Henri, duke de Rohan

Henri, duke de Rohan (born 1579, Château of Blain, Brittany, France—died April 13, 1638, Königsfeld, Switz.) was a duke of Rohan from 1603, and a soldier, writer, and leader of the Huguenots during the French Wars of Religion.

Henri, whose father was René II, Count de Rohan (1550–86), appeared at court and entered the army at the age of 16. He was a special favourite with Henry IV, who made him Duke de Rohan and a peer of France in 1603, at the age of 24. Two years later he married Marguerite de Béthune, the Duke de Sully’s daughter. Henry IV died in 1610, and Rohan led the Huguenots in revolt against the government of Marie de Médicis in 1615–16. He became the Huguenots’ foremost general in the civil wars of the 1620s, campaigning with considerable success in Languedoc. He twice made short-lived peace treaties with King Louis XIII’s government (1623 and 1626), but again took up arms against the French king in 1627, during the War of La Rochelle, and fought on in Languedoc until the Peace of Alais in 1629. Rohan recounted the events of this last war in his celebrated Mémoires (1644–58).

After a long stay in Venice, Rohan returned to France in 1635 and was given command of the army sent across Switzerland to intervene against the Habsburgs’ forces in the Valtellina. Though militarily victorious in his campaigns there, he failed to win the local population to a pro-French policy and was driven out in 1637. Because he was still considered dangerous to France, Rohan retired to Geneva and then entered the service of Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. He received a mortal wound at the Battle of Rheinfelden on Feb. 28, 1638, and died at the abbey of Königsfeld, Bern canton.

Besides his memoirs, Rohan was also the author of a treatise on military theory entitled Le Parfait Capitaine (1636; The Complete Captain).