BERTHIER Alexandre (1753-1815) maréchal et ministre de la Guerre

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BERTHIER Alexandre (1753-1815) maréchal et ministre de la Guerre
L.S. " Alexandre ", Paris June 10, 1811, to General BELLIARD; 2 pages in-4. Strong rebuke to General Belliard who wanted to present his resignation to the Emperor. [Auguste-Daniel BELLIARD (1769-1832), who had distinguished himself in Egypt, was then in command in Spain]. Berthier did not submit this letter to the Emperor "because His Majesty would certainly have ordered me to tell you that you had undoubtedly lost your head [...]; that to offer one's resignation for not having carried out an order is to declare that one does not want to obey; it is to expose oneself to the consequences that disobedience can have: that these 4,000 men and 1,200 horses could have saved the army of the South; that you could have evacuated Cuenca or any other point, but execute the order of the Emperor. There are two or three passages in your letter which are not from a soldier, & if I had put them before the eyes of the Emperor, His Majesty would have seen in them only a breach of discipline & perhaps He would have made a severe example. It was out of respect for his friendship and his former record of service that he did not hand it over to Napoleon; on the contrary, he told him that his orders were being carried out: "In this protest of feelings of honor and personality, She would have found only affectation and indiscipline; She would have told me that the honor of a General consists in obeying, in keeping the subordinates under his orders in the path of probity, in making good discipline reign, in giving himself exclusively to the interests of the State and of the Sovereign, and in disdaining entirely his particular interests"...
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