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Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condé (8 September 1621 – 11 December 1686) was a French general and the most famous representative of the Condé branch of the House of Bourbon. Prior to his father's death in 1646, he was styled the duc d'Enghien. For his military prowess he was renowned as le Grand Condé. Louis was born in Paris, the son of Henri de Bourbon, prince de Condé and Charlotte Marguerite de Montmorency. His father was a first cousin - once - removed of Henri IV, the King of France, and his mother was an heiress of one of France's leading ducal families. Conde's father saw to it that his son received a thorough education – Louis studied history, law, and mathematics during six years at the Jesuits' school at Bourges. After that he entered the Royal Academy at Paris. At seventeen, in the absence of his father, he governed Burgundy. His father betrothed him to Claire-Clémence de Maillé-Brézé, niece of the powerful Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of the king, before he joined the army in 1640. Despite being barely twenty years of age and in love with Mlle du Vigean (Marthe Poussard, called mademoiselle du Vigean, daughter of the king's gentleman of the bedchamber François Poussard, marquis de Fors and baron du Vigean, by his wife Anne de Neubourg, daughter of Roland, sieur de Sercelles), he was compelled by his father to marry his fiancée, a child of thirteen. Although she bore her husband three children, Enghien later claimed she committed adultery with different men in order to justify locking her away at Châteauroux, but the charge was widely disbelieved: Saint-Simon, while admitting that she was homely and dull, praised her virtue, piety and gentleness in the face of relentless abuse. Enghien took part with distinction in the siege of Arras. He also won Richelieu's favor when he was present with the Cardinal during the plot of Cinq Mars, and afterwards fought in the siege of Perpignan (1642). In
1643 Enghien was appointed to command against the Spanish in northern
France. He was opposed by experienced generals, and the veterans of the
Spanish army were held to be the toughest soldiers in Europe. The great Battle of Rocroi (19
May) put an end to the supremacy of the Spanish army and inaugurated
the long period of French military predominance. Enghien himself
conceived and directed the decisive attack, and at the age of
twenty-two won his place amongst the great generals of modern times.
The king he represented on the battlefield, Louis XIV of France, was only five years old at the time. After
a campaign of uninterrupted success, Enghien returned to Paris in
triumph, and tried to forget his enforced and hateful marriage with a
series of affairs (after Richelieu's death in 1642 he would
unsuccessfully seek annulment of his marriage in hopes of marrying Mlle du Vigean, until she joined the order of the Carmelites in 1647). In 1644 he was sent with reinforcements into Germany to the assistance of Turenne, who was hard pressed, and took command of the whole army. The Battle of Freiburg (August) was desperately contested, but in the end the French army won a great victory over the Bavarians and Imperialists, commanded by Franz Baron von Mercy. As after Rocroi, numerous fortresses opened their gates to the duke. Enghien
spent the next winter, as every winter during the war, amid the
gaieties of Paris. The summer campaign of 1645 opened with the defeat
of Turenne by Mercy at Mergentheim, but this was retrieved in the brilliant victory of Nördlingen, in which Mercy was killed, and Enghien himself received several serious wounds. The capture of Philippsburg was the most important of his other achievements during this campaign. In 1646 Enghien served under Gaston, Duke of Orléans in Flanders, and when, after the capture of Mardyck, Orléans returned to Paris, Enghien, left in command, captured Dunkirk (11 October). It
was in this year that Enghien's father died, leaving him the fourth of
his line and second of his name to bear the title Prince of
Condé. He also now became premier prince du sang, addressed by everyone, from the king down, simply as Monsieur le prince. The enormous power that fell into his hands was naturally looked upon with serious alarm by the Regent and
her minister. Condé's birth and military renown placed him at
the head of the French nobility, but, added to that, the family of
which he was now chief was both enormously rich and master of a large
part of France. Condé himself held Burgundy, Berry and the marches of Lorraine, as well as other less important territory. His brother, the Prince de Conti held Champagne, and his brother-in-law, Longueville, Normandy. The government, therefore, was determined to allow no increase of his already overgrown authority, and Mazarin made
an attempt, which for the moment proved successful, both to find him
employment and to tarnish his fame as a general. He was sent to lead the revolted Catalans. Ill supported, he was unable to achieve anything, and, being forced to raise the siege of Lleida, he returned home in bitter indignation. In 1648, however, he received the command in the important field of the Low Countries, and at Lens (19
August) a battle took place, which, beginning with a panic in his own
regiment, was retrieved by Condé's coolness and bravery, and
