Benoît de Boigne

Benoît Leborgne (24 March 1751 – 21 June 1830), better known as Count Benoît de Boigne or General Count de Boigne, was a military adventurer from the Duchy of Savoy, who made his fortune and name in India with the Marathas. He was also named president of the general council of the French département of Mont-Blanc by Napoleon I.

The son of shopkeepers, Leborgne was a career military man. He was trained in European regiments and then became a success in India in the service of Mahadaji Sindhia of Gwalior in central India, who ruled over the Maratha Empire. Sindhia entrusted him with the creation and organization of an army. He became its general, and trained and commanded a force of nearly 100,000 men organized on the European model, which allowed the Maratha Empire to dominate north India and be the last native state of Hindustan to resist the British Empire. Along with his career in the army, Benoît de Boigne also worked in commerce and administration. Among other titles, he became a jaghirdar which gave him enormous land holdings in India.

After a turbulent life, Benoît de Boigne returned to Europe, first to England, where he married a French emigrant after having repudiated his first, Persian wife; then to France during the Consulate, and finally back to Savoy (then an independent kingdom). He devoted the end of his life to charity in Chambéry, where he was born. The king of Piedmont-Sardinia gave him the title of Count.

He was born at Chambéry in Savoy on 24 March 1751, the son of a fur merchant. His paternal grandfather, born at Burneuil in Picardy, moved to Chambéry, in the Dukedom of Savoy, at the beginning of the 18th century. In 1709 the grandfather married Claudine Latoud, born in 1682. They had thirteen children, of whom only four reached the age of twenty, and opened up a fur shop on rue Tupin in Chambéry.

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