Vauban

For more information on Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, visit Britannica.com.

Vauban, Marshal Sebastien le Prestre de (1633-1707). Vauban was the leading military engineer of his own age and arguably the best known of any, whose impact on fortification and siegecraft was enormous. Indeed, although there were many other successful engineers in the era of artillery fortification, somehow the star-shaped bastioned trace tends to take his name. His military career began inauspiciously. Born to a poor family of Burgundian gentry, he served as a cadet under Condé during the Fronde and was promptly captured. His captor, who had noted his promise, induced him to join the royal army and gave him a commission in his own regiment. He was appointed a ‘king's ordinary engineer’ in 1655, and fought under Turenne in the Low Countries: he directed the siege of Gravelines, which brought him a captaincy in the senior line regiment, Picardy. During the War of Devolution (1667-8) he helped take Douai, Tournai, and Lille, and at its conclusion assisted Louvois in his reform of the army.

Vauban was assisted by the fact that Louis XIV took engineering very seriously. He was to be present at nineteen of the sieges directed by Vauban, partly because, as Christopher Duffy observes, a grand siege was his favourite operation of war, ‘a magnificent spectacle in the baroque style, at once vigorous and theatrical’. With royal support Vauban sketched out his plan for the famous pré carré, a defensible frontier zone based on two lines of fortresses running across France's northern border. The outer line was eventually to run from Dunkirk on the coast through Ypres, Lille, Tournai, and Valenciennes to Dinant on the Meuse, while the inner belt stretched from Gravelines through Arras and Cambrai to Charleville. His fortresses would contain magazines for French armies on campaign, and would present enemies with obstacles which could only be reduced by costly and time-consuming formal sieges. The building of 33 new fortresses and the remodelling of hundreds of others was to consume much of his time. In addition, he built fortified naval bases at Dunkirk, Brest, Le Havre, Rochefort, and Toulon to support Colbert's plans for the creation of a powerful navy.

Vauban wrote extensively about his craft, with his Treatise on Sieges and the Attack of Fortresses (1704) discussing attack and Treaty on the Defence of Fortresses (1706) defence. His correspondence with Louis and Louvois testified both to the minutely detailed quality of his unrelenting work and flashes of genuine humanity. In 1699, for instance, he asked Louvois to compensate a poor man with eight children whose land had been eaten up by the citadel of Pinerolo.

The details of his techniques evolved from his ‘first system’, essentially the bastioned trace inherited from Pagan, which he used in normal circumstances throughout his life; through bastion towers which lay at the heart of his ‘second system’; to the addition of casemated shoulders or flanks to these towers, his ‘third system’. The last combined the familiar advantages of the bastioned trace with formidably strong internal works intended to seriously disrupt the latter stages of the attack.

Vauban miraculously contrived never to find himself besieged—which in some respects is a pity, for he maintained that he had discovered an infallible method of defending a fortress, but never disclosed what it was. As a besieger, however, he had few equals, and at Maastricht in 1673 he developed what became the standard method of attack in the age of artillery fortification, moving forward by successive parallels connected by zigzag saps until the rampart could be breached at close range and an assault delivered—or, more commonly, capitulation agreed. Vauban never spared himself during the process, and was always on hand, muttering away in a Burgundian dialect littered with forceful neologisms. When the breach was reported practicable, he would always try to check it himself, scrambling back to report, ‘that's ripe!’ or ‘that's not ripe!’

When not designing fortresses, a process which consumed the winter months in Paris, Vauban was on the road, surveying, inspecting, and checking. He also found time to pioneer the use of the socket bayonet, and to develop the use of ricochet fire.

Appointed commissaire générale des fortifications in 1678, Vauban became a lieutenant general (then the highest rank of general officer in the French army) in 1688 and marshal of France in 1703. He died in 1707, having sustained eight wounds and directed 48 sieges. Evidence of his handiwork still litters France, and the town of Maubeuge, its northern side still snug behind rampart and ravelin, boasts a block of flats, a stationery shop, and, most importantly, a bar named after the old gentleman.

Bibliography

• Duffy, Christopher, The Fortress in the Age of Vauban and Frederick the Great (London, 1985)

— Richard Holmes

Vauban, Marshal Sébastien Le Prestre de French military engineer, inventor of ricochet gunfire and the bayonet.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Sebastien Vauban (1633-1707) served as France's foremost military engineer under Louis the XIV. A man of humble birth, Vauban's acumen in planning military fortifications and his direction of sieges against France's enemies helped the regime achieve dominance over much of western Europe during the latter part of the seventeenth century.

Sebastien LePrestre de Vauban was born in 1633 in Saint-Leger-de-Foucherest, in France's Morvan region. He was the son of Urbain Vauban and Edmee Corvignolle, and his grandfather, a notary a century before, had been able to buy a partial fief, which ennobled him and his heirs. Unfortunately, the family was too large to amass any real wealth from their title. Vauban was given the name Sebastien after his godfather, who was the local priest; and also educated Vauban, though he reportedly taught himself math and was fascinated by a chance discovery of a book on military fortifications.

Civil Strife in France

In 1651 a famed French royal and officer, Louis II de Bourbon, also known as the Prince de Conde, passed through Saint-Leger-de-Foucherest and Vauban left to join his regiment. The prince was leading an insurrection against the regime of Louis XIV, France's underage king. Through an influential cardinal who held power jointly with the king, many of the princes' rights had been curtailed. Conde waged an all-out war, even allying with France's sworn foe, Spain, and during these battles across France Vauban made a name for himself as a young cadet. He held towns in the Argonne, and more famously helped take Sainte-Menehould by swimming across its river under fire.

In 1653 Vauban was captured by royal forces and taken as a prisoner of war. He then switched sides, as Conde would later do, and helped the crown retake Sainte-Menehould. Vauban served in several capacities, but proved himself most proficient as an engineer in a special officer corps for defense fortifications. Though it was almost separate from regular military duty, Vauban's post placed him in the middle of fire and he was wounded several times. The princes' rebellion was quelled in 1658, and the years until 1667 marked a relatively peaceful time in French politics. Vauban, now a lead engineer, busied himself with demolishing outmoded fortifications and constructing new ones. He married a woman from his hometown in 1663, but spent little time there. That same year he was rewarded with his own company in the Picardy regiment.

An Integral Royal Advisor

One of Vauban's most noteworthy achievements was his fortification of Dunkirk, a French port on the North Sea that Louis XIV purchased from England in 1662. It was a sandy area with almost no natural geographic defenses. Vauban studied the sea tides, and constructed a series of dams and canals. When a war against the Spanish Netherlands was launched in 1667, Vauban returned to combat and was handsomely rewarded for his successes in taking a number of towns. Louis XIV bestowed upon him a royal pension and made him a lieutenant in the Royal Guards. He also achieved the title as France's Commissary General of Fortifications, and worked closely with the king in determining France's military strategies. There were volumes of correspondence written between the pair, who, wrote Francois Bluche in Louis XIV, "urged each other on, oscillating between pragmatism and less objective stances. The result was the corridor running around the realm which is known as the 'military iron curtain."' Vauban's fortifications of the entire northern border of France were mapped out in extensive blueprints that after his death were part of European military curriculum for the next hundred years; at one point he even suggested to Louis XIV that Paris become a walled enclave.

Peace again reigned in France under Louis XIV from 1668 to 1672, but the Third Dutch War with Holland again, for the next six years, called Vauban's skills into action. Often, the king was alongside his top defense engineer during crucial sieges. For the town of Maastricht Vauban designed a system of zig-zag trenches which ran parallel to the perimeter of defenses and saved French soldiers from enemy artillery fire. Such trenches became quite well-known when used by troops during World War I. Because of the French victory at Maastricht, Vauban was financially compensated with a large sum of money by the king, and with it bought a chateau near where he was born, at Bazoches. He was also elevated to the rank of marechal de camp, equivalent to a brigadier general.

Left French Stamp Upon Europe's Cities

Though officially not at war, Louis XIV and his troops-considered Europe's most formidable military presence of the day-seized a number of important cities. In 1681 the German border city of Strasbourg became the most notable of these, and that same year Vauban began constructing a massive fortress there. He argued in favor of its rather ornate gates, an expenditure for which the king balked-Vauban asserted that they issued the necessary statement of French opulence and might to Strasbourg's German-French populace.

Over the next few years Vauban supervised sieges of key locales, such as the 1684 siege of Luxembourg, for which he invented the cavalier, a tower that allowed French troops to look down and fire upon the besieged town. In 1687 he constructed the fortification at Landau in Bavaria, a structure so masterful in planning that military historians cite it as the apex of Vauban's career. In the War of the Grand Alliance, in which Louis XIV's France battled a trio of formidable powers-the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and England-Vauban served as a lieutenant general and took the vital town of Phillippsburg on the Rhine. That battle was also notable for Vauban's introduction of ricochet gunfire, in which he ordered cannons to be fired with less gunpowder so they did not immediately sink into the ground but instead hit a number of targets.

