#Louis-Nicolas Davout

[joachimnapoleon]

[deceptigoons-attack]

Post-Austerlitz Complaints and Recriminations

(aka Imperial Alert: The girls are fightingggg)

"After Austerlitz, as after Ulm, there was a rich crop of mutual complaints and recriminations among the Marshals. A bitter feud between Bernadotte and Davout was developing and there were respective rows between Lannes and Soult, Soult and Davout, and Murat and Lannes. To crown everything Lannes to offense at the Emperor's bulletin which he felt, gave insufficient credit to the work done by Lannes' corps, and took himself off on a prolonged, self-awarded leave. It is significant that while Napoleon was swift to punish dereliction of duty by his Marshals in future years, he let this peccadillo pass."

(Humble, Richard. Napoleon’s Peninsular Marshals. 1975.)

[cadmusfly]

Analysing the Quality of Napoleon's Marshals With Silly Data Science

Let's talk numbers and laugh at funny graphs with missing data!

Other people in this fandom do really lovely detailed information posts, I do weird fanfic, dragon shitposting, body pillow design shitposting and run a stupid Lannes ask rp blog. But! I'm also a programmer with an interest in Numbers, and today we're going to Analyse These Dead Frenchmen with a bunch of screenshots of graphs.

Ethan Arsht published a really interesting article called Napoleon was the Best General Ever, and the Math Proves it., where using data scraped off Wikipedia articles, he creates a statistical model drawing from multiple variables per battle to calculate How Good A General Is At Winning.

Give the article a read, it's great stuff, but if you don't feel like it, he basically applies WAR - "Wins Above Replacement" - which is a value from baseball that measures how many wins a player is worth when compared to a replacement.

So the general's WAR would be how well they compare to a completely average general who replaced them. Yes, as Arsht says, "in other words, I would find the generals’ WAR, in war."

But as he says, this is not a stringent historical analysis and is more of a fun thought experiment. Wikipedia is probably the most comprehensive dataset on this topic that he had access to, but it is Wikipedia the crowdsourced online encyclopedia, so it is going to have holes and inaccuracies. And this was written seven years ago, and the data was collected then, so any updates to these articles since then wouldn't be reflected.

And it's not a perfect model that takes into account everything - it's an approximation, a whole bunch of number crunching. I haven't looked too deeply into how the numbers work exactly, even though I could.

I think that 0 would be "completely and utterly average"? A positive WAR is good, a negative WAR is not. Napoleon is the best general ever at 16.679 WAR, the next highest is Caesar at 7.445 WAR.

(Link, you can hover over each battle and look at each datapoint!)

But I'm interested in Napoleon's marshals. The 26 men he raised up to military nobility! The dramatic assholes who kept arguing with each other. I'll post links for all of them at the end of this, but I won't be screenshotting each of their WAR graphs, just a few.

I'm not entirely sure how the scraper collected the information about what battles a commander is considered in "charge" of - I tried looking at the provided code repository but I am reminded that data science people bless them are not really good at structuring or publishing code and why are all the html pages just straight up saved in the root folder why are the jupyter notebook outputs just uncleared aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Oh yeah this was scraped from seven years ago so current wikipedia pages won't be reflective of what's on the graphs - so we can assume that this is just grabbing stuff from the "Commanders and leaders" part from each individual battle page and collating them into numbers

Anyway let's look at the iron man himself, Davout, considered to be the best of Napoleon's marshals.

(Link)

Heh, here we see the first hole in the dataset - Jena-Auerstedt is considered to be one battle, and Napoleon would like you to think that's the case.

Anyway, pretty good! Let's look at Jean Lannes, the lively Gascon

(Link)

Oooooh, even better than Davout! Helps he didn't go to Russia. Wait, why is Aspern-Essling dated to before Ratisbon, especially when Lannes died in the former?

Let's look at André Masséna, also known as being pretty cool:

(Link)

Damn, neat, though I think there's a lot of omissions here.

Here's Murat:

(Link)

Lol Tolentino, I do like how Murat Peaked there a little bit

But we're forgetting a certain redhead, aren't we?

(Link)

Ouch. But also Waterloo not appearing there, hmmm.

Anyway let's finish off the screenshots with Napoleon's greatest strategist, Jean-de-Dieu Soult, the man that Wellington called a master of the defensive!

