Biographies : 6
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BiographyNansouty, Etienne-Marie-Antoine Champion
Born in 1768, Etienne-Marie-Antoine Champion Nansouty was a brilliant horseman and like Napoleon, attended military school in Brienne and Paris. He served in the Ancien Régime army but did not leave France following the Revolution and went on to serve in the Armée du Rhin, becoming a général de brigade in August 1799. Serving under […]
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BiographyNAPOLEON II
Napoleon François Charles Joseph (1811-1832), Roi de Rome, French emperor, Prince de Parme, Duc de Reichstadt. On 20 March, 1811, a salvo of one hundred cannon shots broke the news to the city of Paris: the long-awaited son of the emperor had been born at the Tuileries Palace. Named the Prince Imperial, as dictated by […]
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BiographyNELSON, Horatio
Nelson was born on 29 September, 1758, in Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk, England, the sixth of eleven children. His father, Edmund Nelson, was parish priest and his mother, Catherine Nelson, was a grandniece of Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Oxford. His mother died when Nelson was nine. Nelson joined the Royal Navy aged 12 on January […]
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BiographyNEY, Michel
Distiguished by his red hair, fiery temper and combat bravery, Ney was fellow Gascon Murat's only serious rival as the most dashing of Napoleon's marshals. He joined the royal French hussars in 1787, and was an NCO in Flanders during the opening actions against the First Coalition in 1792. Commissioned in October of that year, […]
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BiographyNIEL, Adolphe
Adolphe Niel was born on 4 October, 1802 in Muret, in the Haute-Garonne. A bourgeois family for generations, the Niels were originally from Goyrans, in the Haute-Garonne, and not, as some have suggested, Ireland. Niel is a traditional 'Midi' name. Niel graduated from the Ecole polytechnique in 1823 with the rank of sous-lieutenant and enrolled in […]
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BiographyNORVINS, Jacques de
Jacques de Norvins was born in Paris on 18 June, 1769 (the same year as the emperor, he used to say proudly). He was the son of a wealthy tax administrator (receveur général des finances). After studying law, he became a magistrate and councillor-auditeur at the Châtelet de Paris.In 1792 he emigrated, serving in the […]