At the age of sixteen, he joined the staff command of General Clarck, upon the departure of Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul, for the Marengo campaign, where French forces defeated the Austrian army on 14 June 1800, forcing them to withdraw from Italy west of Ticino. His later political and administrative education flourished as a student of Alexandre Theodore Victor, Comte de Lameth, with whom he formed a very close friendship. Lameth was a young nobleman who served in the American Revolutionary War of Independence, became a French revolutionary but later aligned with Napoleon under the Empire, and the Bourbons under the French Restoration.