Charles Auguste Louis Joseph de Morny, 1st Duc de Morny (French pronunciation: [ʃaʁl oɡyst lwi ʒozɛf dəmɔʁni]; 15/16 September 1811 – 10 March 1865) was a French statesman.
Contents
Biography
Morny was born in Switzerland, and was the extra-marital son of Hortense de Beauharnais (the wife of Louis Bonaparte and queen of Holland) and Charles, Comte de Flahaut, making him half-brother of Emperor Napoleon III and grandson of Empress Joséphine and Talleyrand. His birth was duly registered in a misleading certificate, which made him the legitimate son of Auguste Jean Hyacinthe Demorny, and born in Paris on 23 October 1811, and described as a landowner of Saint-Domingue. M. Demorny was in fact an officer in the Prussian army and a native of the French colony of St. Domingue (now Haiti), though he owned no land there or elsewhere.
Morny was educated by his grandmother, Adelaïde Filleul. After a brilliant school and college career the future duc de Morny received a commission in the army, and the next year he entered the staff college. The comte de Morny, as he was called by a polite fiction, served in Algeria in 1834–1835 (during the French conquest of Algeria) as aide-de-camp to General Camille Alphonse Trezel, whose life he saved under the walls of Constantine.