Théophile Corret de la Tour d'Auvergne

Théophile Malo Corret de la Tour d'Auvergne (23 November 1743 – 28 June 1800) was a French officer named by Napoleon "first grenadier of France". He was also a celtomaniac antiquarian who introduced the words "dolmen" and "menhir" into general archaeological usage.

He was the son of a lawyer named Corret, and was certainly baptised and perhaps born at Carhaix-Plouguer in Brittany, though nearby Saint-Hernin where his father had a position is one of a number of other places in the area put forward as his place of birth. His desire for a military career being strongly marked, he was enabled by the not uncommon device of producing a certificate of nobility signed by his friends, first to be nominally enlisted in the Maison du Roi, and soon afterwards to receive a commission in the line, under the name of Corret de Kerbaufret. Four years after joining, in 1771, he assumed with the help of a letter from the Duke of Bouillon the surname of La Tour d'Auvergne, claiming descent from an illegitimate half-brother of the great Marshall Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne, one of Louis XIV's leading commanders. Many years of routine service with his regiment were broken only by his participation as a volunteer in the Duke de Crillon's Franco-Spanish expedition to Minorca in 1781. This led to an offer of promotion into the Spanish army, but he refused to change his allegiance.

In 1784 he was promoted captain, and in 1791 he received the Cross of St. Louis. In the early part of the French Revolution his patriotism was still more conspicuously displayed in his resolute opposition to the proposals of many of his brother officers in the Angoumois regiment to emigrate rather than to swear to the constitution, and he fought in the revolutionary army in the French Revolutionary Wars, refusing promotion beyond the grade of captain. In 1792 his lifelong interest in numismatics and questions of language was shown by a work which he published on the Bretons. At this time he was serving under Montesquiou in the Alps, and although there was only outpost fighting he distinguished himself by his courage and audacity, qualities which were displayed in more serious fighting in the Pyrenees the next year. He declined well-earned promotion to colonel, and, being broken in health and compelled, owing to the loss of his teeth, to live on milk, he left the army in 1795.

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