Abstract EN:

As many other brave men between 1792 and 1815, La Tour d'Auvergne died with gallantry on the battlefield. As a simple subordinate officer, but also as the « First Grenadier of the Armies of the Republic » he was among those called « heroes » and celebrated as such throughout the 19th century.Known as an erudite man and admired for his virtues while he was still alive, one can acknowledge he wasn't a regular soldier. This thesis is not about the life of the man celebrated by many, but instead on the ways he was celebrated from the French Revolution until the Great War.In that objective, amongst all of the tools offered to us by social sciences that have rediscovered heroes and heroism over the past few years, this thesis prioritises the tool of admiration, which allows us to go over the usual heroisation-remembrance duo to give a better understanding of the mechanisms, the actors and the contexts of celebration.This process of « admiration » gives us the opportunity to understand that even if La Tour d'Auvergne was a minor hero, his glory, however, dawned so much upon him that it kept growing consistently. It also gives a better idea of the space national heroes take in the french « identitarian check-list » and thus in the process of national construction, but also republican consensus.Starting from this « case » documented by several sources, this thesis proposes the notion of « society of admiration » to describe the French society in the 19th century. To achieve that process, multiply the different scales as well as the overviews, focus on a few singular moments, and track the process of admiration for the « first grenadier » after 1918.