Louis-Joseph de Montcalm

French general

• Born: February 28, 1712
• Birthplace: Candiac, France
• Died: September 14, 1759
• Place of death: Quebec City (now in Quebec, Canada)

Montcalm assumed command of the French forces in North America in 1756. With the 1756 entrance of the English into the ongoing French and Indian War, the Seven Years’ War began. Montcalm won important battles against the English at Oswego, Fort William Henry, and Fort Ticonderoga, but he lost his last battle and his life on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City. This final defeat led to the demise of New France.

Early Life

The eldest son of a noble military family, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm (mohn-kahlm) was also a scholar. He was not quite a child prodigy like his younger brother, who unfortunately died at the age of seven. The older Montcalm was accused by his own tutor of being opinionated and stubborn, but he applied himself dutifully to his Greek, Latin, and history and enjoyed such pursuits his whole life. He began his active military career in 1732, serving in the Rhineland during the War of the Polish Succession with armies commanded by Maurice, comte de Saxe, and the marechal duke of Berwick.

In 1736 he married Angelique-Louise Talon de Boulay, whose family also belonged to the French nobility of the robe. The couple had ten children, but only five of them survived to adulthood. Montcalm appears to have been devoted to his family, made especially clear by the letters he sent home during his service in New France at the end of his life.

In his early military career, he also fought in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), where he was wounded in the Siege of Prague. He became a colonel in 1743 and was made a knight of Saint-Louis the following year. He was wounded and taken prisoner in the crushing Italian victory at Piacenza in June of 1746. Released in a prisoner of war exchange, he returned to the front and was again wounded in the Battle of Assiette in the Italian Alps. By this time, Montcalm had participated in eleven campaigns and had been wounded five times. He was awarded a pension in 1753.

Life’s Work

France had been at peace and Louis-Joseph de Montcalm enjoyed the life of a provincial nobleman for a number of years, but he was called to active duty again when war with England started in 1756. The commander of the regular French army in America, baron de Dieskau, had been wounded and captured in a battle near Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York. Montcalm was asked to assume this command, and his place in history is based on his performance for the next three years in this role.

Arriving in Canada in the spring of 1756, he immediately began consultations with the governor general, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, about an assault on the English fort at Oswego on Lake Ontario. Because of a personality clash and the competitive nature of their virtually equal status in the French hierarchy, the relationship between these two men was strained from the beginning. Still, New France did very well in the war during the first two years of Montcalm’s leadership.

The victory at Oswego secured French control of Lake Ontario. That area of English influence had been the missing link in a chain of French military emplacements, which encircled the British colonies in the New World. Roughly, the chain traced the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes west; then it followed the Mississippi River south to the Gulf of Mexico. The British presence in North America at this time was confined to a narrow strip of settlements along the east coast. Unfortunately for the French and Montcalm, the population of the British colonies outnumbered the French on the Continent by more than fourteen to one.

The British colonies, though, were fragmented and quarrelsome. At first, they could not react together in a timely fashion to military pressure exerted by the French and their indigenous allies. However, after the surrender of Fort William Henry in August of 1757, there was a massacre of more than five hundred prisoners, despite the best efforts of Montcalm and others to prevent it. This tragedy motivated the beginning of a sense of urgency among British colonists, which was effectively organized and supported by the new secretary of state in England, William Pitt the Elder. Victories by the British at Louisbourg in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and at Fort Duquesne, where the city of Pittsburgh is now located, began to turn the tide against New France.

The critical confrontation took place in the summer of 1759 at Quebec City. By this time, Montcalm commanded all forces in America, Canadian and indigenous as well as French regular troops. Assisted by captured French-Canadian pilots, the British Royal Navy negotiated the hazardous passage up the St. Lawrence River with eighty-five hundred well-trained British regular troops and arrived at Quebec City in June. Altogether, Montcalm had almost twice as many men under his command, but most of them were poorly organized militia and indigenous troops. The ensuing standoff lasted all summer.

Montcalm’s forces occupied the high ground overlooking the river where the Chateau Frontenac Hotel now stands, a seemingly impregnable position. Major-General James Wolfe, the British commander, considered the natural strength of the terrain to be his most formidable enemy. Finally, on September 13, a desperate gamble by Wolfe paid off. A sizable force was able to land at Anse au Foulon and ascend the steep cliff there undetected. In the morning, forty-five hundred British regulars confronted Montcalm’s forces on the Plains of Abraham.

Montcalm’s troops were weary, inexperienced, and nervous. In addition, Montcalm was unsure of support from his rival, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, who controlled needed reinforcements. Therefore, Montcalm decided to gamble and attack the British without delay. He has often been criticized for this move because his troops were routed, the battle was decisively lost, and Montcalm was fatally wounded.

Significance

James Wolfe also was killed on the Plains of Abraham, but because of the British victory, his place in history is much less ambiguous than that of Louis-Joseph de Montcalm. The ongoing rivalry between Vaudreuil and Montcalm still attracts partisans on both sides. In France, Montcalm has been awarded the honors of a fallen hero, but historians in Canada tend to favor Vaudreuil. On balance, the corruption in the French court of King Louis XV at the time, which also reached into the ruling elite of New France, was probably impossible for either man to rise above.

The French and Indian War, known as the Seven Years’ War beginning in 1756, was a relatively minor part of the major conflict in Europe at the time, involving France and England. The war was not going well for the side to which France rallied. Sufficient resources could not be spared for the North American theater.

New France survived another year after Montcalm’s death, until Vaudreuil signed the Capitulation of Montreal on September 8, 1760, and Canada became part of the British Empire. The battle on the Plains of Abraham had been the decisive turning point, and that defeat is still memorialized in Quebecer folklore. The inscription on automobile license plates in Quebec reads, je me souviens, meaning “I remember,” and refers indirectly to Montcalm’s last battle. In fact, Quebec’s desire for independence from English domination remains a major factor in Canadian politics into the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Casgrain, H. R. Wolfe and Montcalm. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1964. First published in 1905, this account presents a traditional clerical view of Montcalm and his period.

Dorn, W. L. Competition for Empire, 1740-1763. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940. An excellent treatment of the European aspects of the conflict.

Fregault, Guy. Canada: The War of the Conquest. Toronto, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 1969. The military history of this period from a French Canadian perspective.

Kennet, Lee. The French Armies in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Military Organization and Administration. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967. A sound and concise examination of the logistics of this conflict.

Leckie, Robert. A Few Acres of Snow. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999. Chronicles the struggle between England and France for domination in North America from 1689 to 1759, without taking a political position.

MacLeod, Peter. The Canadian Iroquois and the Seven Years’ War. Toronto, Ont.: Dundurn Press, 1996. Details the Iroquois alliance with Montcalm and the French.

Parkman, Francis. Montcalm and Wolfe: The Decline and Fall of the French Empire in North America. Toronto, Ont.: Collier-Macmillan, 1962. This dramatic account of the French and Indian War from the point of view of the English colonies was originally published in 1884.

Stacey, C. P. Quebec, 1759: The Siege and the Battle. Toronto, Ont.: Macmillan, 1959. An excellent study of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, which resulted in the death of Montcalm and led to the demise of New France.