ROHAN Henri de (1579-1638), a general and writer of eminence and one of the last and best representatives of the independent French noblesse, was born at the château of Bleins in Brittany on 21st August 1579. His father was René IL, count of Rohan, and head of a family which had hardly a superior in France for antiquity and distinction, and which was connected with most of the reigning houses of Europe. Rohan was by birth the second son, but his elder brother René dying young he became the heir of the name. He appeared at court and in the army at the age of sixteen, and was a special favourite with Henry IV., after whom, failing the house of Condé, he ∙ might be said to be the natural chief of the French Protestants. Having served till the peace of Vervins, he travelled for a considerable time over Europe, including England and Scotland, in the first of which countries he received the not unique honour of being called by Elizabeth her knight, while in the second he was godfather at Charles I.’s christening. On his return to France he was made duke and peer at the age of twenty-four and married Marguerite de Béthune, Sully’s daughter, receiving lucrative appointments. After the assassination of Henry IV., which was a great blow to him, Rohan fought with success at the siege of Jülich. But from this time onwards he was for the greater part of many years either in active warfare against the Government of his country, or in active though peaceable opposition to it. For a time, however, he abstained from actual insurrection, and he endeavoured to keep on terms with Marie de’ Medici; he even, despite his dislike of De Luynes, the favourite of Louis XIII., reappeared in the army and fought in Lorraine and Piedmont. It was not till the decree for the restitution ...of church property in the south threw the Bearnese and Gascons into open revolt that Rohan appeared as a rebel. His authority and military skill were very formidable to the royalists, forced them among other checks to raise the siege of Montauban, and brought about the treaty of Montpellier (1623). But Rohan did not escape the results of the incurable factiousness which showed itself more strongly perhaps among the French Huguenots than among any other of the numerous armed oppositions of the 17th century. He was accused of lukewarmness and treachery, though he did not hesitate to renew the war when the compact of Montpellier was broken. Again a hollow peace was patched up, but it lasted hardly any time, and Rohan undertook a third war, the first the events of which are recounted in his celebrated Memoirs. This last war (famous for the siege of La Rochelle, in which, however, Rohan’s brother Soubise, not Rohan himself, was principally concerned) was one of considerable danger for Rohan: he was condemned to death, and a great reward was offered for him dead or alive. Nor at the close of the war did he think it best to remain in France, but made his way to Venice. Here he lived quietly for some time and is said to have received from the Porte the offer of the sovereignty of Cyprus. It is more certain that his hosts of Venice wished to make him their general-in-chief, a design not executed owing to the peace of Cherasco (1631). Soon afterwards Rohan was again called to serve his lawful sovereign. Richelieu had had experience, though not friendly experience, of his abilities, and when France began once more to take a vigorous part in the Thirty Years’ War Rohan was appointed to the task of occupying the Valtelline, and thus cutting off the communication between Germany and Italy. He was entirely successful and repeatedly beat both the imperialists and the Spaniards. But, despite this service, Rohan was still thought dangerous to the peace of France owing to his influence with the Huguenots, and objection was even made to his residence in Geneva. He therefore joined Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, and was serving in his army when he met with the wound which caused his death at Rheinfelden on l4th March 1638. His body was buried at Geneva and his arms solemnly bequeathed to and accepted by the Venetian republic. Rohan’s wife was a woman of talent and energy, though she did not escape scandal. His younger brother Benjamin, generally known as Soubise, was, like him, a famous Huguenot leader. His daughter and only recognized surviving child, named Marguerite, carried the honours of Rohan into the Chabot family.
What has chiefly preserved Rohan’s memory is not his military achievements, though they were remarkable, nor his political position, though it was high, but his admirable J/eznoirs. These cover the civil wars in three books, while a fourth contains the narrative of the Valtelline campaigns; and they rank among the best products of the singular talent for memoir-writing which the French aristocracy of the 16th and 17th centuries possessed. Alike in style, in clearness of matter, and in shrewdness of thought they deserve very high praise. The first three books appeared in 1644, that on the Valtelline War not till 1758. Some suspicions were thrown on the genuineness of this latter, but it would seem groundlessly. Rohan also wrote Le Parfait Capitaine, an adaptation of the military precepts and examples of Caesar to modern warfare; an account of his travels; a political tract, L'Intérêt des États et des Princes de la Chrétienté, &c. The Memoirs, which alone have continued to bo reprinted, may be conveniently found in the collection of Michaud and Poujoulat, voL xix.
