Bertrand Clausel

Bertrand, Comte Clauzel (; 12 December 1772 – 21 April 1842), was a French soldier who served in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. He saw service in the Low Countries, Italy, Haiti, and Spain, where he achieved short periods of independent command.

Clauzel spent 1815–1820 in exile in the United States before returning to France and becoming politically active in the republican and liberal opposition to the absolutist governments of Charles X.

Clauzel would later become a Marshal of France under the Orléans monarchy following the July Revolution and served during the French conquest of Algeria, first during the initial French expedition and later as governor. Napoleon listed Clauzel amongst his most skilful generals.

Early life

Bertrand Clauzel was born on 12 December 1772 in Mirepoix, in the County of Foix.

Bertrand's father, Gabriel Clauzel, was a bankrupt wholesale merchant who had been disinherited by his own father. Gabriel embraced the revolution. He was on the committee of surveillance of Mirepoix, where a deputy to the National Convention would later write that "his presence alone frightens the enemies of the new regime."

Bertrand joined the Mirepoix National Guard at the end of July 1789; the Guard was deployed by his father Gabriel to invest in the episcopal palace of Mirepoix and harass the bishop in 1790.

Military career (1791–1809)

Early military career (1791–1809)

Clauzel enlisted in the 43rd Infantry as one of the volunteers of 1791. He saw service in the first campaign of the French Revolutionary Wars. Having distinguished himself repeatedly on the northern frontier (1792–1793) and in the eastern Pyrénées (1793–1794), Clauzel was made a chef de battalion and given the honour of bringing four flags taken from the Spanish back to Paris to present to the National Convention.

In 1798, Clauzel became the chief of staff to General Emmanuel de Grouchy, in which role he negotiated the abdication of the King of Sardinia in December 1798. In 1799, Clauzel was promoted to général de brigade. In this rank, he served in Italy, during which he won great distinction at the battles of Trebbia and Novi. Clauzel took command of the 4th Division under General Louis-Gabriel Suchet in 1800, and during the campaign that spring, he seized the redoubt of Melogno and participated in the attack on Monte-San-Giacomo. Months later, in December, he fought at Pozzolo.

The Treaty of Amiens enabled Napoleon to organise the Leclerc expedition to reassert French control in the lucrative colony of Saint-Domingue following the Haitian Revolution. Clauzel seized Fort-Dauphin in December 1802 and became commander at Cap Français with a promotion to Divisional General. General Charles Leclerc died of yellow fever in 1803, and under the command of Leclerc's successor, Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, vicomte de Rochambeau, Clauzel became disillusioned with Rochambeau's use of extreme violence and indiscriminate killing in an attempt to reassert French control. Clauzel worked with General Thouvenot at first to try and influence Rochambeau before they eventually conspired on a plot to overthrow Rochambeau and exile him. Rochambeau learned of the plot and, in September 1803, ordered both Clauzel and Thouvenot arrested and deported. The frigate ''La'' ''Surveillante'' carrying Clauzel was shipwrecked off the coast of Florida. He survived the wreck and made his way to New York, where he obtained passage to France.

After his return to France, he was in almost continuous service in a number of coastal garrisons until 1806, when he was sent to the army of Naples. Soon after, Napoleon made him a Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur. In 1808–1809, he was under the command of Marshal Auguste de Marmont in Dalmatia, and at the close of 1809, Clauzel was assigned to the Army of Portugal under Marshal André Masséna.

The Peninsular War (1809–1814)

Clauzel commanded a division in the Army of Portugal during the Peninsular War, including the Torres Vedras campaign. Masséna's failures saw him replaced by Marmont, under whom Clauzel worked to re-establish the discipline, efficiency, and mobility of the army, which had suffered severely in the retreat from Torres Vedras.

Salamanca: "a grand attempt to retrieve the battle"

In 1812, the French concentrated their forces to besiege Valencia and withdrew other units in preparation for the invasion of Russia. This left other theatres stripped of troops. Wellington, having previously secured key fortresses at the Spanish–Portuguese border, opted to attack, threatening the northern road connecting Madrid to Burgos and then France.

