Adam-Philippe de Custine

Le général mustache

Adam-Philippe, comte de Custine , called général mustache (born February 4, 1740 in Metz , † August 28, 1793 in Paris ) was a French général de division , who was best known for the conquest of Mainz in the First Coalition War . As a result of his opposition to the Jacobins and failures in military arbitrariness, he was convicted and guillotined .

Life

Custine came from the Lorraine country nobility . The family owned the Baronnie de Sarreck , on the Saar , near the German-French border. At the age of five, Custine received a position as a Sous-lieutenant in the Regiment de Custine . (The fact that the name is identical with the Mestre de camp des Regiment indicates a kindred favor.) Custine was married to Céleste Gagnat de Logny. The marriage had two children, a son and a daughter.

In the regional history of the first years of the French Revolution in the southern Rhineland , especially in the Mainz Republic , General Custine was a welcome herald and champion of revolutionary ideas among German Jacobins . In his "Appeal to the depressed German people of the German nation" after his capture of Mainz , in which he promised and assured the citizens of Mainz, Speyer and Worms the liberation and protection from the " despots " (meaning the feudal German princes ) “[…] As far as I am concerned, I, proud of the beautiful title of Frankish citizen , have sworn off all those distinctive signs invented by the pride of the despots. The only ambition worthy of a sensible person is this: to live in the hearts of his fellow citizens. "

The French Republicans, who viewed him with suspicion as the aristocrat and man of yesterday, judged: "[...] Custine is not lacking in spirit, but he was haughty, heated and inconsistent." His brief participation in the American War of Independence against the English is said to be the cause his commitment to the revolution in France. A contemporary , however, judged (translated): “He had made the principles of the revolution his own, but without understanding them.” Biographers of the 19th century, regardless of whether they were republican or monarchist , accused him of political misconduct and multiple wrong military decisions but considered his sentencing and execution to be unjust.

His military career

In the armies of Louis XV. and XVI.

In 1748 he was deployed in the Netherlands with the army of the Maréchal de France Moritz von Sachsen. He distinguished himself in the Seven Years' War so that the Minister Étienne-François de Choiseul gave him his own dragoon regiment, which he exchanged with the Régiment de Saintonge infanterie , which was intended to be embarked for America in 1780 . In America he stood out as a Colonel under the command of Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, especially during the siege of Yorktown .

Returned to France in 1782/83 , he was appointed Maréchal de camp and Governor of Toulon . In 1788 he was inspector general of the troops in Flanders .

In the First Revolutionary War

In 1789, Custine became a member of the Lorraine nobility in the National Assembly , where he decidedly sided with the Liberal Party. He took the view that it was necessary for France to conquer the left bank of the Rhine , with the Rhine as the “natural border” of France. He was known for admiring Prussian drill and for demanding strict obedience from his soldiers, which marked him as an old-school military. He tried to discipline the volunteer battalions integrated into the line troops with brutality, which should weigh heavily on him during his 1793 trial. In 1791 he was promoted by the National Assembly to Général de division and in 1792 received a command on the Upper Rhine over the Vosges Army from the army of Marshal Nicolas Luckner with which he conquered the fortress of Pruntrut . He occupied the Weißenburg lines and arrived in Landau on August 12th . Luckner's successor Armand-Louis de Gontaut, duc de Biron ordered him to march into the Palatinate and on September 30th he took Speyer , on October 5th Worms , on October 21st Mainz . All cities (Mainz, for example, had only 800 Austrians for defense and 2000 Mainzers) were taken almost without resistance, since the Prussian-Austrian line troops were with the invading army in Champagne and the Habsburg Netherlands .

He left the fortress of Mannheim in the Electoral Palatinate unmolested, because the elector had behaved neutrally in the conflict with France. The almost loss-free conquests on the Rhine inspired the French public - and the Germans who sympathized with the revolution saw in Custine the liberator from absolutist aristocratic rule and a supporter of their own democratic efforts. In October he is said to have become supreme commanding general of the combined Moselle, Rhine and Vosges armies. It was his mistake not to connect with General François-Christophe Kellermann , who besieged the fortress of Luxembourg, and the Ardennes army of General Charles-François Dumouriez , in order to assist the troops of Duke Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand of Braunschweig in their retreat after the cannonade To drive Valmy apart for good.

Roughly exceeding his competencies - and seduced by his successes in taking the southern Rhineland - he called on both of the aforementioned generals to support his plans to invade German areas to the right of the Rhine. But he crossed the Rhine alone with an army that was far too weak and on October 27, 1792, with high demands for contributions, occupied “[...] the trading and free imperial city of Frankfurt am Main , which had always remained neutral in the various wars and for the The French were in a favorable mood […] “For further looting and income from contributions, Custine let his generals Jean-Nicolas Houchard and Victor Neuwinger move as far as the Lahn to Limburg and the Wetterau .

