The Marquis of Lafayette took part in the American Revolution since 1777, being wounded in the leg at the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777. Having participated two years in the war against the British forces, Lafayette returned to Paris in February 1779, where he convinced the French King Louis XVI to send more aid to America. Working with Benjamin Franklin, Lafayette secured another 6,000 soldiers to be commanded by General Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau. In May 1780, he returned to America and was put in command of two light brigades, and by February 1781, he commanded three regiments. From September to October, 1781, Lafayette fought in the Siege of Yorktown along side Washington’s forces that defeated British army of Charles Cornwallis.

When Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, returned to France in December 1781, he was welcomed as a hero as he was received at Versailles by the French king and was promoted to field marshal. However, when the French Revolution broke out, Lafayette joined the National Assembly in June 1789. On July 11, Lafayette presented a draft of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen". The next day, after the dismissal of Finance Minister Jacques Necker, Camille Desmoulins organized an armed mob. On July 13, the Assembly elected Lafayette their vice-president; the following day, July 14, 1789, the Bastille was stormed.

On July 15, 1789, Lafayette was appointed by the National Assembly commander-in-chief of the National Guard of France, an armed force established during the French Revolution to maintain order under the control of the Assembly. Ideologically, Lafayette was a moderate who inclined in favor of a parliamentary monarchy, like the English political system. As leader of the National Guard, Lafayette attempted to maintain order. In May 1790, he instituted, along with Jean Sylvain Bailly, who was mayor of Paris, a political club called the "Society of 1789". The club’s intention was to provide balance to the influence of the Jacobins, who were on the extreme left as they favored the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic.

In June 1791, when the king and his family tried to escape from France, Lafayette was called a traitor by the Jacobins as the National Guard was responsible for the royal family custody. This event and the massacre of the Champs de Mars, where National Guard fired opened fire on a Parisian crowd, marked the decline of Lafayette as a key influencing figure of the French Revolution. And in August 1792, after National Convention relieved him of his command, Layayette fled to Holland with his family, for he feared being guillotined by the Jacobins. He remained in exile in the Danish province of Holstein and the Batavian Republic until Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 18 Brumaire, November 9, 1799. Lafayette used the change of regime to slip into France with a passport in the name of "Motier". He managed to convince an angry Napoleon that he planned to live in rural obscurity. Not wanting to serve in Napoleon’s army, Lafayette resigned his commission. The Lafayettes retired to La Grange, which his wife Adrienne had inherited from her mother.

Otto Carius was born on May 27, 1922, in Zweibrücken, Germany. Although he had been rejected twice before by the German Army as not fit for service when he volunteered, Carius was finally accepted in the 104th Infantry Replacement Battalion in May 1940. After intensive tank training in the Panzer Corps he had volunteered for, he was transferred to the 21st Panzer Regiment. By the end of June 1941, during Operation Barbarossa, Carius had his baptism of fire as a gunner in a Panzer 38 light tank, suffering wounds from spalling.

Brief Biography

Arthur Wellesley was born on May 1, 1769, in Dublin, Ireland, to Garret Wesley, 1st Earl of Mornington, and Anne, the eldest daughter of Arthur Hill, Viscount Dungannon. He went to the diocesan school in Trim. He then enrolled at Eton, where he studied from 1781 to 1784. As he was not a good student at Eton, Arthur joined the army in 1787, on his mother initiative. He fought against the French in Flanders during the French Revolutionary Wars and in 1796 went to India. His brother Richard was appointed governor general there in 1797. In India, Wellesley obtained considerable military experience there, as he took part in the Mysore War against Tipu Sultan.

In 1804, Arthur Wellesley returned to England and became a member of Parliament. In 1806, he married Catherine Pakenham, with whom he had two children: Arthur and Charles. Although he had been appointed chief secretary of Ireland in 1807, his political career came to an end in that year, when he returned to active service against the French. In 1808, he took command of the British, Spanish, and Portuguese forces in the Peninsular War (1808-1814). There, he eventually forced the occupying French to withdraw from Spain and Portugal. When Napoleon abdicated in 1814, Wellesley returned home as a hero and was created Duke of Wellington. After the victors had exiled Napoleon to Elba in 1814, he served as ambassador to France. Since Napoleon’s confinement on Elba was short-lived, returning to France in 1815, Wellington became commander of the allied armies. Just before the arrival of Prussian forces, led by Gebhard von Blucher, Wellington defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815. The threat of Napoleon was at an end.

Jacques Necker was born on September 30, 1732, in Geneva, Switzerland, to Charles Frederick Necker, a lawyer from Custrin, Prussia, and his wife Jeanne Gautier. In 1747, Jacques was sent to Paris where he worked as an accountant in a bank owned by his father’s friend. In 1764, he married Suzanne Curchod, a young Swiss girl, with whom he had a daughter, Anne Louise Germaine Necker; his daughter would eventually become a famous writer known as Madame de Staël. In 1766, Necker became director of the French East India Company, which was a commercial enterprise founded in 1664. Since the company was not able to maintain itself financially, it was abolished in 1769.

In 1776, Necker was named France director-general of finance. Although he gained popularity in regulating the finances by attempting to divide the direct land tax on the French peasantry and capitation tax more equally, Jacques Necker’s greatest financial measures were his usage of loans to help fund the French debt and his usage of high interest rates rather than raising taxes. He also advocated loans to finance French involvement in the American Revolution. In 1781, he was dismissed by the King as director-general of finance, since he had been blamed for the high debt accrued from the American Revolution.

In 1788, as France had been struck by both economic and financial crises, Necker was called back and appointed director-general of finance again to stop the deficit and to save France from financial ruin. Nevertheless, his actions could not stop the French Revolution as he set to work to arrange for the summons of the Estates-General of 1789. Although Necker advocated doubling the representation of the Third Estate to satisfy the people, he failed to address the matter of voting; rather than voting by head count, which is what the people wanted, voting remained as one vote for each estate. Necker’s dismissal on July 11, 1789, made the people of France incredibly angry and provoked the storming of the Bastille on July 14.

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, on August 15, 1769, to Carlo Buonaparte and Letizia Ramolino. He was the second of eight children. When he was ten years old, Napoleon left the island of Corsica for the mainland France to study French at a religious school in Autun. Then, he started his military education at Brienne military academy and later in 1784 at the Military School (École Militaire) in Paris. Napoleon was a withdrawn and aloof student who spoke French with a strong Corsican accent. He was proficient at mathematics, science, history, and geography. In September 1785, he graduated and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in La Fère artillery regiment.

When the French Revolution broke out, he spent the first years in Corsica and supported the revolutionary Jacobin faction, gained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and command over a battalion of volunteers. He led a riot against a royalist French army in Corsica, convincing military authorities in Paris to promote him to captain in July 1792. Because of his military skills, Napoleon was rapidly promoted to higher ranks. In 1796, he was made commander of the French army in Italy, where he forced Austria and its allies to make peace. In 1798, Napoleon conquered Ottoman-ruled Egypt in an attempt to strike at British trade routes with India. He was stranded when his fleet was destroyed by the British at the Battle of the Nile. By this time, France faced a new coalition composed of Britain, Austria, and Russia. A political crisis in Paris forced Napoleon to return to the France where he overthrew the Directory in a coup d’etat in November 1799 and became First Consul. In 1800, he defeated the Austrians at Marengo and negotiated a general European peace which established French power on the continent. In 1802, he was made consul for life and two years later, he was crowned Emperor of France. He oversaw the centralization of government, the creation of the Bank of France, the reinstatement of Roman Catholicism as the state religion and law reform with the Code Napoleon.

In 1803, Britain resumed war with France, later joined by Russia and Austria. Britain inflicted a naval defeat on the French at Trafalgar (1805) so Napoleon abandoned plans to invade England and turned on the Austro-Russian forces, defeating them at Austerlitz later the same year. He gained much new territory, including annexation of Prussian lands which ostensibly gave him control of Europe. The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved, Holland and Westphalia created, and over the next five years, Napoleon’s relatives and loyalists were installed as leaders in Holland, Westphalia, Italy, Naples, Spain and Sweden. In 1810, he had his childless marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais annulled and married the daughter of the Austrian emperor in the hope of having an heir. A son, Napoleon, was born a year later.

Frederick II was born in Berlin, on January 24, 1712, to the King Frederick William I and Sophia Dorothea of Hanover. His father was a strict disciplinarian and the creator of the Prussian military machine. His grandfather on his mother’s side was King George I of Great Britain, who had succeeded Queen Anne in 1714. He had three brothers and two sisters. Aside from having a strict militaristic upbringing, Frederick was educated by a French woman, Madame de Montbail, and Huguenot governesses and tutors as he learned French since an early age. Thus he acquired a taste for the French culture and philosophy. Frederick’s years dedicated to the arts instead of politics ended in 1740, upon the death of Frederick William I and his inheritance of the Kingdom of Prussia.

Frederick the Great’s goal was to make the Prussian government as coherent as a system of philosophy, so that finance, policy, and the army were coordinated to the same end: the consolidation of the state and the increase of its power. Although he described himself as merely the first servant of this all-powerful state, Frederick ruled with such an autocratic hand that his ministers were little more than filing clerks. Upon assuming the throne in 1740, Frederick II broke his father’s pledge of nonaggression to the Austrian ruler Maria Theresa and launched a surprise attack on the Habsburg province of Silesia, known as the "Rape of Silesia", which led to an eight-year war with Austria, known as the War of the Austrian Succession, which in turn produced the Seven Years War, a conflict pitting Prussia against a coalition of powers which included Austria, France, Russia, and Spain. Thanks largely to Frederick II’s brilliant generalship, Prussia emerged more powerful than ever.

