement of Brittany, where confrontations with the ancien regime were sharpening by the year. By 1789, as tempers rose across France, Moreau was commanding his student band in daily street fights against supporters of the Bourbons. It was an improbable military apprenticeship, with no drills and no commissions, but it trained something in him that law school could not: the ability to hold a group of men together under pressure on contested ground. When the Revolution opened the army to men of talent rather than noble birth, Moreau was already practiced at the essential skill.

• 3. The Rhine Campaigns

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  In 1791, Moreau was elected a lieutenant colonel of the volunteers of Ille-et-Vilaine. He served under Charles François Dumouriez, and by 1793 the discipline of his battalion had earned him promotion as général de brigade. Lazare Carnot raised him again, to général de division, early in 1794, placing him on the right wing of the army in Flanders under Charles Pichegru. The Battle of Tourcoing in 1794 put his name on the map. A year later he had command of the Army of the Rhine and Moselle, crossed the Rhine, and pushed deep into Germany, reaching as far as the Isar before Archduke Charles of Austria forced him back. What followed became the episode that most enhanced his reputation. The retreat Moreau conducted was judged a model of its kind by professional soldiers who witnessed it. He brought back more than five thousand prisoners from a campaign that had otherwise stalled, and the combination of tactical skill and cool under fire marked him as someone to watch. He crossed the Rhine again in 1797, but operations were cut short by the preliminaries of the Peace of Leoben, the agreement Bonaparte struck with the Austrians without Moreau being consulted.

• 4. The Pichegru Affair

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  While operating in Germany in 1797, Moreau uncovered something damaging: evidence of a traitorous correspondence between his former commander Charles Pichegru and the émigré Prince de Condé. The discovery put Moreau in an impossible position. He had already defended Pichegru publicly against accusations of disloyalty. Now he held proof of the very betrayal he had dismissed. He chose, fatally, to conceal it. Only later did he send the correspondence to Paris and publicly denounce Pichegru as a traitor. The damage was done. From that point on, Moreau was shadowed by suspicion of at least partial complicity. He was dismissed from command. When he was re-employed in 1799, it was out of necessity, not confidence, because the victorious advance of the Russian commander Aleksandr Suvorov in Italy left France in need of any experienced general it could field. His brief command of the Army of Italy produced little. He was present at the Battle of Novi, where his successor Barthelemy Catherine Joubert fell in the fighting, and Moreau then led the retreat to Genoa, handing command over to Jean Etienne Championnet. The Pichegru affair had never been forgotten, and it hung over everything that followed.

• 5. Hohenlinden and Its Aftermath

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  Bonaparte returned from Egypt and Syria to find Moreau in Paris, deeply dissatisfied with the Directory. That shared grievance made them briefly allies. When Bonaparte mounted the coup d'etat of 18 Brumaire, it was Moreau who commanded the force that confined two of the directors inside the Luxembourg Palace. In reward, Napoleon gave him command of the Army of the Rhine. The campaign that followed produced the Battle of Hohenlinden on the 3rd of December 1800, one of the celebrated French victories of the Revolutionary era. After it, Moreau returned to Paris and married Eugenie Hulot, a nineteen-year-old born in Mauritius and a friend of Josephine de Beauharnais. His wife was described as ambitious and gained, according to those around him, a complete ascendancy over him. She drew around her all who were dissatisfied with Napoleon's growing power, and the circle became known as "Club Moreau". Napoleon watched this with mounting irritation. Moreau was not unwilling, by some accounts, to become a military dictator who might restore the republic. But he refused any role in a scheme to bring back Louis XVIII. Napoleon moved against the conspirators regardless. Moreau's condemnation required heavy pressure on the judges to obtain it. Afterward, in a gesture of calculated magnanimity, Bonaparte commuted his prison sentence to banishment. In 1804, Moreau left through Spain and sailed for America.

• 6. Pennsylvania Exile

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  Moreau arrived in New York City in August 1805, and was received with enthusiasm. He declined all offers of military service and spent time traveling before settling in 1806 in Pennsylvania, where he bought a villa that had once belonged to Robert Morris. It sat near the Delaware River in Morrisville, directly across the water from Trenton. He lived there until 1813, filling his days with fishing, hunting, and the social life of a house that had become a gathering point for political exiles from across Europe. Representatives of foreign powers made repeated attempts to draw him back into active service against Napoleon. At the outbreak of the War of 1812, President James Madison offered Moreau command of American troops. He was willing to accept. Then, in November 1812, news reached him of the destruction of the Grande Armee in Russia, and he changed course. Europe, he judged, had shifted. Napoleon was vulnerable. Moreau decided to return.

• 7. Return and Final Battle

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  The return was shaped, probably at his wife's urging, by a connection from his republican past: Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, now Crown Prince Charles John of Sweden and later King Charles XIV. Charles John and Tsar Alexander I of Russia were coordinating with Prussian and Austrian forces in an allied campaign against Napoleon. Moreau, whose aim was Napoleon's defeat and the installation of a republican government, placed himself in an advisory role to the Swedish and Russian commanders. On the 27th of August 1813, at the Battle of Dresden, Moreau was talking with Tsar Alexander when he was struck down. He died from his wounds on the 2nd of September in Louny. The political context of his presence at Dresden had already been contested. On the 17th of August 1813, Alexander had demanded the post of supreme commander of the allied armies for himself, with Moreau and the military theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini as his deputies. Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich had resisted that request, because the command had already gone to Karl Philipp, Prince of Schwarzenberg. After Moreau fell, the tsar turned to Metternich and said: "God has uttered his judgment. He was of your opinion." Moreau was buried in the Catholic Church of St. Catherine in St. Petersburg.

• 8. The General's Measure

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  Moreau's reputation among military professionals rested on specific qualities: skillful and elaborate combinations, and a capacity to remain calm under pressure. His final words, reported as "Soyez tranquilles, messieurs; c'est mon sort," meaning "Be calm, gentlemen; this is my fate," were read by those who knew him as consistent with a man who did not regret being removed from the contradictions of his position. His father had been guillotined in the Reign of Terror, yet Moreau remained a sincere republican. His wife received a pension from the tsar after his death. Louis XVIII granted him the rank of Marshal of France posthumously. The Bonapartists, for their part, called it defection, grouping him with Dumouriez and Pichegru as traitors. The town of Moreau in New York state carries his name, and Valentin Pikul's 1985 novel Kazhdomu svoyo is built around his story, a reminder that the shape of his life, from student brawler in Rennes to fatally wounded adviser on a Saxon battlefield, has drawn writers as well as historians to try to account for it.