Lazare Carnot
Lazare Carnot (1753 – 1823) was a French politician, general, and administrator during the French Revolution. He was a leading member of the Committees for General Defense, and for Public Safety. In those capacities, he organized and oversaw the mass mobilization of French manpower to beat back foreign attacks from all sides, as well as snuff out internal rebellions. Those accomplishments earned him the moniker Organizer of Victory. Despite his valuable services to France, Carnot ended up getting screwed over by his country.
The son of a lawyer, Carnot attended a military school and upon graduation, was commissioned a lieutenant in the French royal army in 1773. He was a captain when the Revolution broke out in 1789. He entered politics, and by 1792, had been elected as a deputy to the National Convention. Assigned to the Committee for General Defense, Carnot exhibited a genius for administration.
He introduced mass conscription, known as the levee en masse, which put the entire French population at the disposal of the war effort. The French army grew from about 645,000 in 1793, to over 1,500,000 by 1794. Carnot also reorganized the French military, upon realizing that the new revolutionary citizen armies lacked the training of the professional armies of France’s neighbors. Making a virtue out of necessity, Carnot changed French military doctrine to emphasize attacks by massed troops in dense columns. That required relatively little troop training, and when such columns were thrown at vulnerable points in enemy battle lines, they could overwhelm and break them with sheer mass.
As a result, a series of stunning French victories were won, radically changing the war. France went from hard pressed and on the edge of defeat in 1792, to victorious on all fronts, and on the offensive, fighting deep in enemy territory instead of on French soil. Carnot continued to serve the Revolution, and Napoleon thereafter, to France’s benefit. However, after Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, the newly restored French Bourbon kings banished Carnot from France. He spent the final years of his life as an exile, until his death in 1823.
