Marc-René de Montalembert
| Marc René, marquis de Montalembert | |
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Portrait of Marc-René, marquis de Montalembert by Quentin de La Tour (18th-century)
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| Born | 16 July 1714 Angoulême |
| Died | 29 March 1800 (aged 85) Paris |
| Occupation | Military engineer Writer |
Marc René, marquis de Montalembert (16 July 1714 – 29 March 1800) was a French military engineer and writer, known for his work on fortifications.
He was born at Angoulême, and entered the French Army in 1732. He fought in the War of the Polish Succession on the Rhine (1733–34), and in the War of the Austrian Succession made the campaigns of 1742 in Bohemia and Italy. In the years preceding the Seven Years' War, Montalembert (who had become an associate member of the Académie des Sciences in 1747) devoted his energies to the art of fortification, to which Vauban's Traité de l'attaque attracted him, and founded the cannon foundry at Ruelle, near his birthplace.
On the outbreak of war he became French commissioner with the allied army of Sweden, with the rank of brigadier-general. He constructed the field fortifications of Anklam and Stralsund. In 1761 he was promoted maréchal de camp, and began the works on which his fame rests. Montalembert's fortress has been aptly described by an English author as an "immense battery." The intricacies of trace by which Vauban and Cormontaigne sought to minimize the power of the attack, are abandoned in favour of a simple tenaille plan so arranged that the defenders can bring an overwhelming fire to bear on the works of the besieger.
Montalembert, who himself drew his idea from the practice of Swedish and Prussian engineers, furnished the German constructors of the early 19th century with the means of designing entrenched camps suitable to modern conditions of warfare. The "polygonal" method of fortification is the direct outcome of Montalembert's systems. In his own country the caste-spirit of the engineer corps was roused to defend Vauban, and though Montalembert was allowed to construct some successful works at Île-d'Aix and Oleron, he was forbidden to publish his method, and given but little opportunity for actual building. After fifteen years of secrecy he published in Paris (1776-1778) the first edition of La Fortification perpendiculaire.
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