Confederate General Trivia: II

CAMILLE ARMAND JULES MARIE PRINCE de POLIGNAC 1832-1913

 This dashing CSA officer was born in France, and was a bona fide prince whose father was born at the Palace of Versailles. His grandmother, Gabrielle, had been a famous aristocratic beauty and Queen Marie-Antoinette’s closest friend. The royal friendship was rewarded by the family being ensconced in a thirteen room apartment in the massive palace.   Who was this handsome prince?

How did he wind up in the Confederate army? Fighting in the Red River Campaign?

His name was Camille Armand Jules Marie Prince de Polignac, but he was affectionately called Prince Polecat by his unsophisticated soldiers.

W. P. Doran, a war correspondent for the Houston Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Sioux,’ stayed with Polignac’s division throughout the Red River campaign, and in 1882 ‘Sioux’ wrote of the general in his biography of the general, as follows:

“Polignac was a true type of a Frenchman. He was about forty-five years of age, medium size with a long sharp nose, and he resembled Napoleon Bonaparte’s portraits. He spoke the French and English languages fluently, and when in camp, was no better dressed than one of his orderlies. Those not knowing him would take him for a common soldier. At one point in the woods, the Federals made a determined stand, and the writer (‘Sioux’) was near Polignac when he gave orders to the different commanders under him… He ordered battalions and regiments to the different points specified on his map with the ease of a chess player.”

Polignac was born February 16, 1832, in Millemont Seine-et-Oise, France into one of the most famous families of the French nobility. His father was Jules, Prince de Polignac, who had been a passionate supporter of absolute monarchy and chief minister during the reign of King Charles X of France. Through his distant cousin, Pierre de Polignac, he was related to the Grimaldis of Monaco, a family who still rule the principality today.

Prince Polecat studied mathematics and music at St. Stanislas College in the 1840s. In 1853 he joined the French army. He served in the Crimean War from 1854 to 1855, receiving a commission as a second lieutenant. He resigned from the army in 1859 and traveled to Central America to study geography and political economy, and also the native plant life. He then visited the United States in the early 1860s.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Polignac initially served on the staffs of generals P. G. T. Beauregard and Braxton Bragg as a lieutenant colonel. He served at the Battle of Shiloh and the subsequent Siege of Corinth. In January 1863, he was promoted to brigadier general. Two months later, he was transferred to the Trans-Mississippi Department and assigned command of a Texas infantry brigade. Polignac is best known for his leadership at the Battle of Mansfield, April 8, 1864, in De Soto Parish, Louisiana, a Confederate victory in the first major action of the Red River Campaign. Polignac received a battlefield promotion at Mansfield to division command after the death of Alfred Mouton. He was formally promoted to major general on June 14, 1864. Polignac led the division throughout the remainder of the campaign and during its service in Arkansas in the fall of 1864. In March 1865 he was sent to Napoleon III of France to request intervention on behalf of the Confederacy but he arrived too late to accomplish his mission. He remained in his native France, his role in American history having ended. But his memory lived on in the hearts of his former Louisiana Confederate soldiers, particularly those of Mouton’s Division and the Calcasieu Regiment, who remembered their ‘Prince Polecat’ with a certain fondness throughout the remainder of their lives.

Polignac was married twice and died in France on November 15, 1913, at the age of eighty-one..

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