ROHAN Louis René Édouard, Cardinal de (1734-1803), prince de Rolian-Guéménée, archbishop of Strasburg, the hero of the scandal of the diamond necklace, and a cadet of the great family of Rohan (which traced its origin to the kings of Brittany, and was granted the precedence and rank of a foreign princely family by Louis XIV.), was born at Paris on 25th September 1734. Members of the Rohan family had filled the office of archbishop of Strasburg from 1704,—an office which made them princes of the empire and the compeers rather of the German prince-bishops than of the French ecclesiastics. For this high office Louis de Rohan was destined from his birth, and soon after taking orders, in 1760, he was nominated coadjutor to his uncle, Constantine de RohanRochefort, who then held the archbishopric, and he was also consecrated bishop of Canopus. But he preferred the elegant life and the gaiety of Paris to his clerical duties, and had also an ambition to make a figure in politics. He joined the party opposed to the Austrian alliance, which had been cemented by the marriage of the archduchess Marie Antoinette to the dauphin. This party was headed by the due d’Aiguillon, who in 1771 sent Prince Louis on a special embassy to Vienna to find out what was being done there with regard to the partition of Poland. Rohan arrived at Vienna in January 1772, and made a great noise with his lavish fêtes. But the empress Maria Theresa was implacably hostile to him; not only did he attempt to thwart her policy, but he spread scandals about her daughter Marie Antoinette, laughed at herself, and shocked her ideas of propriety by his dissipation and luxury. On the death of Louis XV., in 1774, Rohan was recalled from Vienna, and coldly received at Paris; but the influence of his family was too great for him to be neglected, and in 1777 he was made grand almoner, and in 1778 abbot of St Vaast. In 1778 he was made a cardinal on the nomination of Stanislaus Poniatowski, king of Poland, and in the following year succeeded his uncle as archbishop of Strasburg and became abbot of Noirmoutiers and Chaise-Dieu. His various preferments brought him in an income of two and a half millions of livres; yet the cardinal was restless and unhappy until he should be reinstated in favour at court and had appeased the animosity which Marie Antoinette felt against him. Though a man of some ability, he became infatuated with the notorious charlatan Cagliostro in 1780, and lodged him in his palace, and in 1782 he made the acquaintance of Madame de Lamotte-Valois, a descendant of an illegitimate branch of the Valois, but a poor adventuress, and married to an adventurer. These people, having acquired great influence over Rohan, determined to turn his excessive desire to become reconciled to the queen to their own advantage. They persuaded him that Marie Antoinette wished him well, and contrived an interview between him and a girl named Oliva, who greatly resembled the queen, in the gardens of Versailles in August 1784, so skilfully that he believed he had seen the queen herself and that she had given him a rose. The adventuress then persuaded him that the queen would be much gratified by the present of an extremely valuable diamond necklace which she had refused in 1778 and 1781, and on 26th January 1785 the cardinal purchased it for 1,600,000 francs, to be paid in three instalments, and handed it over to a pretended valet of the queen on receipt of a forged letter of thanks signed “Marie Antoinette of France.” The comte de Lamotte-Valois at once started for London, and, after breaking up the necklace, began to sell the diamonds separately. The plot soon came to light, and the king sent the cardinal to the Bastille. This arrest of a great nobleman and an archbishop excited the wrath of both the nobility and the bishops, and the large party opposed to the Austrian alliance regarded him as a martyr. In this feeling the old courtiers and the judges of the parlement of Paris participated, for they hated the queen for her abolition of strict etiquette and for her extravagance and frivolity. The people, who had also been taught by pamphleteers to hate her and to regard her as the cause of all their ills, shared the feeling of their superiors in education; and, when the parlement of Paris solemnly absolved the cardinal of all blame on 31st May 1786, his acquittal was received with universal enthusiasm, and regarded as a victory over the court and the queen. Though acquitted by the parlement of Paris, the cardinal was deprived of his office as grand almoner and exiled to his abbey of Chaise-Dieu. He was soon allowed to return to Strasburg, and his popularity was shown by his election in 1789 to the states-general by the clergy of the bailliages of Haguenau and Weissenburg. He at first declined to sit, but the states-general, when it became the national assembly, insisted on validating his election. But as a prince of the church in January 1791 he refused to take the oath to the constitution, and went to Ettenheim, in the German part of his diocese. In exile his character improved, and he spent what wealth remained to him in providing for the poor clergy of his diocese who had been obliged to leave France; and in 1801 he resigned his nominal rank as archbishop of Strasburg. On 17th February 1803 he died at Ettenheim.
For the affair of the diamond necklace and the life of the cardinal see the Mémoires of his secretary, the Abbé Georgel, of the baroness d’Oberkirch, of Beugnot, and of Madame Campan; the Mémoires inédits du Comte de Lamotte-Valois, ed. Louis Lacour, 1858, in which Rohan is ably defended and Marie Antoinette stigmatized; Marie Antoinette et le Procès du Collier, by Émile Campardon, 1863; and Carlyle’s “The Diamond Necklace,” in FraseVs Magazine (1837), republished in his Essays.
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