Brune

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 8 January 1858


First published in The New American Cyclopaedia, Vol. IV, 1859
Reproduced from The New American Cyclopaedia
Source : Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 18
Collection(s): New American Cyclopaedia

Marx informed Engels of his intention to write an essay on Brune in his letter of September 17, 1857. But he apparently did not begin working on it before the end of November. There is no entry in Marx's notebook about its dispatch to New York. One can only assume that the word "etc." in the entry of January 8, 1858 about the dispatch to Dana of Marx's "Bolivar" and Engels' "Campaign", "Cannonade" and "Captain" refers to this essay. On February 1, 1858, in a letter to Engels, Marx mentioned it among the articles beginning with B already written and sent off to the United States.

Marx's excerpts on the subject from Fr. Chr. Schlosser's book Zur Beurtheilung Napoleon's und seiner neusten Tadler und Lobredner, Frankfurt am Main, 1835 (probably made long before Marx started writing the essay), and a rough draft (more detailed than the final version) of the essay based mainly on Schlosser's book and on relevant articles in the Biographie universelle (Michaud) ancienne et moderne (Vol. 6, Paris, 1854) and The English Cyclopaedia (Vol. V, London, 1856) are extant (see this volume, pp. 397-401).

Brune, Guillaume Marie Anne, a marshal of the French empire, born at Brives-la-Gaillarde, March 13, 1763, died« in Avignon, Aug. 2, 1815. His father sent him to Paris to study the law, but on leaving the university, financial difficulties caused him to become a printer. In the beginning of the revolution, together with Gauthier and Jourgniac de St. Méard, he published the Journal general de la Cour et de la Ville. He soon embraced the party of the revolution, enlisted in the national guard, and became an ardent member of the club of the cordeliers.[1] His grand figure, martial air, and boisterous patriotism, rendered him one of the military leaders of the people in the demonstration of 1791 in the Champ de Mars, which was crushed by La Fayette's national guards.[2] Thrown into prison, and the rumor spreading that the partisans of the court had attempted to get rid of him by odious means, Danton was instrumental in procuring his release. To the protection of the latter, among whose partisans he became prominent, he owed a military appointment during the famous days of Sept. 1792,[3] and his sudden promotion, in Oct. 12, 1792, to the rank of colonel and adjutant-major. He served under Dumouriez in Belgium; was sent against the federalists of Calvados, advancing under Gen. Puisaye upon Paris, whom he easily defeated. He was next made a general of brigade, and participated in the battle of Hondschoote.[4] The committee of public safety intrusted him with the mission of putting down the insurrectionary movements in the Gironde, which he did with the utmost rigor.[5]

After Danton's imprisonment, he was expected to rush to the rescue of his friend and protector, but keeping prudently aloof during the first moments of danger, he contrived to shift through the reign of terror. After the 9th Thermidor he again joined the now victorious Dantonists,[6] and followed Fréron to Marseilles and Avignon. On the 13th Vendémiaire (Oct. 5, 1795) he acted as one of Bonaparte's under-generals against the revolted sections of Paris.[7] After having assisted the directory in putting down the conspiracy of the camp at Grenelle (Sept. 9, 1796),[8] he entered the Italian army in the division of Masséna, and distinguished himself during the whole campaign by great intrepidity. Wishing to propitiate the chiefs of the cordeliers, Bonaparte attributed part of his success at Rivoli[9] to the exertions of Brune, appointed him general of division on the battle-field, and induced the directory to instal him as commander of the second division of the Italian army, made vacant by Augereau's departure for Paris.

After the peace of Campo Formio[10] he was employed by the directory on the mission of first lulling the Swiss into security, then dividing their councils, and finally, when an army had been concentrated for that purpose, falling upon the canton of Bern, and seizing its public treasury; on which occasion Brune forgot to draw up an inventory of the plunder. Again, by dint of manoeuvres, bearing a diplomatic rather than a military character, he forced Charles Emmanuel, the king of Sardinia, and the apparent ally of France, to deliver into his hands the citadel of Turin (July 3, 1798). The Batavian campaign,[11] which lasted about 2 months, forms the great event of Brune's military life. In this campaign he defeated the combined English and Russian forces, under the command of the duke of York, who capitulated to him, promising to restore all the French prisoners taken by the English from the commencement of the anti-Jacobinic war. After the coup d'état of the 18th Brumaire,[12] Bonaparte appointed Brune a member of the newly created council of state, and then despatched him against the royalists of Brittany.

