Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé

Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé (September 8, 1621 – November 11, 1686) was the most celebrated representative of the Condé dynasty and one of the most brilliant soldiers of the 17th century. His military prowess won him the nickname "The Great Condé" (le Grand Condé), and he has been referred to as "the French Alexander".

Early life

Louis was born in Paris, the son of Charlotte-Marguerite de Montmorency. Charlotte was married to Henry II of Bourbon, making Louis a "prince of the blood", practically a member of the royal family. Louis may have inherited the French throne if Louis XIII of France had not claimed two other boys as heirs late in his life.Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality and Civilization. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2003.

As a boy, under his father's careful supervision, Louis studied history, law, and mathematics diligently at the Jesuits' College at Bourges. At seventeen, in the absence of his father, he governed Burgundy. The Duc d'Enghien, as he was styled during his father's lifetime, took part with distinction in the military campaigns of 1640 and 1641 in northern France while still under twenty years of age.

Despite his own rank in society, Enghien was disdainful of courtly custom in his youth. He joined a group of libertine poets, where the Abbé Saint Pavin greeted him with a poem comparing him to Julius Caesar: "For your honor I am jealous:/ this parallel gives me pain,/ Caesar, just between us,/ was also a bugger like you,/ but never so great a captain." Enghien also developed a passionate relationship with Marthe de Vigean.

However, during Enghien's youth all power in France was in the hands of Cardinal Richelieu. Even the princes of the blood had to yield to him, and Henry of Condé tried with the rest to win the Cardinal's favour. Young Enghien was forced to conform. In order to flatter the Cardinal, he was married by his father at the age of twenty, to Richelieu's niece, Claire Clémence de Maillé Brézé, a child of thirteen. Enghien further gained 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).

The arranged marriage to Richelieu's niece was not happy. Enghien later claimed she had sex with other men in order to justify locking her away at Châteauroux. Her contemporaries, greedy as they were of scandal, refused to believe this. Enghien's bitterness toward his wife was so great that the illustrious diarist Madame Elisabeth d'Orléans thought he didn't like women at all: "In the army he was used to young cavaliers; when he returned he could not tolerate women." Enghien's devoted friend and fellow general, the comte de Coligny-Saligny, claimed that Enghien was more attracted to men, while the famous courtesan, Ninon de Lenclos, who tried to seduce him, claimed he was not interested in sex at all. A popular Latin proverb said that "A hairy man is either strong or lustful"; Enghien was hairy, and Lenclos slyly commented that this must make him strong.

Success at Rocroi

Regardless of his personal life, Enghien was certainly the premier French soldier of his day. 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 (May 19) 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. 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 von Mercy. As after Rocroi, numerous fortresses opened their gates to the duke.

The next winter Enghien spent, like every other 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 the Duke of Orleans in Flanders, and when, after the capture of Mardyck, Orleans returned to Paris, Enghien, left in command, captured Dunkirk (October 11).

The Fronde

It was in this year that the old prince of Condé died. The enormous power that fell into the hands of his successor 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 Conti held Champagne, his brother-in-law, Longueville, Normandy.

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 March 20 (see Fronde).

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. Her policy caused the sudden arrest of Condé, Conti and Longueville on January 18, 1650. But others, including Turenne and his brother the duc de 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. The Duchess of 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, gained respect and sympathy. Faithful to a faithless husband, she came forth from the retirement to which he had condemned her, and gathered an army to fight for him.

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 resource 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 (July 2, 1652). The army of the prince was only saved by being admitted within the gates of Paris. La Grande Mademoiselle, daughter of the duke of Orleans, 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.

In 1655, Condé paused his fighting to meet with the abdicated queen Christina of Sweden in Antwerp. Possibly due to his now tenuous and very public position, the Prince disapproved of her openly rebellious views on religion and sexuality. But he did like her personally.

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 (June 14, 1658), in which an English contingent of Cromwell's veterans took part on the side of Turenne, led Spain to open negotiations for peace. After the peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, Condé obtained his pardon (January 1660) from Louis, who thought him less dangerous as a subject than as possessor of the independent sovereignty of Luxembourg, which had been offered him by Spain as a reward for his services.

Rehabilitation

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 a masterful sovereign. Even so, some years passed before he was recalled to active employment, and these years he spent on his estate at 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 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 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, Nicole and Bossuet, and devoted himself to religious exercises. He died on November 11, 1686 at the age of sixty-five. Bourdaloue attended him at his death-bed, and Bossuet pronounced his elegy. The Prince's lifelong disappointment of his forced marriage lingered in a bitter letter, his last to the king, where he asked that his wife never be released from her country exile.

Legacy

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." The splendid and brutal reign of Louis XIV, which would recreate Europe, was built to no small extent on the military prowess of Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé.