desperately contested, but in the end the French army won a great victory over the Bavarians and Imperialists commanded by Count Mercy. As after Rocroy, numerous fortresses opened their gates to the duke. The next winter Enghien spent, like every other winter during the war, amid the gaieties of Paris. The summer campaign of 1645 opened with the defeat of Turenne by Mercy, but this was retrieved in the brilliant victory of Nördlingen, in which Mercy was killed, and Enghien himself received several serious wounds. The capture of Philipsburg was the most important of his other achievements during this campaign. In 1646 Enghien served under the duke of Orleans in Flanders, and when, after the capture of Mardyck, Orleans returned to Paris, Enghien, left in command, captured Dunkirk (October 11th).
It was in this year that the old prince of Condé died. The enormous power that fell into the hands of his successor was naturally looked upon with serious alarm by the regent and her minister. Condé’s birth and military renown placed him at the head of the French nobility; but, added to that, the family of which he was chief was both enormously rich and master of no small portion of France. Condé himself held Burgundy, Berry and the marches of Lorraine, as well as other less important territory; his brother Conti held Champagne, his brother-in-law, Longueville, Normandy. The government, therefore, determined to permit no increase of his already overgrown authority, and Mazarin made an attempt, which for the moment proved successful, at once to find him employment and to tarnish his fame as a general. He was sent to lead the revolted Catalans. Ill-supported, he was unable to achieve anything, and, being forced to raise the siege of Lerida, he returned home in bitter indignation. In 1648, however, he received the command in the important field of the Low Countries; and at Lens (Aug. 19th) a battle took place, which, beginning with a panic in his own regiment, was retrieved by Condé’s coolness and bravery, and ended in a victory that fully restored his prestige.
In September of the same year Condé was recalled to court, for the regent Anne of Austria required his support. Influenced by the fact of his royal birth and by his arrogant scorn for the bourgeois, Condé lent himself to the court party, and finally, after much hesitation, he consented to lead the army which was to reduce Paris (Jan. 1649).
On his side, insufficient as were his forces, the war was carried on with vigour, and after several minor combats their substantial losses and a threatening of scarcity of food made the Parisians weary of the war. The political situation inclined both parties to peace, which was made at Rueil on the 20th of March (see Fronde, The). It was not long, however, before Condé became estranged from the court. His pride and ambition earned for him universal distrust and dislike, and the personal resentment of Anne in addition to motives of policy caused the sudden arrest of Condé, Conti and Longueville on the 18th of January 1650. But others, including Turenne and his brother the duke of Bouillon, made their escape. Vigorous attempts for the release of the princes began to be made. The women of the family were now its heroes. The dowager princess claimed from the parlement of Paris the fulfilment of the reformed law of arrest, which forbade imprisonment without trial. The duchess of Longueville entered into negotiations with Spain; and the young princess of Condé, having gathered an army around her, obtained entrance into Bordeaux and the support of the parlement of that town. She alone, among the nobles who took part in the folly of the Fronde, gains our respect and sympathy. Faithful to a faithless husband, she came forth from the retirement to which he had condemned her, and gathered an army to fight for him. But the delivery of the princes was brought about in the end by the junction of the old Fronde (the party of the parlement and of Cardinal de Retz) and the new Fronde (the party of the Condés); and Anne was at last, in February 1651, forced to liberate them from their prison at Havre. Soon afterwards, however, another shifting of parties left Condé and the new Fronde isolated. With the court and the old Fronde in alliance against him, Condé found no resource but that of making common cause with the Spaniards, who were at war with France. The confused civil war which followed this step (Sept. 1651) was memorable chiefly for the battle of the Faubourg St Antoine, in which Condé and Turenne, two of the foremost captains of the age, measured their strength (July 2, 1652), and the army of the prince was only saved by being admitted within the gates of Paris. La Grande Mademoiselle, daughter of the duke of Orleans, persuaded the Parisians to act thus, and turned the cannon of the Bastille on Turenne’s army. Thus Condé, who as usual had fought with the most desperate bravery, was saved, and Paris underwent a new investment. This ended in the flight of Condé to the Spanish army (Sept. 1652), and thenceforward, up to the peace, he was in open arms against France, and held high command in the army of Spain. But his now fully developed genius as a commander found little scope in the cumbrous and antiquated system of war practised by the Spaniards, and though he gained a few successes, and manœuvred with the highest possible skill against Turenne, his disastrous defeat at the Dunes near Dunkirk (14th of June 1658), in which an English contingent of Cromwell’s veterans took part on the side of Turenne, led Spain to open negotiations for peace. After the peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, Condé obtained his pardon (January 1660) from Louis, who thought him less dangerous as a subject than as possessor of the independent sovereignty of Luxemburg, which had been offered him by Spain as a reward for his services.
Condé now realized that the period of agitation and party warfare was at an end, and he accepted, and loyally maintained henceforward, the position of a chief subordinate to a masterful sovereign. Even so, some years passed before he was recalled to active employment, and these years he spent on his estate at Chantilly. Here he gathered round him a brilliant company, which included many men of genius—Molière, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Nicole, Bourdaloue and Bossuet. About this time negotiations between the Poles, Condé and Louis were carried on with a view to the election, at first of Condé’s son Enghien, and afterwards of Condé himself, to the throne of Poland. These, after a long series of curious intrigues, were finally closed in 1674 by the veto of Louis XIV. and the election of John Sobieski. The prince’s retirement, which was only broken by the Polish question and by his personal intercession on behalf of Fouquet in 1664, ended in 1668. In that year he proposed to Louvois, the minister of war, a plan for seizing Franche-Comté, the execution of which was entrusted to him and successfully carried out. He was now completely re-established in the favour of Louis, and with Turenne was the principal French commander in the celebrated campaign of 1672 against the Dutch. At the forcing of the Rhine passage at Tollhuis (June 12) he received a severe wound, after which he commanded in Alsace against the Imperialists. In 1673 he was again engaged in the Low Countries, and in 1674 he fought his last great battle at Seneff against the prince of Orange (afterwards William III. of England). This battle, fought on the 11th of August, was one of the hardest of the century, and Condé, who displayed the reckless bravery of his youth, had three horses killed under him. His last campaign was that of 1675 on the Rhine, where the army had been deprived of its general by the death of Turenne; and where by his careful and methodical strategy he repelled the invasion of the Imperial army of Montecucculi. After this campaign, prematurely worn out by the toils and excesses of his life, and tortured by the gout, he returned to Chantilly, where he spent the eleven years that remained to him in quiet retirement. In the end of his life he specially sought the companionship of Bourdaloue, Nicole and Bossuet, and devoted himself to religious exercises. He died on the 11th of November 1686 at the age of sixty-five. Bourdaloue attended him at his death-bed, and Bossuet pronounced his éloge.
The earlier political career of Condé was typical of the great French noble of his day. Success in love and war, predominant influence over his sovereign and universal homage to his own exaggerated pride, were the objects of his ambition. Even as an exile he asserted the precedence of the royal house of France over the princes of Spain and Austria, with whom he was allied for the moment. But the Condé of 1668 was no longer a politician