Sent in 1800 to the army of Italy, Brune occupied 3 hostile camps, intrenched on the Volta, drove the enemy beyond this river, and took measures for crossing it instantly. According to his orders, the army was to effect its passage at 2 points, the right wing under Gen. Dupont between a mill situated on the Volta and the village of Pozzolo, the left wing under Brune himself at Monbazon. The second part of the operations meeting with difficulties, Brune gave orders to delay its execution for 24 hours, although the right wing, which had commenced crossing on the other point, was already engaged with far superior Austrian forces. It was only due to Gen. Dupont's exertions that the right wing was not destroyed or captured, and thus the success of the whole campaign imperilled. This blunder led to his recall to Paris.

From 1802 to 1804 he cut a sorry figure as ambassador at Constantinople, where his diplomatic talents were not, as in Switzerland and Piedmont, backed by bayonets. On his return to Paris, in Dec. 1804, Napoleon created him marshal in preference to generals like Lecourbe. Having for a while commanded the camp at Boulogne,[13] he was, in 1807, sent to Hamburg as governor of the Hanseatic towns, and as commander of the reserve of the grand army.[14] In this quality he vigorously seconded Bourrienne in his peculations. In order to settle some contested points of a truce concluded with Sweden at Schlatkow, he had a long personal interview with King Gustavus, who, in fact, proposed to him to betray his master. The manner in which he declined this offer raised the suspicions of Napoleon, who became highly incensed when Brune, drawing up a convention relating to the surrender of the island of Rügen to the French, mentioned simply the French and the Swedish armies as parties to the agreement, without any allusion to his "imperial and royal majesty."[15] Brune was instantly recalled by a letter of Berthier, in which the latter, on the express order of Napoleon, stated

"that such a scandal had never occurred since the days of Pharamond."[16]

On his return to France, he retired into private life. In 1814 he gave his adhesion to the acts of the senate,[17] and received the cross of St. Louis from Louis XVIII. During the Hundred Days[18] he became again a Bonapartist, and received the command of a corps of observation on the Var, where he displayed against the royalists the brutal vigor of his Jacobin epoch. After the battle of Waterloo[19] he proclaimed the king.[20] Starting from Toulon for Paris, he arrived at Avignon, on Aug. 2, at a moment when that town had for 15 days been doomed to carnage and incendiary fires by the royalist mob. Being recognized by them, he was shot, the mob seizing his corpse, dragging it through the streets, and throwing it into the Rhône.

"Brune, Masséna, Augereau, and many others," said Napoleon at St. Helena, "were intrepid depredators."[21]

In regard to his military talents he remarks:

"Brune was not without a certain merit, but, on the whole, he was a general de tribune rather than a terrible warrior."[22]

A monument was erected to him in his native town in 1841.

