His son, Victor Ambroise, Vicomte de Lanjuinais (1802-1869), was also a politician, becoming a deputy in 1838. His interests lay chiefly in financial questions and in 1849 he became minister of commerce and agriculture in the cabinet of Odilon Barrot. He wrote a Notice historique sur la vie et les ouvrages du comte de Lanjuinais, which was prefixed to an edition of his father’s Œuvres (4 vols., 1832).
For the life of the comte de Lanjuinais see also A. Robert and G. Cougny, Dictionnaire des parlementaires, vol. ii. (1890); and F. A. Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Législative et de la Convention (Paris, 1885-1886). For a bibliography of his works see J. M. Quérard, La France littéraire, vol. iii. (1829).
LANMAN, CHARLES ROCKWELL (1850- ), American Sanskrit scholar, was born in Norwich, Connecticut, on the 8th of July 1850. He graduated at Yale in 1871, was a graduate student there (1871-1873) under James Hadley and W. D. Whitney, and in Germany (1873-1876) studied Sanskrit under Weber and Roth and philology under Georg Curtius and Leskien. He was professor of Sanskrit at Johns Hopkins University in 1876-1880 and subsequently at Harvard University. In 1889 he travelled in India and bought for Harvard University Sanskrit and Prākrit books and manuscripts, which, with those subsequently bequeathed to the university by Fitzedward Hall, make the most valuable collection of its kind in America, and made possible the Harvard Oriental Series, edited by Professor Lanman. In 1879-1884 he was secretary and editor of the Transactions, and in 1889-1890 president of the American Philological Association, and in 1884-1894 he was corresponding secretary of the American Oriental Society, in 1897-1907 vice-president, and in 1907-1908 president. In the Harvard Oriental Series he translated (vol. iv.) into English Rājaçekhara’s Karpūra-Mañjarī (1900), a Prākrit drama, and (vols. vii. and viii.) revised and edited Whitney’s translation of, and notes on, the Atharva-Veda Samhitā (2 vols., 1905); he published A Sanskrit Reader, with Vocabulary and Notes (2 vols., 1884-1888); and he wrote on early Hindu pantheism and contributed the section on Brahmanism to Messages of the World’s Religions.
LANNES, JEAN, duke of Montebello (1769-1809), marshal of France, was born at Lectoure (Gers) on the 11th of April 1769. He was the son of a livery stables keeper, and was apprenticed to a dyer. He had had little education, but his great strength and proficiency in all manly sports caused him in 1792 to be elected sergeant-major of the battalion of volunteers of Gers, which he had joined on the breaking out of war between Spain and the French republic. He served through the campaigns in the Pyrenees in 1793 and 1794, and rose by distinguished conduct to the rank of chef de brigade. However, in 1795, on the reform of the army introduced by the Thermidorians, he was dismissed from his rank. He re-enlisted as a simple volunteer in the army of Italy, and in the famous campaign of 1796 he again fought his way up to high rank, being eventually made a general of brigade by Bonaparte. He was distinguished in every battle, and was wounded at Arcola. He was chosen by Bonaparte to accompany him to Egypt as commander of one of Kléber’s brigades, in which capacity he greatly distinguished himself, especially on the retreat from Syria. He went with Bonaparte to France, assisted at the 18th Brumaire, and was appointed general of division, and commandant of the consular guard. He commanded the advanced guard in the crossing of the Alps in 1800, was instrumental in winning the battle of Montebello, from which he afterwards took his title, and bore the brunt of the battle of Marengo. In 1801 Napoleon sent him as ambassador to Portugal. Opinions differ as to his merits in this capacity; Napoleon never made such use of him again. On the establishment of the empire he was created a marshal of France, and commanded once more the advanced guard of a great French army in the campaign of Austerlitz. At Austerlitz he had the left of the Grand Army. In the 1806-07 campaign he was at his best, commanding his corps with the greatest credit in the march through the Thuringian Forest, the action of Saalfeld (which is studied as a model to-day at the French Staff College) and the battle of Jena. His leadership of the advanced guard at Friedland was even more conspicuous. He was now to be tried as a commander-in-chief, for Napoleon took him to Spain in 1808, and gave him a detached wing of the army, with which he won a victory over Castaños at Tudela on November 22. In January 1809 he was sent to attempt the capture of Saragossa, and by February 21, after one of the most stubborn defences in history, was in possession of the place. Napoleon then created him duc de Montebello, and in 1809, for the last time, gave him command of the advanced guard. He took part in the engagements around Eckmühl and the advance on Vienna. With his corps he led the French army across the Danube, and bore the brunt, with Masséna, of the terrible battle of Aspern-Essling (q.v.). On the 22nd of May he had to retreat. During the retreat Lannes exposed himself as usual to the hottest fire, and received a mortal wound, to which he succumbed at Vienna on the 31st of May. As he was being carried from the field to Vienna he met the emperor hurrying to the front. It was reported that the dying man reproached Napoleon for his ambition, but this rests on little evidence save the fact that Lannes was the most blunt and outspoken of all Napoleon’s marshals. He was one of the few men for whom the emperor felt a real and deep affection, and at this their last meeting Napoleon gave way to a passionate burst of grief, even in the midst of the battle. His eldest son was made a peer of France by Louis XVIII.
Lannes ranks with Davout and Masséna as the ablest of all Napoleon’s marshals, and consciously or unconsciously was the best exponent of the emperor’s method of making war. Hence his constant employment in tasks requiring the utmost resolution and daring, and more especially when the emperor’s combinations depended upon the vigour and self-sacrifice of a detachment or fraction of the army. It was thus with Lannes at Friedland and at Aspern as it was with Davout at Austerlitz and Auerstädt, and Napoleon’s estimate of his subordinates’ capacities can almost exactly be judged by the frequency with which he used them to prepare the way for his own shattering blow. Routine generals with the usual military virtue, or careful and exact troop leaders like Soult and Macdonald, Napoleon kept under his own hand for the final assault which he himself launched, but the long hours of preparatory fighting against odds of two to one, which alone made the final blow possible, he entrusted only to men of extraordinary courage and high capacity for command. In his own words, he found Lannes a pigmy, and lost him a giant. Lannes’s place in his affections was never filled.
See R. Périn, Vie militaire de Jean Lannes (Paris, 1809).
LANNION, a town of north-western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Côtes-du-Nord, on the right bank of the Léguer, 45 m. W.N.W. of St Brieuc by rail. Pop. (1906) 5336. Lannion is 5 m. in direct line from the mouth of the Léguer; its port does a small trade (exports of agricultural produce, imports of wine, salt, timber, &c.), and there is an active fishing industry. The town contains many houses of the 15th and 16th centuries and other old buildings, the chief of which is the church of St Jean-du-Baly (16th and 17th centuries). On an eminence close to Lannion is the church of Brélevenez of the 12th century, restored in the 15th or 16th century; it has an interesting 16th-century Holy Sepulchre.