Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine ( , ; 4 February 174028 August 1793) was a French Army officer. 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.
Military service
Early career
Custine began his career at the age of eight, in 1748, at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession in Germany under Marshal Maurice de 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. Adam Philippe Custine, Mémoires sur les guerres de la République. Introduction by Charles Francois Dumouriez. Paris, Ladvocat, 1824. pp.ii–xii. While fighting the Prussians, Custine learned to admire their modern military organization, which later influenced his own military style.Émile Auguste Nicolas Jules Bégin Biographie de la Moselle, Verronais, 1829, vol. 1, pp. 320–370.
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.Thomas Balch, The French in America during the War of Independence. nl, Porter and Coates, 1895, pp. 90–91. 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 as a colonel in the expeditionary force of Count Rochambeau in the American Revolutionary War. The regiment participated in the Yorktown campaign of 1781 and received distinguished commendations for action at the siege of Yorktown against a British army under Lord Cornwallis; Custine received individual recognition of merit and a brevet from the United States government.Appleton Prentiss Clark Griffin and United States Congress, Joint committee on the Library. Rochambeau: A commemoration by the Congress of the United States of America of the Services of the French Auxiliary Forces in the War of Independence. Washington, DC, S. Government Printing Office, 1907. pp. 570–572. Rouchambeau's reports praised his honesty, zeal, courage and talents.
Custine was in charge of the French troops that opened the first parallel at Yorktown on 8 October 1781. During other Yorktown operations he acted as a second-in-command to Claude-Anne de Rouvroy de Saint Simon. At least one officer had a poor opinion of Custine. At 7:00 pm on the night of 14–15 October, French and American columns successfully stormed two British redoubts in the Yorktown defenses. A diversionary attack was carried out against the Fusilier's Redoubt at the opposite end of the line in which the French suffered 16 casualties. One of Rochambeau's aides, Baron Ludwig von Closen wrote that Custine botched this assignment by making the feint attack after the other redoubts were captured. The aide heard that Custine was late because he had imbibed too much alcohol and believed the rumor because he had seen Custine drunk. Closen asserted that Custine underwent 24-hours arrest for his blunder.
Following the surrender of Cornwallis' army, the Saintonge regiment wintered in Williamsburg, Virginia and departed for the Antilles in December 1782, with the rest of the expeditionary force. On his return to France, Custine was named maréchal de camp (brigadier general) and appointed governor of Toulon.Bégin, p. 321. He also resumed responsibilities as the proprietor of the dragoon regiment de Rouergue.
Activities during the French Revolution
In 1789, the bailliage (bailiwick) of Metz elected Custine to the Estates-General; upon his election, he resigned his military commission, judging that his responsibilities in the national assembly required his full attention. In July 1789, as the French Revolution gained momentum, he remained in the National Constituent Assembly. There, he supported the creation of a constitution espousing the principles of representative government and often voted with such liberal (constitutional) nobility as the Marquis de Lafayette. Although he supported the abolition of some seigniorial rights, he strongly defended royal prerogative and the rights of the nobility who fled during the Great Fear, especially their rights of property. He offered limited support of the nineteen decrees that abolished game-laws, seigniorial courts, the purchase and sale of posts in the magistracy, pecuniary immunities, favoritism in taxation, surplice money, first-fruits, pluralities, and unmerited pensions.James Matthew Thompson, The French Revolution nl, Sutton, 2001 , pp. 90–111.
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.
In early May 1793, Custine designed a plan to cut off a body of the Coalition force that had ventured too far from the main force at Mainz. However, since he was about to take command of the Army of the North, he delegated some of the responsibility for this plan to Jean Nicolas Houchard (another ill-fated general destined for the guillotine), instructing him to attack Limbourg with the Army of the Moselle. The garrison at Landau was to make several feints to distract the Prussian troops. Custine also created and distributed a false report that the cavalry of the Army of the Moselle had arrived, and that they had also been reinforced by part of the artillery from Strasbourg. General Jean-Baptiste Michel Féry, who commanded an 40 battalions, was to throw himself on the Prussians until he heard that the principal engagement by Rheinzabern had begun. Custine left with his troops in the evening; several delays prevented him from arriving until five in the morning, but Charles Hyacinthe Leclerc de Landremont engaged the Austrian army in the meanwhile and prevented them from advancing until Custine arrived and charged the Austrian post with two divisions of dragoons. Unfortunately, a battalion of French mistook Custine's dragoons for the enemy, and fired upon them with great accuracy. Any attempt to rally the battalion met with additional discharges. The commander, who apparently had no control over his troops, was denounced by both the representatives and his troops, and was arrested, but shot himself. Custine was disgusted with the affair: "This day, which ought to have so memorable, terminated by the taking of one piece of cannon and a very great number of prisoners."Jean-Paul Rabaut, An Impartial History of the Late Revolution in France: From Its Commencement, to the Death of the Queen, and the Execution of the Deputies of the Gironde Party. nl, Rabaut, 1794, pp. 462–464. Custine was recalled to Paris on 15 July.Gaston Maugras, Pierre Croze-LeMercier, Memoires of Delphine de Sabran, Marquise de Custine, London, W. Heinemann, 1912, p. 108.
Trial before the Tribunal
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.
After three weeks of searches and examination, the public prosecutor Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville drew up the indictment: Custine's crime, according to the representatives on mission, was negligence, for allowing the Allies to take Condé and Valenciennes, and also for the loss of Mainz, a city that Custine had abandoned when occupation became untenable. During his trial, Hébert continued to attack Custine via his newspaper, the infamous Père Duchene.Jacques Hebert, Le Père Duchesne, No. 264; Jacques Hebert archive. Accessed 3 March 2014.