Turenne: marshal of France

Turenne was a Protestant prince's son who became the sword of a Catholic king, a rebel who saved his sovereign's crown, and a cautious maneuverer who grew bolder with every year. Over half a century of war he fought in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France, often with small, ill-paid armies against stronger enemies. Napoleon, who studied his campaigns in exile, called him the greatest of French generals and the only one who became bolder with age.²

Early life

Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne was born at Sedan on 11 September 1611, a younger son of Henri, duc de Bouillon, sovereign prince of Sedan and a leader of the French Protestants. His mother, Elizabeth of Nassau, was a daughter of William the Silent, prince of Orange. He grew up a convinced Calvinist, a faith he kept for most of his life.³

After his father's death he was sent to learn soldiering from his mother's brothers, Maurice and Frederick Henry of Nassau, who were leading the Dutch against Spain. He served five years in Holland, mostly at sieges, the school of war of the age. In 1630 he was given a French infantry regiment, but by 1632 he was back in Frederick Henry's camp.⁴

The Thirty Years' War

In 1635 Cardinal Richelieu brought France openly into the war against the Habsburgs, and Turenne, with the rank of maréchal de camp, went to the Rhine under Cardinal de La Valette. He made his name in a retreat from Mainz to Metz and was wounded in the arm in the assault on Saverne in 1636. In 1638 he led the assault at the siege of Breisach, and two campaigns in Italy ended with the capture of Turin in 1640.⁵

His family's politics nearly ruined him. In 1642 his elder brother, the duc de Bouillon, was arrested for his part in the Cinq-Mars conspiracy against Richelieu and had to give up Sedan to save himself. Turenne stayed loyal. When Louis XIII died in 1643, the queen regent, Anne of Austria, made him a marshal of France.⁶

The Army of Germany

At the end of 1643 France's Army of Germany was shattered in the Black Forest and its commander killed, and the command passed to Turenne. With barely 10,000 men, mostly German veterans of Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, he was weaker than the Bavarians facing him. In 1644 he joined the young Duke of Enghien, the future Great Condé, for three fierce actions around Freiburg that drove the Bavarians from the Rhine valley.⁷ › Battle of Rocroi, 1643

In 1645 he was surprised at Marienthal (Mergentheim) and lost half his army, but with Enghien he fought the Bavarians again at Nördlingen that August and won, at a heavy cost in infantry. In 1646 he achieved his long-held plan of joining the Swedes under Carl Gustav Wrangel, and together they marched into Bavaria. After their victory at Zusmarshausen in 1648 the allies reached the Inn, the elector fled, and the emperor agreed to the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War.⁸

The Fronde

Peace abroad brought revolt at home. In the Fronde, the aristocratic rising against Cardinal Mazarin, Turenne followed his family and the Duchess de Longueville, Condé's sister, and turned against the court. When Mazarin arrested Condé in January 1650, Turenne joined the rebels, allied himself with Spain, and was badly beaten at Rethel in December 1650, narrowly escaping capture.⁹

In 1651 he married Charlotte de Caumont, the Protestant heiress of the duc de La Force, and the next year, after his brother made terms with the regent, he returned to the royal side. It was now Condé who was the rebel. By blocking the bridge at Jargeau Turenne saved the young Louis XIV from capture, and at Bléneau he checked Condé. Britannica counts the campaign of 1652 to 1653, fought with small forces on the Loire, before Paris and in Champagne, as his greatest service to the monarchy: it kept the court near Paris and let the king return to his capital.¹⁰

Arras and the Dunes

The war against Spain went on, with Condé now on the Spanish side. In 1654 Turenne and his colleagues stormed the Spanish siege lines around Arras and relieved the town. In 1658, allied with Cromwell's England, he laid siege to Dunkirk, and when a Spanish relief army advanced over the coastal dunes he attacked it on 14 June and destroyed it, using the difficult ground into which the enemy had unwisely moved. Dunkirk fell and was handed to the English, and the Peace of the Pyrenees followed in 1659.¹¹

In 1660 Louis XIV made him marshal-general of the king's camps and armies. His wife died in 1666, and in 1668 Turenne became a Catholic. As the war minister Louvois built up a royal military machine, the king began to command in person, and Turenne served at his side in the War of Devolution of 1667 and the invasion of Holland in 1672.¹²

The last campaigns

The campaigns of 1672 to 1675, in the Dutch War, made his lasting fame. Sent east of the Rhine with only a secondary army, he broke the German coalition for a time by January 1673 and forced the elector of Brandenburg to negotiate. In 1674 far stronger German forces gathered. Turenne beat a detached corps at Sinzheim in June and laid waste the Palatinate, then fought an indecisive battle at Enzheim near Strasbourg in October. With the Brandenburgers joining the imperial army, the allies seemed to hold Alsace for the winter.¹³

Turenne answered with the most famous march of his career. In December he slipped south behind the Vosges mountains on the Lorraine side, reappeared at Belfort at the end of the month, and on 5 January 1675 struck the flank of the main enemy army at Turckheim, near Colmar. The Germans recrossed the Rhine, and Alsace was saved.¹⁴

Command style

For most of his career Turenne was a master of what Britannica calls "strategic chess moves": he maneuvered for supplies and position, struck at enemies weakened by detachments, and kept small armies alive in devastated country by marching into new land to feed them. His campaigns of 1644 to 1648 show the method: too weak to fight alone, he looked constantly for a junction with an ally, first Enghien and then the Swedes, that would give him the numbers to strike.¹⁵

Age made him more daring, not less. In his last campaigns, Britannica notes, he offered battle more often and seized every chance his stronger opponents gave him; Longueville describes the sixty-three-year-old showing magnificent personal courage at Enzheim. Napoleon, who dictated a critique of his campaigns on St Helena, found plenty to criticize in detail but ranked him first among French generals. His soldiers' loyalty was legendary: when the German cavalry of the Army of Germany mutinied in 1647, he marched with them for three months and brought most of them back to the French service by the force of his personality.¹⁶ › The military history of France

Death at Sasbach

In the summer of 1675 Turenne crossed to the east bank of the Rhine to maneuver against the imperial general Raimondo Montecuccoli for control of the crossing near Strasbourg. On 27 July, with the armies in contact at Sasbach in Baden, he rode forward to examine an enemy position and was killed by a cannonball. Without him the French fell back across the Rhine.¹⁷

Legacy and memory

He was buried with the kings of France at the abbey of Saint-Denis. During the Revolution the royal tombs were opened and his body, still recognizable, was put on show and later kept in a museum, until Napoleon had it moved to the Invalides in Paris, where it lies today near the emperor's own tomb.¹⁸

Two of his campaigns, those of 1646 to 1648 and 1672 to 1675, won France an advantageous peace or saved one of its provinces, and the Peace of Westphalia and the Peace of the Pyrenees both followed his victories. He learned war in the mercenary armies of the Thirty Years' War and fought his last campaigns in the royal army that Louvois was building for Louis XIV.¹⁹

Read about his ally and rival Condé at Rocroi, or the other greatest commanders of France and the greatest military commanders of all time.

Napoleon counted Turenne among the great captains; see how he ranks in our list of the greatest commanders by era.