Marmont initially retreated in the face of Wellington's superior forces, but once reinforced, he attempted to force the Anglo-Portuguese army to retreat. Marmont attempted this by marching to turn Wellington's flank and threaten its lines of communication back to Portugal; it was these manoeuvres that instigated the Battle of Salamanca.

As the battle began, Clauzel's division was initially positioned behind the French left wing. After the rout of Jean Guillaume Barthélemy Thomières's division, it advanced to reinforce the faltering line. With both Marshal Marmont and General Jean Pierre François Bonet wounded, Clauzel, as the most senior officer available, assumed command of the French forces under challenging circumstances. Marmont's attempt to flank had exposed the divisions led by Thomières and Antoine Louis Popon de Maucune to an Anglo-Portuguese assault. According to Lewis Butler, Clauzel's subsequent actions constituted "a grand attempt to retrieve the battle".

The battlefield was characterised by two small hills, the lesser and the greater Arapiles. The lesser Arapile was situated at the heart of the Anglo-Portuguese army's position, while the greater Arapile occupied a central position in the French army's deployment. Both hills served as crucial points, securing the flanks of each army's formations. Clauzel's strategy aimed to counter the attack on his left flank by launching an assault on the Anglo-Portuguese centre to capture the lesser Arapile.

The offensive proved unsuccessful as it was met with staunch resistance from fresh enemy troops, resulting in disarray among the French forces and leaving them vulnerable to subsequent assaults on their left and centre. The battle culminated in a resounding defeat for the French, with Butler noting that the engagements had rendered the divisions of Maucune, Thomières, and Clauzel incapable of functioning as cohesive military units.

The Castile Campaign

The retreat from Salamanca posed significant challenges to Clauzel due to the substantial losses suffered by the French army. Initially, Maximilien Sébastien Foy's division, the only French unit relatively unscathed, provided cover as the rear guard. However, it suffered a decisive defeat the following day at the Battle of García Hernández.

Clauzel managed to salvage what remained of the Army of Portugal as he retreated north of Burgos. Burgos was besieged by Wellington before he could regroup his forces. With reinforcement from General Joseph Souham, Clauzel spent some time recovering from wounds before resuming divisional command in the subsequent campaign, which saw Wellington's retreat back to Ciudad Rodrigo. Despite Wellington's return to his initial position, Clauzel's costly defeat at Salamanca compelled French forces in Spain to focus their efforts against Wellington, leading to the liberation of Andalusia, Extremadura, and Asturias by Spanish forces.

The rest of the War of the Sixth Coalition

In early 1813, Clauzel assumed command of the Army of the North in Spain. During the Battle of Vitoria, he was a day's march away and unable to aid Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, contributing to the latter's defeat. In the days after Vitoria, his army was separated from Jourdan's retreating army and risked being cut off, but Clauzel conducted a skilful retreat through Jaca to concentrate French forces.

After Jourdan was replaced, Clauzel would continue service under the command of Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult. He continued to serve throughout the rest of the Peninsular War and the 1814 campaign in south-west France, seeing action at the major battles of Nivelle, Orthez and Toulouse as well as personally securing a minor French victory at Aire.

Political life

Changing loyalties

Following the Bourbon restoration in 1814, he reluctantly submitted to the restored monarchy but swiftly joined Napoleon upon his return to France. Throughout the Hundred Days, he held command along the Pyrenees. While there were no major battles on this front before Napoleon surrendered, Clauzel did manage to gain the particular ire of French royalists with his actions in chasing the Duchess of Angoulême out of Bordeaux.

Exile in the United States

Clauzel was listed as among those who had "attacked the person" of the King by their participation in the Hundred Days in the edict of 24 July 1815. Clauzel left Bordeaux and escaped police detection as he fled through France, aided by anonymous letters sent to police which reported his whereabouts to be in the region of Foix, where he had grown up. Exiled initially in Belgium, he understood the great legal danger he was in and set off for the United States, arriving in Brooklyn on 29 August 1815.

