Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, Viscount of Turenne

Born to a Huguenot family, the son of a Marshal of France, he was introduced to the art of war at a young age. He first served as a volunteer in the Dutch States Army under the orders of his maternal uncles Maurice of Nassau and Frederick Henry before pursuing his career in the service of France, where his noble origins and proven qualities soon saw him rise to the top of the military hierarchy. He rose to prominence during the Thirty Years' War by capturing the fortress of Breisach in 1638. Promoted Marshal of France in 1643, he struck against Bavaria the following year, defeating the Bavarian army in three years of campaigning and forcing the Elector of Bavaria to make peace. The Elector soon broke the treaty and in 1648 Turenne invaded again with Swedish support, subduing the Imperial army at Zusmarshausen and pacifying Bavaria.


Turenne initially supported the Fronde but returned to Royal service in 1651, emerging as France's foremost general by defeating the rebellious army of the Prince of Condé on the outskirts of Paris and re-occupying the city. His triumphs against Spanish armies at Arras (1654) and at Dunkirk (1658) led to the overrunning of much of the Spanish Netherlands and brought the war against Spain to a victorious conclusion. Two years later, Louis XIV appointed him Marshal General of France. Although a supporter of absolute monarchy, he only converted to Catholicism in 1668, refusing to do so earlier despite political incentives.


During the War of Devolution in 1667 Turenne captured the Spanish Netherlands practically without resistance. In 1672 the French invaded the Dutch Republic and the Marshal General conquered the country up to Amsterdam. Checked by the Dutch flooding of the land, he invaded the Holy Roman Empire the next year, reaching the Elbe and compelling Brandenburg to abandon the anti-French coalition. Faced with the loss of Alsace to superior Allied forces, he crowned his career with a series of battlefield victories, most notably at Turckheim (1675) and a masterful strategic turning movement around the Vosges in mid-winter that drove the Imperials from Alsace. He was killed by an Imperial cannonball at the battle of Salzbach in 1675.

Turenne's most eloquent countrymen wrote his éloges, and Montecuccoli himself exclaimed, "Il est mort aujourd'hui un homme qui faisait honneur à l'homme" (A man is dead today who did honour to Man). His body, taken to St Denis, was buried with the Kings of France. Even the revolutionaries of 1793 respected it, and, while they reburied the bodies of the monarchs in a mass grave, they preserved the remains of Turenne at the Jardin des Plantes until 22 September 1800, when Napoleon had them removed to the church of the Invalides at Paris, where they still rest.^[49]


Napoleon recommended all soldiers to "read and re-read" the campaigns of Turenne as one of the great captains of history, placing him among Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Frederick the Great, Prince Eugene of Savoy, Gustavus Adolphus, and Julius Caesar. His fame as a general rivalled that of any other in Europe at a period when the populace studied war more critically than ever before, for his military character epitomized the art of war of his time (Prince de Ligne). Strategic caution and logistic accuracy, combined with a brilliant dash in small combats and constancy under all circumstances—of success or failure—perhaps emerge as the salient points of Turenne's genius for war. Great battles he avoided. "Few sieges and many combats" he used as his maxim. And, unlike his great rival Condé, who appeared as brilliant in his first battle as in his last, Turenne improved day by day. Napoleon said of him that, his genius grew bolder as it grew older, and a later author, the Duke of Aumale (Histoire des princes de la maison de Condé), took the same view when he wrote: "To know him, you must follow him up to Salzbach. In his case, every day signalled some progress”.^[86]


In his character Turenne showed little more than the nature of a simple and honourable soldier, endowed with much tact; but in the world of politics he seemed disinterested and out of place, the glittering court of Versailles held no sway in the mind of the great commander. His morals, if not beyond reproach, were at least more austere than those prevalent in the age in which he lived. He operated essentially as a commander of regular armies. He spent his life with the troops; he knew how to win their affection; he tempered a severe discipline with rare generosity, and his men loved him as a comrade no less than they admired him as a commander. Thus, though Condé's genius appeared far more versatile, Turenne's genius best represents the art of war in the 17th century. For the small, costly, and highly trained regular armies, and the dynastic warfare of the age of Louis XIV, Turenne functioned as the ideal army leader.^[86]


During the French Revolution his reputation as a man of the people made his tomb one of the few nobles’ tombs not destroyed by the Revolutionaries.^[87] Napoleon rated him the greatest modern commander.^[87][88] Eugene of Savoy when praised above Turenne called the flattery ingratiating at the expense of Turenne.^[89] Turenne is one of the subjects of Morris’ work “Great commanders of modern times”.^[5] According to him the “powerful genius” of Turenne greatly contributed to shaping modern warfare.^[90]

In fiction[edit]

Marshal of France Turenne is depicted in several alternative history novels written by Eric Flint and David Weber. These include 1633 and 1634: The Baltic War. Turenne also appears in a historical novel by G.A. Henty called Won by the Sword.^[91]