Lazare Carnot
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Lazare Carnot |
Comte Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot (
May 13,
1753—
August 22,
1823) was a
French politician, engineer, and mathematician. He is best known for his role as
Organizer of Victory in the
French Revolutionary Wars.
Education and early life
Born in
Nolay, Carnot was educated in
Burgundy and obtained a commission in the
engineer corps of the
Prince de Condé. Although in the army, he continued his mathematical studies in which he felt great interest. His first work, published in
1784, was on
machines; it contains a statement which foreshadows the principle of energy as applied to a falling weight, and the earliest proof of the fact that
kinetic energy is lost in the collision of
imperfectly elastic bodies.
Political career
On the outbreak of the
French Revolution in
1789, Carnot entered political life. He became a delegate to the
Legislative Assembly in
1791, to the
National Convention in
1792 (where he voted in favor of
King Louis XVI's
death penalty), and in
1793 he was elected to the
Committee of Public Safety.
The creation and victories of the
French Revolutionary Army were largely due to his powers of organization and enforcing discipline, with successes both in the actual theatre of operations and in obtaining fresh recruits by compulsion: the
levée en masse, which amounted to a one-off
conscription. It added significantly to discontent with the course of the Revolution in still
Bourbon-loyalist areas — such as the
Vendée, which
broke out in open revolt — but the government of the time considered it a success, and Carnot became known as the
Organizer of Victory. In autumn 1793, he took charge of French columns on the
Northern Front, and contributed to
Jean-Baptiste Jourdan's victory in the
Battle of Wattignies.
He had taken no steps to oppose the
Reign of Terror, but he, along with other
technocrats on the committee like
Robert Lindet and
Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, turned on
Maximilien Robespierre and his allies during the
Thermidorian Reaction.
With the establishment of the
Directory in
1795, Carnot became one of the initial directors. His and
Étienne-François Letourneur's moderation was viewed as weakness, and it probably contributed to France's failure to capitalize on the
Treaty of Campo Formio. After Letourneur had been replaced by another close collaborator of Carnot,
François de Barthélemy, both of them, alongside many deputies in the
Council of Five Hundred ousted in the
Fructidor coup d'état of (
September 4,
1797), engineered by Generals
Napoleon Bonaparte (originally, Carnot's
protégé) and
Pierre François Charles Augereau. He took refuge in
Geneva, and there in 1797 issued his
La métaphysique du calcul infinitésimal.
In
1800 he was appointed
Minister of War by Bonaparte, and served in that office at the time of the
Battle of Marengo. In
1802, he voted for the establishment of Napoleon's
Consular powers for life.
Retirement
However, his
republican convictions were inconsistent with high office under the
First French Empire, and he resigned from public life - although he was later made a
Count of the Empire by Napoleon as
Lazare Nicolas Marguerite, comte Carnot.
In 1803 he produced his
Géométrie de position. This work deals with
projective rather than
descriptive geometry, it also contains an elaborate discussion of the geometrical meaning of
negative roots of an
algebraic
equation. Carnot returned to office in defense of Napolon during the disastruous
invasion of Russia; he was assigned the defence of
Anvers against the
Sixth Coalition - he only surrendered on the demand of the
Count of Artois.
During the
Hundred Days, he served as
Minister of the Interior for Napoleon, and was exiled as a
regicide after the
Second Restoration. He lived in
Warsaw, and moved to
Prussia, where he died in the city of
Magdeburg. Carnot's remains were enterred at the
Panthéon in
1889, at the same time as those of
Marie Victor de La Tour-Maubourg,
Jean-Baptiste Baudin, and
François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers.
*His son
Sadi Carnot was responsible for the
second law of thermodynamics, as well as the theory of
heat engines (
the Carnot cycle).
*His second son
Lazare Hippolyte Carnot was a French statesman.
*His grandson
Marie François Sadi Carnot (son of Hyppolyte) was
President of the French Republic from 1887 until his assassination in 1894 .
*
W. W. Rouse Ball,
A Short Account of the History of Mathematics (4th Edition, 1908)
*
