Years of service 1769–1813 Service/branch French Army | Rank Divisional general | |
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Born 7 April 1755
Paris, Kingdom of France ( 1755-04-07 ) Allegiance Kingdom of France
Kingdom of the French
French First Republic
First French Empire Battles/wars American Revolutionary War
French Revolutionary Wars
Napoleonic Wars Awards Name inscribed under the Arc de Triomphe Relations Son of Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau Name Donatien-Marie-Joseph Vimeur, Died October 16, 1813, Leipzig, Germany Battles and wars American Revolutionary War, French Revolutionary Wars, Napoleonic Wars Similar People Francois Capois, Charles Leclerc, Jean‑Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint Louverture, Henri Christophe | ||
Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, vicomte de Rochambeau (1755 – 16 October 1813) was a French soldier, the son of Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau.
Biography
He served in the American Revolutionary War as an aide-de-camp to his father, spending the winter of 1781-1782 in quarters at Williamsburg, Virginia. In the 1790s, he participated in an unsuccessful campaign to re-establish French authority in Martinique and Saint Domingue. Rochambeau was later assigned to the French Revolutionary Army in the Italian Peninsula, and was appointed to the military command of the Ligurian Republic.
In 1802, he was appointed to lead an expeditionary force against Saint Domingue (Haiti) after General Charles Leclerc's death. His remit was to restore French control of their rebellious colony, by any means. Historians of the Haitian Revolution credit his brutal tactics for uniting black and gens de couleur soldiers against the French. After Rochambeau surrendered to the rebel general Jean-Jacques Dessalines in November 1803, the former French colony declared its independence as Haiti, the second independent state in the Americas.
At the Surrender of Cap Francais, Rochambeau was captured aboard the frigate Surveillante by a British squadron under the command of Captain John Loring and returned to England as a prisoner on parole, where he remained interned for almost nine years.
He was exchanged in 1811, and returned to the family chateau, where he resumed the work of classifying the family's growing collection of maps, which his father had begun. He also enriched the collections with new acquisitions, in particular ones contributed by the military campaigns of his son, Auguste-Philippe Donatien de Vimeur, who served as the aide-de-camp for Joachim Murat and was with Murat's cavalry in the Russian campaign in 1812.
He was mortally wounded in the Battle of Nations, and died three days later at Leipzig, at the age of 58.
In addition to his legitimate son, Vimeur was survived by an illegitimate son, Lewis Warrington, conceived in Williamsburg, Virginia, when Vimeur was a young officer serving with his father in America during the Revolutionary War.