Louis de Buade de Frontenac

Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac et de Palluau (May_22, 1622 – November_28, 1698) was a French courtier and Governor of New France from 1672 to 1682 and from 1689 to his death in 1698. He established a number of forts on the Great Lakes and engaged in a series of battles against the English and the Iroquois.

Early Life

Louis de Buade was the son of Henri de Buade, colonel in the regiment of Navarre. The details of his early life are meager, as no trace of the Frontenac papers has been discovered. The de Buades, however, were a family of distinction in the principality of Beam. Antoine de Buade, seigneur de Frontenac, grandfather of the future governor of Canada, attained eminence as a councilor of state under Henri IV; and his children were brought up with the dauphin, afterwards Louis XIII.

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Louis de Buade entered the army at an early age. In the year 1635 he served under the prince of Orange in Holland, and fought with credit and received many wounds during engagements in the Low Countries and in Italy. He was promoted to the rank of colonel in the regiment of Normandy in 1643, and three years later, after distinguishing himself at the siege of Orbitello, where he had an arm broken, he was made marshal de camp. His service seems to have been continuous until the conclusion of the peace of Westphalia in 1648, when he returned to his fathers house in Paris and married, without tile consent of her parents, Anne de la Grange-Trianon, a girl of great beauty, who later became the friend and confidante of Madame de Montpensier. The marriage was not a happy one, and after the birth of a son incompatibility of temper led to a separation, the count retiring to his estate on the Indre, where by an extravagant course of living he became hopelessly involved in debt. Little is known of his career for the next fifteen years beyond the fact that he held a high position at court; but in the year 1669, when France sent a contingent to assist the Venetians in the defense of Crete against the Turks, Frontenac was placed in command of the troops on the recommendation of Turenne. In this expedition he won military glory; but his fortune was not improved thereby.

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