X-Nico

unusual facts about Étienne François, duc de Choiseul


Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan

He was intimate with the comtesse de Tess, sister of the duc de Choiseul, and in 1781 met Madame de Créquy, then sixty-seven years of age, and began a long friendship with her.


Antoine de Sartine

Antoine de Sartine inherited a strong French Navy, resurrected by Choiseul after the disasters of the Seven Years' War (in which France had lost Canada, Louisiana, and India); a resurrected French Navy which would later defeat the British Navy in the War of American Independence.

Étienne François, duc de Choiseul

English writer Horace Walpole, in his Memoirs, gives a vivid description of the duke's character, accuses him of having caused the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), as a revenge on tsarina Catherine II, and says of his foreign policy: "he would project and determine the ruin of a country, but could not meditate a little mischief or a narrow benefit. ... He dissipated the nation's wealth and his own; but did not repair the latter by plunder of the former".

Hermann Busenbaum

At Toulouse in 1757, though the offending sections were repudiated by the heads of the Jesuit colleges, the Medulla was publicly burned, and the episode undoubtedly led the way to the duc de Choiseul's attack on the Jesuits.


see also