In 1693, Vauban was sixty years of age, but was still active in military service as a commanding officer and defense engineer. He led an infantry division in Charleroi that year, traveled to the Atlantic port of Brest to fortify it against the English, and in 1697 was wounded in Ath. Peace came the following year, and his renovation of the Alsace fort at Neuf-Brisach was the last project of his career. His talents were not only restricted to forts and artillery, however. He wrote a number of treatises on matters crucial to France during his day, and undertook important censuses on behalf of Louis XIV from 1678 to 1693.

The Sun King

During Louis XIV's long rule (1643-1715) France grew into a thriving empire and one that reflected the glory of the king and his divine right to the throne. Through a series of measures designed to restrict the power of the nobility and concentrate power in his hands, Louis XIV and his reign virtually epitomized the term "absolute monarchism." As a reflection of his power, he built an impressive new palace at Versailles, and moved his court there in 1682. Art and culture were supposed to reflect the King and his tastes, and his important ministers such as Francois-Michel Louvois (Vauban's immediate superior) and Jean-Baptiste Colbert carried out policies that also reflected the king's firm directives. One of those was to make France as prosperous and self-sufficient as possible, and in some areas, long-standing hostilities that threatened such aims were effectively checked for a time by military victories in which Vauban played a key role.

Not unlike other members of the cadre of advisors close to the King, Vauban saw himself in complete service to the King and was dedicated to the monarch's goals. He was appointed by the king to direct a series of censuses beginning in 1678, and his collected data provided the king with an accurate look at the number of French subjects, their wealth, trade and work, as well as land-use statistics. Vauban authored General and Simple Method for Counting Peoples, published in 1686, and his Projet d'une dixme royale ("Project for a Royal Tythe, or General Tax") caused a stir in 1707. It did not appear under his own name, for Vauban was well aware of the controversy it would bring. In it, he asserted that France's complicated tax code should be abandoned and a flat tax of ten percent on property and trade be put in place. More significantly, in this book Vauban supported his arguments with a wealth of statistical data he had collected, and thus laid the foundation for the use of statistics to corroborate and forecast economic aims. Louis XIV censored its publication, however, and this devastated Vauban, though it appears they remained friends.

During his lifetime Vauban wrote on a variety of other topics, including pig breeding, canal construction, and even "Leisures" in his collection Oisivets. He was considered a kind and personable man, and over his long career was roundly praised for his bravery in battle and regard for the lives of his soldiers. It is said he often passed military accolades due him on to lesser officers. He died March 30, 1707 at the age of 74 and left behind his prolific correspondence with the king, which provided a glimpse into why one of Europe's most influential monarchs relied upon Vauban's wisdom and insight. In a 1673 report back to Louvois and Louis XIV about the haphazardness of France's border with Holland, Vauban, quoted in The Age of Louis XIV, remarked that "it should always be our object, either by treaty or by war, not to square the circle but to give our country a square and regular shape. It is a fine thing when one can hold on to one's possessions with one's two hands." The town where Vauban was born, Saint-Leger-de-Foucherest, was later renamed Saint-Leger-Vauban in his honor.

Further Reading

Bluche, Francois, Louis XIV, translated by Mark Greengrass, Franklin Watts, 1990.

Gaxotte, Pierre, The Age of Louis XIV, translated by Michael Shaw, Macmillan, 1970.

French military engineer, architect, and urban designer. He has been credited with the design of over 120 fortresses, and protected France's borders with a series of powerful strongholds, notably those of Lille (1668–74), Maubeuge (1678–81), and Neuf-Brisach (1696–1708). Responsible for planning several new towns, including Sarrelouis (1681–3), Longwy (from 1679), and Neuf-Brisach (1689–99), using regular geometrical layouts, he also designed several monumental gateways including the Baroque Porte de Paris, Lille (1668–70), complete with trophies, and the massively severe Porte de Mons, Maubeuge (1681). He was the author of Mémoire pour servir à l'instruction dans la conduite des sièges (drawn up 1669, published in 1740 with a memorandum on the defence of fortresses, apparently by another hand) (1667–72), Traité de l'attaque des places (1737), De de la défense des places (published with the Traité de l'attaque, 1828–9), Véritable manière de bien fortifier (1702), Plusieurs maximes bonnes, etc. (a treatise on building), and a proposal for a fairer system of taxation in France (Projet d'une dix^me royale, 1707), which was instantly suppressed. He designed the aqueduct of Maintenon (1684–5) that supplied Versailles with water.

