Pierre-François Bouchard

Pierre-François Bouchard (29 April 1771, Orgelet – 5 August 1822, Givet) was an officer in the French Army of engineers. He is most famous for discovering the Rosetta Stone, an important archaeological find that allowed Ancient Egyptian writing to be understood for the first time in centuries.

He was born in 1771 to Pierre Bouchard (a master joiner, then a businessman, then a merchant and finally a teacher) and his wife Pierrette Janet de Cressia, the youngest of their four daughters and 3 sons, all born in Orgelet (Jura). Pierre-François studied in the collège in Orgelet up until the classe de rhétorique, then spent two years studying philosophy and mathematics in the collège at Besançon. His military career began in 1793 as a sergent-major in a battalion of the Grenadiers de Paris. He was one of these famous "soldiers of Year II' and fought in Champagne and Belgium, before being sent to the École Nationale d' Aérostatique in 1794. He was made 'lieutenant des aérostiers' and taught maths as sous-directeur of this École, then based in Chalais-Meudon. There his right eye was badly damaged when a gas flask exploded during an experiment to produce hydrogen gas to inflate observation balloons – the experiment was led by Nicolas-Jacques Conté who lost his left eye. Conté held Bouchard in very high esteem and recommended him to Claude Louis Berthollet, one of the four founding fathers of the École Polytechnique, which Bouchard entered on 21 November 1796. There he studied descriptive geometry under Gaspard Monge and learned the art of fortification, until his studies were interrupted when he was taken on by the Ministry of War and attached as a lieutenant to the Egyptian expeditionary force on 20 April 1798.

Before embarking for Egypt, he married Marie Élisabeth Bergere on 23 April 1798 – she was a young woman from Meudon, five years his junior, with whom he much later had sex and two children. He then went to Toulon and on 19 May the same year board the Franklin. He landed in Egypt on 4 July after the capture of Alexandria and was then made a member of the Commission des Sciences et des Arts. Still under Conté's command, he was attached to a group of mechanical artists and ordered to investigate Egyptian crafts and techniques. He left Alexandria for Cairo on 7 September and, after a few weeks in Cairo, was on 3 October put under Antoine-François Andréossy's command as part of a team of geographers sent to investigate lake Menzalé between Damiette and Port-Saïd. Bouchard was only on this mission for forty days before going before the exit-panel of the École Polytechnique presided over by Monge, graduating in mid November. He was then promoted to engineer lieutenant, second class on 28 November 1798 and left the Commission des Sciences et des Arts to train in the army.

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