LAZARE NICOLAS MARGUERITE, one of the most consistent but intemperate of the French republicans, of the bloody period of the first French revolution, was born at Nolay in Burgundy, May 13, 1758. After a good mathematical education in his native province he was admitted as an officer of the engineer corps under the patronage of the prince of Condé, and was a captain in that corps when the storms of the revolution thrust him forward in political life, as he was beginning to be known by some mathematical essays and poetical effusions of small merit. In 1791 he was returned a member of the National Assembly for the Pas de Calais, and was soon engaged in the most violent measures of the republican party. It would have been lucky for his memory had his zeal been less unscrupulous; but he soon leagued himself with the party of the Mountain, became a member of the committee of public safety under Robespierre, voted for arming with pikes 30,000 sansculottes, for the condemnation of the princes, and the execution of the king; in short, he was highly accountable for the indiscriminate bloodshed that characterized the Reign of Terror. His genius, however, was more military than political, and he laboured energetically in improving the discipline of the French army; is said to have been the proposer of the military conscription; cashiered on the field a general who had retreated before the enemy; and as commissioner of the republic put himself at the head of the troops. It is certain that his activity and spirit produced great effects on the soldiery, and thus he contributed materially to the wonderful successes of the armies of France. In 1794 he was president of the convention; but in the following year his severities had rendered him unpopular; and when Legendre moved his arrest in the convention, he was saved by the exclamation of a member, "This is the man who organized victory in the French armies." Afterwards Carnot became one of the five directors of the republic, and was the author of the Plan for the Invasion of England, by landing two armies simultaneously on the coasts of Sussex and Yorkshire. In this tract he stated that walls and hedges, instead of being a defence, would aid the advance of a disciplined enemy; and maintained that open plains would give us greater advantages, by permitting the superiority of our cavalry and horse artillery to have full effect; while he greatly underrated the efforts of an irregular force, animated by a love of home, and of national independence. Soon afterwards Carnot was proscribed, and compelled to take refuge in Germany, where, though under the protection of a monarch, he published his Mémoire Justificatif, in which he declares himself the "irreconcilable enemy of kings." This memoir hastened the fall of the Directory, already shaken by its vices and its crimes. On its downfall he returned to France, and he was minister of war in 1800, but soon resigned his office; having, with a consistency then not common, opposed the consulship for life; and afterwards the imperial title to Bonaparte, when Carnot, as one of the tribunate, he persisted in refusing to affix his name to the registers.

Carnot now devoted himself to the peaceful pursuits of science. He was an active member of the Institute. His best production in this field, perhaps, is the Réflexions sur la Métaphysique du Calcul Infinitesimal; next to that we would place his Principes Fondamentaux d'Équilibre et de Mouvement—works of great originality and power. His work De la Défense des Plaques Portes is far less esteemed by competent judges. From the Institute he was twice expelled; first, through the influence of the Directory, and secondly, on the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814. On Napoleon's reverses in the Russian campaign, he offered his services to his country, and was made governor of Antwerp, which he defended till the abdication in 1814, when he retired to Germany. On Napoleon's return from Elba, he was minister of war; but on the overthrow of the emperor of the French, Carnot retired first to Warsaw, and finally to Magdeburg, where he died in 1823.

The republican principles of Carnot, and the stern severity of his temper, impressed the lines of his countenance, and indicated the cruelty of which he has too justly been accused; but he did not disgrace himself by the peculation of which his brother directors of the republic cannot be acquitted.