Jean Victor Constant de Rebecque or Jean Victor de Constant Rebecque (22 September 1773 – 12 June 1850) was a Swiss mercenary and member of the house of Constant de Rebecque who distinguished himself in Dutch service. As chief of staff of the Netherlands Mobile Army, he countermanded the order of the Duke of Wellington to evacuate Dutch troops from Quatre Bras on the eve of the Battle of Quatre Bras, thereby preventing Marshal Michel Ney from occupying that strategic crossroads.
Contents
Biography
Family
Rebecque was the son of Samuel Constant de Rebecque (1729–1800) and his second wife Louise Cathérine Gallatin (1736–1814). The father was, like the grandfather Samuel Constant de Rebecque (1676–1782) (who reached the rank of lieutenant-general), a Swiss officer in the service of the Dutch Republic. A nephew (not a brother as sometimes erroneously stated) was Benjamin Constant. Jean Victor de Constant Rebecque married Isabella Catharina Anna Jacoba baroness van Lynden (1768–1836) in Braunschweig on 29 April 1798.
They had children:
Victor, (Customary Marquis) baron De Constant Rebecque (1803-1858). A colonel in the Royal Netherlands Army, decorated with the Military Order of William. Aide-de-Camp to Prince Alexander of The Netherlands, King William II and King William III.
Charles baron De Constant Rebecque (1805-1870). An officer in the Royal Netherlands Army, decorated with the Military Order of William. Chamberlain to William II and King William III, Secretary of the Dutch Council of State.
Guillaume baron De Constant Rebecque (1807-1862). An officer in the Royal Netherlands Navy.
Louise baroness De Constant Rebecque (1809-1852), who married Sylvius Reichsgraf Von Pückler
Early career
Rebecque entered the service of France as a sous-lieutenant in a regiment of Swiss Guards in 1788. He started a journal that year that he faithfully kept every day of the rest of his life, thereby providing useful source material to historians. During the Insurrection of 10 August 1792 at the Tuileries Palace his regiment was massacred by French revolutionaries, but he escaped with his life. He returned to Switzerland where he was in military service until he (like his ancestors before him) entered the service of the Dutch Republic in 1793 in the regiment of Prince Frederick (a younger son of stadtholder William V, Prince of Orange). After the fall of the Republic, and the proclamation of the Batavian Republic he first entered British service (1795–1798) and subsequently Prussian service (1798–1811). During that Prussian service from 1805 he tutored the future William II of the Netherlands in military science and helped him pass his exams as a Prussian officer. When William started his studies at Oxford University he accompanied the young prince there and obtained a doctorate honoris causa from Oxford himself in 1811.
William was next appointed aide-de-camp of the Duke of Wellington during the Peninsular War and Rebecque likewise entered British service again on 12 May 1811 as a major, and participated in every battle the Duke (and William) fought there, distinguishing himself at the Battle of Vittoria.
When William, and his father William I of the Netherlands, returned to the Netherlands in November 1813, Rebecque was appointed a lieutenant-colonel in the Orange-Nassau Legion. He advanced very rapidly after that: colonel and aide-de-camp of the Sovereign Prince on 31 December 1813, and Quarter-master-general on 15 January 1814. He took part in the Siege of Bergen op Zoom (1814), and then was promoted to major-general on 30 November 1814.
Rebecque played a very prominent role in the organization from scratch of the armed forces of the Kingdom of the United Netherlands in 1813–1815. On 11 April 1814 he was appointed chief of staff of the new Netherlands Mobile Army that was then formed to besiege the French in Antwerp. In July 1814 he was appointed in a commission that was charged with the formation of a combined Dutch-Belgian army. He played a leading role in that commission. Next he helped Prince Frederick of the Netherlands found the headquarters of the Netherlands Mobile Army, that was to play such an important part in the Waterloo Campaign, on 9 April 1815.
Quatre Bras and Waterloo
After Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from Elba and quickly overthrew the restored Bourbon monarchy in March 1815, he quickly formed Army of the North, with the help of veterans like Anne-François Mellinet (who organized the Jeune Garde), though he had to do without Marshals Berthier and Murat for various reasons. Threatened by this military build-up the Great Powers declared war on Napoleon personally and started to prepare for the inevitable showdown. The Sovereign Prince of the Netherlands also brought his plans for forming his Kingdom of the United Netherlands forward and proclaimed himself king on 16 March 1815 (see Eight Articles of London). Incidentally, this allowed him to give up his title of Prince of Orange and bestow it upon his eldest son as a courtesy title. That eldest son was now also put in charge of the new Netherlands Mobile Army, though at the same time the Duke of Wellington was appointed a field-marshal in the Dutch army. The arrangement was to be that Wellington would command the combined Anglo-allied army that was now assembling in the "Belgian" part of the United Netherlands, but that the Prince of Orange would be in charge of the Belgian-Dutch troops (with his younger brother Frederick nominally commanding a corps). Only Wellington and his chief of staff Lord Hill would be able to give direct orders to the Belgian/Dutch troops, but in practice Wellington always went "through channels" and conveyed his orders to the Belgian/Dutch units via the Prince of Orange.