Bibliography

• Blomfield (1938)
• Halévy (1925)
• Lazard (1934)
• Michel (1879)
• Placzek (ed.) (1982)
• Parent & Verroust (1971)
• Rébelliau (1962)
• Rochas d'Aiglun (ed.) (1910)
• Sauliol (1931)
• Jane Turner (1996)
• Toudouze (1954)
• Vauban (1910)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre, seigneur de (1633-1707). Genius of siegecraft and legendary military strategist who personally directed over 50 sieges and designed and built 333 fortified places, many of which still stand. His accomplishments are wide-ranging: he pioneered creative statistics, reorganized the army, and imagined the first modern draft system. Perhaps Vauban's greatest project, which establishes him as a founder of modern economics and a precursor of the Enlightenment's socially concerned intellectuals, is La Dîme royale (1707). This far-reaching economic project proposed a total revision of the taxation system and documented the economic misery of the lower classes. It was confiscated and destroyed on Louis XIV's decree.

[Joan Dejean]

For other uses, see Vauban (disambiguation).

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (March 2008)

Sébastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de Vauban.
Vauban, French School painting of the 18th century
Born	15 May 1633(1633-05-15) Saint-Léger-Vauban
Died	30 March 1707 (aged 73) Paris
Cause of death	Pulmonary embolism
Resting place	Bazoches. Heart at Les Invalides
Nationality	French
Known for	Contributions to military engineering and fortifications
Title	Maréchal de France Commissaire général des fortifications (1678-1703) Governor of Lille (from 1668)
Awards	Ordre de Saint-Louis
Signature

Sébastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de Vauban and later Marquis de Vauban (15 May 1633 – 30 March 1707), commonly referred to as Vauban, was a Marshal of France and the foremost military engineer of his age, famed for his skill in both designing fortifications and in breaking through them. He also advised Louis XIV on how to consolidate France's borders, to make them more defensible. Vauban made a radical suggestion of giving up some land that was indefensible to allow for a stronger, less porous border with France's neighbours.

Contents 1 Life and doctrines 2 Fortifications 3 See also 4 Further reading 5 References 6 External links

Life and doctrines

Vauban was born in Saint-Léger-de-Foucheret (renamed Saint-Léger-Vauban in his honour in 1867), in the département of Yonne, in Burgundy, France, into a family of minor nobility. At the age of ten he was left an orphan in very poor circumstances, and his boyhood and youth were spent amongst the peasantry of his native place. A fortunate event brought him under the care of the Carmelite prior of Semur, who undertook his education, and the grounding in mathematics, science and geometry which he thus received was of the highest value in his subsequent career.

At the age of seventeen Vauban joined the regiment of Condé in the war of the Fronde. His gallant conduct won him within a year the offer of a commission, which he declined on account of poverty. Condé then employed him to assist in the fortification of Clermont-en-Argonne. Soon afterwards he was taken prisoner by the royal troops; but though a rebel he was well-treated, and the kindness of Mazarin converted the young engineer into a devoted servant of the king.

He was employed in the siege of Sainte-Menehould (which he had helped to storm as a Frondeur) and won a lieutenancy in the regiment of Burgundy, and at Stenay he was twice wounded. Soon afterwards he besieged and took his own first fortress, Clermont; and in May 1655 he received his commission as an ingénieur du roi, having served his apprenticeship under the Chevalier de Clerville, one of the foremost engineers of the time. Between that year and the peace of 1659 he had taken part in or directed ten sieges with distinction, had been several times wounded, and was rewarded by the king with the free gift of a company in the famous Picardy regiment. About this time he married a cousin, Jeanne d'Aulnay.

Vauban's fortifications in Besançon.

After the peace Vauban was put in charge of the construction of several important defences, amongst other places at Dunkirk, where his work continued until the year before his death. On the renewal of war in 1662 he conducted, under the eyes of the king, the sieges of Douai, Tournai and Lille. During siege of Lille he so distinguished himself that he received a lieutenancy in the guard (ranking as a colonelcy).

