Rochambeau, Donatien Marie Joseph de Vimeur de (1755–1813)

Donatien Marie Joseph de Vimeur de Rochambeau (b. 7 April 1755; d. 20 October 1813), French general and last colonial governor of Saint-Domingue. Born at the Rochambeau estate near Vendôme, Rochambeau entered the army at fourteen and accompanied his father, Jean Baptiste de Vimeur de Rochambeau, commander of French troops, to America during the War of Independence. In the early 1790s he was commandant of the Windward Islands and in 1793 was in Martinique. From January to May 1796, he was governor-general of Saint-Domingue. He returned to Saint-Domingue, serving as captain-general from January to November 1803, during which time he helped to put down the revolt led by Toussaint Louverture.

On the return voyage to France, Rochambeau's ship was seized by the British, who imprisoned him until 1811. He then resumed his military career. He died of wounds suffered at the Battle of Leipzig.

See alsoLouverture, Toussaint; Windward Islands.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jean-Edmond Weelen, Rochambeau, Father and Son: A Life of the Maréchal de Rochambeau, translated by Lawrence Lee (1936).

James Breck Perkins, France in the American Revolution (1971).

David P. Geggus, Unexploited Sources for the History of the Haitian Revolution (1983).

Additional Bibliography

Brown, Gordon S. Toussaint's Cause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Haynsworth, James Lafayette. "The Early Career of Lieutenant General Donatien Rochambeau and the French Campaigns in the Caribbean, 1792–1794." Ph.D. thesis. Florida State University, 2003.

                                             Anne Greene