Jean Joseph Amable Humbert

General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert (August 22, 1755—January 3, 1823) was a French soldier, a participant in the French Revolution, who led a failed invasion of Ireland to assist Irish rebels in 1798.

Born in Saint-Nabord, Vosges, he was a sergeant in the National Guard of Lyon, and rapidly advanced through the ranks to become Brigadier General on April 9, 1794, and fought in the before being allocated to the Army of the Rhine.

Invasion of Ireland

In Ireland, although managing to land at Killala, meeting with initial success in the battle of Castlebar, and subsequently declaring a "Republic of Connaught", with hopes of even of taking Dublin, but his small force of was defeated at the battle of Ballinamuck and he was taken as a prisoner of war by the Kingdom of Great Britain. [See Guy Beiner, "Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory" (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007)]

He was shortly repatriated in a prisoner exchange, and later participated in several Caribbean campaigns for Napoleon Bonaparte, and was appointed governor of Saint Domingue (Haiti). A committed Republican, his displeasure at Napoleon's Imperial pretensions led to a fall from favour and exile to Brittany.

Coming under increasing scrutiny and fearful of arrest, Humbert escaped to the United States in 1808. He settled in New Orleans, once again fighting the British at the battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, and briefly participated in the Mexican War of Independence (on the revolutionaries' side) in 1814. He then lived peacefully as a schoolteacher until his death in New Orleans.

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