Француз генералы Адам Филипп де Кюстин өмірі мен трагедиясы

French general (1740–1793)

Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine (4 February 174028 August 1793) was a French general. As a young officer in the French Royal Army, he served in the Seven Years' War. In the American Revolutionary War he joined Rochambeau's Expédition Particulière (Special Expedition) supporting the American colonists. Following the successful Virginia campaign and the Battle of Yorktown, he returned to France and rejoined his unit in the Royal Army. When the French Revolution began he was elected to the Estates General and served in the subsequent National Constituent Assembly as a representative from Metz. He supported some of the August Decrees, but also supported, generally, royal prerogative and the rights of the French émigrés. At the dissolution of the Assembly in 1791, he rejoined the army as a lieutenant general and the following year replaced Nicolas Luckner as commander in chief of the Army of the Vosges. In 1792, he successfully led campaigns in the middle and upper Rhine regions, taking Speyer and Mainz and breaching the Wissembourg lines. Following Charles François Dumouriez's apparent treason, the Committee of Public Safety investigated Custine, but a vigorous defense mounted by Maximillien Robespierre resulted in his acquittal. Upon return to active command, he found the army had lost most of its officer corps and experienced troops, and in 1793, following a series of reversals in the spring, the French lost control of much of the territory they had acquired the year before. Ordered to take command of the Army of the North, Custine sought first to solidify French control of the important crossings of the Rhine by Mainz. However, when he failed to relieve the besieged fortress of Condé the following year, he was recalled to Paris. After Condé, Mainz and Speyer had all been lost, he was arrested. He was prosecuted in a lengthy trial before the Committee on Public Safety's Revolutionary Tribunal by Antoine Quentin Fouquier Tinville, and Jacques Hébert continued to attack Custine through his publication Le Père Duchesne. Custine was found guilty of treason by a majority vote of the Tribunal on 27 August, and guillotined the following day. His son was also executed a few months later, and his daughter in law Delphine de Custine suffered for several months in prison before she was released in the summer of 1794. She managed to recover some of the family property and emigrated to Germany, and later Switzerland, with her son, Astolphe Louis Léonor, who became a well known travel writer. The fate of the family is representative of the fates of many of the minor aristocracy in France, especially those in the military and diplomatic corps, whose reputations the Montagnards tarnished in the Reign of Terror.

Custine began his career at the age of eight, in 1748, at the end of the War of Austrian Succession in Germany under Marshal Saxe, who continued his tutelage during peace time. During the Seven Years' War (1756–63), Custine served in the French army in the German states; in 1758, he was a captain of dragoons in the Schomberg regiment. While fighting the Prussians, Custine learned to admire their modern military organization, which later influenced his own military style. By the end of the Seven Years' War, Custine was maestre de camp. The Duc de Choiseul recognized his talent and created a regiment of dragoons for him, but Custine exchanged this for a regiment of infantry that was heading for America, where he could continue military action, acquire additional experience, and obtain promotion. His regiment, the Regiment de Saintonge (1,322 men and officers), embarked for the Thirteen Colonies in April 1780 from Brest. There, he served with distinction against the British as a colonel in the expeditionary force of Count Rochambeau in the War of American Independence. The regiment participated in the Virginia campaign of 1781 and received distinguished commendations for action at the Battle of Yorktown; Custine received individual recognition of merit and a brevet from the United States government. Rouchambeau's reports praised his honesty, zeal, courage and talents. He also resumed responsibilities as the proprietor of the dragoon regiment de Rouergue. With the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly in October 1791, Custine was appointed lieutenant general to the Army of the Vosges, as the army of volunteers was known. Despite his strict discipline, he was popular with the soldiers, amongst whom he was known as "général moustache". The following year he was appointed commander in chief of the army, replacing Nicolas Luckner; in the following campaign, he took Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Frankfurt in September and October 1792. In the Rhineland, Custine continued the revolution by proclamation, and levied heavy taxes on the nobility and clergy. During the winter a Prussian army forced him to evacuate Frankfurt, re cross the Rhine and fall back upon Landau. This occurred during Charles François Dumouriez's treasonous collaboration with the Austrians. Summoned to Paris to account for himself, Custine was accused of treason, but was ably defended by Robespierre, the French revolutionary and lawyer, who declared Custine an honest man who gave his country good service. With Robespierre's defense, he was cleared of all charges, and was later given command of the Army of the North. Custine was recalled to Paris on 15 July.

