Armand-Jacques Leroy de Saint-Arnaud

France state institutions Monarchy and royalism 1798–1854 ○ Died on campaign

Marshal of France notorious for massacres in Algeria who, as minister of war, ran the military side of the coup of 2 December 1851

Born in Paris in 1798, he entered the army in 1817 but after ten years was still a sub-lieutenant; he resigned, drifted, and returned at thirty. Debts and scandal sent him to Algeria as a captain in the Foreign Legion, where in August 1845 he suffocated hundreds of tribesmen in a cave and in 1846 burnt some 200 villages. He commanded a brigade in Paris during the revolution of 1848, and Louis Napoleon, who saw in him a military chief for a coup, brought him home as a general of division after the Little Kabylie expedition of 1851. Minister of war from October, he superintended the military operations of the coup of 2 December 1851. Made a Marshal of France and a senator in 1852, he commanded the French army in the Crimean War and died on board ship nine days after the Battle of the Alma in 1854.

Also known as: Marshal Saint-Arnaud