Lazare Hoche

Lazare Hoche (born June 24, 1768, Versailles, Fr.—died Sept. 18, 1797, Wetzlar, Nassau [Germany]) was a general of the French Revolutionary Wars who drove the Austro-Prussian armies from Alsace in 1793 and suppressed the counterrevolutionary uprising in the Vendée (1794–96).

The son of a royal stableman, Hoche enlisted in the French guards in 1784. He remained in the guards after the outbreak of the revolution in 1789, and in September 1792 he was made a captain. By that time France was at war with Austria and Prussia. Hoche distinguished himself in the invasion of the Austrian Netherlands (winter of 1792–93), and in October 1793 he was appointed commander of the army of the Moselle. The handsome, dashing Hoche proved to be a brilliant general. After raising the siege of Landau (now in Germany) in late December 1793, he secured Alsace by forcing the Austro-Prussian armies to pull back across the Rhine. Nevertheless, he was denounced to the Committee of Public Safety as a traitor by his colleague and rival, General Charles Pichegru. Hoche was arrested in March 1794 and imprisoned in Paris until shortly after the collapse of the Jacobin regime in late July.

Appointed commander of the army of Brest in November 1794, Hoche set out to subdue the royalist-led Roman Catholic peasants who had been in continual rebellion in the Vendée since 1793. By adopting a conciliatory policy, he brought the fighting to an end in February 1795, but in June British ships landed French émigrés (nobles in exile) at Quiberon Bay in Brittany. Hoche quickly rounded up the invaders, and by July 1796 he had completed the pacification of the Vendée.

Hoche’s military triumphs and the extent of the area under his command made him one of the most powerful men in France. He took command of an army of the Rhine in January 1797 and defeated the Austrians at Neuwied (now in Germany) on April 18, thereby ending the war in Germany. Early in September a portion of Hoche’s army helped the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte expel the royalists from the government of the Directory in Paris. Soon thereafter Hoche died, perhaps of pneumonia, at his military headquarters. Had he lived longer he would almost certainly have been drawn into a power struggle with Bonaparte, who seized control of the government in 1799.