ended in a victory that fully restored his prestige. In September of the same year Condé was recalled to court, for the Regent Anne of Austria required his support. Influenced by the fact of his royal birth and by his scorn for the bourgeoisie,
Condé lent himself to the court party, and finally, after much
hesitation, he consented to lead the army which was to reduce Paris. On
his side, although his forces were insufficient, the war was carried on
with vigour. After several minor combats with substantial losses, and a
threatening scarcity of food, the Parisians were weary of the war. The
political situation inclined both parties to peace, which was made at
Rueil on 20 March. It was not long, however, before Condé became estranged from the court. His pride and ambition earned
him universal distrust and dislike, and the personal resentment of
Anne. She assented to the sudden arrest of Condé, Conti and
Longueville on 18 January 1650. But others, including Turenne and his
brother the Duke of Bouillon, made their escape. Vigorous
attempts for the release of the princes began to be made. The women of
the family were now its heroes. The dowager princess demanded from the parlement of Paris fulfilment of the reformed law of arrest, which forbade imprisonment without trial. Condé's sister Anne Genevieve, duchesse de Longueville entered into negotiations with Spain; and the young Princess of Condé, having gathered an army around her, entered Bordeaux and gained the support of the parlement of
that town. She, alone among the nobles who took part in the folly of
the Fronde, earned respect and sympathy. Faithful to a faithless
husband, she came forth from the retirement to which he had condemned
her to fight for his freedom. The delivery of the princes was brought
about in the end by the coming together of the old Fronde (the party of
the parlement and of Cardinal de Retz)
and the new Fronde (the party of the Condés). Anne was at last,
in February 1651, forced to liberate the princes from their prison at Le Havre.
Soon afterwards, however, another shifting of parties left Condé
and the new Fronde isolated. With the court and the old Fronde in
alliance against him, Condé found no recourse but that of making
common cause with the Spaniards who were at war with France. The confused civil war which followed this step (September 1651) was memorable chiefly for the battle of the Faubourg St Antoine,
in which Condé and Turenne, two of the leading generals of the
age, measured their strength (2 July 1652). The army of the Prince was
only saved by being admitted within the gates of Paris. La Grande Mademoiselle, daughter of Gaston d'Orléans, persuaded the Parisians to act thus, and turned the cannon of the Bastille
on
Turenne's army. Thus Condé, who as usual had fought with the
most desperate bravery, was saved, and Paris underwent a new siege.
This ended in the flight of Condé to the Spanish army (September
1652), and thenceforward, up to the peace, he was in open arms against
France, and held high command in the army of Spain. Nonetheless, even
as an exile, he asserted the precedence of the royal house of France
over the princes of Spain and Austria, with whom he was allied for the
moment. Condé's
fully developed genius as a commander found little scope in the
cumbrous and antiquated system of war practised by the Spanish, and
though he gained a few successes, and manoeuvred with the highest
possible skill against Turenne, his disastrous defeat at the Dunes near Dunkirk (14 June 1658) led Spain to open negotiations for peace. The Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, which ended the Franco - Spanish War, pardoned Condé and allowed him to return to France. In 1664 he fought against the Ottomans in Hungary and took a stand in the Battle of Saint Gotthard. Condé
now realized that the period of agitation and party warfare was at an
end, and he accepted, and loyally maintained henceforward, the position
of a chief subordinate to Louis XIV. Even so, some years passed before he was recalled to active employment, and these years he spent on his estate, the Château de Chantilly. Here he gathered round him a brilliant company, which included many men of genius such as Molière, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Nicole, Bourdaloue and Bossuet. About
this time negotiations between the Poles, Condé and Louis were
carried on with a view to the election, at first of Condé's son
Enghien, and afterwards of Condé himself, to the throne of
Poland. These, after a long series of curious intrigues, were finally
closed in 1674 by the veto of Louis XIV and the election of John Sobieski. The Prince's retirement, which was only broken by the Polish question and by his personal intercession on behalf of Fouquet in 1664, ended in 1668. In that year he proposed to Louvois, the minister of war, a plan for seizing Franche-Comté,
the execution of which was entrusted to him and successfully carried
out. He was now completely re-established in the favour of Louis, and
with Turenne was the principal French commander in the celebrated
campaign of 1672 against the Dutch. At the forcing of the Rhine passage at Tolhuis (June 12), he received a severe wound, after which he commanded in Alsace against the Imperialists. In 1673 he was again engaged in the Low Countries, and in 1674 he fought his last great battle, the Battle of Seneffe, against the Prince of Orange (afterwards William III of England).