(Link)

honestly this is the entire reason why i wanted to write this post

in soult's defense - as a soult defender - he had a pretty shitty army full of conscripts, was isolated, was occasionally pretty bad at adapting tactically to new surprises and had to deal with the english being stubborn fuckers, but he was brilliant in setting things up strategically and forcing the english to catch up through a fighting retreat with a demoralised army, stopping them from closing in on france too

but also the way this graph bullies soult so hard makes me laugh a lot

Anyway, yeah, these graphs are definitely inaccurate and I'm also posting these to see the Napoleonic community on tumblr's reaction to them, but they are a fun way to engage with history!

Just don't take them seriously, and feel free to argue in the tags/comments/reblogs

I could theoretically use this guy's code to rerun this just for the Marshals now - I know my way around some data science code - but I do have a lot on my plate, but it would be a fun experiment!

Marshal WAR Graph Links

Note: So these are under the Wikipedia article names at the time that the web scraper was run seven years ago so some of these names turned out to be different from what they are now and I had to do a bit of digging to fix some

you can definitely tell that the information is incomplete on a lot of these, again i repeat the information was scraped off wikipedia seven years ago

Louis-Nicolas Davout

Jean Lannes

Joachim Murat

Michel Ney

André Masséna

Jean-de-Dieu Soult

Bon-Adrien Jeannot de Moncey (one battle lol)

Jean-Baptiste Jourdan

Charles-Pierre Augereau

Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte aka Charles XIV John of Sweden (Two battles and only Swedish ones I think)

Guillaume Brune

Édouard Mortier (two battles)

Jean-Baptiste Bessières (two battles)

François Christophe de Kellermann (one battle, Valmy)

François Joseph Lefebvre (two battles)

Charles-Victor Perrin (ouch)

Étienne Macdonald

Nicolas Oudinot (lol)

Auguste de Marmont (loll)

Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr

Józef Poniatowski (three battles but hmm. pretty bad but feel like there's too much missing info here)

Emmanuel de Grouchy (two battles, can't make a Where's Grouchy joke)

Marshals Without Graphs Not because they didn't command anything but I couldn't find their graphs on the website or in the code repo

Catherine-Dominique de Pérignon

Jean-Mathieu-Philibert Sérurier

Louis-Gabriel Suchet (wtf? maybe seven years ago the documentation on him was sad)

EDIT: wait i was looking at the notebook (the uh place where the code was being run, to see if i could run the code myself)

soult is one of the lowest ranked generals overall on this initial list pfftHAHAHhahahahahahahaha

[empirearchives]

Marshal Davout. Uniform, bicorne worn at the Battle of Auerstedt in October 1806, officer's luxury saber & baton. Exhibition Hotel de la Villette, Paris, 2021

Source: Jésus Chapela Rey

[flowwochair]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Napoleonic Era RPF Rating: Mature Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Louis-Nicolas Davout/Louis Charles Antoine Desaix Characters: Louis-Nicolas Davout, Louis Charles Antoine Desaix Additional Tags: Hurt No Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Foreshadowing, Short One Shot, Animal Death, "Do you think we would have met in every universe?" Summary:

Davout mourns Desaix.

[araiz-zaria]

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[donpishya]

Marshal Davout

I grew him more hair... 😢

[playitagin]

1823-Louis-Nicolas Davout 

Louis-Nicolas d'Avout (French pronunciation: ​[lwi nikɔla davu]; 10 May 1770 – 1 June 1823), better known as Davout, 1st Duke of Auerstaedt, 1st Prince of Eckmühl, was a French military commander and Marshal of the Empire who served during both the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. His talent for war, along with his reputation as a stern disciplinarian, earned him the nickname "The Iron Marshal" (Le Maréchal de fer). 

[northernmariette]

A quick biographical sketch of Davout

Yesterday I posted “A quick biographical sketch of Berthier”, from the September 2019 issue of Historia magazine. The special topic was Napoleon, and the front page’s title read “Napoleon, les secrets d’un chef de guerre”. 

This is the second Marshal on the alphabetical list of the eight highlighted in  an article about Napoleon’s ability to spot talent:

Davout, the Invincible One

Born in 1770, this marshal never lost a single battle. And he likes them difficult! At Austerlitz, he contains the majority of the Austro-Russian attack with much smaller forces. His resilience is one of the factors of this success. A year later he achieved a stunning triumph at Auerstedt against an army twice the size of his. This masterwork of the Prussian campaign even made Napoleon envious. In 1809, the Emperor exclaims adiringly: "Look at Davout as he manoeuvres, he is going to win this battle for me once again". In 1815, he is Minister of War, and the Belgian campaign is lost without him. What a mistake it is to leave him in Paris! He is a member of parliament during the Bourbon Restoration, and dies in 1823.

