#papa berthier would have whipped out the baby pictures if he could

[histoireettralala]

Jean-Baptiste Berthier

In honor of Berthier's birthday, I thought it would be interesting to know a little more about where he came from. Luckily I have a biography by Franck Favier, who has a whole chapter dedicated to the origins and social rise of his family. His father comes across as quite a successful and hard-working man. We can see how such a man would influence our Berthier's work ethics and character.

Please be indulgent, I translated this a little too fast to be really good, but I did my best to be in time.

What a destiny for this family of the Ancien Régime: in three generations, it climbed the ranks of society, passing from the status of ploughman to the splendours of Versailles, then to that of Prince of the Empire! The ascent surprised, because the Berthier family escaped the inevitability of a predetermined fate.

The Berthiers come from the village of Chessy-les-Prés, on the borders of Champagne and Burgundy. The great-grandfather, Rodolphe (1648-1710), was a ploughman, then a laborer. He married a ploughman's daughter, Marie Branche, in 1671. From their marriage were born at least two children who reached adulthood, François (1676), and Michel (1679). The first seems to have known a relative social stagnation by remaining a ploughman, while the second progresses: between the two births, their father Rodolphe passed to domestic service, in the service of Michel de Changy, Lord of Vézannes, who will be the godfather of little Michel.

This parrainage appears providential, because it allows Michel to escape the peasant world to embrace the career of wheelwright, probably with the wheelwright of the seigneury. He then emigrated to the town of Tonnerre, a classic sign of local rural exodus. In 1712, he married Jeanne Dumez, daughter of the servant of the bailiff of Noyers. The Lord of Vézannes still appears as a co-signatory of the act. From their marriage six children are born: four daughters [...] and two sons of whom only Jean-Baptiste, born in 1721, reaches adulthood [...]

Jean-Baptiste enters the service of the seigneurial family. Destiny steps in: Jean-Baptiste inherited from his wheelwright father qualities in mathematics and geometry which surprised his master. The latter then plays his connections, which allows Jean-Baptiste to enter the Ministry of War in 1739 as an instructor, then in 1741 as inspector general at the Ecole de Mars, military academy of Paris [...] There he was responsible for making young nobles maneuver. His studies subsequently pushed him from geometry to topography. As inspector, he proposed to modify the training programs and obtained a little more practice: he built on Ile aux Cygnes, in Paris, a miniature fort called Fort-Dauphin for the exercise of a siege. In front of the marshals of France and the people of Paris, the cadets and officers mimed the assault and the defense of the work.

However, it was during the War of the Austrian Succession that Jean-Baptiste's career took a new turn. In 1744 he obtained a lieutenancy and a job in the body of geographic engineers.

This body of engineers, founded in 1691 by Vauban, was made up of soldiers specializing in topographical surveys. They quickly distinguished themselves from ordinary engineers, more occupied with fortification work, and brought together experts recognized for their skill and dexterity in drawing up maps that were very useful for military strategies. The function required physical (endurance), but also intellectual (geometry, trigonometry and drawing) and military (fortifications) qualities. It repulsed highborn people, but was a means of social advancement for individuals of more modest condition.

In the aftermath of the Battle of Fontenoy (1745), Jean-Baptiste Berthier joined the army, assigned to the staff of Marshal de Saxe, commanding the army of Flanders, as an engineer geographer serving for reconnaissance of the camps , marches and locations of the king's armies. He took part in the Dutch campaign, was noticed at the battle of Lawfeld on July 1 and 2, 1747, where he was also wounded. The war allowed him to show his skills and courage on the ground. On this occasion, he established an album of twenty-five maps relating the main facts of the campaign, an album which he offered to the king.

His reputation being made, he can consider another means of ascension: marriage. On September 23, 1749, he married Marie Françoise Lhuillier de La Serre, born in 1731, whose father, César Alexandre, was captain of the castle of the Marquis de Breteuil, in charge of the surveillance and hunting of the estate [..] All were from recent nobility [..]

Jean-Baptiste thus entered the networks of geographers, important networks which tended to perpetuate themselves, by endogamy, in castes, without progressing, unlike the Berthiers. Fortune was to further benefit the family, already well served: on September 13, 1751, a fireworks rocket celebrated for the birth of the Duke of Burgundy set the Great Stable of the Palace of Versailles ablaze. Faced with the improvisation of the emergency services, Jean-Baptiste Berthier takes the responsibility of organizing the fight against the disaster, even putting his body on the line. Louis XV, who witnessed his exploits in person, would be grateful to him. He will thus enter into the favor of the sovereign. He will be in charge of multiple tasks, participating for example in the founding of the Military School of Paris from 1751 or also, through his plans and drawings, in the improvement of French military ports.

