Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari
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Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, KCB, CSI, (1841-1879), British military administrator, was the son of the French general, the Count Louis Adolphus Cavagnari (1810-1899), by his marriage in 1837 with an Irish lady, Caroline Lyons-Montgomery. Cavagnari was born at Stenay, in the département of the Meuse, France, on the July 4, 1841.
He nevertheless obtained naturalization as an Englishman, and entered the military service of the East India Company. After passing through the college at Addiscombe, he served through the Oudh campaign against the mutineers in 1858 and 1859. In 1861 he was appointed an assistant commissioner in the Punjab, and in 1877 became deputy commissioner of Peshawar and took part in several expeditions against the hill tribes.
In September 1878 he was attached to the staff of a British mission to Kabul, which the Afghans refused to allow to proceed through the Khyber Pass. In May 1879, after the Indo-British Army had invaded Afghanistan, and the death of the amir Shere Ali, Cavagnari negotiated and signed the Treaty of Gandamak with Ali's son and successor, Yakub Khan. With this the Afghans agreed to admit a British resident to Kabul, and the post was conferred on Cavagnari, who also received the Star of India and was made a K.C.B. He took up his residence in July, and for a time all seemed to go well, but on the 3 September Cavagnari and the other European members of the mission, along with their guard made up of The Guides, were massacred in a sudden rising of mutinous Afghan troops.
Cavagnari was survived by his wife, Lady Cavagnari (formerly Mercy Ellen Graves), who he had married in 1871.
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- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