Upon arrival in Paris, Custine displayed his usual sang froid, which seemed to exasperate his political enemies. He took private rooms in a furnished hotel, and rented a room for his secretary. He visited his son and daughter in law, and carried on his usual Parisian social calendar: he appeared in all the public places, at the Palais Royal and the theater, and was received with noisy ovations and shouts of Vive Custine! The Committee of Public Safety ordered a policeman to accompany him everywhere. On 22 July, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Luxembourg. On 23 July, the news came that Mainz had capitulated; on 28 July came the news of the loss of Valenciennes. He was transferred to the Conciergerie on 28 July, and his rooms, those of his secretary, and those of his son were sealed, pending a search. This time Robespierre did not defend Custine. Custine's lovely daughter in law came daily to the courthouse to sit at his feet; eventually, the prosecutors accused the judges of postponing a verdict so that they could continue to gaze at her. The Revolutionary Tribunal convicted him of treason and he was executed by guillotine on the following day, 28 August 1793.

Custine's leadership and character, although impugned by the Tribunal, proved fundamentally sound in the field. As an admirer of the Prussian style of drill and discipline, he was a strict disciplinarian, but his soldiers actually liked him, and felt inspired by him. Custine liked to make speeches and reportedly knew the names of his soldiers. He visited men in the hospital, demonstrated blunt good humor, and was the master of repartee. His ready wit was quoted throughout his command. He did not tolerate disorder or insubordination however; when encountering a troop of volunteers in 1792, who bragged that they were going to teach the army the right step (make it Republican), he ordered his cavalry to surround and disarm them. Custine also recognized and recruited talented officers. At the surrender of the garrison at Mainz, he offered the Mainz commander, Rudolf Eickemeyer, a colonel's commission to serve in the French army. By 1793, Eickemeyer had been promoted to brigadier general; he served in the Upper Rhine campaigns and the Rhine Campaign of 1796. During this campaign, he also acquired the services of a young officer, Laurent Gouvion, later known as Laurent de Gouvion Saint Cyr. According to Antoine Marie Chamans, he acquired Saint Cyr's services in an unusual way, indicative of Custine's temperament and personality. In a break in action, Gouvion was sketching the countryside, including the enemy positions near Eckheim, in the vicinity of Mainz, when Custine saw him from a distance. Not approving of his occupation, Custine galloped to him, snatched the paper from his hand, and angrily asked what he was doing. Upon noticing that Gouvion's drawing closely matched the positions, he assigned the young officer to his own staff. One of Custine's staff officers, Simon François Gay de Vernon wrote that he was careful of his soldiers' well being, a good administrator, generous with his own money, used to managing soldiers, able to understand things at a glance, sober, and active. Custine appreciated the sage advice of intelligent officers and showed his gratitude to them. Aside from Saint Cyr, Custine appointed Louis Desaix and Jean Baptiste Kléber to his staff. His enormous vanity, his belief that his plans were so wonderful that he failed to see their flaws, and his bad habit of accusing and denouncing other generals were Custine's greatest flaws. When Houchard was appointed to command two armies, Custine wrote accurately, "the conduct of two armies is beyond Houchard's power " The letter was published and hurt the feelings of a man who had served Custine loyally. Custine unwisely got into a quarrel with General Pierre Joseph Ferrier du Chastelet who was on friendly terms with the War Minister Jean Baptiste Noël Bouchotte. He also denounced fellow army commanders Pierre de Ruel, marquis de Beurnonville and François Christophe de Kellermann.

