François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers was a French general of the Revolutionary Wars.
Biography
Early life
Desgraviers was born at Chartres, Eure-et-Loir. His father served as a legal officer, and Marceau received an education for a legal career, but at the age of sixteen he enlisted in the regiment of Savoy-Carignan. Whilst on furlough in Paris, Marceau joined in the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 – after that event he took his discharge from the regular army and returned to Chartres, but the opposition of his family soon compelled him to seek new military employment. He became a drill instructor and later a Captain in the Eure-et-Loir départemental regiment of the National Guard. In March 1792, Marceau was elected lieutenant colonel of one of the French Revolutionary Army battalions of the Eure-et-Loir. He took part in the defence of Verdun in 1792, and it was his troop that was ordered to bear the proposals of capitulation to the Prussian camp. The defenders' lack of morale provoked the anger of the revolutionary authorities, and Marceau was fortunate to find re-employment as a captain in the regular service. However, early in 1793, he along with other officers under suspicion were arrested and spent some time in prison.
In the wake of Le Mans, Marceau had rescued and protected a young Royalist lady, Angélique des Mesliers, with whom it has been supposed Marceau fell in love – however, even his help could not save her from the guillotine. He and Kléber themselves were saved from arrest and execution only by the intervention of Bourbotte. Around this time Marceau became engaged to Agathe Leprêtre de Châteaugiron, but the marriage was prevented by his constant military employment, his broken health and the opposition of both Auguste-Félicité Le Prestre de Châteaugiron and Marceau's devoted half-sister Emira, wife of the Republican politician Antoine Joseph Sergent.
Battles of 1795–96
After spending the winter of 1793–94 in Paris, Marceau accepted a command in the army under Jean-Baptiste Jourdan alongside Kléber and took part in the various battles near Charleroi. During the battle of Fleurus on 26 June 1794 he had a horse shot from under him. He distinguished himself at Jülich, at Aldenhoven and at Koblenz, where he stormed the enemy lines on 23 October. He took part in the - with the armies of the Sambre and Meuse, fighting on the Rhine and the Lahn and distinguishing himself alongside Kléber near Neuwied and Sulzbach.
Death
After Jourdan and Jean Victor Marie Moreau's Rhine Campaign of 1796 ended in defeat, Marceau's men covered Jourdan's retreat over the Rhine. Marceau fought in the desperate Battle of Limburg on the Lahn River. While conducting a successful rear guard action near Altenkirchen on 19 September, he received a mortal wound. He died two days later in the early morning, aged only twenty-seven. The Austrians competed with Marceau's own countrymen to honour the dead general. His body was burned and the ashes placed under a pyramid in Koblenz designed by Kléber. They were transferred to the Panthéon in 1889. Marceau was immortalized in Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage":