Beside the Anglo-allied army there also was still a Prussian army under field-marshal Prince Blücher in the Belgian Netherlands, as this part of the country formally still was a Coalition military governorate-general (with king William as its governor-general). The two armies were cantoned over a wide area, with the Prussians taking the south-eastern part, and the Anglo-allies the north-western part. Napoleon strategy was to exploit the dispersal of the two encamped armies by thrusting his Army of the North into the demarcation line between the two armies and by moving quickly to defeat each army in turn (as his Army of the North was larger than each of the Coalition armies separately). For this to succeed he needed the element of surprise, because if the Coalition allies would have known his exact intentions, and would have been able to react in time, they could of course have combined their armies in time and blocked his purpose.
Beside the element of surprise the geo-strategical shape of the theatre of war was also important. The terrain in south-eastern Belgium, where the hilly Ardennes are located, makes only a few invasion routes feasible. Besides, the number of highways was limited in 1815, and this further limited the movements of the opposing armies. Belgium has always been an important theatre of war in the course of the centuries, but in 1815 it had been peaceful since the victory of the French revolutionary armies in 1794, and most generals involved had last campaigned in the country when they were young officers, if at all. Strategic information was therefore at a premium.
Belgian Revolution and Ten Days Campaign
After the Netherlands Mobile Army returned from the campaign in France in 1816, Rebecque was confirmed as Chief of the General Staff of the Netherlands army (which he would remain until his retirement). As such he capably organised that army and the system of conscription on which it was based in close cooperation with Prince Frederick. He was promoted to lieutenant-general in 1816. In 1826 he was appointed gouverneur (tutor) of the young sons of the Prince of Orange, like he had been the tutor of their father from 1805. When in 1830 king William was asked to act as arbiter in the matter of the conflict over the delineation of the Maine and New Brunswick border, the Northeastern Boundary Dispute (a matter that was only finally settled by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty in 1842, Rebecque headed the fact-finding commission that prepared the arbitrage award.
This award was made in August 1830, just about when the Belgian Revolution erupted in which Rebecque was to play a controversial role. During the years the United Kingdom of the Netherlands existed, several complaints were raised by the Belgians towards the regulations of the government. This eventually led to the Brussels insurrection of August 1830, with its anti-Dutch overtones therefore came as a rude shock. At first they reacted with indecision and with reluctance to apply military severity. Especially the Prince of Orange had the illusion that he could rely on his undoubted popularity (he was far more liberal than his paternalistic father, and for that reason hardly on speaking terms with the king) and might be able to reason with the insurrectionists.
However, the échec of Orange's brave entry into the hostile city on 1 September with only a few companions (of which Rebecque was one), which almost ended in a lynching, put an end to that. Rebecque (who was the political antipode of his liberal nephew Benjamin Constant, probably because of his traumatic experience in the Tuileries in 1792) now counseled playing the military card. He is credited with (or blamed for) having made the plan for the assault on Brussels on 21 September, which ended catastrophically, and caused much bloodshed. Rebecque himself was wounded in the street fighting. The Dutch army retreated to Antwerp where the next catastrophe, the indefensible bombardment of the city by general Chassé, happened.
Rebecque was back the next year, when he helped organise the ill-fated Ten Days Campaign. This attempt to retrieve terrain lost, was executed brilliantly in a military sense, but politically it was a disaster. One wonders what Rebecque and his political masters hoped to achieve, even if the French had not intervened? They could easily beat the nascent Belgian army, but what would have been next? It seems unlikely that the Dutch would have had the stomach for the kind of repression that Russia used to quell the Polish Insurrection of 1830–1831. As White makes clear, the real objective may more properly have been to strengthen the Dutch position in the following negotiations, which the Dutch successes arguably did. But a reunification of the two countries, as king William seems to have hoped for, was never in the cards.
In popular media
Rebecque is a prominently featured character in Bernard Cornwell's novel Sharpe's Waterloo. In the television adaptation he was portrayed by Swiss actor Oliver Tobias.