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Comte Antoine-Marie Chamans de Lavalette
ANTOINE MARIE CHAMANS, COMTE DE LAVALETTE (14 October 1769 - 15 February 1830) was a French politician and general.
Born in Paris the same year as Napoleon Bonaparte, he spent the Revolution in th...view moreANTOINE MARIE CHAMANS, COMTE DE LAVALETTE (14 October 1769 - 15 February 1830) was a French politician and general.
Born in Paris the same year as Napoleon Bonaparte, he spent the Revolution in the French Revolutionary Army, where he rose through the ranks to become an aide-de-camp to General Louis Baraguey d’Hilliers.
In 1796, after the Battle of the Bridge of Arcole, he joined the personal staff of Napoleon and was entrusted with diplomatic missions. In 1798, Lavalette married Émilie de Beauharnais (1781-1855), niece of Napoléon’s wife Joséphine.
Lavalette returned to France with Napoleon, taking part in the latter’s 18 Brumaire coup against the French Directory (1799). He occupied a number of offices in the French Consulate and First Empire, most notably eleven years as Minister of Posts, during which he oversaw the covert monitoring of the mail of suspected Royalists. In 1808 he became a Count of the Empire.
Having rejected the opportunity to go into exile with Napoleon for family reasons, he was arrested after the beginning of the Bourbon Restoration and sentenced to execution by the Ultras in November 1815.
One night before his scheduled execution, he managed to escape prison and made his way to Great Britain with the assistance of a small group of British soldiers
Lavalette returned to France and died in 1830, aged 60. He was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery.
ALFRED-AUGUSTE CUVILLIER-FLEURY (18 March 1802, Paris - 18 October 1887, Paris) was a French historian and literary critic. He was a teacher of Henri d’Orléans, Duke of Aumale from 1827-1839 and then became Henri’s special secretary.
In 1830 he published Documents historiques sur M. le comte Lavalette and edited the Mémoires of Lavalette’s daughter (and Cuvillier-Fleury’s lover), Joséphine de Lavalette. He was elected to the French Academy in 1866. He died in 1887 aged 85.view less