Vauban, SÉBASTIEN LE PRESTRE DE, military engineer and marshal of France, was born at Saint Léger du Fougeret, near Avallon in Burgundy, 15th May 1633. Left a destitute orphan at ten, he was brought up by the village curé, and at seventeen enlisted in the regiment of Condé, then in league with Spain against the king. Taken prisoner in 1653, he was persuaded by Mazarin to take service under the king, and in 1655 he received his commission as one of the royal engineers. Already in 1658 he had the chief direction of the attacks made by Turenne's army, and the eight years of peace that followed this campaign he devoted to works at Dunkirk and elsewhere. In 1667 he helped to reduce Lille, and next was appointed governor of its new citadel. During the campaigns in Holland (1672–78) he took part in seventeen sieges and one defence, rising to be brigadier and major-general, and at the close commissary-general of fortifications. He first introduced the method of approach by parallels at the siege of Maastricht (1673), and with such effect that that strong fortress capitulated in thirteen days. The rest of his more famous exploits in these campaigns were the trimphant defence of Oudenarde and the sieges of Valenciennes and Cambrai. During the ten years of peace which followed 1678 Vauban rendered to France perhaps the greatest of his services, in surrounding the kingdom with a complete cordon of fortresses (for his system, see FORTIFICATION); and he planned and partly executed the magnificent aqueduct of Maintenon, by which the waters of the Eure are conveyed to Versailles. In 1703 he rose to be marshal of France.
War breaking out again in 1688, Vauban conducted with his usual success the sieges of Philipsburg—introducing here his invention of ricochet-batteries—Mannheim, Mons (1691), and Namur (1692). The sieges of Charleroi (1693), Ath (1697), Breisach (1704), and the construction of the entrenched camp near Dunkirk (1706) are the only professional works of importance during the last fourteen years of his life. After the peace of Ryswick in 1697 he had applied his active mind to the consideration of various faults in the internal government of France, and he had observed the fatal consequences of the Revocation of 1685. His ideas he submitted in a memoir to Louvois and Madame de Maintenon in 1686. But another work, the Dine Royale (1707), in which he discussed the question of taxation, and anticipated in the most striking manner the doctrines which eighty years later overthrew the French monarchy, brought down a heavier storm upon his head. Saint-Simon tells us the book was clear, simple, and exact, but the truths it told were unpalatably plain. In 1699 and again in 1704 he had sent it to the king, but no notice was taken till in 1706 he began privately to print 300 copies, whereupon the book was at once condemned. Vauban did not long survive his disgrace, dying at Paris, March 30, 1707. 'I have lost a man very devoted to my person and to the state,' said his self-complacent master. His body was buried at Bazoches; in 1806 Napoleon deposited his heart in the Invalides.
Saint-Simon describes Vauban as 'perhaps the most honest and most virtuous man of his age . . . never was man more gentle, more kindly, or more obliging.' Of middle height, hardly frame, blunt manners, sound judgment, and indomitable courage, he never experienced a reverse, yet all his success never turned his head nor impaired his modesty. He conducted fifty successful sieges, and designed or improved the works of more than 160 fortresses, among them Dunkirk, Landan, Lille, and Strasbourg. He it was, and not Mackay, who in 1687 invented the socket instead of the plug bayonet.
In 1669 he wrote in six weeks for Louvois his Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction dans la Conduite des Sièges, published at Leyden in 1740. A selection of his MSS. formed the Oeuvres de M. de Vauban (4 vols. 1843–46). See Chambray, Notice historique sur Vauban (1840); Michel, Histoire de Vauban (1879); Ambert, Le Maréchal de Vauban (1882); also Major E. M. Lloyd's Vauban, Montalembert, Carnot: Engineer Studies (1887).