What happened at the Battle of Turckheim?
On 5 January 1675, during the Franco-Dutch War, a French army under Marshal Turenne attacked the Imperial and Brandenburg armies wintering in Upper Alsace. The allies stood behind the Logelbach stream between Colmar and Turckheim, but had left Turckheim itself almost unguarded. Turenne's left wing seized the town and fought along the stream on their flank until dark. That night the allies retreated, and by the middle of January they had recrossed the Rhine.5
Turckheim was a small battle with large results. It crowned a winter march around the Vosges mountains that took a stronger enemy by surprise, a campaign that Frederick the Great praised in verse and Napoleon dissected in a critique, and it cleared Alsace of the armies that had settled there for the winter. The general who planned it is profiled in our portrait of Turenne, and the wider story of French arms in the military history of France.6
The war comes to the Rhine
In 1672 Louis XIV invaded the Dutch Republic. The war spread to the Rhine, where Turenne commanded the French army against the troops of the Holy Roman Empire, Lorraine and their German allies, while the Prince of Condé fought in the Low Countries.7
Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, joined the coalition against France in July 1674. That summer Turenne beat the Imperial and Lorraine troops at Sinsheim in June and laid waste the Palatinate, and on 4 October he fought the allies at Entzheim near Strasbourg. The battle ended their offensive but did not drive them out of Alsace.8
In October the Elector crossed the Rhine with about 20,000 men to join the Imperial army under the Duke of Bournonville. Weygand puts the combined allied army at about 57,000, against some 20,000 French before Turenne's reinforcements arrived.9
Winter quarters in Alsace
Turenne would not fight at such odds. He fell back toward his fortresses of Saverne and Haguenau, at the passes into Lorraine, and waited for reinforcements. Weygand puts his army at about 33,000 men once they had come in at the beginning of November.10
The allies, convinced that the campaign was over, spread their troops in winter quarters across the fertile plain of Upper Alsace. The Elector set up his court at Colmar.11
This was what Turenne had been waiting for. On 9 November he wrote to the secretary of state Le Tellier: "If he tries to settle down in Alsace, we leave Saverne and Haguenau well provisioned and march against him over the mountains of Lorraine straight into Upper Alsace." His letters of the following weeks show the plan taking shape.12
The march behind the Vosges
Armies of the time normally rested in winter. At the end of November and in the first days of December 1674 Turenne left garrisons in Saverne and Haguenau and marched south along the Lorraine side of the Vosges, in several columns, by Épinal and Remiremont.13
The march took about three weeks, through snow, then hard frost, over roads deep in mud. By 27 December the army was gathering around Belfort, in the gap between the Vosges and the Jura, at the southern end of the allied quarters. The allies had not expected an attack from that side.14
In Paris Turenne was sharply criticized, first for leaving the allies in Alsace and then for a march that seemed to abandon the province. According to Longueville, even the war minister Louvois complained of him to the King. Weygand adds that even in his own army there were malcontents, because Turenne had not revealed his intentions.15
Mulhouse and the allied stand
29 December. Turenne's cavalry fell on the allied troops near Mulhouse and routed them, in a fight that the historical atlas of Alsace names after the nearby village of Brunstatt. Allied detachments fled north, and over the next days the French picked up stragglers and isolated units across southern Alsace.16
The allied commanders pulled their scattered forces together around Colmar and resolved to wait for Turenne there in a defensive position.17
They chose the line of the Logelbach, a mill stream branching off the Fecht, between Colmar on their left and Turckheim, at the foot of the Vosges, on their right. They held Colmar in strength. Turckheim they thought out of reach and left almost unguarded: Kortzfleisch, followed by Legrand-Girarde, puts the guard at an ensign and 30 men.18
5 January: the battle
5 January. Turenne set out at daybreak from his camp south of Colmar. The French accounts disagree on whether the army marched in two or in three columns.19
His right wing under the Count of Lorges deployed in the plain facing Colmar, as if the attack were coming there, and held the allied left in place. Turenne himself took the left wing along the foot of the hills toward Turckheim, a march so strange to his officers that, as the Marquis de La Fare remembered, they feared the enemy would fall on the army while it was strung out.20
The French found Turckheim almost empty, crossed the stream and took the town, then extended their line along the water on the allied right flank. The allies sent battalions and guns from their right wing to throw them back, and a fierce fight broke out around a mill and the stream bank.21
The heaviest fighting began at about three in the afternoon and went on until darkness fell, early on a January day. Lieutenant General Foucault, who led the French infantry there, was killed, and so was the Marquis de Moussy at the head of his regiment.22
Legrand-Girarde points out that the French guns could not come up through the vineyards, hedges and sunken lanes north of Turckheim, so the infantry fought under allied cannon fire without artillery of its own. On the other side the allies used only part of their strength. The Duke of Celle refused an order to support the Imperial troops, and Kortzfleisch finds that the Brandenburg and Brunswick-Lüneburg corps stayed idle apart from a few battalions sent to the right, an inaction he calls inexcusable.23
When night fell both sides were still facing each other across the water. That evening the allied commanders, afraid of being cut off from their line of retreat to the north, decided to retreat, and they marched off during the night. In the morning the French found the enemy gone.24
The allies leave Alsace
The allied armies fell back north toward Strasbourg. Turenne followed them but did not force another battle. By the middle of January they had crossed back over the Rhine near Strasbourg.25
A French medal struck for the victory bears the legend Sexaginta millia Germanorum ultra Rhenum pulsa, "sixty thousand Germans driven beyond the Rhine". Beaurain's engraved plan of the battle, shown at the top of this page, reproduces the medal under its title.26
For the Elector of Brandenburg the campaign ended in grief. His eldest son, the electoral prince Karl Emil, had died in Strasbourg on 7 December 1674. Meanwhile the Swedes, drawn into the war by French diplomacy, had invaded Brandenburg, and the Elector turned north to meet them. On 28 June 1675 he beat the Swedes at Fehrbellin.27
Turenne then set out for the court. Crowds cheered him in the towns along the way, and Louis XIV received him in triumph. He did not live to see the end of the year's campaign: on 27 July 1675, at Sasbach, across the Rhine, he was killed by a cannonball.28
Judgments and legends
Weygand calls the campaign of 1674 the one in which Turenne rose to his greatest heights. Frederick the Great held up the Alsace campaign as a model in French verse in his poem on the art of war, and according to Weygand he urged his officers to study Turenne's last two campaigns.29
Napoleon, who wrote a critique of Turenne's campaigns, was more critical. He held that Turenne lost too many days between Belfort and Colmar, letting the allies gather their forces, and that he should have made for the bridge at Strasbourg. In his words, Turenne showed more talent in the conception of the plan than in its execution.30
German historians judged the fight itself more cautiously. Kortzfleisch notes that both sides believed they had won, since the allies had held their position, and that only their voluntary night retreat made Turckheim a French victory. Erdmannsdörffer, writing in 1878, still called it an indecisive action.31
A long-lived legend has Turenne leading his left wing over the Hohlandsberg, the hill above Turckheim, to come down on the town unseen. Kortzfleisch and Legrand-Girarde show that the troops marched along the foot of the hills. Beaurain's plan of 1782 draws the route over the hill: Kortzfleisch makes Beaurain the source of the error, while Legrand-Girarde thinks Beaurain more likely took it from a local tradition.32
