Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban

Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (born May 15, 1633, Saint-Léger-de-Foucherest [now Saint-Léger-Vauban], France—died March 30, 1707, Paris) was a French military engineer who revolutionized the art of siege craft and defensive fortifications. He fought in all of France’s wars of Louis XIV’s reign (1643–1715).

Early career

Vauban was from a family of very modest means that belonged to the petty nobility. In 1651 he became a cadet in the regiment of Louis II de Bourbon, prince de Condé, who was about to rebel against the young Louis XIV.

Vauban’s talents were soon revealed. He distinguished himself by defending towns in the Argonne region and in the siege and capture of Sainte-Menehould for Condé. In 1653 he was taken prisoner by the government’s forces. Honourably treated, he was soon induced to change sides and to help the royalists recapture Sainte-Menehould. During a siege in 1654 he was twice wounded. In 1655 he was admitted, as a “king’s ordinary engineer,” into the corps of officers that was gradually being built up, outside the regular military hierarchy, for specialized work on fortification and siege craft. After taking part in operations against various fortresses and cities between 1655 and 1657, he was engineer in chief at the siege of Gravelines in 1658.

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During the interval of peace, from 1659 to 1667, Vauban was employed in demolishing the fortifications of Nancy, in Ducal Lorraine, from 1661 to 1662 and in fortifying Alt-Breisach, a French outpost on the right bank of the Rhine, from 1664 to 1666. In 1663 he was given a company in the king’s Picardy regiment. His services in the capture of Tournai, Douai, and Lille in the French invasion of the Spanish Netherlands in 1667 were rewarded with a pension, a lieutenancy in the Royal Guards, and the governorship of the Lille citadel.

Vauban’s growing responsibilities included those as “commissary general of fortifications”—though that title remained with the nominal holder of the office until 1677; he traveled constantly and conducted an immense correspondence with the king and with the war minister, the marquis de Louvois. Vauban’s technical memoranda made his systems of fortifications the focus of military studies in Europe for more than a century. In the period of peace from 1668 to 1672 he not only inspected the defenses of Roussillon, the French Low Countries, Picardy, and Lorraine, but he also was sent to Piedmont (1671) to advise the duke of Savoy on the defenses of Verrue, Vercelli, and Turin—advice that France later had cause to regret.

Innovations in siege craft

Louis’s Dutch war of 1672–79 brought conspicuous glory to Vauban because of the king’s presence, in supreme command, at sieges that he was directing. At the siege of Maastricht (1673) he used a complete system of “parallels”—i.e., trenches dug parallel or concentric to the perimeter of the defenses and connected by radical zigzag trenches that made the approach comparatively safe from the defenders’ artillery fire. For his success at Maastricht he was promoted and given a grant of money that enabled him to buy the château of Bazoches (near his family’s seat of Vauban), and further successes won him the rank of maréchal de camp (equivalent to brigadier general) in 1676. At the siege of Valenciennes, in 1677, he persuaded the king, against the advice of Louvois and five marshals, to authorize a daylight assault, partly because the conventional assault in darkness often resulted in the attackers’ shooting at one another by mistake. For the capture of Valenciennes he received another grant of money.

In 1680–81 Vauban undertook another great tour of the French frontiers, inspecting or improving fortifications. For Strasbourg (1681) he designed a splendid fortress of the most advanced kind. Having directed the siege of Luxembourg in 1684, he subsequently also redesigned the defenses of that city. His design for the fortification of Landau in Bavaria is sometimes reckoned as his greatest work (1687).

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In September 1688, early in the War of the Grand Alliance, in which Louis was opposed by the combined forces of the Netherlands, England, the Holy Roman Empire, and their lesser allies, Vauban was promoted to lieutenant general, and in October, under the command of the dauphin Louis, he took Philippsburg, on the right bank of the Rhine south of Speyer. At this siege he introduced ricochet gunfire, whereby a cannonball was made to bounce forward over parapets and to hit several objectives before its force was spent. At the same time he was advocating use of the socket bayonet, another invention of his. This bayonet was slipped over the muzzle into a socket and did not have to be removed before firing the musket. He took Mons in 1691 and Namur, rapidly and with few casualties, in 1692. At the siege of Charleroi, in 1693, he was for the first time in command of an infantry division. Diverted to Brest in 1694 to guard against an English threat to Brittany, he returned to the Low Countries for the defense of Namur in 1695 but could not save the city. In 1697 he participated in the siege and capture of Ath and was wounded again.

During the peace of 1698–1701 Vauban reconstructed the defenses of Neuf-Brisach in Alsace, the last of the 160 fortresses on which he worked. By this time his health was failing him, but he still wanted active employment in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). In a letter of 1702 to the king, he asked to be created a marshal of France so as to avoid the embarrassment of having to serve under marshals junior to himself. Louis XIV, knowing (as all Europe did) that many of France’s victories were due far more to his discerning patronage of the petty gentleman Vauban than to the performances of higher nobles whose birth alone had hastened their appointment as marshals, created Vauban marshal of France in January 1703. Vauban had, however, never commanded an army in the field—as was customary for marshals of France—and was only really capable of “engineering,” which was considered beneath a marshal’s dignity. After directing operations for the recapture of Alt-Breisach (1703), he was recalled from service. In 1705 and again in 1706 he offered to help an incompetent general in the siege of Turin, whose fortification he had himself planned, but the offer was rejected. Vauban’s last effective commission was to organize an entrenched camp at Dunkerque (1706). In 2008 many of the fortifications Vauban constructed in France—including walls, towers, and mountain forts—were collectively designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Writings

Vauban was indefatigable. He devoted his time between duties and in convalescence to writing assiduously on matters of public concern. Some of these writings concerned his profession, others were external to it; many were assembled by him in manuscript volumes under the collective title of Oisivetés (“Leisures”). His treatises De l’attaque et de la défense des places (“On Siege and Fortification”), written in 1705–06, were printed in 1737 and reprinted in 1829 (several interpretations of his systems of fortifications had been published in his lifetime). He wrote also on the expediency of recalling the banished Huguenots to France (1689); on routes for canals and inland navigation; on privateering at sea; on the geography of the Vézelay district; on forestry and pig breeding; on overseas colonies; and on international affairs, with regard to the concessions that could be made, strategically and politically, for a satisfactory peace (1706). His most important “leisure,” however, was his Projet d’une dixme royale (printed anonymously, 1707; Project for a Royal Tythe, or General Tax), suggesting the abolition of nearly all France’s existing taxes and the substitution of a tax of 10 percent on all land and trade from which no one should be exempt. He substantiated his arguments with a mass of statistical documentation practically unprecedented and, in so doing, pioneered the use of statistics in economics. But the French government—too deeply committed to the system of tax farming (i.e., selling the right to collect taxes to groups of financiers for a fixed sum), reluctant and even unable to revoke the exemptions of the privileged classes because of dependence on them, and lacking interest in fundamental reforms—suppressed the publication of his book. Vauban was crushed by this rebuff, but the story that his book made Louis XIV forget his past services is untrue.

Personality

Vauban was of medium height, squarely and solidly built. Although he was unpretentious and straightforward, his martial appearance and unpolished manners disguised his kindness and his truly considerate readiness to help people. On the battlefront, he was always concerned to save soldiers’ lives, and he often let other officers take the credit for the fruit of his own courageous efforts. The duc de Saint-Simon, the outstanding memorialist of the reign of Louis XIV, who never squandered praise, described Vauban as “the most honourable and virtuous man of his age…incapable of lending himself to anything false or evil.”