Jacques-Félix Jan de La Hamelinaye
Command Ratings
Jacques-Félix Jan de La Hamelinaye (often styled “Jan de La Hamelinaye,” and recorded on the Arc de Triomphe as HAMELINAYE) was a French infantry officer who rose to général de division and held field and staff appointments in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, with notable service in Germany (1806–1807), in the Danube campaign (1809), in southern Italy (1810–1811), and in northeastern Spain (1811–1813), before receiving higher command responsibilities in France in 1814 and a territorial command during the Hundred Days. He was born on 22 February 1769 at Montauban-de-Bretagne (Ille-et-Vilaine) and died on 14 April 1861 at Rennes.
He entered military service in 1791 as a sub-lieutenant in the French line infantry. In 1792 he campaigned under Custine during the first French offensives on the Rhine frontier, beginning a career that combined regimental duty with repeated employment on staffs. Early war service placed him in the armies operating between Alsace, the Palatinate, and the Middle Rhine, where the rapid alternation between offensive incursions and defensive concentrations created a steady demand for officers capable of managing orders, returns, and march discipline at battalion and brigade level.
After the consolidation of the Consulate’s military administration, Jan de La Hamelinaye was admitted into the Légion d’honneur as an officier on 14 June 1804. By the outbreak of the War of the Fourth Coalition he was attached to Marshal Bernadotte’s I Corps headquarters, and in October 1806 he was appointed deputy chief of staff of I Corps. In that capacity he served through the rapid operational sequence that followed the Prussian collapse: the combat of Halle (17 October 1806), the action of Lübeck (6 November 1806), and the winter operations in East Prussia culminating in the battle of Mohrungen (25 January 1807). In February 1807 he became Bernadotte’s principal aide-de-camp, continuing to work at the junction of staff planning and battlefield transmission of orders, and he remained employed in the northern German and Hanseatic zone thereafter.
In 1809 he joined the campaign against Austria and is recorded in service at Linz in May. On 12 June 1809 he was promoted to général de brigade. He distinguished himself in July at Wagram (5–6 July 1809), where the scale of the battle and the density of command traffic placed a premium on accurate staff-to-line coordination and on the maintenance of brigade alignment under heavy artillery fire and repeated counterattacks.
In 1810 he was sent to the Kingdom of Naples and served in Calabria with Lamarque’s division, where French forces were heavily engaged in security operations and coastal defense against British-supported incursions and partisan warfare. From 1810 to 1811 he held command along the coast from Scilla to Reggio, a sector exposed to naval raids and small-boat attacks emanating from the Strait of Messina. On 15 July 1810 he was created chevalier de l’Empire, and on 4 January 1811 he was created baron de l’Empire, formalizing his position within the imperial nobility attached to senior military service.
In 1811 he transferred to Spain and was employed with the Army of Catalonia. He was appointed chief of the general staff of that army and on 13 January 1814 was promoted to général de division. His Catalonia service included combat in early 1812 at Tàrrega and Altafulla, and he was wounded later in 1812 during fighting in the same theater. By late 1813 he is recorded as commanding the 1st Brigade of the 4th Division in Suchet’s Army of Aragon and Catalonia, a field appointment that placed him within the French command structure tasked with sustaining lines from the Ebro and the Tarragona–Barcelona axis while meeting increasingly aggressive allied and Spanish pressure.
In the 1814 campaign in France, now a général de division, Jan de La Hamelinaye received responsibilities connected to reserve and territorial defense formations. He held a divisional command at Troyes in January 1814 but left the field army in February due to severe illness, moving to recover on leave. During the transition of April 1814 he was in a position of local command around Orléans, where a substantial artillery park and older troops were assembled; upon learning of Napoleon’s abdication (10 April 1814) he adhered to the provisional government and the restored Bourbon regime.
Under the First Restoration he was appointed to departmental command (including Mayenne in 1814), remaining in senior employment. During the Hundred Days in 1815 Napoleon placed him in command of the 22nd Military Division at Tours, a territorial command responsible for order, mobilization measures, and the administration of troops and matériel within its district. After the Second Restoration he was placed on non-activity and then returned to employment, remaining in service until his retirement in 1832. In the Bourbon period he received senior honors, including appointment as commandeur of Saint-Louis and advancement within the Légion d’honneur to grand officier.
His name, rendered “HAMELINAYE,” was later inscribed under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris among the generals of the Revolutionary and Imperial armies.
Sources
XX 14 – forming a new division @ Troyes