Louis II de Bourbon, 4 prince de Condé

Louis II de Bourbon, 4^e prince de Condé (born Sept. 8, 1621, Paris, France—died Dec. 11, 1686, Fontainebleau) was the leader of the last of the series of aristocratic uprisings in France known as the Fronde (1648–53). He later became one of King Louis XIV’s greatest generals.

The princes de Condé were the heads of an important French branch of the House of Bourbon. The Great Condé was the elder son of Henry II de Bourbon, 3rd prince de Condé, and of his wife, Charlotte de Montmorency.

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His father gave to the duc d’Enghien, as the Great Condé was at first called, a complete and strict education: six years with the Jesuits at Bourges, as well as mathematics and horsemanship at the Royal Academy at Paris. His studies completed, he was presented to Louis XIII (Jan. 19, 1636) and then accompanied his father to the Duchy of Burgundy (the government of which had become a family perquisite since 1631), where he received the king on September 19 of the same year.

His father betrothed him to the young Claire-Clémence de Maillé-Brézé (Cardinal de Richelieu’s niece) before his son’s departure to the army of Picardy, with which he, in July 1640, saw action before the siege of Arras. On his return, despite the passion that he had conceived for Marthe du Vigean, a young lady of the inner circle of Parisian society, the young duke was obliged, on Feb. 9, 1641, to go through the marriage that had been imposed on him and from which little but conjugal distrust and hatred was to ensue. She was barely 13, and they began so badly that the cardinal summoned him to Narbonne (1642).

The duc d’Enghien won his first great victory over the Spaniards as head of the royal army at Rocroi (May 19, 1643). It was the greatest French victory for a century and was due, beyond doubt, to his personal effort. He followed his success at Rocroi with successes in the area of the Rhine at Thionville and Sierck. With the marshal de Turenne, he was victorious at Freiburg, Philippsburg, Mainz, and Nördlingen. He also conducted a brilliant campaign in Flanders (1646).

Louis’s father died on Dec. 26, 1646, and he then became both prince de Condé and heir to an enormous fortune. He was sent by Cardinal Mazarin—ever distrustful of so prestigious a prince—to Catalonia, in Spain, where on June 18, 1647, he was defeated at Lérida. On his recall to Flanders, however, he won another great victory at Lens (Aug. 19–20, 1648).

But a change in his destiny came with the civil wars of the Fronde. During the first of these wars, he conducted the siege of Paris (January–March 1649) for the government but afterward behaved with such arrogance as the government’s saviour that Mazarin, in collusion with his former opponents, had Condé, his brother, and their brother-in-law the duc de Longueville (Henri d’Orléans) arrested on Jan. 18, 1650, when they were in attendance at court. (They were in prison for 13 months.) Thereupon, his friends launched the second war of the Fronde, which ended with Condé’s release and Mazarin’s first voluntary exile. Condé, however, again tried to extract too high a price for his goodwill toward the queen regent. When she took up the challenge, he launched an open rebellion in the southwest (September 1651), allied himself with Spain, and made his way to Paris, where he was able for a time to defy the royal army commanded by Turenne. His position, however, soon became both politically and militarily untenable, and he left Paris (October 1652) to take service with the Spaniards, whose generalissimo he became. He was sentenced to death as a rebel on Nov. 25, 1654.

With varying fortunes he opposed the royal army for four years more but was finally defeated at the Battle of the Dunes before Dunkirk (Dunkerque) on June 14, 1658. After the Peace of the Pyrenees had been signed (1659), Condé returned to Paris and, reentering the king’s good graces, was received by him at Aix-en-Provence on Jan. 27, 1660. Thenceforth, he comported himself as a humble and loyal servant of the king, who, however, was long at pains to keep him from any military command.

At one moment Condé entertained the idea of having himself elected king of Poland, but, despite his determined measures and the support of Louis XIV, he was unsuccessful. (This dream of kingship he was to pursue vainly for several years.)

When in 1668 the king at last entrusted to his command the attack of the Spanish-held Franche-Comté, Condé took Artois, Besançon, Dôle, and Gray in 15 days. Then, totally restored to Louis XIV’s favour, Condé, with Turenne, was placed by the king in command of the army that was going to invade the United Provinces of the Netherlands (1672). He was wounded in the famous crossing of the Rhine near Arnhem (June 12, 1672) but, nevertheless, went on to defend Alsace from invasion. Having completed the evacuation of the United Provinces, he halted the prince of Orange’s army at Seneffe in the Spanish Netherlands (Aug. 11, 1674), then raised the siege of Oudenarde. The following year, again in the company of Louis XIV and of the army of Flanders, he had to reach Alsace, which had been threatened by Turenne’s death, hastily. There, he once more confronted an old adversary, Raimondo Montecuccoli, Austria’s foremost commander, whom he forced to raise the siege of Haguenau and to withdraw across the Rhine. This was his last campaign and victory. A prey to gout in later life and living quietly in his palace of Chantilly, he surrounded himself with his family, friends, and the writers and artists whom he loved. His deathbed conversion is not entirely convincing, for it came at the end of a life without religion.

Portraits and busts of Condé suggest rapacity: wide, protruding eyes and a prominently downcurving “Bourbon” nose dominate a thin and bony face in which a willful mouth overshadows a receding chin. Though he was without doubt, with Turenne, the greatest captain of his day, he was also a man of unrestrained temper and limitless pride—in himself, his race, and his house. His will admitted no constraint, and his arrogance augured nothing for his equals but distrust. But he was also a man of wide intellectual interests, of unconventional habits, and possessed of an uncommonly sound independence of mind. His attitude both to religion and to politics was unorthodox, for he was as rebellious to ecclesiastical dogma as to the authority of the king. The moral temper and philosophy of this prince, so removed from the conventional standards of his day, were revealed by his libertine youth and by doctrinally questionable relationships—among them that with Pierre-Michon Bourdelot, a philosopher and skeptical doctor, and with the philosopher Spinoza, whom he tried to meet in Holland—by his nonobservance of all religious practices, and by his aggressive atheism—despite his honourable fidelity to the Jesuits who had instructed him. To these traits he added peerless courage—as may be seen by his help and protection of Protestants who were persecuted after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685).

A cultivated man, according to Mlle de Scudéry, who depicted him in her novel Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–53), he was also a patron of the arts. He maintained a troupe of comedians who toured the provinces; he protected Jean de La Fontaine, Nicolas Boileau, and Molière; and he chose Jean de La Bruyère to tutor his son, Henri-Jules. Even on his military campaigns he read the novels of Gaultier de Coste de La Calprenède, the histories of Livy, and the tragedies of Pierre Corneille. André Le Nôtre landscaped his park at Chantilly; Pierre Mignard and Charles Le Brun decorated the walls of his palace with mythological paintings; Antoine Coysevox sculpted a famous bust of him; and Pérelle and Jean Berain painted views of his palace. He also enjoyed the conversation of Bishop Bossuet, François Fénelon, and Nicolas Malebranche, all of whom were at Chantilly.