1753 saw the birth of his first son, Louis-Alexandre, the eldest of an upcoming series of twelve children, six of whom survived the horrors of infant mortality. In 1757, Jean-Baptiste acceded to the post of chief geographer engineer and to the direction of maps and plans of the Ministry of War. As such, he is in direct contact with the King and the Minister of War, to whom he can present each morning, with supporting maps, the operations of the French army during the Seven Years' War. As for his wife, she is assigned the much sought-after office of Monsieur's chambermaid. This charge made it possible to penetrate even further into the King's House. Monsieur will also honor the Berthiers by holding on the baptismal font one of their sons named after himself, Louis-Stanislas, born in 1767, while one of their daughters, Jeanne-Antoinette, born in 1757, had for godmother the Marquise de Pompadour.

[..]

The Duke of Choiseul demanded from Berthier the construction of the hotels of the Navy and Foreign Affairs. The work was quickly completed, in eighteen months. Speed, reasonable cost, architectural elegance, richness of ornamentation, ingenuity of interior design are admired by contemporaries [..] Moreover, always pragmatic, Berthier innovated in memory of the fire of 1751: he decided to replace everywhere the parquet floors with tiles, and developed a new system of incombustible brick vaults.

In July 1763, the king, as a reward, appointed him chief geographer of the king's camps and armies, governor of the War, Navy and Foreign Affairs hotels, and raised him to the nobility by letters patent established in Compiègne [..]

To these honors was added a salary of 12,000 pounds per year, half of which went to his widow and reversible to his children. It was the peak for Jean-Baptiste Berthier, who decided to have his portrait and that of his wife painted, signs of his notability. In 1765, he received the order of Saint-Michel, and two of his children have, as we have seen, illustrious godfather and godmother.

His new status giving him the privilege of being able to practice hunting, he associates the useful with the pleasant. At the request of Choiseul, then to that of the king, he established numerous hunting maps for most of the royal forests: Amboise, Rambouillet, Versailles, Marly, Saint-Germain, Sénart, Boulogne and Vincennes. This considerable work, unfinished during the Revolution, will be completed by his son, the future marshal.

[..] Having reached the peak of his career, Jean-Baptiste Berthier can look at his career with satisfaction. Despite his words: "I am no richer than when I was born in Tonnerre from the poorest citizens of this city", his rise is remarkable.

Beyond the titles and honors accumulated by the engineer Berthier, we will notice the extent of family and matrimonial alliances. The Berthier couple had twelve children, five of whom, along with the marshal, reached adulthood. Among those who survived, the two daughters, Jeanne-Antoinette (1757-?) And Thérèse (1760-1827) made excellent marriages [...] Of the four sons, three will be, under the Revolution and subsequently, illustrious soldiers: Louis-Alexandre marshal, Louis-César (1765-1819) and Victor-Léopold (1770-1807), major generals. The fourth son, Charles, born in 1759, nicknamed Berthier de Berluy to differentiate him from his elder Louis-Alexandre, died during the American expedition.

[..]

General Thiébault, then in garrison at Versailles, reports in his Memoirs of his meeting with old Jean-Baptiste in 1803.

"One morning, as I was having breakfast, a little old man who was still green came into my house, and who, in a deliberate tone, said to me:" Would you like, Monsieur le Général, to receive a visit from the father of the Minister of War, of General Berthier? " I hastened to answer that I would have hastened to offer this to him, if I had known that he was in Versailles, and I could have added if I had known that he was still in this world. He told me that he resided in Paris, but that, having come to Versailles on business, he had not wanted to leave it without seeing me. "From your place," he said, "I will visit, as is my habit, the Hotel de la Guerre which was built by me, where I lived so many years and where all my children were born. "I insisted that he do me the honor of having lunch with me, but he only accepted a cup of coffee, and the idea occurred to me to suggest that I accompany him to the Hotel de la Guerre, which he was delighted with. We left together, and if it had been about selling it to me, he could not have shown me this hotel in more detail and told me more exactly the history of all this construction from the cellars to the attics. When, after one hour, we reached the attics, he said: "This is the accommodation that I was occupying ", and having stopped in a rather small and more than modest room with alcove:" Here is ", he added with pride," where Alexandre was born. "And on this subject he recounted many memories to me. We would have been by the cradle of the Macedonian king that Macedonia could not have been complete. Convinced that he had kept this place for the last bouquet of what he wanted to show me and teach me, I thought I was at the end of my chore. I had already congratulated him on his legs which seemed to find in this building the vigor they had during the construction, when he warned me that what was most curious to see, was the roof. Immediately he passed through a window, and drawing me as if to a trailer, but running, climbing like a cat, he walks me from ridge to ridge, from gutter to gutter, at the risk of breaking my neck twenty times. "

Six months later he passed away. He had fulfilled his role of dynastic founder to the best of his ability. He endowed his descendants, either by marriages for his daughters, or by a perfect education for his sons. The fact that he gave Alexandre as a second name to his eldest son and César to his third son could presage Jean-Baptiste's military ambitions. He was not disappointed.

Franck Favier- Berthier, l'ombre de Napoléon

I hoped you enjoyed this!