Not knowing how big the advancing army of the Prussians, Saxons and Hesse actually was, he had to withdraw. Since the residents of Frankfurt also attacked the insignificant French occupation, he ordered the withdrawal from Frankfurt on December 2 and planned winter quarters for his troops in the hinterland of Mainz. He himself moved his headquarters to Worms.

Too cumbersome and indecisive, he organized a defense against the Prussians and blamed his commanders for the defeats they suffered in early 1793 from weak positions around Mainz. So in January on the Untermain near Hochheim am Main , in March in the Hunsrück near Stromberg , on the Nahe near Bingen and Bad Kreuznach and in Rheinhessen near Ober-Flörsheim .

Far too late and insufficiently, he had the Mainz fortress equipped with war material and provisions for a siege. The 20,000 men were locked in on April 10th and after three months had no ammunition and the city ran out of food. He had already withdrawn to Landau on March 31, because the Austrians and the small emigre army of Prince Condé under Dagobert Sigmund von Wurmser were making a front against Alsace. The French were pushed back on the Lauter and Queich rivers , the Weißenburg lines were reoccupied and the Landau fortress was enclosed.

In April 1793 he had received the supreme command of the Northern and Ardennes Army from the National Convention in place of Charles-François Dumouriez , who had switched to the Austrians. Like his predecessor, Custine opposed government decisions and was an opponent of the radical revolutionary Jacobins .

In May / June 1793 he had an offensive against the besiegers planned to relieve the Mainz occupation from the southern Palatinate. Far before that, on a line between Speyer and Kaiserslautern, it was repulsed. Custine had meanwhile taken over his new command of the Northern Army in West Flanders. During this time the French lost the fortresses Condé and Valenciennes there .

On the occasion of the acceptance of the command of the Northern Army at the Ministry of War in Paris, he was summoned to the Welfare Committee on the accusation of Jean Paul Marat and Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne and in the indictment of August 14, 1793, he was deliberately accused of the dignity of a general misused, betrayed the interests of the republic and maintained agreements with the enemies of France. Despite his defense, with which he was able to refute several charges, he was sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal on August 27, 1793 and guillotined the following day . In Paris in those days the Jacobin terreur began . Custine was the first of a series of guillotined generals who were suspected of their aristocratic origins and service in the king's army, and who were charged and convicted for military failures or statements critical of the revolution.

It should be noted that revolutionary France was in an extremely critical situation in the summer of 1793. The finances, the economy and the supply of the population had practically collapsed. At all borders his troops were in a sometimes poor condition and attacked by almost all princes of Europe. In the majority of the departments there was revolt and armed resistance against the central government, which eventually suspended the constitution and brutally dictatorially acted against its enemies both internally and externally.

The Custine process (after Adolphe Thiers )

Adam-Philippe de Custine, colored engraving by Christophe Guérin , 1793

The government, which had been ruled by the Jacobins since June 1793, was confronted with a number of troop leaders who pursued foreign policy without authorization, disregarded the orders of Paris and denied them the authority to conduct military and warfare. It was suspected that Custine would therefore be tried on behalf of the court, also because Dumouriez could no longer be prosecuted for his defeat at Neerektiven and his betrayal . "[...] one was eager to meet a lofty head and thereby achieve that the chiefs of the armies had to bow to the violence of the people [...]" (Adolphe Thiers). The prosecution witnesses accused Custine of surrounding himself only with aristocratic officers, "... you have never had good Republicans at your table!" And of executing looters and defectors without a trial. German witnesses claimed that he had not occupied Mannheim , Koblenz , Darmstadt , Hanau , etc., although citizens asked him to do so. Military officials accused him of abandoning his troops.

Many of the charges were denunciation and acts of revenge . Ultimately, it was probably decisive for the tribunal that Custine was compared with the “traitor” Dumouriez, which “completely ruined him”. He could not prove that he had betrayed the nation , but his unauthorized leaving the line of operations on the Rhine, not having obeyed the order to return and his "timid inaction during the siege of Mainz ", made the tribunal vote with a majority in favor of his condemnation.

Remarks

Maximilien de Robespierre criticized the tough course of the proceedings, "the spirit of chicane and the taste for formalities that had usurped the tribunal."

Custine's daughter Adélaide-Philippine, a well-known Parisian actress , tried in vain to win support and exonerations for her father during the trial .

