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Charles Auguste de Tornaco

Luxembourgish mayor (1763-1837)

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 20, 2026
Entity authorityQ15053678 ↗
Source-derived summary

Baron Charles Auguste de Tornaco de Vervoz (12 December 1763 – 10 December 1837) was a Luxembourgish industrialist and politician. He was born and died at the castle of Vervoz near Clavier, Liège.

The Tornaco family came from Sanem. In 1738, Emperor Charles VI had ennobled them by creating them Barons, for their services in the Habsburg Netherlands. Charles-Auguste was the youngest son of Baron Jean-Théodore de Tornaco.

In his early life, he was a cuirassier officer in the Austrian military. He left the army to become a noble member of the second chamber of the Dutch Estates-General.

Under the French occupation, Napoleon named him mayor of Luxembourg City by decree on 5 April 1811, an office he held until June 1814. He cared for the good of the city with a deep sense of duty, and also managed to represent the city's interests to the occupying forces. Of particular note is his care for the typhus-afflicted soldiers in the city.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Charles Auguste de Tornaco” is luxembourgish mayor (1763-1837). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Charles, Auguste and Tornaco, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1763, 1837, 1738, 1811—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1763-12-12. For this dossier, Charles, Auguste and Tornaco is the immediate research focus.
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The phrase “luxembourgish mayor (1763-1837)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15053678. VIAF identifies the subject as 71145003781861340205. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1763, 1837, 1738 and 1811.

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This entry incorporates text from “Charles Auguste de Tornaco” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.