  1. ↑ The Club of the Cordeliers—a popular club founded in Paris in July 1790, during the French Revolution. It derived its name from the former convent of Franciscan Cordeliers where its members met. Its official name was the Société des amis des droits de l'homme et du citoyen (Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and the Citizen). With the Jacobin Club it played an important part in France's political life. Originally it united representatives of various trends which later on made up the Right (Dantonist) and the Left (Hébertist) wing of the Jacobins. With the growth of the revolution the Left elements prevailed. During the revolutionary-democratic Jacobin dictatorship the club was the stronghold of the Hébertists, existing until March 1794.
  2. ↑ The anti-monarchist demonstration of Paris artisans and workers in the Champ de Mars took place on July 17, 1791. It was directed by the leaders of the Club of the Cordeliers who drew up a petition to the Constituent Assembly demanding the abdication of the King. The demonstration was fired on by government troops and the National Guard of the city's bourgeois districts commanded by La Fayette with the support of big bourgeois constitutionalmonarchist circles.
  3. ↑ On September 2-5, 1792 Paris was the scene of popular unrest caused by foreign intervention and internal counter-revolution. The people seized prisons and staged improvised trials of imprisoned counter-revolutionaries, many of whom were executed. This Red Terror was an act of revolutionary self-defence.
  4. ↑ At the battle of Hondschoote on September 6-8, 1793, during the war of revolutionary France against the first European coalition, the French defeated the allied armies of Britain, Hanover, the Netherlands and Austria.
  5. ↑ Counter-revolutionary insurrections in the Gironde, Calvados and many other departments of Western, Southwestern and Southeastern France were raised in the summer of 1793 by the Girondists (the party of the big commercial and industrial bourgeoisie) allied with the royalists. The Girondists revolted against the Jacobin government and the revolutionary masses on the pretext of defending the rights of the departments to autonomy and federation. In the autumn of 1793 the counter-revolutionary "federalist" movement was suppressed by troops of the French Republic. The Committee of Public Safety (Le Comité de salut public) — the leading body of the revolutionary government of France, established in April 1793. During the Jacobin dictatorship (from June 2, 1793 to July 27, 1794) it headed the struggle against home and foreign counter-revolution and supervised the carrying out of revolutionary measures.
  6. ↑ A reference to Dantonists who survived after the execution of Danton and his comrades-in-arms and who expressed the interests of the so-called new bourgeoisie which emerged during the revolution. With other counterrevolutionary forces they took an active part in the coup d'état of the 9th Thermidor (see Note 63).
  7. ↑ On the 12th and 13th Vendémiaire (October 4-5), 1795 government troops under General Bonaparte suppressed a royalist revolt in Paris.
  8. ↑ In May 1796 Babeuf and his closest associates, who sought to overthrow the existing regime by revolution and to establish the community of goods, were arrested. In the autumn of that year, the Babouvists made an attempt to release them and to raise a revolt in the Grenelle military camp under the slogan of overthrowing the Directory (see Note 184) and restoring the Jacobin Constitution of 1793. The revolt was put down by government troops.
  9. ↑ See Note 65
  10. ↑ See Note 187.
  11. ↑ At the end of August 1799, during the war of the French Republic against the second anti-French coalition, an Anglo-Russian corps under the Duke of York landed at Helder (Northern Holland) for the purpose of abolishing the Batavian Republic which was dependent on France, restoring the pre-revolutionary regime and seizing the Dutch fleet. But in October the allied troops were routed by the Franco-Dutch army commanded by Brune. On October 18 the Duke had to sign the Alkmar capitulation which, besides the return of French and Dutch prisoners-of-war, provided for the withdrawal of the anti-French coalition troops from Holland.
  12. ↑ See Note 68.
  13. ↑ The camp at Boulogne was set up by Napoleon I in 1803-05 as a base for invading England across the Channel. Napoleon was compelled to abandon his plan by the defeat of the French fleet in the war with Britain and the formation in Europe of a new, third, anti-French coalition including Britain, Russia and Austria.
  14. ↑ See Note 28.
  15. ↑ "Capitulation de Fisle de Rügen, en date du 7 Sept. 1807" (G. F. Martens, Recueil des principaux Traités, I, t. VIII, pp. 695-96).— Ed.
  16. ↑ Quoted from the article "Brune" published in Biographie universelle (Michaud) ancienne et moderne, t. 6, p. 19.— Ed
  17. ↑ A reference to the act of the French Senate deposing Napoleon and restoring the Bourbon dynasty. It was passed after the entry of the armies of the sixth anti-French coalition into Paris on March 31, 1814.
  18. ↑ See Note 254.
  19. ↑ See Note 30.
  20. ↑ Louis XVIII.—Ed.
  21. ↑ Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. Probably quoted from the article "Brune" published in Biographie des célébrités militaires, t. 1, p. 243.— Ed.
  22. ↑ A. H. Jomini, Vie politique et militaire de Napoléon, t. 2, ch. VII, p. 64.— Ed.