Genealogy John Muijsers » "Louis" ii "(le grand Condé)" van Bourbon (1621-1686)

Personal data "Louis" ii "(le grand Condé)" van Bourbon 

• Nickname is (le grand Condé).
• He was born on September 8, 1621 in Paris, 75056, Paris, Ile-de-France, Frankrijk.
• Profession: prins van Condé, hertog van Enghien.
• He died on December 11, 1686 in Fontainebleau, 77186, Seine et Marne, Ile-de-France, Frankrijk, he was 65 years old.
• A child of Henri van Bourbon and Charlotte Marguerite van Montmorency

Household of "Louis" ii "(le grand Condé)" van Bourbon

He is married to Claire-Clémence de Maillé-Brézé.

They got married.

Child(ren):

1. Henri Jules van Bourbon- Condé  1643-1709 
2. Louis van Bourbon  1652-1653
3. N. van Bourbon  1657-1660

Notes about "Louis" ii "(le grand Condé)" van Bourbon

Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condé (8 September 1621 – 11 December 1686) was a French general and the most famous representative of the Condé branch of the House of Bourbon. Prior to his father's death in 1646, he was styled the Duc d'Enghien. For his military prowess he was renowned as le Grand Condé.
Louis was born in Paris, the son of Henri de Bourbon, Prince de Condé and Charlotte Marguerite de Montmorency. His father was a first cousin-once-removed of Henry IV, the King of France, and his mother was an heiress of one of France's leading ducal families.

Condé's father saw to it that his son received a thorough education – Louis studied history, law, and mathematics during six years at the Jesuits' school at Bourges. After that he entered the Royal Academy at Paris. At seventeen, in the absence of his father, he governed Burgundy.

Signature of Gaston, Duke of Orléans at the marriage of Louis, and Claire Clémence de Maillé on 7 February 1641
His father betrothed him to Claire-Clémence de Maillé-Brézé, niece of the powerful Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of the king, before he joined the army in 1640. Despite being barely twenty years of age and in love with Mlle du Vigean (Marthe Poussard, called mademoiselle du Vigean, daughter of the king's gentleman of the bedchamber François Poussard, marquis de Fors and baron du Vigean, by his wife Anne de Neubourg, daughter of Roland, sieur de Sercelles), he was compelled by his father to marry his fiancée, a child of thirteen.[1] Although she bore her husband three children, Enghien later claimed she committed adultery with different men in order to justify locking her away at Châteauroux, but the charge was widely disbelieved: Saint-Simon, while admitting that she was homely and dull, praised her virtue, piety and gentleness in the face of relentless abuse.[2]

Enghien took part with distinction in the siege of Arras. He also won Richelieu's favor when he was present with the Cardinal during the plot of Cinq Mars, and afterwards fought in the Siege of Perpignan (1642).

In 1643 Enghien was appointed to command against the Spanish in northern France. He was opposed by experienced generals, and the veterans of the Spanish army were held to be the toughest soldiers in Europe. The great Battle of Rocroi (19 May) ended the myth of the invincibility of the Army of Flanders. Enghien himself conceived and directed the decisive attack, and at the age of twenty-one won his place amongst the great generals of the 17th century.

After a campaign of uninterrupted success, Enghien returned to Paris in triumph, and tried to forget his enforced and hateful marriage with a series of affairs (after Richelieu's death in 1642 he would unsuccessfully seek annulment of his marriage in hopes of marrying Mlle du Vigean, until she joined the order of the Carmelites in 1647).[2] In 1644 he was sent with reinforcements into Germany to the assistance of Turenne, who was hard pressed, and took command of the whole army.

The Battle of Freiburg (August) was desperately contested, but in the end the French army won a great victory over the Bavarians and Imperialists, commanded by Franz Baron von Mercy. As after Rocroi, numerous fortresses opened their gates to the duke.

Enghien spent the next winter, as every winter during the war, amid the gaieties of Paris. The summer campaign of 1645 opened with the defeat of Turenne by Mercy at Mergentheim, but this was retrieved in the victory of Nördlingen, in which Mercy was killed, and Enghien himself received several serious wounds. The capture of Philippsburg was the most important of his other achievements during this campaign. In 1646 Enghien served under Gaston, Duke of Orléans in Flanders, and when, after the capture of Mardyck, Orléans returned to Paris, Enghien, left in command, captured Dunkirk (11 October).