I’ve read that Davout died of tuberculosis, but I’ve read more often that he died of congestive heart failure. Either way, at the time there was no real treatment for either of these diseases, He was just 53 at his death, one of many Marshals to die before reaching the age of 60. 

[koda-friedrich]

(過去絵)👓🥊🎻⚔️

[bozsianddragon]

Davout and his pro-Polish position

It’s not really something new or extraordinary. We just love Davour’s pro-Polish position.

All was started in Memoirs of A. Potocka which we reread. I don’t know why and how, but we found really interesting works by Józef Bonawentura Załuski who called “La Pologne et les polonais, défendus par un ancien officier de Chevau-Légers polonais de la garde de l'Empereur Napoléon Ier contre les erreurs et les injustices des écrivains français, MM. Thiers, Ségur Lamartine”. Very nice title, sans doute et ironie. 

There is a passage about Davout.

I completely agree with M. Thiers [he wrote that Davout had supported the idea of the restoration of Poland]. Of all french marshals what I had the honor to know marshal Davout was the one who most appreciated Poles and who as a result inspired them most confidence and attachment.

And Alexander Chernyshov (a Russian military leader and diplomat; had spies in Paris) describing French marshals and generals wrote about Davout:

Davout, Duke of Auerstädt. The Prince of Eckmühl. The marshal of the Empire, commander in chief, hated by everyone who belonged to Napoleon’s entourage, diligent supporter of the Poles, he is a big enemy of Russia. 

And, of course our lovely fact: Davout had really nice (but at the start they didn’t understand each other, we think, and Davout didn’t trust Poniatowski) relationship with Jozef Poniatowski and called him “honest and honorable”. Yes, it isn't about position of Davout, but we love it :)

[joachimnapoleon]

Aaahhhh!!! I've been obsessing over it lately and I thank you for creating your blog, it's very informative! But I would like to know please how Murat got along with most of the Marshals, I also read that he got along well with Bessiéres, reply when you can!

Sorry for the late reply, I haven’t had energy for social media for the past month or so. Glad you’ve been enjoying the blog though!

As for Murat’s relationships with his fellow marshals, I think in general the tensions/conflicts he had with several of them have been overblown. I’ve written a bit about my view of his relationship with Lannes before (here, and a little follow-up here), and I still remain convinced that they were closer than the ongoing mainstream narrative based on dubious memoirs. Murat also butted heads with Ney on various occasions during campaigns, but I don’t believe there was any deep hatred between them or anything like that, and they got on well enough during the 1812 campaign and seemed pretty much on the same page. Oh, but Murat, Lannes, and Ney were all hanging out at Bareges together taking the waters when Murat found out he was going to be the new King of Naples, so there’s that.

Murat’s relationship with Berthier is interesting and I wish I knew more about it. Early on, Murat (who was pretty prone to paranoia) was convinced that Berthier was his enemy, as a result of Murat having been critical of him. But their relationship seems to have grown better over the years judging from some tidbits I came across in some of Berthier’s letters to Murat. Berthier also serves as kind of a go-between when Murat is in Naples and Napoleon wants to criticize him and needs someone to word it in such a way as to not wound Murat’s delicate feelings too deeply; he takes a much more gentler approach while still making sure Napoleon’s points get through to Murat.

Murat doesn’t seem to have gotten along very well with Soult, but I think @josefavomjaaga has posted more details on that on her page before, I really don’t know much about Soult in general.

Bessieres and Murat were supposedly good friends but it’s just another one of those things that unfortunately doesn’t have enough documentation on it one way or the other. Most of their correspondence I’ve ever comes across has been very formal and businesslike. It’s also hard to glean too much about Murat’s relationship with Bernadotte either. They had similar political views early in their careers, and Murat invited Bernadotte to his wedding (I’ve always wondered if it was just to spite Napoleon, who refused to attend), but also expressed criticism of Bernadotte in a letter to Joseph Bonaparte for having refused to side with the Bonapartes during the Brumaire coup. I really haven’t found much else about their relationship at all.

