Charles Nicolas Fabvier

Charles Nicolas Fabvier (10 December 1782 – 15 September 1855) was an ambassador, general and French member of parliament who played a distinguished role in the Greek War of Independence.

Career under Napoleon He was born at Pont-à-Mousson in Meurthe and was a student at the École Polytechnique before joining the 1st Artillery Regiment in Napoleon’s army in Germany in 1804. He participated in the 1805 Ulm Campaign, and was wounded in the battle of Dürenstein. In 1807, he was part of the French military mission to the Ottoman Sultan Selim III, tasked with shoring up the defences of Constantinople. Fabvier then managed to join the diplomatic mission of General Charles Mathieu Gardanne, Napoleon's envoy to Persia, who tried to combat British and Russian influence in the region. Fabvier was tasked with creating an artillery school and arsenal at Esfahān, and was awarded the newly constituted Order of the Lion and the Sun for his efforts. In 1823 he decided to leave France and went to Greece, to help the Greeks during their ongoing War of Independence. His first task was the supervision of the fortifications of Navarino. Then he travelled to Britain to drum up support among the Philhellenes. Returning again to Greece, he was appointed head of the small Greek regular army, with which he participated in several battles, most notably the Siege of the Acropolis of Athens in 1826. In 1828, he returned to France, only to return to Greece alongside the French Morea expedition. For his services during the Greek War of Independence, the Third National Assembly at Troezen declared Fabvier an honorary Greek citizen in 1827, and he was later awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of the Redeemer by King Otho I.

In 1830, he returned to France and took part in the July Revolution. Initially chief of staff to General Étienne Maurice Gérard, on 4 August Fabvier was named military commander of Paris. In 1831, he resigned his commission and retired with the rank Lieutenant General. Fabvier was made a peer of France in 1845, and in 1848, he was sent as the French ambassador to Constantinople, and thereafter to Denmark. Back in France he was elected to the National Assembly of France as a representative of Meurthe. There he sided with the conservative group of the assembly. He retired from public life on 2 December 1851, and died in Paris four years later.