Turenne: Marshal General of France, Part I
Born of a Calvinist family in the principality of Sedan, Turenne became the military hero of the Bourbon forces in civil and foreign wars. By Aram Bakshian.
No event in the long reign of Louis XIV evoked more universal grief among Frenchmen than the death, in 1675, of a myopic, stammering junior member of the Bouillon family, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, better known as Marshal Turenne.
If Louis was the first absolute ruler of the modern French nation, Turenne had been its premier military hero - the indispensable man of action without whose generalship, loyalty and unselfishness the Bourbon monarchy might never have prevailed over foreign enemies and a jealous native nobility.
The Sun King, never a man to overstate the importance of one of his subordinates, seems to have recognized this himself. He responded to the news of Turenne’s death with the statement that, ‘We have lost the father of our country’.
The view was held far beyond the confines of the Royal court, for, as the body of the fallen hero made its final journey home from the front on the Rhine, the roads were crowded with thousands of weeping peasants.
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