Pierre-Louis Jean Casimir, Count of Blacas d'Aulps (10 January 1771 – 17 November 1839), later created 1st Duke of Blacas (1821), was a French antiquarian, nobleman and diplomat during the Bourbon Restoration.
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Biography
Early life
He was baptized at Avignon on 11 January 1771. He was the son of an aristocrat from Provence and took an opposing view of the French Revolution. In 1790, while a sous-lieutenant in the Noailles dragoons from Tarn, he fled across the Var to Nice in the Kingdom of Sardinia. From there, he went to the German frontier town of Coblenz and joined the counter-revolutionary émigré army of Louis XVI's cousin, the Prince of Condé. Later, he went through Italy before entering the service of Russia and fighting the French Republic in Switzerland under Alexander Suvorov.