If there’s one marshal we can say for sure Murat absolutely did not like or get along with, it’s Davout. These two were just oil and water, unalike in pretty much every fathomable way. Their relationship got so bad during the 1812 campaign that Murat’s chief of staff had to physically restrain Murat from going out to either challenge Davout to a duel, or maybe just to shoot him on the spot (Murat had just grabbed his pistol and was on his way out of his tent). When Murat dared to speak against Napoleon for abandoning the army during the retreat and threatening to leave himself, Davout upbraided him for “black ingratitude”. I’ve never found exactly how Davout reacted to news of Murat’s defection in 1814, but it’s pretty easy to imagine.

Thanks for the ask!

[hanciiii]

another sketch today!!!! ill hope ill get some inspiration to make an actual piece soon ♡

[cadmusfly]

#I have thoughts on Pokémon teams for some of the marshals omg pleaseee make a post about it i would love to read it <3

Made those tags on this post by @bambooale - and yeah, I love Pokemon ever since I played Pokemon Blue as a small child and named my Venusaur "AAAAAAAAA" so I definitely have pokemon thoughts!

I was thinking about answering this in the form of drabbles but I do have Assignments, but I am Tempted to write some silly fanfic about this at some point.

Edit: I wrote fanfic oops

Michel Ney and a Balloon

Young Murat and Bessieres and art by @apurpledust !!!

Anyway, using this page to put together pokemon teams for Lannes, Murat, Ney, Bessières, Soult, Masséna, Davout and Napoleon, and feel free to disagree or talk about your own thoughts!

-

Lannes

Dubwool, Ampharos, Aegislash, Diggersby, Ceruledge, Falinks

Obviously Lannes needs the two sheep(ish) pokemon in his team: Dubwool and Ampharos. Even if Ampharos loses its wool as it evolves, maybe he got it as a cute Mareep and still loves it.

The other pokemon are based on him as an infantry commander who participated in besieging fortifications - Diggersby for tunnelling, Aegislash and Ceruledge as... swords, ghostly swords who "fell before accomplishing their goal"

and Falinks, well, Lannes was known as the Roland or Achilles of the Grande Armee, Achilles was Greek, Falinks is kinda Greek-

but I was also thinking that Falinks fits Napoleon a lot as well, especially with seeing that drawing by bambooale-

What if Napoleon looked after Lannes' Falinks after he died?

Interesting thoughts.

-

Ney

Mudsdale, Pyroar, Armarogue, Talonflame, Lycanroc, Drifblim

The entire reason I started thinking about this was because I thought it would be extremely funny if Ney had a Drifblim because of the time a guy claimed to have invented a hot air balloon for battlefield reconnaissance, sold the idea to Ney and promptly disappeared with the money.

It would be even funnier if in Poke-verse, the guy sold Ney a Drifloon.

Mudsdale is because Ney started out as a hussar/cavalryman, Pyroar because "that man is a lion!", Talonflame is a brave bird that has the powerful recoil-causing moves Brave Bird and Flare Blitz, Midnight Lycanroc is red and loves to charge in, Armarouge is also red, loyal and gallant.

-

Murat

Rapidash, Milotic, Sylveon, Gallade, Sirfetch'd, Vanilluxe

Obviously a horse man needs a horsie, and a fiery unicorn is definitely up Murat's alley. As the beau sabreur of France, he also needs valiant swords-pokemon by his side, and also the most fashionable and beautiful pokemon with him, such as one that grows from an unassuming fish into a splendid creature and one that evolves with love and affection.

I was stuck on the last pokemon to give him. It's a bit anachronistic, but what if King of Naples had, uh, Neapolitan ice cream.

Sorry.

Also Rapidash and Sylveon go along with...

-

Bessières

Galarian Rapidash, Zebstrika, Swanna, Indeedee, Furfrou, Glaceon

Another horse man obviously needs a horsie, and look, I enjoy Murat and Bessières's friendship and shipping, I do like the idea of paralleling them with their Rapidashes and Eeveelutions.

I was thinking Umbreon because Umbreon is my favourite eeveelution and Umbreon evolves via happiness, but Glaceon's hair kinda fits and Bessières was described as seeming to be "cold". Ah well, I'm sure Glaceon loves him anyway.

