The Life and Times Sébastien le Prestre, Seigneur de Vauban:
The later half of the Seventeenth Century would witness the early stages of the Scientific Revolution (material, physical revolution) and the Enlightenment (intellectual, metaphysical revolution) , through which western civilization would permanently change the way it conceived of itself in both physical and metaphysical terms - a process of transformation that we now refer to as ‘modernity’.
No discipline would remain as it once was - certainly not that of the military sciences. Their critical importance was self-evident to absolutist sovereigns and their centralizing nation-states, who needed little convincing to allocate extensive resources to fortifying their national borders and expanding their domains. This, in turn, produced a new generation of military engineers who sought to use scientific and mathematic principles to rationalize warfare. And none was greater, more influential, or more interesting than the French mastermind known as Vauban.
Vauban is interesting because in both his professional and personal life we find a man who is, in all respects, seemingly at war with himself. The irony of Vauban’s life is befitting more of an artist, a philosopher, or a character in a play than any military man I’ve ever heard of. He is both defender and besieger, builder and obliterator.
He is the indispensable instrument of a warmongering absolutist monarch yet possesses a profound, instinctual sense of compassion and value for human life as well as a genuine desire to help people. He has a manic, obsessive predisposition for orderliness yet is perfectly at home on the battlefield. He is almost a perfect pragmatist, yet his creations bear an unmistakable aesthetic artistry that could not have been unintentional. Look closely at the portrait of Vauban as displayed above and observe the keen inscrutability of his expression - it is hard to mark sense of, yet the visage gazing back as us is far from an unfriendly one.
Where to even start? What is to be made of such a man?
Sébastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de Vauban, had been born in 1633 to an insignificant, impoverished, Burgundian noble family. And yet by the end of his life, King Louis XIV, the model of an absolutist monarch, had personally selected him first as General Commissioner of Fortifications in 1678, and later Marshall of France in 1703, the highest military honor the King of France could bestow upon a military leader.
And yet Vauban had surprisingly little interest in anything of the sort, preferring frankness over courtly pomp and circumstance. In a letter to the Marquis of Louvois, Minister of War, his superior, mind you, dated November 1668, Vauban explains himself in the most straightforward terms:
“I prefer the truth, however badly polished, to a cowardly complacency which would serve only to deceive you, if you were capable of it, and dishonor me… I am on the spot; I see things with appreciation, and it is my job to know them; I know my duty, to the rules of which I inviolably adhere, but even more that I have the honor of being your creature, that I owe you all that I am, and that I only hope through you… so please find it good that with the respect I owe you, I freely tell you my feelings on the matter… you know better than I that only people who behave this way are capable of serving a master as he they should”1.
Louvois, who frequently worked and had to deal with Vauban described him to the king as “a sesame with many doors”2, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Vauban could credit his initial advancement to his education, his lifelong love of architecture and spatial planning, and circumstance - in 1650, he joined the entourage of a certain Prince de Condé.
This occurred during a period of instability known as the Fronde (1648-1653), in which the French nobility came into conflict with the monarchy, lead only nominally by an infant King Louis XIV, while real power laid in the hands of his scheming chief minister, the Cardinal Mazarin, and his domineering mother, Anne of Austria.
When de Condé sought to fortify his seat of power at Sainte-Menehould and the surrounding towns in the Argonne Forest, Vauban volunteered to oversee construction. When the Chevalier de Clerville, the Royalist general sent to subdue the Frondistes, met Vauban in November 1653 (by chance, he had been captured outside the city by a royalist patrol), he was so impressed by his efforts to fortify the city that he offered Vauban a pardon on the condition that he join his staff. Hoping to keep his head, Vauban readily accepted.
Vauban at War, Maastricht 1673:
Under Louis the XIV, France launched a series of aggressive wars seeking to expand her borders. In what was known as the Devolution War (1667-1668), Louis used a dynastic dispute3 with the Spanish Habsburgs as a pretext to invade and successfully occupy valuable Habsburg towns in Flanders. Then, in 1672, Louis, with an army of over 120,000 men launched the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678) in an effort to conquer the Netherlands. What the French hoped would be a quick victory turned into a bloody, six-year conflict against a coalition led by the Austrian Habsburgs and allies.
Although Vauban had up to that time developed a highly respectable reputation as a talented young officer, it was in this series conflicts where he was to gain real renown, not to mention the King’s attention. By the outbreak of the Franco-Dutch War, Vauban had overseen the siege, capture, and refortification of countless walled towns in the Low Countries.
