Jean-Mathieu-Philibert Sérurier
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Jean-Mathieu-Philibert Sérurier, comte Sérurier (December 8, 1742—December 24, 1819), was a French soldier and political figure who rose to the rank of Marshal of France.
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[edit] Life
[edit] Early life
Born in Laon to middle-class parents, he became a lieutenant of the Laon militia, and then entered the French royal army, served in the Seven Years' War campaigns in Hanover (1759), Portugal (1762), and against Pasquale Paoli in Corsica (1771). At the beginning of the French Revolution he had attained the rank of major, and in its course he became colonel, brigadier-general and finally général de division.
[edit] Revolution and Empire
He fought in the French Revolutionary Wars under François Christophe Kellermann and Barthélemy Schérer in the army of the Alps in 1795, and under Napoleon Bonaparte in the Italian Peninsula in the battles of Vico, Mondovì, Castiglione and in the siege of Mantua.
He also showed great administrative talent as governor of Venice (1801) and Lucca (1798). He helped Bonaparte to carry out his 18 Brumaire Coup (November 1799), and had an impressive career under the First French Empire, when he was made senator, count, marshal, and governor of Les Invalides in Paris, where, in March 1814, upon the arrival of the Sixth Coalition armies, he destroyed the 1,417 captured enemy flags and personally burned the sword and sash of Frederick the Great as to not let them fall in the allies' hands.
[edit] Later life
Nonetheless, he voted for the downfall of Napoleon later in the year, and under the Bourbon Restoration was made a Peer of France. He was dismissed from his post in the Invalides for having joined Napoleon during the Hundred Days (the Emperor's return from Elba), but as Peer voted in favour of the death penalty for Marshal Michel Ney.
Sérurier died in retirement and was buried at Père Lachaise until his body was transferred to the Invalides in 1847. A statue has been raised to his memory at Laon.
