Flamboyant American Exile, Aspiring Conqueror of Algeria: Lions of the Atlas
Bertrand Clauzel (Wikimedia Commons)
Marshal Bertrand Clauzel
Among the most enjoyable parts of writing my soon-to-be-published book, Lions of the Atlas: France’s Wars for Empire and Resistance in North Africa, 1827-1934, has been discovering the remarkable personalities—heroic, bizarre, tragic, and malevolent—North African and French, who stalked the battlefields during these fascinating campaigns. I’ll look at some of them in a series of blog posts leading up to and beyond my book’s publication on October 29, 2026, beginning with the flamboyant Marshal, Bertrand Clauzel (1772-1842).
Born into a middle-class background in Ariège, France, near the Spanish border, Clauzel would play a dominant role in French efforts to conquer and subdue Algeria in the 1830s. Though talented, he was a thoroughly odd individual, combining equal parts tactical brilliance, arrogant hauteur, theatricality, and liberal good intentions. His military career began in his teens when he joined the National Guard at the onset of the French Revolution in 1789. Moving up through the ranks, he became a brigadier general in 1799. Over the following decade Clauzel traveled the world. In 1802–1803 he served creditably in the French war to subjugate Saint-Domingue (Haiti) but, disgusted by the genocidal campaign being waged by his commander, the Comte de Rochambeau (son of George Washington’s counterpart at Yorktown), Clauzel plotted to depose him. Discovered, arrested, and deported, Clauzel was shipwrecked on the Florida coast, eventually making his way to New York and back to France, where his dedication and experience made him once more welcome with Emperor Napoleon’s army.
Over the next several years Clauzel held a series of combat commands in Spain and France, and was severely wounded in the foot at the Battle of Salamanca in 1812. He marched with Napoleon in the Hundred Days, and stuck with the emperor to the bitter end. This made Clauzel anathema to the returning Bourbon royal family. They condemned Clauzel to death in absentia after he fled with his family to the United States. He spent five years near Monroeville, Alabama, as a member of the so-called Vine and Olive Colony of exiled Bonapartists, working as a gardener and leaving behind descendants. He returned to France after being pardoned in 1820.
A scene from Clauzel’s Constantine campaign of 1836 (Wikimedia Commons)
Able Soldier, Architect of Disaster
As a liberal with extensive military experience, Clauzel was a natural choice to take command in Algeria, where he arrived in 1830 following the deposition of the Bourbons in the Revolution of 1830. At fifty-seven, portly and gray-haired, he no longer cut the dashing figure of his youth, but still seemed as bright-eyed and energetic as a man half his age. Clauzel wasn’t particularly articulate but had a stolidity and confidence in his purpose that, over time, inspired military compatriots. He had a reputation for being both reliable and humane. A military reformer, he had reorganized wilting commands during Napoleon’s wars in Spain. For his own part, Clauzel had since his time in Alabama developed a deep interest in colonization, settlement, and farming, voicing ideas that some fellow liberals considered applicable to the Algerian adventure.
Clauzel would engage in some of the most spectacular battles of the Algerian campaigns of the 1830s, before meeting his doom in the epic first expedition to the forbidding mountain fortress of Constantine in 1836. That campaign, and Clauzel’s other battles, are chronicled in Lions of the Atlas.