In 1673, the French army, led by King Louis himself, laid siege to the formidably fortified Dutch city of Maastricht, a critical stronghold due to its bridges and fortifications on both banks of the River Meuse. Because Louis, wanting the lion’s share of the glory, had forbidden his other generals from attending, only Vauban was there to supervise the actual siege. His response to the problem was not only novel, but nothing short of brilliant. It was called The Siege Parallel.
First Vauban ordered his sappers to dig a series of three parallel trenches in concentric semi-circles around Maastricht - a process known as Circumvallation. This allowed the French to place a large amount of infantry within an extremely close, but relatively safe proximity to the walls. The main parallels, dug along the contours of the landscape, were connected to each other by a series of communication trenches, zig-zagged to minimize their exposure to enemy fire. At the far ends of each parallel, Vauban constructed battery redoubts that could simultaneously protect the his flanks and serve as firing positions through which the French artillery could bombard the city, placed at specific locations to minimize exposure from the enemy’s guns. All the excavated earth could be repurposed as earthworks to provide further coverage.
This level and mode of investment left Vauban with a considerable amount of strategic initiative. From the first parallel, further prodding trenches could be dug perpendicular to the walls. This allowed the French to get so close to the walls that the enemy could no longer see them, let alone within the range of their cannons. Meanwhile, the French could bring in their own cannons and fire at weakpoints from incredibly, almost comically short distances to create a breach. Once a breach had been created, large amounts of troops could be funneled in through the connection trenches. He also extended the trenches in strategic locations, such as bends and corners in the defenses, building redoubts - or Places d’Armes, as Vauban coined them - to which French troops could easily fall back and regroup.
Although the plans and strategy behind them were very much his own, Vauban claimed to have inspired by, and drawn many of his lessons from the Ottoman Siege of Candia against the Venetians on the island of Crete ten years prior. In that siege, the superior numbers and firepower that the Ottoman’s possessed seemed to matter little as the siege dragged on for a staggering twenty-one years, costing the Ottomans well over 100,000 men. Even after the Turks gained knowledge of a flaw in the fort from a captured Venetian engineer, it would still be three years until the Venetians surrendered. Thus, Vauban was acutely aware that overwhelming numbers, and even knowledge of a fort’s weaknesses, was not, by itself, enough to ensure a speedy victory.
Nevertheless, Vauban identified his weak point. Tongeren Gate, located in the northeast corner (see map), was the oldest section of Maastricht’s walls, virtually unchanged from their original medieval construction centuries prior. The ravelins and hornworks, the protrusions so prominent throughout the rest of the perimeter, are virtually absent at this northeastern corner. It is also there that the moat begins to dry up. Years earlier, the Dutch had updated this section of the wall by building an outer lunette extending beyond the gate, flanked by an fortified demi-lune within the moat itself called “the Half Moon”, which could support the main lunette deadly enfilading fire.
The French first launched a diversion against the right bank the city, called the Wijk, to draw away the defenders to the opposite side. The French musketeers, alongside a detachment of English Royalists, exiled by Cromwell - including Sir John Churchill, a many-times great grandfather of Winston Churchill - spent the entire night attacking the lunette and half moon from various angles, the lunette was captured and recaptured three times, before finally falling to the French, sustaining horrific casualties. Vauban, for his part, was extremely anxious, later claiming that he was just one failed assault from lifting his own siege.
This back and fourth, tooth and nail fighting would continue for some time, though the French made steady progress. Following several days of continuous, concentrated, close range bombardment a large section of the wall to the left of Tongeren Gate finally collapsed. Vauban had always been an enthusiastic proponent of coordinated, massed siege artillery. “Let us burn more powder and less blood” he had said as early as 1672 - but the proximity allowed them by their trenches allowed them to perform what was, certainly for the Seventeenth Century, an unprecedented degree of accuracy and precision.
As for the Dutch, the writing was on the wall. The Dutch garrison and their Italian mercenaries surrendered and was allowed to leave in dignity with their flags flying and drums beating, while Louis began his triumphant entrance. Though very few in comparison noticed Vauban or paid him much attention, it was he who really won the day4. Vauban, meanwhile, was promoted to “Comissioner of Fortifications”.
The Iron Border:
Vauban, however, had neither the time for nor the interest in celebrating, even following the cessation of hostilities by 1678. Although France did fail to conquer the entirety of the Netherlands (this had been Louis’ objective), it had achieved nevertheless massive territorial gains at the expense of the Habsburgs: France recieved the entirety of the Franche-Comté5, the Imperial counties of Alsace Lorraine, in addition to a consolidation of gains in the low countries. And King Louis had every intention to keep his hard-won spoils.
