Jean Victor Marie Moreau (14 February 1763 – 2 September 1813) was a general of the French Republic and French Empire during the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars. Moreau defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Tourcoing in 1794 and the 1800 Battle of Hohenlinden, and commanded a Napoleonic army in Nantes in 1805. Moreau was banished from France by Napoleon on trumped-up charges and fled to the United States; he was offered command of American forces during the War of 1812 but refused. He later defected to the Russian Empire and died fighting for them at the Battle of Dresden, shot while talking to Czar Alexander III of Russia.
Biography[]
An unwilling law student in Brittany, Moreau had always wanted to be a soldier. The Revolution transformed his life. In 1792, a regiment of local volunteers elected him as his colonel and he led them off to fight in the early battles of the French Revolutionary Wars. He distinguished himself in the defeat of Austrian and British forces at Tourcoing in May 1794 and subsequently campaigned with great skill in the war against Austria on the Rhine front. In 1796, he advanced into Bavaria, but when Jourdan's army on his left suffered a series of defeats, he was forced to retreat across Germany. Conducting a fighting withdrawal with consummate skill, he brought his army back intact to the west bank of the Rhine.
In April 1797, Moreau once more took the offensive, with a successful crossing of the Rhine at Diersheim. The victory, however, was upstaged by Napoleon's successes in Italy, which forced Austria to make peace. In one of the reversals of fortune so comman at the time, Moreau was implicated in a plot to restore the monarchy and was dismissed from the army.
In 1799, with France once more facing a military crisis, Moreau was recalled. He supported the coup that brought Napoleon to power as First Consul and was rewarded in 1800 with leadership of the Army of the Rhine. His brilliant victory against superior Austrian forces at Hohenlinden in December was achieved through a Napoleon-like use of divisions maneuvering independently to outflank and envelop enemy forces. His downfall followed directly from this triumph. The First Consul had him arrested on trumped-up charges and banished from France. He lived in the United States until 1812, when he returned to Europe to assist in the defeat of Napoleon. He was killed while acting as adviser to Czar Alexander at the battle of Dresden in 1813.