Jean-Pierre Lacombe-Saint-Michel
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Divisional-General Jean-Pierre Lacombe-Saint-Michel (5 March 1751 – 27 January 1812) was a French Army officer who served in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.[1] He appeared as a character in Les Géorgiques by the novelist Claude Simon, his direct descendant.[2] During the French Revolution, Lacombe-Saint-Michel protected the father of Honoré de Balzac.[3]
Starting as an artillery cadet in 1765, Jean-Pierre Lacombe-Saint-Michel became a second lieutenant in the Toul regiment in 1767, gunnery captain in 1779, and mortar captain in 1786. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos was his captain-major at this time. In 1789, he took part in the storming of the Bastille, but as marshal de Broglie did not have confidence in him he was sent back to Tarn, where he was elected to an administrative post.[2] In 1782 he married Marie Anne d’Hasselaër, by whom he had a son. His first wife died in January 1790.[2]
He was first a member of the military committee of the Assembly, and was then re-elected as a deputy to the National. Convention.[1] He was sent to Savoy, together with Thomas-Augustin de Gasparin and Edmond Louis Alexis Dubois-Crancé to dismiss General Anne-Pierre, marquis de Montesquiou-Fézensac. On his return, he voted for the death of the king (though later in 1793 he remarried, to Marie Micoud, a courageous woman who had tried to save the king from the guillotine and had been imprisoned at the beginning of the year).[2][1]
Lacombe-Saint-Michel was then sent to Corsica, where he arrived on 6 April 1793 and defeated Pasquale Paoli at the Battle of Farinole on 15 November.[4] Wounded in the battle, Lacombe-Saint-Michel was promoted to brigadier general on 17 November. He was part of the Army of the North when Maximilien Robespierre fell from power. On 31 July 1793, Lacombe-Saint-Michel wrote to the Committee of Public Safety: "By attacking the treacherous coalition that I will search out Robespierre’s accomplices."[2] In February 1794, British forces invaded Corsica, besieging Bastia on 4 April. Lacombe-Saint-Michel, who commanded the Bastia garrison, slipped past the British on 12 May and made his way to France to inform the National Convention of the invasion's progress; the town fell ten days later. On his return to Paris in February 1795, he became a member of the Committee himself.[1]