This battle, fought on August 11, was one of the hardest of the
century, and Condé, who displayed the reckless bravery of his
youth, had three horses killed under him. His last campaign was that of
1675 on the Rhine, where the army had been deprived of its general by
the death of Turenne; and where by his careful and methodical strategy
he repelled the invasion of the Imperial army of Montecuccoli. After this campaign, prematurely worn out by the toils and excesses of his life, and tortured by gout, Condé returned to Château de Chantilly, where he spent the eleven years that remained to him in quiet retirement. At the end of his life, Condé specially sought the companionship of Bourdaloue, Pierre Nicole and Bossuet,
and devoted himself to religious exercises. He died on 11 November 1686
at the age of sixty-five. Bourdaloue attended him at his death-bed, and
Bossuet pronounced his elegy. The Prince's lifelong resentment of his forced marriage to a social inferior persisted, and
found unchivalrous expression in a bitter letter, his last to the king,
in which he begged that his wife never be released from her exile to
the countryside. Nonetheless, Claire-Clémence de Maillé
had brought the Prince of Condé a dowry of 600,000 livres, the manors of
Ansac, Mouy, Cambronne, Plessis-Billebault, Galissonnière and
Brézé, and, on one occasion, liberation from the King's
dungeon. In 1685, his only surviving grandson, Louis de Bourbon, married Louise Françoise, Mademoiselle de Nantes - eldest surviving daughter of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan. In mid 1686, Louise Françoise (later better known as Madame la Duchesse) caught smallpox while at Fontainebleau;
it was the Prince himself who helped nurse the little Duchess back to
health, to the point of staying up with her to help her eat. The Prince
even forcibly stopped Louis XIV himself from seeing his daughter for
his own safety. Despite Louise Françoise surviving and giving
her husband ten children, the Prince himself became ill; most said it
was from worry about her health. He himself died at the Palace of Fontainebleau.
He was buried in the Église at Valléry, the traditional
burial place of the Princes of Condé; Claire-Clémence,
who outlived her husband, was buried at the Église Saint-Martin
at the Château de Châteauroux, France in 1694. His
son and grandson left little in history except they were afflicted by
the madness which they had inherited from Claire-Clémence. It is on his military character that the Grand Condé’s
fame rests. Unlike his great rival, Turenne, Condé was equally
brilliant in his first battle and in his last. The one failure of his
generalship was in the Spanish Fronde, and, in this, everything united
to thwart his genius; only on the battlefield itself was his personal
leadership as conspicuous as ever. That
he was capable of waging a methodical war of positions may be assumed
from his campaigns against Turenne and Montecucculi, the greatest
generals opposing him. But it was in his eagerness for battle, his
quick decision in action, and the stern will which sent his regiments
to face the heaviest losses, that Condé is exalted above all the
generals of his time. Upon the Grand Condé’s death, Louis XIV pronounced that he had lost "the greatest man in my kingdom." In 1643 his success at the Battle of Rocroi,
in which he led the French army to an unexpected and decisive victory
over the Spanish, established him as a great general and popular hero
in France. Together with the Marshal de Turenne he led the French to victory in the Thirty Years' War. During the Fronde,
he was courted by both sides, initially supporting Mazarin; he later
became a leader of the princely opposition. After the defeat of the
Fronde he entered Spanish service and led their armies against France.
He returned to France only after theTreaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, but soon received military commands again. Condé conquered the Franche-Comté during the War of Devolution and led the French armies in the Franco - Dutch War together
with Turenne. His last campaign was in 1675, taking command after
Turenne had been killed, repelling an invasion of an imperial army. He
is regarded as one of the premier generals in world history, whose
masterpiece, the Battle of Rocroi, is still studied by students of military strategy. |