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Louis Marie Joseph, Marquis de Lescure

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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MARQUIS DE (1766-1793), French soldier and anti-revolutionary, was born near Bressuire. He was educated at the Ecole Militaire, which he left at the age of sixteen. He was in command of a company of cavalry in the Regiment de Royal-Piemont, but being opposed to the ideas of the Revolution he emigrated in 1791; he soon, however, returned to France, and on the 10th of August 1792 took part in the defence of the Tuileries against the mob of Paris. The day after, he was forced to leave Paris, and took refuge in the château of Clisson near Bressuire. On the outbreak of the revolt of Vendee against the Republic, he was arrested and imprisoned with all his family, as one of the promoters of the rising. He was set at liberty by the Royalists, and became one of their leaders, fighting at Thouars, taking Fontenay and Saumur (May - June 1793), and, after an unsuccessful attack on Nantes, joining H. du Verger de la Rochejaquelein, another famous Vendean leader. Their peasant troops, opposed to the republican general F. J. Westermann, sustained various defeats, but finally gained a victory between Tiffauges and Cholet on the 19th of September 1793. The struggle was then concentrated round Chatillon, which was time after time taken and lost by the Republicans. Lescure was killed on the 15th of October 1793 near the château of La Tremblaye between Einee and Fougeres.

See Marquise de la Rochejaquelein (Lescure's widow, who afterwards married La Rochejaquelein), Memoires (Paris, 1817); Jullien de Courcelles, Dictionnaire des generaux frangais, tome vii. (1823); T. Muret, Histoire des guerres de l'ouest (Paris, 1848); and A. M. Cretineau-Jol, Guerres de Vendee (1834).