Background
Kléber was born on March 9, 1753 in Strasbourg, France, where his father worked as a master builder.
Kléber was born on March 9, 1753 in Strasbourg, France, where his father worked as a master builder.
Kléber planned to be an architect, but entered the military school in Munich and was so successful that he obtained the post of an officer in the Austrian army in 1776.
Seeing no possibility of proper advancement for one who did not belong to the nobility, Kléber resigned from the Austrian service in 1783 and became an inspector of public buildings at Belfort. At the outbreak of the war of the First Coalition against France, he joined the French army as a private, distinguished himself at the defense of Mainz in 1793, and was made a general the same year. He was successful against the royalist revolt in La Vendée, but was recalled with the complaint of too great leniency toward the insurgents. In 1794, however, he was given three divisions under Jean Baptiste Jourdan, whose most important aide Kléber became during the campaign of Belgium and in the operations on the Rhine. After Jourdan's defeat and resignation, Kléber resigned and worked on his memoirs, remaining deliberately inconspicuous because he was under the threat of becoming a political suspect. In 1798, however, he was placed in command of a division in Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, was wounded during the capture of Alexandria, and was made governor of the city. The next year in the Syrian campaign he won a brilliant victory at Mount Tabor. After the return of Bonaparte to France, Kléber was left in command of the French army in Egypt but, hard pressed by the Turks and the English, he concluded the convention of El Arish in January 1800, providing for the return of his troops to France. Kléber defeated the Turks at Heliopolis in March, and reconquered Cairo, where an insurrection against the French had broken out. Kléber's career was abruptly ended when he was assassinated by a fanatic in the Egyptian capital on June 14, 1800.