Maurice de Saxe - Writings

Writings

Saxe wrote a remarkable work on the art of war, Mes Rêveries, which though described by Carlyle as "a strange military farrago, dictated, as I should think, under opium", is in fact a classic. Published posthumously in 1757, it was described by Lord Montgomery, more than two centuries later, as in fact "a remarkable work on the art of war." Saxe's Lettres et mémoires choisis appeared in 1794. His letters to his sister, the Princess of Holstein, preserved at Strasbourg, were destroyed by the bombardment of that place in 1870. Thirty copies had, however, been printed from the original.

Many previous errors in former biographies were corrected and additional information supplied in Carl von Weber's Moritz Graf von Sachsen, Marschall von Frankreich, nach archivalischen Quellen (Leipzig, 1863), in Saint-René Taillandier's Maurice de Saxe, étude historique d'après les documents des archives de Dresde (1865) and in C.F. Vitzthum's Maurice de Saxe (Leipzig, 1861).

A biography in English is Jon Manchip White's Marshal of France: The Life and Times of Maurice, Comte de Saxe (Rand McNally & Company, Chicago, 1962). See also the military histories of the period, especially Carlyle's Frederick the Great.

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