The Great Condé

French military leader

• Born: September 8, 1621
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: December 11, 1686
• Place of death: Fontainebleau, France

Condé played an important role in the struggle for royal absolutism, initially supporting the royal cause during the Fronde, then rebelling against the king. After reconciliation, he continued to serve as a successful and innovative military commander. He was part of the movement to abandon the old feudal levies in exchange for a tightly organized and highly trained and disciplined standing royal army. Condé was an expert tactician in the field.

Early Life

The princes of Condé (kohn-day) were members of the most important cadet branch of the ruling Bourbon family of France, descended through Duke Charles IV of Bourbon. Two sixteenth century ancestors were Huguenot leaders, but Henri I renounced Calvinism during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 to save his life. The family continued to play important roles until the dethronement of Charles X in 1830, when Louis-Henri-Joseph committed suicide. The son of the above, Louis-Antoine-Henri, the duke of Enghien, had been executed on Napoleon I’s orders in 1804, ending the Condé line.

Louis II de Bourbon, the duke of Enghien, a title the line’s oldest male member held from birth, was a youth of such violent and moody temper that some questioned his sanity and his ability to function as an adult. By age twenty, however, he appeared to have outgrown the worst of these shortcomings, though he continued to be an extremely arrogant and undiplomatic individual, showing little tolerance for persons of lesser ability. Following the death of his father in 1646, he inherited the rank of “Premier Prince of the Blood,” becoming the fourth prince of Condé. As a young boy, he received a thorough education from the Jesuits at Bourges in central France and at the Royal Academy in Paris, where he was taught mathematics and horsemanship.

Though of high nobility, Louis, twenty years old, had to enter into an unhappy marriage with the thirteen-year-old hunchbacked Claire-Clémence de Maillé-Brézé, a niece of Cardinal de Richelieu, Louis XIII’s prime minister, to gain a military command. Richelieu believed him to be more trustworthy than most of the king’s generals and named him commander in chief of an ill-trained and poorly disciplined French force on the Flemish frontier late in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). At this point, the emphasis in the Thirty Years’ War had shifted from Germany to northeastern France. Louis, though he had no prior military experience or formal military training, immediately set about to train and instill discipline in his force, a task in which he was ably supported by two officers who had earlier served under King Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden.

Life’s Work

Condé won his first major victory in defeating a Spanish army that had besieged the border fortress of Rocroi, near Sedan, only five days after Louis XIV’s accession to the throne. Rocroi, often considered the most important French victory of the seventeenth century, was won by the French cavalry, well supported by field artillery (though the French had only twelve, as opposed to twenty-eight, Spanish guns), over the famous Spanish infantry, marking the beginning of the end of Spain’s military prestige. Of the eighteen thousand Spanish infantry involved in the battle, eight thousand were killed and seven thousand captured (total Spanish casualties amounted to twenty-one thousand out of twenty-seven thousand men). French casualties numbered four thousand of about twenty-three thousand men engaged. The Spanish never again fielded infantry as good as the troops lost there. Condé continued to enhance his martial reputation during the last years of the Thirty Years’ War, winning several significant victories in southwestern Germany. During this period, he served alongside his famous contemporary and sometime rival, Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, viscount de Turenne.

It was during this period that the French army adopted the new tactics of concentrated fire and rapid movements. Condé became a master of these tactics, which supplemented Turenne’s strategic ability. Condé was instrumental in furthering the new concepts of a rigidly disciplined and thoroughly trained army, as opposed to the old, poorly organized, and inadequately equipped and trained feudal levies. The old matchlock musket was replaced with the flintlock musket, and the formerly rather independent artillery was more fully integrated into the army, which was now composed of about 75 percent infantry, deemphasizing cavalry. Condé employed his rather mobile field artillery in a more concentrated fashion, following the example of Gustavus, providing more effective support for both infantry and cavalry. The number of camp followers, especially women, was substantially reduced, and the army became more national in makeup and spirit. Increasingly, the power and security of the state depended on the new royal standing army, which in France was carefully and strictly supervised by the war office, progressively replacing the formerly powerful feudal levies, largely controlled by the high nobles of the realm.

France emerged from the Thirty Years’ War with the most powerful European army and with expanded borders, though the war with Spain continued until 1659. During the final phase of the Thirty Years’ War, however, France faced a most serious internal challenge to royal power and national unity in the form of the Fronde (1648-1653).

The initial phase of the Fronde was supported primarily by the middle class and the parlementaires (judges and lawyers of the Paris law court), who were struggling to maintain traditional power distributions within government against the growth of royal absolutism. Condé, still serving in Germany until the Treaty of Westphalia (October, 1648), which ended the Thirty Years’ War, initially supported the royal cause. Following the peace in Germany, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, Richelieu’s successor, fearing the power and following of the ambitious Condé, sent him first against Spain and then against the Spanish Netherlands. The war with Spain continued until 1659. Upon his return, Condé besieged rebellious Paris with an army of fifteen thousand and was instrumental in ending the first Fronde in the king’s favor. As a result of disagreements with Mazarin, Condé fell into royal disfavor. Condé believed that he, not Mazarin, was the true savior of the king’s power and demanded a greater role in government as well as high rewards. Condé was arrested in January, 1650, and imprisoned for about a year.