Clauzel's fears were justified, and he would later be condemned to death in absentia. In the Americas, French societies of exiles organised attempts to purchase land in various countries, not all of them with entirely peaceful and commercial intentions. The restored Bourbons worried that Clauzel, amongst other exiles such as Joseph Bonaparte and Grouchy, was assembling Napoleonic loyalists in the Americas with a view to free Napoleon from exile in St Helena through the hiring of American privateers. Once free, a range of ambitious schemes were dreamt up for Napoleon to join in various Spanish American independence wars to create a new empire. Clauzel was not directly implicated in such schemes, but in one case, an expedition was organised by Lakanal, and he did have letters addressed to him.

Clauzel was amongst those who settled in the Vine and Olive Colony in modern-day Alabama. He was known to tend a vegetable garden and sell produce at the local market; during his time in exile, Clauzel was a personal friend of former General Grouchy.

Return to France

Clauzel seized the first opportunity to return and assist the Orléanist Liberals in France when he was pardoned in 1820, serving in the Chamber of Deputies for Ariège in 1827, then for Ardennes in 1830.

He sat on the left and voted for the Address of the 221, which expressed disapproval of the ultra-royalist administration. Following the July Revolution of 1830, he promptly assumed a military command, being appointed the commander of French forces in Algeria.

General in Algeria

The invasion of Algiers had been begun by the government of the Bourbon absolutist King Charles in a late measure to shore up popular support for his rule, but with the July Revolution, the new constitutional monarchy was governed by liberals who had opposed the Algiers expedition. Victory by French forces at the Battle of Staouéli and the fall of Algiers did not save the absolutist government; however, French success was publicly popular, and the new government was careful to not turn public opinion against itself by abandoning Algeria. The political imperative in Paris was to secure both the loyalty of the troops in Algeria and, begrudgingly, the conquest, albeit with a reduced size for the expedition. Clauzel was sent to replace Legitimist General Louis-Auguste-Victor de Bourmont as commander in chief of the invasion of Algeria.

Under Bourmont, French forces had militarily defeated the Deylik taking control over many major ports across the country. In the case of Oran and Bône these would be latter abandoned on hearing of the overthrow of Charles X in France. Bourmont even intended to lead his troops back to France to restore the Bourbons, but, with little support from the rank and file, he opted instead to go into exile in Spain. Clauzel therefore inherited a situation in flux; many units needed new, politically loyal officers, and the size of the expedition was reduced by 50%. Nevertheless, Clauzel oversaw the re-occupation of Oran and Bône but was unable to secure the Algerian interior.

As a veteran of the war in Spain, characterised by insurgency and resistance, given the numerous grievances of Algerians against Ottoman rule, Clauzel attempted to steer French policy away from the likelihood of a protracted engagement. Clauzel's approach involved a political settlement between the French, who would take over as suzerain over the Husaynid rulers of Tunis, who would gain control over much of Algeria beyond some major ports. This was done in a system similar to that of the status of Algiers under the Ottoman Empire, but with France as overlord. Clauzel's attempts collapsed, his actions lacking sanction from his superiors in Paris. The arrival of a 500-strong Tunisian contingent led to unrest in Oran, and, having lost support, he was replaced.

Clauzel acted in the absence of orders from the War Ministry, and while debates were live in parliament about what to do with the territories in North Africa, he set out a clearly defined goal for France in Algeria that matched the military forces available to him given the limited political will in the early 1830s for a large and expensive commitment of troops. The invocation of the Tunisians failed to account for simmering tensions emanating in Algerian society that had been present before the French arrived and were manifested in the unrest that accompanied their arrival.

Elsewhere, Clauzel was an enthusiastic supporter of the first attempt at agricultural colonialism in Algeria, especially a model farm in the Mitidja. Clauzel would also set up a company to acquire agricultural land and enable settlement by Europeans.

Political activity (1831–1835)

Simultaneous with his removal, Clauzel was appointed a Marshal of France in February 1831. In his absence, Algeria saw a small revolving door of successors to Clauzel as governor general, combined with vacillation in France causing 'restricted occupation' in Algeria to become the French goal, due to, in the words of Charles-André Julien, "less a matter of policy than of an absence of policy".

For nearly four years thereafter, he advocated on behalf of Algerian colonists to the Chamber of Deputies and defended his actions while in military command in Algeria. He advocated for continued occupation, arguing that France's "national honour would be tainted" by withdrawal, not only on account of such an event but also because he believed that France's withdrawal would lead to the massacre of the Jewish population of Algeria.

Clauzel wrote and advised the national assembly and the government on what policy France should take to secure her interests now that the occupation had become permanent, as well as providing information about the physical and human geography of Algeria. Amongst these suggestions was support to allow Jews to hold positions in local governance and the judiciary, which they had not done under the Deylical rule.

Drawing on his own experiences farming in Alabama, Clauzel publicised Algeria as a "Mediterranean Alabama" – suggesting that the climate would be suitable for the cultivation of cotton, sugar, and other colonial produce that France would otherwise have to import.

Second term as governor general in Algeria

By summer 1835, an uneasy truce had broken down, and hostilities between France and Abd al-Qadir had erupted as Makhzen tribes from around Oran sought French protection. On 28 June, a French column was surprised between the low hills around Maqta. The disastrous Battle of Maqta provoked popular outrage in France, and the then governor, General Trèzel, was replaced by Clauzel, who once again returned to North Africa. Despite early successes, such as at the Battle of Habra and the capture of Mascara, both in December 1835, and then Tlemcen in January 1836. These victories were, however, spoiled as Clauzel struggled to strike a decisive blow against Abd al-Qadir and by political missteps, such as his imposition of a massive indemnity upon Tlemcen, thereby failing to turn his conquests into allies. The French presence in the Algerian hinterland remained extremely limited.In the western theatre of Algeria, it took until the summer of 1836 for the French to force a decisive battle against Al-Qadir's forces at the Sikkak River, where a ten-thousand-strong contingent of regulars and tribal warriors was routed by General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud.
In the east, Clauzel mustered forces to strike at the Beylik of Constantine, supported in raising funds and gathering equipment by the Oran-based merchant Jacob Lasry. However, weather and determined resistance from Ahmad Bey saw the 1836 attempt to seize Constantine fail. Public and political opinion turned on Clauzel, leading to his recall in February 1837. With French policy shifting to a policy of 'restricted, progressive and peaceful' occupation, such a policy entailed making peace with Abd al-Qadir's sovereignty with the Treaty of Tafna so they could concentrate forces to avenge Clauzel's defeat. Clauzel's successor was General Charles Marie Denys de Damrémont, who would die during the ultimately successful siege of Constantine later in 1837.

Retirement and legacy

Upon his return to France, he retired from active service, vigorously defending his actions before the deputies before withdrawing from public life. Historian James McDougall argues in his ''History of Algeria'' that General Bugeaud's actions to conclude a treaty subsequent to Clauzel's removal with Abd al-Qadir were short-sighted and only gave a defeated enemy time to regroup while extracting meaningless concessions.

Other assessments note the lack of political support in France which limited the success of Clauzel's actions in Algeria.

He lived in retirement until his death from apoplexy at Château du Secourieu in Haute-Garonne in 1842.

Clauzel's name is one of 660 French generals whose names are inscribed on the Arc de Triomphe, his name appearing at the top of column 34 on the west side. When asked on Saint Helena which of his generals was the most skilful, Napoleon named Clauzel along with Marshal Suchet and Étienne Maurice Gérard.Ojala, Jeanne A. (1987). "Suchet". IN: Chandler, David (ed.). ''Napoleon's Marshals'', p. 502. Macmillan Publishing Company.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Clauzel, Bertrand
1772 births
1842 deaths
People from Ariège (department)
Counts of France
Politicians from Occitania (administrative region)
Orléanists
Members of the Chamber of Deputies of the Bourbon Restoration
Members of the 1st Chamber of Deputies of the July Monarchy
Members of the 2nd Chamber of Deputies of the July Monarchy
Members of the 3rd Chamber of Deputies of the July Monarchy
Members of the 4th Chamber of Deputies of the July Monarchy
Members of the 5th Chamber of Deputies of the July Monarchy
Governors general of Algeria
People of the French conquest of Algeria
Marshals of France
Military leaders of the French Revolutionary Wars
French commanders of the Napoleonic Wars
Names inscribed under the Arc de Triomphe