Revolution
Born in L'Albenc in the province of Dauphiné on 10 December 1765, Marchand became a lawyer and practiced in Grenoble. He joined the French army in 1791, leading a company of scouts in an Isère volunteer battalion. In the French Revolutionary Wars, he served in Italy during the years 1792-1799. He fought first in Savoy, where he won notice, then at the Siege of Toulon in 1793. Marchand became a staff officer to General Jean-Baptiste Cervoni. At the Battle of Loano on 23 and 24 November 1795, he and Colonel Jean Lannes led 200 grenadiers against an enemy redoubt armed with six cannons. They successfully stormed the fortification and ejected the Hungarian grenadiers who defended it. For this exploit, his army commander Barthélemy Louis Joseph Schérer named him chef de bataillon (major).
On 11 April 1796, as a junior officer on Amédée Emmanuel Francois Laharpe's staff, Marchand accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte as the new army commander scouted the terrain before the Battle of Montenotte. He participated in the battles of Ceva and Caldiero in 1796. He transferred to the staff of General Barthélemy Catherine Joubert. In June of that year, while leading 300 carabiniers of the 3rd Light Infantry Regiment, he surprised a large camp of Austrians and captured 400 of them. He was shot in the chest during an action on 29 July in the Castiglione Campaign. On 14 June 1797 he was made prisoner by the Austrians. Exchanged immediately, he was promoted to chef de brigade (colonel) two days later.
After commanding the post of Rome for a time in 1798, Marchand was dismissed, but Joubert took him back as an aide-de-camp. At the Battle of Novi on 15 August 1799, when Joubert was killed by a chance shot at the beginning of the engagement, Marchand was at his side. He was promoted to general of brigade on 13 October 1799. He fought on the Rhine the following year.
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Famous quotes containing the word revolution:
“Rugged, mountainous, volcanic, he was himself more a French revolution than any of his volumes.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)
“O God, that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)