It was in this year that Enghien's father died, leaving him the fourth of his line and second of his name to bear the title Prince of Condé. He also now became premier prince du sang, addressed by everyone, from the king down, simply as Monsieur le prince. The enormous power that fell into his hands was naturally looked upon with serious alarm by the Regent and her minister. Condé's birth and military renown placed him at the head of the French nobility, but, added to that, the family of which he was now chief was both enormously rich and master of a large part of France. Condé himself held Burgundy, Berry and the marches of Lorraine, as well as other less important territory. His brother, the Prince de Conti held Champagne, and his brother-in-law, Longueville, Normandy.

The government, therefore, was determined to allow no increase of his already overgrown authority, and Mazarin made an attempt, which for the moment proved successful, both to find him employment and to tarnish his fame as a general. He was sent to lead the revolted Catalans. Ill supported, he was unable to achieve anything, and, being forced to raise the siege of Lleida, he returned home in bitter indignation. In 1648, however, he received the command in the important field of the Low Countries, and at Lens (19 August) a battle took place, which, beginning with a panic in his own regiment, was retrieved by Condé's coolness and bravery, and ended in a victory that fully restored his prestige.

See also: Fronde
In September of the same year, 1648, Condé was recalled to court, for the Regent Anne of Austria required his support. Influenced by the fact of his royal birth and by his scorn for the bourgeoisie, Condé lent himself to the court party, and finally, after much hesitation, he consented to lead the army which was to reduce Paris.

On his side, although his forces were insufficient, the war was carried on with vigour. After several minor combats with substantial losses, and a threatening scarcity of food, the Parisians were weary of the war. The political situation inclined both parties to peace, which was made at Rueil on 20 March.

It was not long, however, before Condé became estranged from the court. His pride and ambition earned him universal distrust and dislike, and the personal resentment of Anne. She assented to the sudden arrest of Condé, Conti and Longueville on 18 January 1650. But others, including Turenne and his brother the Duke of Bouillon, made their escape.

Louis, Grand Condé
Vigorous attempts for the release of the princes began to be made. The women of the family were now its heroes. The dowager princess demanded from the parlement of Paris fulfilment of the reformed law of arrest, which forbade imprisonment without trial. Condé's sister Anne Genevieve, duchesse de Longueville entered into negotiations with Spain; and the young Princess of Condé, having gathered an army around her, entered Bordeaux and gained the support of the parlement of that town. She, alone among the nobles who took part in the folly of the Fronde, earned respect and sympathy. Faithful to a faithless husband, she came forth from the retirement to which he had condemned her to fight for his freedom.

The delivery of the princes was brought about in the end by the coming together of the old Fronde (the party of the parlement and of Cardinal de Retz) and the new Fronde (the party of the Condés). Anne was at last, in February 1651, forced to liberate the princes from their prison at Le Havre. Soon afterwards, however, another shifting of parties left Condé and the new Fronde isolated. With the court and the old Fronde in alliance against him, Condé found no recourse but that of making common cause with the Spaniards who were at war with France.

The confused civil war which followed this step (September 1651) was memorable chiefly for the battle of the Faubourg St Antoine, in which Condé and Turenne, two of the leading generals of the age, measured their strength (2 July 1652). The army of the Prince was only saved by being admitted within the gates of Paris.

La Grande Mademoiselle, daughter of Gaston, Duke of Orléans, persuaded the Parisians to act thus, and turned the cannon of the Bastille on Turenne's army. Thus Condé, who as usual had fought with the most desperate bravery, was saved, and Paris underwent a new siege. This ended in the flight of Condé to the Spanish army (September 1652), and thenceforward, up to the peace, he was in open arms against France, and held high command in the army of Spain. Nonetheless, even as an exile, he asserted the precedence of the royal house of France over the princes of Spain and Austria, with whom he was allied for the moment.

Condé's fully developed genius as a commander found little scope in the cumbrous and antiquated system of war practised by the Spanish, and though he gained a few successes, and manoeuvred with the highest possible skill against Turenne, his disastrous defeat at the Dunes near Dunkirk (14 June 1658) led Spain to open negotiations for peace. The Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, which ended the Franco-Spanish War, pardoned Condé and allowed him to return to France.