His desire that his son Renaud-Philippe de Custine (* 1768), who succeeded his father as aide stood to side, his vindication by the publication of his correspondence may cause remained unfulfilled because of his father on January 3, 1794 the scaffold followed . Two years after Adam-Philippe Custine's death, a biography about him appeared anonymously under the title Mémoires posthumes du géneral français comte de Custine, rédigés par un de ses aides de camp (German, Berlin 1795, 2 volumes). It was rumored that it came from one of his former adjutants, later General Louis Baraguey d'Hilliers . However, its content comes exclusively from publicly available sources, so that Arthur Chuquet already excluded the authorship of a person close to him.

Custine's grandson was the writer Astolphe, Marquis de Custine .

Several ramparts were named after Custine, such as the Custine ski jumps in Oberursel am Taunus , which were built at the end of November 1792 on the extreme left wing of the defensive line along Urselbach and Nidda west of Frankfurt to allow Hessian and Prussian troops to advance towards Mainz prevent.

Honors

His name is entered on the triumphal arch in Paris in the 3rd column.

Anecdotal

Not everywhere in Germany did the liberal spirit meet with enthusiastic approval, which at the time traveled through the Rhineland with Custine's troops . The Mainz press reported: “The people of Mainz are very dissatisfied with the freedom that Custine has given them; [...] because all those over the age of 16 and under 62 should take up arms to defend the city. They demanded that if Custine wanted to make them free, he must protect them too. "

exhibition

On the occasion of the 225th anniversary of the "Expedition Custine", the Adam Philippe de Custine campaign with about 20,000 men from the French fortress Landau to the German Reich via Rheinpfalz, Rheinhessen and the Rhine-Main area (September 22, 1792 to 23 July 1793) the historical commission foundation for the Rhineland 1789–1815 created the traveling exhibition "Expedition Custine - Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse and the failed freedom 1792/93". The exhibition series started in September 2017 in Mainz, the main exhibition took place from March 18 (225th anniversary of the proclamation of the Mainz Republic ) to May 18, 2018 in the Hessian State Archives in Darmstadt. Bernhard Vogel was the patron .

See also

• Kannitverstan

literature

• Arthur Chuquet : L'Expédition de Custine (= Les guerres de la Révolution 6). Cerf, Paris 1892.
• Arthur Chuquet (1892), Mark Scheibe: Expedition Custine - Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse and the failed freedom 1792/93. Accompanying volume to the traveling exhibition of the Historical Commission Foundation for the Rhineland 1789–1815, Kelkheim 2019, www.stiftung-hkr.info
• Marco Michael Wagner: Georg Forster versus Adam Philippe Custine - Two revolutionaries in the Republic of Mainz? Grin, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-640-12343-8 .
• Axel Kuhn: The history of the French Revolution, Reclam UB 17017, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 978-3-15-017017-5
• Alain Pigeard: Les étoiles de Napoléon, Editions Quatuor, Paris 1996
• Adolphe Thiers : History of the French Revolution, trans. A. Walthner, 6 volumes, Mannheim 1844–1845
• Abel Hugo: France militaire. Histoire des armées de terre et de mer 1792-1837, 5 volumes, Paris 1833-1838, http://gallica.bnf.fr

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Arthur Benoit, Les plaids annaux de la baronnie de Sarreck , Metz 1869
2. ^ A. Kuhn, Die Franz. Revolution, p. 185
3. ^ A. Kuhn, Die Franz. Revolution, p. 227
4. ^ A. Thiers, History of the French Revolution, Vol. 2, p. 81
5. ↑ A. Pigeard quoted from a biography of J.-M. d'Allonville in, Les étoiles ..., p. 288
6. ↑ A. Pigeard quoted from writings of Dumouriez, Rochambeau, Lameth u. a. in L'étoiles de…, pp. 287-88
7. ↑ A. Pigeard, Les Étoiles ... , p 287
8. ↑ The 21st edition of the État militaire de France 1779 , p. 388, lists him as “ Mestre de camp commandant” of the Dragoon Regiment No. 17 "Custine"
9. ↑ Ralf Roth, Stadt und Bürgertum in Frankfurt am Main , Munich 1996, ISBN 3-486-56188-X : The claim initially amounted to two million gold guilders. Only the owners should be involved in the contribution.
10. ↑ A. Thiers: The Gesch. the French Revolution. Vol. 2, p. 81.
11. ↑ A. Thiers, Geschichte der Franz. Rev…., Volume 3, p. 151ff.
12. ↑ A. Thiers, Gesch. the French Revolution, vol. 3, p. 151ff.
13. ↑ The Privileged Elector. Saxon Postilion , Jhg. 1793-1797; here: 9th century, Jan. 1793, p. 4
14. ↑ Welcome to the Historical Commission Foundation for the Rhineland 1789-1815. Retrieved September 2, 2019 .