Thus, Vauban had an enormous, daunting task ahead of him: the fortification of five hundred miles of terrain. Ironically, the difficulty of this task was increased tremendously by the French conquest in the first place, not to mention Vauban’s sieges. It had been said that “a city built by Vauban is a city saved, a city sieged by Vauban is a city lost”, and Vauban had put most of those cities to siege. And so nearly all fortifications would need to rebuilt from scratch, if not greatly updated. Moreover, the fact that the French had managed to take them in the first place, was proof of their vulnerability - the French would need to rethink not only the way their built their fortifications, but also their entire defensive strategy.
By at least the end of the war, Vauban had begun to consider defense on a larger scale. The design of the fortresses themselves be perfected, but separate fortresses could also complement each other. Vauban was also aware that France had spent much of its history fighting in the northeast, both as an entrance for Burgundian, English, Austrian, Spanish, and German invaders as well as an natural avenue for French expansion. And unlike many defensive planners, Vauban did not discount the possibility of pitched battles or go to great lengths to avoid them - seeking only that they take place in controlled environment ideal for the French defenders.
The Frontière de Fer, iron border, was Vauban’s concept for decisive area defense of this critical region. It consisted of two fortified defensive lines - the first placed directly on the border and and the second located twenty to forty miles (depending on the contours of the land) from the first line. Were the enemy to penetrate the first line, they would find themselves in what Vauban coined the Pre Carré, the garden: a fun-house where the enemy could be harried, attacked, and harassed at every turn. French troops could easily fall back behind the second line if they needed to regroup, while the enemy would find himself with no easy escape route.
For the rest of the frontier, Vauban at least had geography on his side. The natural eastern boundary of the Franche-Comté ends at the western fringe of the Alps, the Jura, highly defendable mountain territory. The wealthy cities of Alsace, Strasbourg, Kolmar, and Mulhouse, are hemmed in by the mighty (and wide) River Rhine and thus highly defendable. Were the Habsburgs, presumably attacking from the south-west, to cross the Rhine and take these cities with great difficulty, they would be denied access to the French heartland by the Vosges Mountain Range. Meanwhile, the notoriously impassible Ardennes (certainly for a 17th Century army, at least) served as a vast, natural barrier in much (though not all) of the northeast.
Additionally, the Treaty of Nijmegen had tidied up the traditionally messy borders with France and the HRE, full of difficult-to-defend enclaves and exclaves into a straighter, more coherent line, and, most importantly, more defendable. The obsessive-compulsive Vauban decried this as the disgusting “intermingling of places”, a complaint that appears again and again in his writings. “This confusion of friendly and enemy places does not please me”, says Vauban in a stern letter to Louvois.
Nevertheless, Vauban knew that neither natural barriers nor lines on a map would be anything near enough. Rivers can be crossed, mountains have passes. Old forts would be destroyed if needed; better that than push a bad position. He also ordered the demolition of older forts in the interior (not in border regions), which freed up men and resources which could then be redeployed to the Pre Carré. This served an additional purpose in light of the Fronde - which Vauban had participated in - since the presence of these forts within the core of France made it more difficult to reassert royal authority in times of armed rebellion.
Overall, Vauban would spend much of the rest of his life traveling up and down between these places, supervising up to ten or twenty projects at any given time. He never could, nor did sit still for very long.
Belfort:
Between the Vosges and the Jura ranges, for example, lies a considerably wide gap known as the Burgundian Gate. The fortress city of Belfort, located directly between the two ranges in the center of the plain, was the only thing stopping a hostile army from passing through6 and marching on Paris. Thus one of Vauban’s earliest projects was to extensively fortify this strategic town following the French capture of the city in 1675, a project which took place over the course of two decades.
Belfort is also a good early example of how Vauban’s approach developed into a synthesis of both defensive geometry and urban planning. This did not occur spontaneously, rather it was the logical next step of his larger project of spatial rationalization. In the Middle ages, control of a town meant very little without control of its castle. Towns developed around castles, not vice-versa.
However, as we have already seen in the fortifications of Maastricht, this had began to shift by the first centuries of the Early Modern Period, facilitated in large part by the evolution of both offensive and defensive military technology. Vauban, in addition to being a military engineer and architect, was also an economist and thus was especially sensitive to the fact that a nation’s power7 is a function, at least in part, of its economic base. In any case, the people deserved to be protected.