The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle confirmed France's possession of new fortresses, which Vauban now improved or rebuilt. Hitherto the characteristic features of his methods of fortification had not been developed, and the systems of preceding engineers were faithfully followed. Colbert and Louvois were profoundly interested in the work, and it was at the request of the latter that the engineer drew up in 1669 his Mémoire pour servir à l'instruction dans la conduite des sièges (this, with a memorandum on the defence of fortresses by another hand, was published at Leiden in 1740).

On the renewal of war Vauban again conducted the most important sieges, (Rheinbergen and Nijmegen 1672, Maastricht and Trier 1673, Besançon 1674). In the latter year he also supervised the only defence in which he ever took part, that of Oudenaarde. This was followed by the reduction of Dinant, Huy and Limbourg. At this time he wrote for the commandants of Verdun and Le Quesnoy, valuable Instructions pour la défense. In 1675 Vauban bought the Château de Bazoches. In 1676 he was made marechal de camp. He took Condé, Bouchain and other places in that year, Valenciennes and Cambrai in 1677, Ghent and Ypres in 1678.

It was at this time that Vauban synthesized the methods of attacking strong places, on which his claim to renown as an engineer rests far more than on his systems of fortification. The introduction of a systematic approach by parallel series of trenches (said to have been suggested by the practice of the Turks at Candia in 1668) dates from the siege of Maastricht, and in principle remained until the 20th century the standard method of attacking a fortress. The Peace of Nijmegen gave more territory to France, and more fortresses had to be adapted.

Vauban's fortifications in Camaret-sur-Mer.

Vauban was named commissaire-général des fortifications on the death of Clerville, and wrote in 1679 a memorandum on the places of the new frontier, from which it appears that from Dunkirk to Dinant France possessed fifteen fortresses and forts, with thirteen more in second line. Most of these had been rebuilt by Vauban, and further acquisitions, notably Strasbourg (1681), involved him in unceasing work, some of which, such as the Barrage Vauban, can still be seen today. At Saarlouis for the first time appeared Vauban's "first system" of fortification, which remained the accepted standard till comparatively recent times. He never hesitated to retain what was of advantage in the methods of his predecessors, which he had hitherto followed, and it was in practice rather than in theory, that he surpassed them.

In 1682 his "second system," which introduced modifications of the first designed to prolong the resistance of the fortress, began to appear; and about the same time he wrote a practical manual entitled Le Directeur-Général des fortifications (Hague, 1683-85). Having now attained the rank of lieut.-general, he took the field once more, and captured Kortrijk in 1683, and Luxembourg in the following year. The unexpected strength of certain towers designed by the Spanish engineer Louvigni (fl. 1673) at Luxemburg suggested the tower-bastions which are the peculiar feature of Vauban's second system which was put into execution at Belfort in the same.

In 1687 he chose Landau as the chief place of arms of Lower Alsace, and lavished on the place all the resources of his art. But side by side with this development grew up the far more important scheme of attack. He instituted a company of miners, and the elaborate experiments carried out under his supervision resulted in the establishment of all the necessary formulae for military mining (Traité des mines, Paris, 1740 and 1799; Hague, 1744); while at the siege of Ath in 1697, having in the meanwhile taken part in more sieges, notably that of Namur in 1692 (defended by the great Dutch engineer Coehoorn), he employed Ricochet firing for the first time as the principal means of breaking down the defence. He had indeed already used it with effect at Philippsburg in 1688 and at Namur, but the jealousy of the artillery at outside interference had hindered the full use of this remarkable invention, which with his other improvements rendered the success of the attack almost certain.

Neuf-Brisach

After the peace of Ryswick Vauban rebuilt or improved other fortresses, and finally Neuf-Brisach, fortified on his "third system " which was in fact a modification of the second and was called by Vauban himself système de Landau perfectionné. His last siege was that of Old Breisach in 1703, when he reduced the place in a fortnight. On January 14 of that year Vauban had been made a marshal of France, a rank too exalted for the technical direction of sieges, and his active career came to an end with his promotion. Soon afterwards appeared his Traité de l'attaque des places, a revised and amplified edition of the older memoir of 1669, which contains the methods of the fully developed Vauban attack, the main features of which are the parallels, ricochet fire and the attack of the defending personnel by vertical fire.

But Louis XIV was now thrown on the defensive, and the war of the Spanish Succession saw the gradual wane of Vauban's influence, as his fortresses were taken and retaken. The various captures of Landau, his chef-d'oeuvre, caused him to be regarded with disfavour, for it was not realized that the greatness of his services was rather in the attack than in the defence. In the darkness of defeat he turned his attention to the defence; but his work De la defense des places (ed. by General Valaze, Paris, 1829) is of far less worth than the Attaque, and his far-seeing ideas on entrenched camps (Traits des fortifications de campagne) were coldly received, though therein may be found the elements of the "detached forts" system universal in Europe by the 20th century.

