Marshal Saint-Arnaud

Biography

Armand-Jacques Leroy de Saint-Arnaud was born on August 20, 1798, in Paris, and rose to become Marshal of France and Commander-in-Chief of French forces in the Crimea through a career built on colonial campaigns in Algeria and on his pivotal role in Napoleon III's coup d'état of December 1851. Saint-Arnaud served as Minister of War when Louis-Napoleon seized power and was the military enforcer of that seizure — a role that left him deeply distrusted by French liberals but in high favor with the new Emperor. Saint-Arnaud was a genuinely able commander by the standards of his time. His Algerian campaigns had taught him the brutal realities of sustained military operations in difficult terrain, and he understood logistics and operational planning in ways that his British counterpart Raglan did not. He arrived in the East in 1854 in poor health — suffering from a heart condition and what contemporaries described as severe intestinal illness, almost certainly cholera — but concealed his condition from his commanders and his emperor. The Allied landing at Calamita Bay in September 1854 and the subsequent advance to the Alma River were conducted under his overall strategic guidance. The Battle of the Alma on September 20, 1854 — the first major engagement of the Crimean campaign — was a tactical Allied victory, with French forces ascending the western heights while the British drove the Russians from their positions on the right. Saint-Arnaud's performance was creditable given his physical condition, but he was already a dying man. Two weeks after the Alma, Saint-Arnaud was too ill to continue. He transferred command to General Canrobert on September 26, 1854, and boarded a ship for Constantinople. He died aboard the ship on September 29, 1854, just three days after relinquishing command, aged fifty-six — making him one of the war's earliest senior casualties, killed by disease before a major battle had been fought around Sevastopol. His death robbed the French of their most capable general and contributed to the subsequent drift in Allied strategic decision-making.

Key Battles