After time spent as a prisoner of war in Britain, Lally voluntarily returned to France to face charges where he was beheaded for his alleged failures in India.

He was born at Romans-sur-Isère, Dauphiné,[1] the son of Sir Gerald Lally,[2] an Irish Jacobite from Tuam, County Galway, who married a French lady of noble family.

Entering the French army in 1721, he served in the War of the Polish Succession against Austria; he was present at the Battle of Dettingen,[4] and commanded the regiment de Lally in the famous Irish brigade at Fontenoy (May 1745).

He reached Pondicherry in April 1758,[3] and within six weeks had pushed the British back from the coast to Madras (in modern-day Chennai), the headquarters of the English East India Company.

A piece written by Dr. Louis, as cited in Daniel Arasse's "The Guillotine and the Terror," recounts that during the execution, Lally knelt blindfolded and Charles-Henri Sanson struck him on the back of the neck.

[11] By one Felicity Crofton,[12] Lally had a legitimised son and heir, Trophime-Gérard, later Marquis de Lally-Tollendal, a distinguished French statesman who (as further described below) subsequently devoted much time and energy to the rehabilitation of his father's memory.

There is an account that the shame of military failure was originally so great that this son was brought up in total ignorance of who his father had been, and only inadvertently discovered the truth of his background at the age of fifteen.

Louis XV tried to throw the responsibility for what was undoubtedly a judicial murder on his ministers and the public, but his policy needed a scapegoat, and he was probably well content not to exercise his authority to save an almost friendless foreigner.

[3] The family records of his executioner stated that, while the charge of treason was clearly baseless, those of abuse of power, violence against the administrators of the colony and his soldiers, and cruelty to the natives, had ample witnesses.

Still, it took discussion in thirty-two sessions before, in 1778, the Royal Council agreed to annul the proceedings against Lally, though the case still had to be referred to the Parlement of Rouen for formal overturning.

Deeply moved, Voltaire wrote to him: "The dying man has been revived by learning this great news; he embraces M. de Lally very tenderly; he sees that the king is the defender of justice.