Born in Metz on 4 February 1740, Custine was a son of Philippe François Joseph, comte de Custine, and Anne Marguerite Maguin, daughter of Francois, comte d' Roussy and Marguerite de Walter. His father, the tenth count, had died at the Battle of Rossbach in 1757, one of six French generals killed in the engagement. Custine's other titles included Signeur de Guermagne and de Sareck, and he was, after 1770, also the lord of Niderviller, a property he purchased. He married Adelaide Celeste Louise Gagnat de Longny. In 1790 Custine's daughter, Adelaide Anne Philippe, married Henri Evrard, marquis de Dreux Brézé, master of ceremonies for Louis XVI. She and her husband spent much of the early 1790s as refugees in Britain, although he returned to France several times to visit his estates; he was eventually confirmed as a peer of France,

Custine's son, Renaud Louis Philippe Francois, (b. in Paris in 1768 and died 3 January 1794), also called Armand, was a captain in one of the regiments in the Army of the Rhine. As a young man, he had traveled widely, and made a long study of the art of war in Berlin. Comte de Mirabeau, ever the politician, predicted that the young Custine would become a well respected diplomat. By 1792, Armand was Nicholas Luckner's aide de camp; following Luckner's dismissal, he entered a brief embassy duty in Berlin in 1792 as chargé de affaires and eventually, as diplomatic relations between France and the rest of Europe became strained, he was a hostage for the safe return of Prussian and Austrian diplomats in Paris. His deceased mother had left him capital of 700,000 livres, making him a wealthy young man; it was assumed that his father would also settle a suitable amount on him upon his marriage as well as the family estates in Niderviller, which included six farms. Custine, as an aristocratic general, and his son, an up and coming diplomat, seemed natural targets of suspicion. In 1792, after spending part of a year in Berlin, the younger Custine found himself under suspicion, despite his careful and circumspect behavior in Berlin: he had gone out of his way to make sure that he documented and reported any contact with the Prussians, and that all reports of his conversations were carefully and specifically annotated. He wrote to his mother in law that, by a miracle, he was not on the list of those to be arrested, and had avoided the September 1792 massacre at the Prison de l'Abbaye. He reported that he feared writing to his wife by the insecure post. He languished in Paris over the winter, but eventually he secured a position in his father's command in the Army of the Rhine, joining that army in Frankfurt. By August 1793, though, following his father's arrest, young Custine found himself proscribed, that is, on the list of suspected royalists. The September Law of Suspects accelerated the son's trial. The chief evidence against him seemed to be a letter he had written to his father the previous spring, suggesting that he resign from the army, and this, as well as other letters—real and forged—guaranteed his condemnation. He was condemned and guillotined a day later. He left a young son, Astolphe Louis Léonor, Marquis de Custine (18 March 1790 – 25 September 1857).

In 1770, Custine acquired property in the Niderviller region, which included a faience factory. The manufactory had been founded in 1735, but had enjoyed limited profitability. Various difficulties, including a fire that gutted the production building and a limitation on the manufacture of soft paste porcelain, discouraged the original investors. When Custine purchased the property in 1770, it was a struggling investment. He encountered significant financial problems over the next eight years, and considered bankruptcy in 1778. He subsequently entered into business with François Henri Lenfrey and the factory began producing faience in the English style of tableware. Lenfrey also revamped the production process, producing cailloutage, which combined faience production techniques with a new process that mixed crushed limestone with the clay. Custine's execution led to the temporary closing of the plant when the regime confiscated his property; the workmen, summarily laid off, traveled to Paris to find work, and several signed a petition for her release. The continued war with the Coalition reduced the number of employees to 15; the factory survived, however, and enjoyed a renaissance in the mid nineteenth century. Custine presented George Washington with a set of this tableware service in 1782.