Lazare Hoche

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Lazare Hoche
Army of the Rhine
Army of the Coasts of Cherbourg
Army of the Coasts of Brest
Army of the West
Army of the Coasts of the Ocean
Army of Sambre and Meuse
Battles/warsFrench Revolutionary Wars
Other workMinister of War
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Louis Lazare Hoche ([lwi la.zaʁ ɔʃ]; 24 June 1768 – 19 September 1797) was a French military leader of the French Revolutionary Wars. He won a victory over Royalist forces in Brittany. His surname is one of the names inscribed under the Arc de Triomphe, on Column 3. Richard Holmes describes him as "quick-thinking, stern, and ruthless... a general of real talent whose early death was a loss to France."[1]

Early life

Lazare Hoche's birthplace in Versailles

Hoche was born on 24 June 1768 in the village of Montreuil, today part of

Versailles, to Anne Merlière and Louis Hoche, a groom at the royal hunting grounds.[2] His mother died when he was two years old, and Hoche was mostly raised by an aunt, who was a fruit-seller in Montreuil, and was educated by his maternal uncle, the parish priest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, who arranged for Hoche to become a choirboy at his church.[3]

Early career

In 1782, Hoche began working as an aide at the royal stables, but soon left in order to join the

French Guards regiment as a fusilier in October 1784, although he originally intended to serve with the colonial troops in the East Indies.[3] He was promoted to grenadier in November 1785 then to corporal in May 1789, just before the outbreak of the French Revolution.[2]

After the French Guards were disbanded at the start of the Revolution, Hoche joined the new

October Days protests, he was among the Guardsmen under the command of La Fayette who escorted King Louis XVI and his family out of the Palace of Versailles.[2] He thereafter served in various line infantry regiments up to the time of his receiving a commission in 1792.[2][4]

French Revolutionary Wars

Flanders campaign

Hoche by Jean-Louis Laneuville, c. 1801

Hoche first saw action in the defence of Thionville in 1792, as a lieutenant, in the early stages of the Flanders campaign of the Revolutionary Wars, and took part in the Siege of Namur at the end of the year.[2] After serving with distinction in the Siege of Maastricht, Hoche became an aide-de-camp to General Le Veneur in March 1793, and further distinguished himself later that month at the Battle of Neerwinden.[2]

When

Lorraine.[4] His first battle was that of Kaiserslautern during 28–30 November 1793 against the Prussians.[2][4] The French were defeated, but even in the midst of the Reign of Terror the Committee of Public Safety retained Hoche in his command.[4] In their eyes, pertinacity and fiery energy outweighed everything else, and Hoche soon showed that he possessed these qualities.[4]

On 22 December 1793 he won the

Second Battle of Wissembourg on 26 December 1793, the French under his command drove Dagobert Sigmund von Wurmser's Austrian army from Alsace.[2] Hoche pursued his success, sweeping the enemy before him to the middle Rhine in four days. He then put his troops into winter quarters at Bouzonville.[2]

Arrest

Before the next campaign opened, Hoche married Anne Adelaïde Dechaux at

Charles Pichegru, the displaced commander of the Army of the Rhine.[4] He was sent to Paris' Carmes Prison on 11 April, was later transferred to the Conciergerie, and was only released on 4 August, after the fall of Maximilien Robespierre and the end of the Reign of Terror.[2]

War in the Vendée and Chouannerie

Shortly after his release, Hoche was given the command of the

Revolt in the Vendée.[2] He set up his headquarters at Rennes, Brittany, and put his initial effort into reorganizing the troops.[2] In addition, he received the command of the Army of the Coasts of Brest in November 1794.[2] Hoche completed the work of his predecessors in a few months by the Treaty of La Jaunaye (15 February 1795), but soon afterwards the war was renewed by the rebel leadership.[2][4]

Hoche at the Battle of Quiberon, by Charles Porion (1879)

Between June and July 1795, Hoche led the defense against the Quiberon Expedition by Royalist émigrés assisted by the British Royal Navy, which he decisively defeated at Fort Penthièvre on 21 July.[2][4] In late August, he was appointed commander of the Army of the West with the order to "act offensively against Charette's army". In December 1795, when the three armies previously under his command (Armies of the West, of the Coasts of Brest and of the Coasts of Cherbourg) merged to form the new Army of the Coasts of the Ocean, Hoche became the supreme commander of all Republican forces in Western France.[2]

Thereafter, by means of mobile columns (which he kept under good discipline), he gradually eliminated the

Catholic and Royal Armies.[2][4] Hoche directed the operations that led to the capture (and subsequent execution) of rebel leaders Jean-Nicolas Stofflet (24 February 1796) and François de Charette (23 March), bringing an end to the War in the Vendée.[2] With the surrender of the leaders of the Chouannerie, in May and June 1796, Hoche concluded the pacification of Western France, which had for more than three years been the scene of civil war.[2][4]

Expedition to Ireland

In End of the Irish Invasion; – or – the Destruction of the French Armada (1797), James Gillray caricatured the failure of Hoche's Irish expedition.

