Lazare Carnot - Political Career

Political Career

At the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, Carnot entered political life. He became a delegate to the Legislation in 1791. While a member of the Legislative Assembly, Carnot was elected to the Committee for Public Instruction. Carnot believed all citizens should be educated and as a member of that committee, he wrote a series of reforms for the teaching and educational systems, but they were not implemented due to the violent social and economic climate of the Revolution.

When the Legislative Assembly dissolved, Carnot was then elected to the National Convention in 1792. He spent the last few months of 1792 on a mission to Bayonne, organizing the military defense effort in an attempt to ward off any possible attacks from Spain. Upon returning to Paris, Carnot voted for the death of King Louis XVI, although he had been absent for the debates surrounding the king’s trial.

On 14 August 1793 he was elected to the Committee of Public Safety where he took charge of the military situation as one of the Ministers of War.

The creation of the French Revolutionary Army was largely due to his powers of organization and enforcing discipline. In order to raise more troops for the war Carnot introduced conscription: the levée en masse approved by the National Convention was able to raise France’s army from a meager 645,000 troops in mid-1793 to 1,500,000 in September 1794. Once the problem of troop numbers had been solved Carnot turned his administrative skills to the supplies that this massive army would need. Many of the munitions and supplies were in short supply: copper was lacking for guns so he ordered church bells seized in order to melt them down; saltpeter was lacking and he called chemistry to his aid; leather for boots was scarce so he demanded and secured new methods for tanning. He quickly organized the army and helped to turn the tide of the war. It added significantly to discontent with the course of the Revolution in still Bourbon-loyalist areas – such as the Vendée, which had broken out in open revolt 5 months earlier – but the government of the time considered it a success, and Carnot became known as the Organizer of Victory. In autumn 1793, he took charge of French columns on the Northern Front, and contributed to Jean-Baptiste Jourdan's victory in the Battle of Wattignies.

He had taken no steps to oppose the Reign of Terror, but he, along with other technocrats on the committee like Robert Lindet and Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, turned on Maximilien Robespierre and his allies during the Thermidorian Reaction.

With the establishment of the Directory in 1795, Carnot became one of the five initial directors. For the first year the Directors did well working harmoniously together as well as with the Councils. However, difference of political views led to a schism between Carnot and Étienne-François Letourneur, followed by François de Barthélemy, on the one side, and the triumvirate of Paul François Jean Nicolas, vicomte de Barras, Jean-François Rewbell, and Louis Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux on the other side. Carnot and Barthélemy both supported concessions to end the war, and hoped to oust the triumvirate and replace them with more conservative men. His and Étienne-François Letourneur's moderation was viewed as weakness, and it probably contributed to France's failure to capitalize on the Treaty of Campo Formio. After Letourneur had been replaced by another close collaborator of Carnot, François de Barthélemy, both of them, alongside many deputies in the Council of Five Hundred, were ousted in the Fructidor coup d'état of (4 September 1797), engineered by Generals Napoleon Bonaparte (originally, Carnot's protégé) and Pierre François Charles Augereau. He took refuge in Geneva, and there in 1797 issued his La métaphysique du calcul infinitésimal.

In 1800 he was appointed Minister of War by Bonaparte, and served in that office at the time of the Battle of Marengo. In 1802, he voted against the establishment of Napoleon's Consular powers for life and the passing of the title to his children, for as Carnot said when speaking of the power necessary to govern a state “If this power is the appendage of a hereditary family it becomes despotic.”