Background
Carnot was born on May 13, 1753, in Nolay, France, where his father, Claude, was a lawyer, a royal notary, and a local judge.
Collège d’Autun, Paris, France
At the age of fourteen, Lazare and his brother were enrolled at the Collège d’Autun, in Burgundy where he focused on the study of philosophy and the classics.
Carnot, a feverishly productive member of the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror.
mathematician physicist politician scientist
Carnot was born on May 13, 1753, in Nolay, France, where his father, Claude, was a lawyer, a royal notary, and a local judge.
Carnot had his early education in the Oratorian collège at Autun. Thereafter, his father enrolled him in a tutoring school in Paris which specialized in preparing candidates for the entrance examinations to the service schools that trained cadets for the navy, the artillery, and the Royal Corps of Engineers. Strong in technique and weak in prestige, the Corps of Engineers was the only branch of military service in which a commoner might still hold a commission. Carnot graduated from its school at Mézières after the normal course of two years. Gaspard Monge wras then at the height of his influence over the cadets as professor of mathematics and physics, but although Carnot’s handling of problems always bore the mark of the engineer, it does not appear that he was one of Monge’s favorite pupils.
Carnot’s approach to mathematics and mechanics was in a curious way more concerned with both fundamentals and operations than that of Monge. Promotion was slower for engineers than for line officers, and Carnot’s outlook on the world, like that of many able and industrious men in the last years of the old regime, was compounded of frustrated talent and civic affirmation, some of which he expressed in tolerable verse. After routine assignments at Calais, Cherbourg, and Béthune, he was posted to Arras, where society was livelier. There in 1787 he became acquainted with Maximilien de Robespierre, a fellow member of the literary and philosophic society of the Rosati.
During these years of garrison duty, Carnot sought reputation by writing of mechanics, mathematics, and military strategy in essays prepared for competitions of the kind regularly set by learned societies in the eighteenth century. In 1777 the Académie des Sciences in Paris proposed the “theory of simple machines with regard to friction and the stiffness of cordage” for a prize. Carnot entered a memoir in that contest and revised it in 1780 for resubmission in a second round opened by the Academy when none of the entries in the first proved worthy of an award. It then received an honorable mention following a memoir on friction by Coulomb which won the prize. Carnot developed its theoretical portion into his first publication, Essai sur les machines en général, which appeared in 1783. In retrospect it is evident that that modest work inaugurated the peculiarly French literature of engineering mechanics, but it commanded little attention until after its author had become great and famous in the politics and military affairs of the Revolution. The fate of an early mathematics memoir was similar. In 1784 the Academy of Berlin invited entries in a competition for a “clear and precise” justification of the infinitesimal calculus. The essay that Carnot submitted forms the basis of the Réflexions sur la métaphysique du calcul infinitésimal that he published many years later, in 1797. Once again Carnot’s entry received an honorable mention but no other notice.
It was, indeed, only through his writings on military strategy that Carnot won a certain minor recognition prior to the Revolution. In 1784 the Academy of Dijon set as subject for its annual prize the career of the founder of the Royal Corps of Engineers, the Maréchal de Vauban (like Carnot a Burgundian), whose theory and practice of fortification and siege-craft had guided the strategy of Louis XIV and become standard doctrine in the limited warfare of the Enlightenment. Carnot’s Éloge de Vauban carried off that award. Its publication brought him into the crossfire of a skirmish of the books that had broken out among members of the French armed forces wherein the political interests and social prestige of the several arms and services were entangled with opposing theories of warfare. In the emergency of 1793-1794 Carnot disposed not of the disciplined, professional, and cautious forces presupposed by conservative strategy, but of untrained levies, some under arms because of patriotism and some because of conscription. Patriotism produced dash and conscription mass, and in both respects the armies of the Republic were quite unlike those of the eighteenth century.
Never an ideologist, never really a democrat, Carnot had the reputation of a tough and reliable patriot when, in August 1793, he was called by the more politically minded men already constituting the emergency Committee of Public Safety to serve among its membership of twelve men who, ruling France throughout the Jacobin Terror, converted anarchy into authority and defeat into victory. His main responsibility was for the war, and he alone of his erstwhile colleagues continued in office after the fall of Robespierre in July 1794 through the ensuing reaction and on into the regime of the Directory that followed in 1795. For two more years Carnot was the leading member of that body, in which office he, together with four incompatible colleagues, exercised the executive power of the French Republic. In 1797 the leftist coup d’état of 18 Fructidor (4 September) displaced Carnot from government. He took refuge in Switzerland and Germany, returning in 1800 soon after Napoleon’s seizure of power.
Carnot had given Napoleon command of the Army of Italy in 1797, and now Napoleon named his sometime patron minister of war. The Bonapartist dispensation proved uncongenial to an independent spirit, however, and after a few months Carnot resigned. Thereupon he devoted his older years to the technical and scientific interests of his younger days, having qualified for membership in the Institut de France in 1796 by virtue of his prominence if not of any wide comprehension of his youthful work in mechanics, his only scientific work then in print. Throughout the Napoleonic period he served on numerous commissions appointed by the Institute to examine the merits of many of the mechanical inventions that testify to the fertility of French technical imagination in those years of conquest and warfare. He was never too old for patriotism, however. Amid the crumbling of the Napoleonic system, he offered his services when the retreat from Moscow reached the Rhine. In those desperate circumstances Napoleon appointed him governor of Antwerp. Carnot commanded the defense. He rallied to the emperor again during the Hundred Days and served as his last minister of the interior. That act bespoke the consistency of the old revolutionary yet more decisively than Carnot’s having voted death to Louis XVI some twenty-two years before. He was not forgiven by a monarchy that had had to be restored twice, and he fled into exile once again, leaving in France his elder son, and taking the younger to bring up in Magdeburg, in which tranquil city he lived out his days corresponding with old associates and publishing occasional verse. Carnot died on August 2, 1823.
(French Edition)
1801(French Edition)
1832Carnot entered politics in 1791 when he was elected a deputy to the Legislative Assembly from the Pas-de-Calais. No flaming radical, his idea of social justice was the career open to talent. As the monarchy proved its untrustworthiness in 1791 and 1792, he became a republican out of a kind of civic commitment natural to his class and family background. Following the outbreak of war in April 1792, the services of a patriotic deputy competent in military matters were at a premium. There was an integrity in Carnot that made itself felt and trusted in dangerous times. He combined it with the engineer’s ability to improvise arrangements and organize procedures.
Though the name of Carnot's wife is unknown, it is stated that he had 2 sons.