Starting from the core of the old Burgundian castle on the hill, Vauban constructed an imposing citadel expanding outward radially in a series of cascading lunettes, reinforced by earthwork, arranged in a demi-star configuration. It made sense to center the fortifications on this focal point - facing southeast towards the plain it would be the most vulnerable to attack. Later it was reinforced with an additional hornwork, providing an extra layer of defense. At each level were scarpworks: inclining and declining surfaces designed to confound the enemy on foot.
The citadel, however, was to be just one side of what would develop into an extensive pentagonal defensive perimeter encompassing the entire town. Both manmade materials and the earth itself would be reshaped to fit Vauban’s vision. Curtain walls were constructed along the outskirts on all sides, strengthened at their corners by additional lunettes and demi-lunes. Dug at their base was a steeply angled earthwork glacis, a dirt incline that would prevent enemy artillery from hitting the walls at close range as at the Siege of Maastrict - a Vaubanian defense for a very, very Vaubanian type of attack! He also had his engineers change the course of the Savoureuse to: i) feed the huge moat, and ii) give the people of Belfort a lovely canal.
Since Vauban’s refortification of the city, Belfort has been put under siege by an invading army three times - all three of which failed. First by the Prussians in 1813 following the Battle of Leipzig and second by the Austrians in 1815, following the Battle of Waterloo and the Coalition’s reoccupation of France. The third and more notable instance during the France-Prussian in 1870, when the Prussians destroyed the French army at the Battle of Sedan (in the Northeast) and charged headlong into Paris. Nevertheless, for four months the French garrison at Belfort managed to hold off a Prussian force at least twice (invested in trenches Vauban-style around the city) its size despite heavy bombardment, only surrendering following the Armistice of Versailles in 1871.
Pujo, Bernard. Vauban. 1991. p.144. Translated.
Ibid. 143.
France and the Habsburgs had been in a state of decades-long, continuous conflict since the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), which had not ceased even with the historic Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. With the Spanish Habsburgs facing imminent bankruptcy as a result of their Eighty Year’s War (1556/1568-1648) with the Dutch, they invited France to the negotiating table. The Treaty of the Pyrenees (1649) produced the desired peace, strengthened by a royal marriage with the Princess Maria Theresa of Spain, daughter of King Philip IV. When Philip died in 1665 and his heir and first son, the sickly Charles, died the following year, Louis used his marriage to Maria Theresa (now Philip’s oldest living child) to attempt to claim the Spanish throne. To prevent this from happening, Maria attempted to renounce her claim to the Spanish throne, while her now enraged husband (and his lawyers) attempted to argue that she had no such power because her father had never paid a dowry.
Despite his taking the king’s share of credit, Louis knew perfectly well to whom he owned the victory at Maastricht. Louis wrote to Colbert, his trusted finance minister, praising Vauban for his skill in “regulating the attacks alone” and his resolution throughout all “vigils and fatigues” of battle. As a reward for his service and ingenuity, Louis rewarded Vauban handsomely in addition to the promotion with a generous cash prize of 80,000 livres. In 1675, Vauban used the money to buy back the Château de Bazouches, his family’s ancestral estate in Burgundy.
Known to the French as Franche-Comté, the Freigrafschaft by the Austrians, and the Franco Condado by the Spanish, this rich and strategically valuable region (which translates in English to ‘Free Imperial County’) served as a major stronghold for the Habsburgs in Western Europe since the Burgundian Succession in 1477. For centuries it had served forward operating base for their efforts to check French ambitions - and its rugged terrain, at the foothills of the alps, were could be fortified. Due to its central location between the two major Habsburg kingdoms of Austria and Spain, many Emperors, such as Charles V and Philip I, were fond of taking residence there and its splendid, but well-defended principal city Besançon (German: Bisanz).
Its strategic value had been appreciated since at least the Middle Ages, having first been fortified by the Burgundians as early as the 11th Century and then updated by the Habsburgs when they inheireted the territory in the late 14th Century. However, by the 17th Century they had become woefully outdated, with Vauban himself remarking on their sad state.
This idea, that of the nation-state, or the ‘nation’ in more abstract terms was a relatively new concept in the 17th Century. What we would refer to today as a person’s sense of patriotism lay not in their sense of belonging to an abstract, politically defined ‘nation’, but rather largely in feudally-derived obligations of service to one’s lords.