Berthier: Jean-Pierre Augereau

Command Ratings

Division

3"A(5)+1

Points: 10

Cavalry or Temp Corps

5"A(5)+1

Points: 17

Corps

8"A(5)+1

Points: 23

Small Army

9"A(5)+1

Points: 34

Wing

10"A(5)+1

Points: 37

Medium Army

12"A(5)+1

Points: 43

Large Army

18"A(5)+1

Points: 61

Supreme HQ

26"A(5)+1

Points: 85

Jean-Pierre Augereau (27 September 1772 – 25 September 1836) was a French officer of the Revolutionary and Imperial armies who attained the rank of lieutenant-général under the Bourbon Restoration. He is most often identified as the half-brother of Marshal Charles Pierre François Augereau, duc de Castiglione, and his career is frequently traced through a sequence of staff employments and brigade-level commands, culminating in his capture during the Russian campaign and his release after the collapse of the Empire.

Augereau entered military service during the early Revolutionary wars. He volunteered on 6 September 1792 in the 8th Battalion of Paris Volunteers and advanced rapidly through elected company grades, being chosen caporal, sergent, and then sous-lieutenant in late 1792. He served with the Army of the North in 1792–1793, before transferring into mounted service. On 9 January 1794 (20 nivôse an II) he joined the 23rd régiment de chasseurs à cheval, then with the Army of the Eastern Pyrenees, an army in which his brother held senior field command.

From November 1795 he served as aide-de-camp to his brother and followed him to the Army of Italy. In that capacity he was present in the later stages of the Italian campaigns, and he is repeatedly described in the contemporary-derived summaries as moving between staff and regimental roles rather than holding an independent field command in the 1790s. By the end of the Directory and the early Consulate period he had accumulated enough experience and patronage to enter the reorganized staff structure of the Consular army. He is recorded as being employed in a military division on 21 December 1802 (30 frimaire an XI), then at the camp of Bayonne on 29 August 1803 (11 fructidor an XI), and at the camp of Brest on 7 January 1804 (17 nivôse an XII), a sequence of postings consistent with the concentration of forces for coastal defence and expeditionary contingencies.

Promotion into general rank followed soon after the proclamation of the Empire. Augereau was promoted général de brigade on 8 May 1804 and, on 14 June 1804, was appointed commandeur of the Légion d’honneur. During the early years of the Grande Armée he was attached to field formations on the German and northern European theatres, remaining with his assignment through the end of 1807.

He was posted to the Peninsular War in 1808. Ordered on 17 March 1808 to the Army of Spain, he served in the operations that led to the battle of Tudela (23 November 1808), where he was cited honourably in Marshal Lannes’s reporting. By mid-1809 he had moved into the Catalonia theatre: on 30 June 1809 he transferred to the Army Corps in Catalonia commanded by Marshal Augereau, and he held a brigade-level role within the infantry divisions operating around Barcelona and the interior lines to Vic and Hostalric. In the action at Vic on 20 February 1810, when General Joseph Souham was severely wounded early in the combat, Jean-Pierre Augereau assumed divisional command for the remainder of the engagement. On 4 May 1810 at Hostalric he is credited with taking prisoners and capturing two guns. Ill health again intervened; he is described as leaving duty on 5 August 1810.

Napoleon granted him the hereditary title baron de l’Empire by decree at Rambouillet dated 13 August 1811. In the administrative-military geography of the Empire, Augereau is also placed at this time in a command or supervisory posting connected with the Ems-Occidental area, indicating that he was used in departmental or territorial responsibilities between field employments.

His record’s note “POW 12–14” corresponds to his capture during the Russian campaign and his absence from French service until after Napoleon’s abdication. On 13 May 1812 he was appointed to command a brigade in a reserve infantry formation of the Grande Armée for the invasion of Russia. During the retreat phase of the campaign, his brigade became isolated near Smolensk and was surrounded by Russian forces in early November. In the action known as the Battle of Liaskowa (Lyakhovo) on 9 November 1812, Russian cavalry and partisan formations under Orlov-Denisov (with Davydov, Figner, and Seslavin operating in concert) compelled the surrender of the French detachment under Augereau. Contemporary administrative handling in the French army treated the loss as serious; he was suspended pending inquiry, but the later political and military collapse of the Empire prevented the completion of any full adjudication while he remained in captivity.

He returned to France after the first abdication of Napoleon in 1814. Under Louis XVIII he was placed on non-active pay and was made a chevalier of the Ordre royal et militaire de Saint-Louis on 24 August 1814. On 27 January 1815 he received the grade of lieutenant-général honoraire. During the Hundred Days he was again employed: on 12 June 1815 he served as a général de brigade with the Corps of Observation of the Var, a formation tasked with security and frontier observation in the south-eastern theatre.

Augereau remained in French service into the Restoration period and is recorded as continuing on the rolls until 1 December 1824, after which he lived in Paris. He never married and had no children. He died in Paris on 25 September 1836 and was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, in a tomb shared with General Louis Lemoine.

Sources

Augereau family grave, Père Lachaise Cemetery (Division 59), Paris

The brother of Augereau #1, he was a POW from 1812 through 1814. XX 12 Russia – captured @ Liakva.

Pictures

Back to List