Zebstrika is another horse, and Bessières is described as having eyes that "project lightning bolts". I think there's a description of his manor's lake having swans, and he did teach his men to swim at one point? Indeedee is a gentlemanly pokemon, and Furfrou, there was a claim that Bessières was a hairdresser at one point, and he does wear his hair in "dog ears".

-

Soult

Dachsbun, Appletun, Smeargle, Oranguru, Thievul, Skarmory

I could have filled this all up with baking jokes. Dachsbun, Appletun, Centiskorch, Alcremie, Slurpuff, uh, maybe I couldn't. Exeggcute. Anyway.

Soult had an appreciation for art and took some from the pieces that had already been looted, and I think with him being known for Strategy he might enjoy Smeargle's potential in learning Any Move. Oranguru is a teacher, Soult was a drill sergeant, same thing, right.

Thievul... Soult was not the worst plunderer but gained a reputation for being such. I was thinking a dark type to represent that reputation (as well as the Roi Nicolas thing) and tossing up between Liepard - as the Dalmatia coat of arms has leopards - and Thievul. But then I thought about the Duke of Wellington going "View Halloo! I have you now!" to Soult, years later, and the association of that kind of cry with fox hunting, and the legend of Wellington going fox hunting with French soldiers, and that clinched it.

Skarmory is because I wanted a steel type for Monsieur "Iron-Arm", a lot of steel-types I've already put aside for the obvious, and Skarmory is my favourite Pokemon. Their feathers harden in the thorny nests that they grow up in, that's totally like what Soult did at the camps of Boulogne right.

-

Masséna

Clefable, Klefki, Gholdengo, Persian, Sneasler, Grimmsnarl

I admit I got a bit stuck here.

Sneasler, Klefi and Grimmsnarl are inspired by Masséna as a smuggler before rejoining the army, with Sneasler helping out in the mountainous areas.

Clefable is based on thoughts of the "Dear Child of Victory" - I didn't want to use Legendaries here, otherwise there is Literally A Victory Pokemon - and I kinda characterise Masséna in my head as a gambler, so a pokemon with Metronome makes sense to me.

Persian and Gholdengo is because he did like his plundering and he was pretty salty about losing his "Livorno millions"!

-

Davout

Metagross, Bisharp, Lucario, Corviknight, Bastiodon, Swellow

Oh look this is where all the steel types went, to the Iron Marshal. I really wanted him to have Metagross and Bisharp as they'd make great buddies for a tactician and strategist, and then the other three steel types are also just cool for the goddamn Iron Marshal.

Swellow is purely because of the cute partridge story (and this is the second time I've referenced something @northernmariette has posted!). Swellow also has the ability Guts, where its attack rises if it is afflicted with a status problem. I think Davout is pretty gutsy, too!

-

Napoleon

Empoleon, Dragapult, Vespiquen, Clawitzer, Falinks, Braviary

Napoleon needs an Empoleon, the pokemon literally named after Napoleon.

Dragapult and Clawitzer are artillery pokemon. Vespiquen and Braviary are symbolic of the First French Empire, with Vespiquen's rulership over Combees being very fitting.

And Falinks could both represent the Grande Armee... and also be a remnant of his fallen friend.

-

Miiiiight write some fanfic for this if the inspiration hits and I survive this last week.

Thank you very much for the ask though! I leave you with a meme screenshot from the Pokemon game set in Pokemon France:

[largecucumber]

Everyone’s tired after a long battle, but at least Marshal Murat looks great in his ridiculous hat 🎩 😮‍💨

How’re y’all doing?? 😣💖 I’m so bored. All I do is school and exercise. I’m so so shy when I go to the gym! There’re these huge men lifting huge weights like omg how?! 😖🏃‍♀️💨 Anywayssss, I’m so sorry about Eugene 😢 I don’t actually know what he looks like lmaooo

[flowwochair]

paused my readings on Augereau to read more about Davout because I thought some details about his life and personality were interesting, but by far the craziest detail I found (purely by chance while watching a video essay that wasn't even about him or the napoleonic era) is that the crazy Theranos lady (I think her name is Elizabeth Holmes or something) is distantly related to him?????? that really took me by surprise tbh!! anyways, if anyone has some extra info/fun facts about him that they'd be willing to share with me, I'd be more than happy to read!! ( ´ ω ` ) if I find some other crazy detail about him or any other marshal I like I'll be sure to share