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Desaix, Louis Charles Antoine

Louis Desaix

Born

17 August 1768

Died

14 June 1800

A younger son of an impoverished Auvergne noble family who refused to emigrate and was briefly arrested as a noble in 1793, Desaix served on the Rhine under Moreau, commanding the rearguard in the retreat of 1796 and holding the bridgehead of Kehl through the winter that followed. Taken to Egypt, he commanded independently in Upper Egypt in pursuit of Murad Bey from August 1798, and French accounts record that the fellahin called him the just sultan. Detained by the British on his return, he reached Bonaparte in Piedmont three days before Marengo. He was killed there on 14 June 1800, aged thirty-one, at the head of the charge that turned the battle, on the same day that Kléber was assassinated in Cairo.

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