Maurice de Saxe
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Maurice, comte de Saxe (German Moritz Graf von Sachsen) (28 October 1696 – 20 November 1750), Marshal of France and later also Marshal General of France.
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[edit] Childhood
Maurice de Saxe was born at Goslar as a natural son of Augustus II with countess Aurora Königsmarck.
In 1698, the Countess sent him to his father in Warsaw. Augustus II had been elected King of Poland in the previous year, but the unsettled condition of the country obliged Saxe to spend the greater part of his youth outside its borders. This separation from his father made him independent and had an important effect on his future career.
[edit] Military career
At the age of twelve, Saxe was with the army of Prince Eugene of Savoy, at the sieges of Tournai and Mons and at the Battle of Malplaquet. A proposal at the end of the campaign to send him to a Jesuit college in Brussels was dropped due to the protests of his mother. Upon his return to the camp of the Allies in the beginning of 1710, he displayed a courage so impetuous that Prince Eugene admonished him to not confuse rashness with valour.
Saxe next served under Peter the Great against the Swedes. In 1711, his father formally recognized him and he was granted the rank of Count. He then accompanied his father to Pomerania, and in 1712 he took part in the siege of Stralsund.
In manhood, Saxe bore a strong resemblance to his father, both in person and character. His grasp was so powerful that he could bend a horseshoe with his hand, and even at the end of his life, his energy and endurance were scarcely affected by the illnesses his many excesses had caused. In 1714, a marriage was arranged between him and one of the richest of his father's subjects, Johanna Victoria, Countess von Loeben, but he dissipated her fortune so rapidly that he was soon heavily in debt. Since he had also given her more serious grounds of complaint against him, he consented to an annulment of the marriage in 1721.
After serving in a campaign against the Turks in 1717, he went to Paris to study mathematics, and in 1720 obtained a commission as maréchal de camp. In 1725, he entered negotiations for election as Duke of Courland, at the insistence of the Duchess Anna Ivanovna, who offered him her hand. He was chosen Duke in 1726, but declined marriage with the Duchess. He soon found it impossible to resist her opposition to his claims, but with the assistance of £30,000 lent him by the French actress Adrienne Lecouvreur, he raised a force by which he maintained his authority till 1727, when he withdrew and took up residence in Paris.
At the outbreak of the War of the Polish Succession, Saxe served under Marshal Berwick, and for a brilliant exploit at the siege at Philippsburg he was named lieutenant-general. In the War of the Austrian Succession he took command of an army division sent to invade Austria in 1741, and on 19 November 1741, surprised Prague during the night, and seized it before the garrison were aware of the presence of an enemy, a coup de main which made him famous throughout Europe. After capturing the fortress of Eger on 19 April 1742, he received a leave of absence, and went to Russia to push his claims for the Duchy of Courland, but returned to his command after getting nowhere.
Saxe's exploits were the sole redeeming feature in an unsuccessful campaign, and on 26 March 1743, his merits were rewarded by promotion to Marshal of France. From this time on, he became one of the great generals of the age. In 1744, he was chosen to command the expedition to Britain on behalf of the Old Pretender, which assembled at Dunkirk but did not proceed farther. After its termination, he received an independent command in the Netherlands, and by skillful maneuvering succeeded in continually harassing the superior forces of the enemy without risking a decisive battle.
In the following year, Saxe besieged Tournai and inflicted a severe defeat on the army of the Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Fontenoy, an encounter determined entirely by his constancy and cool leadership. During the battle, he was unable to sit on horseback due to dropsy, and was carried about in a wicker chariot.
In recognition of his brilliant achievement, King Louis XV of France conferred on him the Chateau Chambord for life, and in April 1746, he was naturalised as a French subject. Until the end of the war, he continued to command in the Netherlands, always with success. Besides Fontenoy he added Rocoux (1746) and Lawfeldt or Val (1747) to the list of French victories, and it was under his orders that Marshal Löwendahl captured Bergen op Zoom. He himself won the last success of the war in capturing Maastricht in 1748. In 1747 the title once held by Turenne and Villars, "Marshal General of the King's camps and armies", was revived for him. But on 30 November 1750 he died at Chambord "of a putrid fever".
In 1748, a daughter was born to him, one of several illegitimate children, whose great-granddaughter was George Sand.
[edit] Sources
Saxe wrote a remarkable work on the art of war, Mes Réveries, which though described by Carlyle as "a strange military farrago, dictated, as I should think, under opium", is in fact a classic. Published posthumously in 1757, it was described by Lord Montgomery, more than two centuries later, as in fact "a remarkable work on the art of war." Saxe's Lettres et mémoires choisis appeared in 1794. His letters to his sister, the Princess of Holstein, preserved at Strassburg, were destroyed by the bombardment of that place in 1870. Thirty copies had, however, been printed from the original.
Many previous errors in former biographies were corrected and additional information supplied in Carl von Weber's Moritz Graf von Sachsen, Marschall von Frankreich, nach archivalischen Quellen (Leipzig, 1863), in Saint-René Taillandier's Maurice de Saxe, étude historique d'après les documents des archives de Dresde (1865) and in C.F. Vitzthum's Maurice de Saxe (Leipzig, 1861). A biography in English is Jon Manchip White's Marshal of France: The Life and Times of Maurice, Comte de Saxe [1696-1750] (Rand McNally & Company, Chicago, 1962). See also the military histories of the period, especially Carlyle's Frederick the Great.
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