Pressure from the noble party forced his release, but bitter disagreements continued, and Condé led the second Fronde, the Fronde of the Princes, believing that he should replace Mazarin as the king’s chief minister. Because of his undiplomatic arrogance and his quarrel with Queen Anne of Austria (the widow of Louis XIII and regent for her young son Louis XIV), Condé’s opponents were able to maneuver him into open rebellion against Louis XIV, who had recently been declared of age. At this time, the monopoly of military power had not yet fully shifted to royal hands, and the great nobles of the realm still held large estates with great wealth and their own powerful military forces.

Condé raised an antiroyal army in southern France, while Turenne, who had briefly joined the Fronde, returned his loyalties to the Crown. The Fronde of the Princes, similar to the earlier Fronde, failed to gain popular support and brought France to the brink of anarchy. The frondeurs’ goals were selfish and designed to benefit the aristocracy, rather than establish true constitutional government, in imitation of the English model, as frequently claimed. The frondeurs were also hindered in their struggle by their own, typically feudal inability to form a clear and lasting alliance, and by Condé’s frequent shifts of allegiance and his lack of clear objectives. This was, in fact, the last serious attempt by the feudal aristocracy to halt the development of divine right royal absolutism. When Condé realized that power was slipping away from him, he fled to the Spanish Netherlands and for the next eight years served the Spanish. He served first in southern France and then in Flanders, though without notable success, partly because the Spanish never fully trusted him. Meanwhile Condé was sentenced in absentia to death for rebellion.

Following Condé’s desertion, the Fronde came to an inglorious end. Louis XIV had broken the power of the parlementaires and of the nobles in general, and had firmly established royal absolutism. Condé and other rebels received a general amnesty following the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. Condé regained all of his possessions and titles, though the king was initially reluctant to trust him fully. For the next few years, Condé lived at his estate of Chantilly about fifteen miles north of Paris and made it a center of the arts. Throughout his life, he had been a patron of the arts, and Chantilly attracted a literary circle that included Jean de La Fontaine , Molière, Jean Racine , and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet . In 1667, when John II Casimir Vasa abdicated as king of Poland, Condé was advanced as his successor, a proposal that alarmed the Prussians in particular, and Louis was able to use this threat to keep Prussia out of the War of Devolution .

Condé returned to military service in 1668, when he led the French forces that captured Franche-Comté in a swift, two-week campaign. In 1672, in the war against Holland, he commanded the French forces in the Rhineland and the Netherlands. Following the death in battle of Turenne on July 27, 1675, Condé, now in overall command of the French forces, successfully defended Alsace against imperial forces. Later that year, ill with gout, he retired to Chantilly, where he spent his remaining years. He died in 1686, following a religious deathbed conversion, after a life without religion, in which he had rebelled against religious as well as worldly authority. He is at times described as an aggressive atheist, though he favored religious tolerance.

Significance

The Great Condé, along with Turenne, was among the most outstanding and innovative military commanders of the seventeenth century, though he, contrary to most of his contemporary military geniuses, had no formal military training or apprenticeship. He was an enterprising and daring tactician, who inspired his troops. Condé adopted military concepts, developed by Gustavus II Adolphus and by Oliver Cromwell , which emphasized mobility and the more flexible use of field artillery, especially in combination with cavalry. Condé employed these methods as early as the Battle of Rocroi, which resulted in a stunning victory over Spain’s famous infantry. Following that battle, Condé was viewed as a model commander and teacher of these new concepts. During this period, however, strong fortifications increasingly dominated warfare, and it was in this latter area that Turenne’s greater strategic skills, based on patience and planning, gained greater success and reputation. The reforms introduced by these two great captains were ably advanced by the marquis de Louvois, one of France’s greatest ministers of war, who held that office from 1677 to 1691.

Condé’s role in the Fronde was designed to reverse the growth of royal absolutism and centralization of power in France and to preserve, or reestablish, traditional noble rights. His efforts failed, and he has to share in the blame for bringing France close to anarchy. His loyalty to the Crown, however, was firm and unchallenging following the amnesty of 1659.

Bibliography

Bannister, Mark. Condé in Context: Ideological Change in Seventeenth-Century France. Oxford, England: European Humanities Research Centre, 2002. Examines Condé’s significance to his contemporaries, who considered him a hero of the age.

Briggs, Robin. Early Modern France, 1560-1715. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. A general introductory history with several charts, an index, a glossary, and a six-page annotated bibliography.

Lynn, John A. Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610-1715. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. A comprehensive overview of army administration and tactics, including information about Condé and other military officials.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667-1714. London: Longman, 1999. A history of French military campaigns during the final years of Louis XIV’s reign, including information on Condé’s participation in these battles.

Montgomery of Alamein, Viscount. A History of Warfare. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1968. A general history of warfare, which places Condé and his times in a larger framework. Includes illustrations, maps, index, and short bibliography.

Ogg, David. Europe in the Seventeenth Century. 9th ed. London: A. C. Black, 1971. A standard history that still is of great value. Contains several maps, an index, and a ten-page bibliography.

Ranum, Orest. Paris in the Age of Absolutism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Chapter 10, “The Frondeurs,” is entirely devoted to the Fronde.

Wedgwood, C. V. The Thirty Years’ War. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1939. A standard history of the war, and an excellent treatment.