Charles-André Merda

Général de brigade Charles André Merda, baron Meda (10 January 1770 – 8 September 1812) was a French soldier. A National Guardsman in the Parisian National Guard from September 1789, then a gendarme from 1794, he participated in the arrest of Maximilien de Robespierre on the night of 9/10 thermidor Year II (27 July 1794) and claimed to have fired the pistol shot which broke Robespierre's jaw and hit Couthon's helper in his leg.

Arrest of Robespierre and his followers. At the centre of the image, gendarme Merda fires at Robespierre. (Colour engraving by Jean-Joseph-François Tassaert after the painting by Fulchran-Jean Harriet - Musée Carnavalet).

Under the First French Empire he was made a baron and changed his surname to Meda (sometimes spelt Méda). Whilst fighting as colonel of the 1er régiment de chasseurs à cheval (France), he was mortally wounded by a musket ball at the battle of Borodino and was made a general on his deathbed. He was survived by his wife and two sons.

Bibliography
  • (in French) Jean-François Fayard, Alfred Fierro et Jean Tulard, Histoire et dictionnaire de la Révolution française 1789-1799, Robert Laffont, Paris, 1998, p. 981.
  • Michael J. Sydenham, Leonard Bourdon. The Career of a Revolutionary. 1754‑1807, Waterloo (Ontario), Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1999.



gollark: I got us one (1) role slot.
gollark: But grass is more common.
gollark: If you are converting the cellulosey bits you could just get rid of the lignin *or* take out the cellulose.
gollark: ?news
gollark: Consequentialist-ly speaking (yes, I am aware you don't subscribe to this) a technological development could be "bad", if the majority of the possible uses for it are negative, or it's most likely to be used for negative things. To what extent any technology actually falls into that is a separate issue though.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.