Vauban designed this pentagonal fortress to withstand sieges.

Although indispensable to Louis XIV, Vauban boldly stretched his goodwill on several occasions. In 1685, Vauban vocally condemned the repeal of the edict of Nantes. It appears that his opposition was mostly based on economic grounds. In the 1690s, he conducted a comprehensive census of Flanders and other areas of France, which earned him his nickname as the "French Petty". A prolific writer on many subjects, including forestry, pig breeding, monetary policy, and colonisation, Vauban was made an honorary member of the French Academy of Sciences. Applying his knowledge, he even correctly estimated and plotted out the growth of Canada, predicting that its population would be about 30 million by the year 2000.

Dismayed by the inefficiency of the French fiscal system, Vauban's 1707 tract called for the repeal of all taxes and the imposition of a single tax on all land and trade with no exemptions. He backed up his argument with a mass of statistics. His book was condemned by the royal government because it had been published without obtaining royal permission. Vauban spent the last weeks of his life trying to collect every copy that he had disseminated privately to friends and acquaintances. Nevertheless, his ideas inspired later Enlightenment economists, such as Forbonnais, Mirabeau and the Physiocrats.

Vauban died in Paris, of an inflammation of the lungs. During the French Revolution his remains were scattered, but in 1808 his heart was found and deposited by order of Napoléon in the church of Les Invalides.

Fortifications

Vauban's fortification of Huningue on the Rhine.

Between 1667 and 1707, Vauban upgraded the fortifications of around 300 cities, including Antibes (Fort Carré), Arras, Auxonne, Barraux, Bayonne, Belfort, Bergues, Besançon (Citadel of Besançon), Bitche, Blaye, Briançon, Bouillon, Calais, Cambrai, Colmars-les-Alpes, Collioure, Douai, Entrevaux, Givet, Gravelines, Hendaye, Huningue, Joux, Kehl, Landau, Le Palais (Belle-Île), La Rochelle, Le Quesnoy, Lille, Lusignan, Le Perthus (Fort de Bellegarde), Luxembourg, Maastricht, Maubeuge, Metz, Mont-Dauphin, Mont-Louis, Montmédy, Namur, Neuf-Brisach, Perpignan, Plouezoc'h (Château du Taureau), Rocroi, Saarlouis, Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, Saint-Omer, Sedan, Toul, Valenciennes, Verdun, Villefranche-de-Conflent (town and Fort Liberia), Ypres

He directed the building of 37 new fortresses, and fortified military harbours, including Ambleteuse, Brest, Dunkerque, Freiburg im Breisgau, Rochefort, Saint-Jean-de-Luz (Fort Socoa), Saint-Martin-de-Ré, Toulon, Wimereux, Le Portel, Cézembre

See also

• Star fort
• Menno van Coehoorn: Vauban's principal adversary.
• "Fortifications of Vauban", 12 groups of fortified buildings, added in 2008 to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
• Citadel of Besançon

Further reading

• Blomfield, Sir Reginald. Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban, 1663–1707. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971 (hardcover, ISBN 0416607403).
• Griffith, Paddy; Dennis, Peter. The Vauban fortifications of France. Oxford: Osprey, 2006 (paperback, ISBN 1841768758).
• Hebbert, F.J. Soldier of France: Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban, 1633–1707. New York: P. Lang, 1990 (hardcover, ISBN 0820408905).
• Ostwald, Jamel. Vauban under Siege: Engineering Efficiency and Martial Vigor in the War of the Spanish Succession (History of Warfare; 41). Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007 (hardcover, ISBN 90-04-15489-2).
• Lechenet, Franck. Plein Ciel sur Vauban (Full Sky over Vauban) Editions Cadré Plein Ciel, 2007 (240 pages), (ISBN 978-2952857017).

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban

• Marshal Vauban Homepage (much detail)
• (French) Details about many works by Vauban at cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr
• (French) aerial pictures of the 100 citadels in France, wonderfull shots
• (French) Biography de Vauban in Le Taureau, forteresse Vauban, baie de Morlaix (
• Vauban Museum website (Museum located in Saint-Léger-Vauban)
• Article on Vauban at fortified-places.com
• (French) Fortifications of Saint-Martin-de-Ré - île de Ré - French

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)