Jean-Baptiste Kléber

Divisional-General Jean-Baptiste Kléber (; 9 March 1753 – 14 June 1800) was a French army officer and architect who served in the War of the Bavarian Succession and French Revolutionary Wars. After serving for one year in the French Royal Army, he joined the Imperial Army of the Holy Roman Emperor seven years later. However, his humble birth hindered his opportunities. Eventually, Kléber joined the French Revolutionary Army in 1792 and quickly rose through the ranks.

Serving in the Rhineland during the War of the First Coalition, he also suppressed the Vendée Revolt. Kléber retired to private life in the peaceful interim after the Treaty of Campo Formio, but returned to military service to accompany Napoleon in the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. As the invasion started to suffer setbacks, Napoleon returned to Paris in 1799 and appointed Kléber as commander of all French forces in Egypt. He was assassinated by Suleiman al-Halabi, a Syrian theology student, in Cairo in 1800. Kléber, in times of peace, designed a number of buildings.

Early career

Jean-Baptiste Kléber was born on 9 March 1753 in Strasbourg, in the province of Alsace, where his father worked as a master builder. In 1769, he enlisted in the French Royal Army's Bercheny's Hussar Regiment, but resigned in 1770 to study architecture for four years, part of which occurred in Paris with Jean-François Chalgrin. His opportune assistance to two German nobles in a tavern brawl obtained for him nomination to the military school of Munich. From this education, he obtained a commission in the Kaunitz Infantry Regiment Nr. 38 of the Imperial Army of the Holy Roman Emperor. He took part in the War of the Bavarian Succession but did not see major engagements. He was stationed alternately in the garrisons of Mons, Mechelen, and Luxembourg in the Austrian Netherlands. Finding that his humble birth hindered his chances for promotion beyond that of an unterleutnant, he left the Austrian army in 1783 after serving seven years.

Architecture

thumb|The [[Hôtel de Ville, Thann, which Kléber designed]]

On returning to France, Kléber received the appointment of inspector of public buildings at Belfort. Between 1784 and 1792, he designed a number of buildings both on public and private commission. Perhaps the most notable is the Hôtel de Ville at Thann, Haut-Rhin (1787–1793), which was originally designed as a hospital but turned into an administrative building before its completion. Other surviving buildings are the château of Grandvillars (often erroneously spelled "Granvillars"), built around 1790 and the canoness houses of the Benedictine abbey of Masevaux (1781–1790). Nine of these houses had been planned but due to the French Revolution, only seven were built. The Musée historique de Strasbourg features a room dedicated to Jean-Baptiste Kléber that also displays a number of his sketches and architectural designs.

French Revolutionary Wars

thumb|upright|1793–1796 portrait of Kléber by [[Louis-Léopold Boilly]]

In 1792, at the start of the French Revolutionary Wars, Kléber enlisted in the 4th Battalion of Volunteers of Haut-Rhin. Thanks to his military experience, he was at once elected adjutant and soon afterward lieutenant-colonel of the battalion. At the defense of Mainz in July 1793 he so distinguished himself that, though disgraced along with the rest of the garrison and imprisoned, he promptly won reinstatement, and was promoted to brigade general in August 1793.

Kléber was then posted to the Army of the Coasts of La Rochelle and deployed to Western France, where he took part in the suppression of the Revolt in the Vendée. In this capacity, seeing no hope of bringing his army back to France or of consolidating his conquests, he signed the Convention of El Arish with Kör Yusuf Ziyaüddin Pasha on 24 January 1800. Signed in Commodore Sidney Smith's presence, the convention allowed the Army of the Orient to return to Europe. While he was negotiating with Sidney Smith in January 1800, Kléber opened a masonic temple in Cairo and thus created the Isis lodge (La Loge Isis), serving as its first master. The motto of the lodge was the slogan of the French Revolution: Liberté, égalité, fraternité. or Arab Syrian student living in Egypt. The assassin appeared to be begging from Kléber, but then took his hand and stabbed him in the heart, stomach, left arm, and right cheek, before running away to hide near the palace. He was soon caught, still in possession of the dagger which he had used to kill Kléber, and was later executed. The assassination happened in Cairo on 14 June 1800, coincidentally the same day on which Kléber's friend and comrade, Desaix, fell at Marengo. The assassin's right arm was burned off, and he was impaled in a public square in Cairo and left for several hours to die. Suleiman's skull was shipped to France and used to teach medical students what the French phrenologists claimed were the cranial features indicating "crime" and "fanaticism".

Burial

After his assassination, Kléber's embalmed body was repatriated to France. Fearing that his tomb would become a symbol of Republicanism, Napoleon ordered it held at the Château d'If, on an island near Marseille. It stayed there for 18 years until Louis XVIII granted Kléber a burial place in his home town of Strasbourg. He was buried on 15 December 1838 in the Strasbourg Cathedral, before being transferred in 1840 below his statue located in the center of Place Kléber. His heart is in an urn in the caveau of the Governors beneath the altar of the Saint Louis Chapel in Les Invalides, Paris. Kléber's name is inscribed in column 23 on the southern pillar of the Arc de Triomphe.

Assessment

thumb|upright|Statue of Kléber at the [[Place Kléber, Strasbourg]]

Kléber emerged as undoubtedly one of the greatest generals of the French revolutionary epoch. Though he distrusted his powers and declined the responsibility of supreme command, there is nothing in his career to show that he would have been unequal to it. As a second-in-command no general of his time excelled him. His conduct of affairs in Egypt, at a time when the treasury was empty and the troops were discontented for want of pay, shows that his powers as an administrator were little, if at all, inferior to those he possessed as a general. While Kléber himself had a mixed view of Napoleon (including cursing at him and drawing mocking caricatures of him), Bonaparte thought highly of Kléber's skill, stating that there was, "No sight so splendid as watching Kléber go into battle", and he likened him to the God of War Mars.

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