On 20 July 1796, Hoche was rewarded by the

United Irishmen in a rebellion against British rule. He survived an assassination attempt in Rennes on 16 October, when a worker at the local arsenal fired at him but missed.[2]

In Brest, Hoche gathered and army and forty-eight vessels for the expedition, under the command of Vice Admiral Justin Bonaventure Morard de Galles.[2] The fleet set sail for Ireland on 15 December 1796, with Hoche and Morard de Galles aboard the frigate Fraternité.[2] Due to a gale, however, the frigate was separated from the expedition the day after its departure, and was afterwards chased by a British ship.[2] By the time it reached the Irish coast, on 30 December, the rest of expedition had already dispersed after a failed landing attempt.[2] The Fraternité re-entered France through the Île de Ré on 11 January 1797 without having effected its purpose.[2][4]

With the United Irish leader, Wolfe Tone, who was to have landed with him in Ireland, Hoche reflected critically on the violent course of the Revolution. Tone, "heartily glad" to find Hoche of "a humane temperament", wrote in his memoirs:[5]

Hoche mentioned, also, that great mischief had been done to the principles of liberty and additional difficulties thrown in the way of the French Revolution, by the quantity of blood spilled: "for", he added, "if you guillotine a man, you get rid of an individual, it is true, but then you make all his friends and connections enemies for ever of the government".

Later career

On his return, Hoche was at once transferred to the Rhine frontier as commander of the

Preliminaries of Leoben.[4]

In July 1797, Hoche was appointed Minister of War by the Directory.[2] In this position he was surrounded by obscure political intrigues, and, finding himself the dupe of Paul Barras and technically guilty of violating the constitution, he resigned after less than month in office, and returned to his command on the Rhine frontier.[2][4] It was his denunciation during that time that had led to Kléber's removal from command. The compromising letter was found by Jean Baptiste Alexandre Strolz in Hoche's papers.[6][7]

Death and funeral

Monument General Hoche in Weißenthurm

On 2 September, Hoche received the command of the

François Marceau at Fort Petersberg in Koblenz.[4]

A funeral procession to Hoche was held on the Champ de Mars, Paris on 1 October.[2] In 1919, the French Army in occupied Rhineland reburied his mortal remains into the 1797-built Monument General Hoche in Weißenthurm, near Neuwied, where he had started his last campaign against the Austrians.

Memorials

Statue of Hoche commemorating his victory in Quiberon, by Jules Dalou (1902)

Hoche is commemorated by a statue on Place Hoche, a gardened square not far from the main entrance to the

Hoche
.

Hoche's motto was Res non verba, which is Latin for "Deeds, not words".[2][8]

Jenny Hoche, daughter

In popular culture

  • Brown, Leah Marie, Silence in the Mist: A Novel of the French Revolution, Eternal Press, 2011

References

  1. ^ Richard Holmes, ed. The Oxford companion to military history (2001) p 411.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao Charavay, Étienne (1894). Lazare Hoche: notice sommaire (in French). Impr. Maretheux.
  3. ^
    Hachette
    .
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Hoche, Lazare". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 553–554.
  5. ISBN 9781856353892
    .
  6. ^ Librairie R. Roger et F. Chernoviz, Feuilles d'Histoire du XVII au XX Siècle, Tome 6, Paris 1911, p. 332.
  7. ^ Lubert d' Héricourt: La Vie du Général Kléber, Paris 1801, p.122.
  8. ^ D.J.A. Westerhuis (1957) Prisma Latijns Citatenboek.

Sources

External links

Military offices
Preceded by
Jacques Charles René Delaunay
 Commander-in-chief of the Army of the Moselle
31 October 1793 – 18 March 1794 		Succeeded by
Preceded by
Pierre Vialle
 Commander-in-chief of the Army of the Coasts of Cherbourg
1 September 1794 – 30 April 1795 		Succeeded by
Preceded by Commander-in-chief of the Army of the Coasts of Brest
10 November 1794 – 10 September 1795 		Succeeded by
Preceded by Commander-in-chief of the
Army of the West

11 September – 17 December 1795 		Succeeded by
Preceded by
New organization
 Commander-in-chief of the Army of the Coasts of the Ocean
5 January – 22 September 1796 		Succeeded by
Discontinued
Preceded by
New organization
 Commander-in-chief of the Army of Ireland
1 November – 23 December 1796 		Succeeded by
Emmanuel Grouchy
Preceded by
Emmanuel Grouchy
 Commander-in-chief of the Army of Ireland
19 January – 9 February 1797 		Succeeded by
Discontinued
Preceded by Commander-in-chief of the
Army of Sambre-et-Meuse

9 February – 18 September 1797 		Succeeded by
Political offices
Preceded by
French minister of War

15 July 1797 – 22 July 1797 		Succeeded by
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