Condé now realized that the period of agitation and party warfare was at an end. He accepted, and loyally maintained henceforward, the position of a chief subordinate to Louis XIV. Even so, some years passed before he was recalled to active employment, and these years he spent on his estate, the Château de Chantilly. Here he gathered round him a brilliant company, which included many men of genius such as Molière, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Nicole, Bourdaloue and Bossuet.

About this time negotiations between the Poles, Condé and Louis were carried on with a view to the election to the throne of Poland, at first of Condé's son Enghien, and afterwards of Condé himself. These, after a long series of curious intrigues, were finally closed in 1674 by the veto of Louis XIV and the election of John Sobieski. The Prince's retirement, which was only broken by the Polish question and by his personal intercession on behalf of Fouquet in 1664, ended in 1668.

In that year he proposed to Louvois, the minister of war, a plan for seizing Franche-Comté, the execution of which was entrusted to him and successfully carried out. He was now completely re-established in the favour of Louis, and with Turenne was the principal French commander in the celebrated campaign of 1672 against the Dutch. At the forcing of the Rhine passage at Tolhuis (June 12), he received a severe wound, after which he commanded in Alsace against the Imperials.

In 1673 he was again engaged in the Low Countries, and in 1674 he fought his last great battle, the Battle of Seneffe, against the Prince of Orange (afterwards William III of England). This battle, fought on August 11, was one of the hardest of the century, and Condé, who displayed the reckless bravery of his youth, had three horses killed under him. His last campaign was that of 1675 on the Rhine, where the army had been deprived of its general by the death of Turenne; and where by his careful and methodical strategy he repelled the invasion of the Imperial army of Montecuccoli.

The Duke of Enghien saving his father, the Grand Condé at the battle of Seneffe
After this campaign, prematurely worn out by the toils and excesses of his life, and tortured by gout, Condé returned to Château de Chantilly, where he spent the eleven years that remained to him in quiet retirement. At the end of his life, Condé specially sought the companionship of Bourdaloue, Pierre Nicole and Bossuet, and devoted himself to religious exercises. He died on 11 November 1686 at the age of sixty-five. Bourdaloue attended him at his death-bed, and Bossuet pronounced his elegy.

The Prince's lifelong resentment of his forced marriage to a social inferior persisted,[3] and found unchivalrous expression in a bitter letter, his last to the king, in which he begged that his wife never be released from her exile to the countryside. Nonetheless, Claire-Clémence de Maillé had brought the Prince of Condé a dowry of 600,000 livres, the manors of Ansac, Mouy, Cambronne, Plessis-Billebault, Galissonnière and Brézé, and, on one occasion, liberation from the King's dungeon.

In 1685, his only surviving grandson, Louis de Bourbon, married Louise Françoise, Mademoiselle de Nantes - eldest surviving daughter of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan. In mid-1686, Louise Françoise (later better known as Madame la Duchesse) caught smallpox while at Fontainebleau; it was the Prince himself who helped nurse the little Duchess back to health, to the point of staying up with her to help her eat. The Prince even forcibly stopped Louis XIV himself from seeing his daughter for his own safety. Despite Louise Françoise surviving and giving her husband ten children, the Prince himself became ill; most said it was from worry about her health. He himself died at the Palace of Fontainebleau. He was buried in the Église at Vallery, the traditional burial place of the Princes of Condé; Claire-Clémence, who outlived her husband, was buried at the Église Saint-Martin at the Château de Châteauroux, France in 1694.

His son and grandson left little in history except they were afflicted by the madness which they had inherited from Claire-Clémence.

Louis married Claire-Clémence de Maillé-Brézé, niece of Cardinal Richelieu at the Palais Royal in Paris February 1641 in the presence of Louis XIII, Anne of Austria and Gaston d'Orléans.

Henri Jules de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien, Prince of Condé (29 July 1643, Paris - 1 April 1709, Paris); married Anne Henriette of Bavaria and had issue;
Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Bourbon (20 September 1652, Bordeaux - 11 April 1653, Bordeaux); died in infancy;
X de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Bourbon (1657, Breda - 28 September 1660, Paris); died in infancy;

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Timeline "Louis" ii "(le grand Condé)" van Bourbon

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