Honore Gabriel Riqueti, count of Mirabeau, was born on March 9, 1749, in Bignon-Mirabeau, France, to the economist Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau and his wife Marie-Geneviève de Vassan. He had four siblings and belonged to a wealthy family of merchants trading in Marseilles. When he was a young boy, he suffered from smallpox, which left his face a bit disfigure. At eighteen, Mirabeau entered at a military boarding school in Paris in the regiment of Berri-Cavaleria at Saints. In 1767 he received a commission in a cavalry regiment which his grandfather had commanded years before. At ninteen, he won the affection of a young woman to whom his colonel had long been devoted, and the scandal resulting therefrom caused the father to obtain a lettre de cachet, by authority of which the indiscreet young man was placed in confinement in the Isle of Rhe. After he was released, released, the young count obtained leave to accompany the French expedition to Corsica as a volunteer.

When Louis XVI decided to summon the Estates-General, Mirabeau went to Provence, and offered to assist at the preliminary conference of the nobility of his district, but was rejected. He then appealed to the Third Estate and was elected to both for Aix and for Marseilles, deciding to sit for Aix. Naturally an enthusiast, he was present (May 4, 1789) at the opening of the States-General, but with excellent sagacity he entered that body as an independent. To the end of his life, twenty-three months later, he maintained that independence. Mirabeau was a leader of magnificent power, enthusiastic in the advocacy and support of his convictions; a statesman who would not speak, write or do, in politics, anything not in accord with his estimate as to what was right. True, he was accused of treason for speaking in support of the king’s right to proclaim war or peace, but three days thereafter he defended himself against the charge, and with overwhelming success. He was a leader who worked prodigiously. In addition to his duties as a member of the Assembly, he was also publisher and editor of a paper first called the Journal des États-Généraux, later the Lettres à mes Constituants, and at last the Courrier de Provence.

Jacques Hebert was born on November 15, 1757 at Alençon, France. His father was a goldsmith and former judge. He studied law at the College of Alençon and practiced as a clerk in a lawyer’s office. Then, he moved to Paris where he went through a difficult financial period before he began writing pamphlets. By 1790, Hebert had become a succesful pamphleteer who stirred up antagonisms toward the nobility and the clergy. After the flight of the King, he attacked the Crown as the enemy of the Revolution. In 1792 Hebert founded the Revolutionary newspaper Le Père Duchesne, which became his vehicle for expressing his radical political ideas of proletarian interests and for venting his own personal frustrations. That year he had married Marie Goupil (born 1756), who was a 37-year-old nun who left convent life at the "Sisters of Providence" convent.

The polemic articles he wrote were written with wit, but were also violent and abusive, and purposely couched in foul language in order to appeal to the sans culottes, who were the radical militants of the lower classes, typically urban laborers. Since he was a member of Cordeliers club, he had a seat in the revolutionary Paris Commune where on the 9th and 10th of August, 1792, he was sent to the Bonne-Nouvelle section of Paris. As a public journalist, he supported the September Massacres. During 1793 Hébert became the advocate of sansculottism, which demanded all-out war against the enemies of the people. These enemies included the Church, counter revolutionaries, profiteers, and political moderates.

In June 1793, encouraged by the "enragés" (enraged ones) Jacques Hebert and Jacques Roux, Paris sections took over the Convention, calling for administrative and political purges, a low fixed price for bread, and a limitation of the electoral franchise to sans-culottes alone. With the backing of the National Guard, they convinced the Convention to arrest 31 Girondin leaders, including Jacques Pierre Brissot. After these arrests, the Jacobins gained control of the Committee of Public Safety on June 10, installing the revolutionary dictatorship. Hebert’s base of power was the Commune and the influence it wielded on the Committee of Public Safety.

Camille Desmoulins was born at Guise, Aisne, in Picardy, France, on March 2, 1760, to Jean Benoit Nicolas Desmoulins, who was a lawyer and lieutenant-general of the bailliage of Guise. His father obtained a scholarship for him to enter the College Louis-le-Grand in Paris. In 1789, when the French Revolution broke out, the Count of Mirabeau, a powerful political figure within the Estates-General who positioned himself as a bridge between the aristocracy and the emerging reformist movement, briefly enlisted Desmoulins to write for his newspaper at this time, strengthening Desmoulins’ reputation as a journalist. He denounced the French aristocracy and the paper became very popular. By this time, Desmoulins had also joined the Jacobins Club and was opposed to the Girondists, and more particularly to Jean-Pierre Brisot.

On July 16, 1791, Desmoulins appeared before the Paris Commune as the head of a group petitioning for the deposition of Louis XVI, who had, in June of that year, briefly fled Paris with his family before being captured and escorted back to the city. In 1792, when the war against Austria broke out, Desmoulins, like Robespierre, opposed this war. However, he changed his mind and joined the ideas of Danton and Marat. In 1792, France was at war with Austria. At first, Desmoulins, like his friend Robespierre, opposed this war. Then he changed his mind and joined the ideas of Danton and Marat. After the downfall of the Monarchy on August 10th, 1792 Desmoulins became the secretary of Danton, the Justice Minister. On September 8, 1792, he was elected deputy in the National Convention and belonged to the "Montagnards" group. At the beginning he was close to Robespierre, however, he took some distance from him after the condamnation of the Girondists group in October 1793.