page_title: Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine
section_title: Family
hierarchical_section_title: Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine / Family
caption_attribution_description: English: engraved image from biography of Madame de Custine
context_page_description: Adam Philippe, Comte de Custine was a French general. As a young officer in the Bourbon Royal army, he served in the Seven Years' War. In the American Revolutionary War he joined Rochambeau's Expédition Particulière supporting the American colonists. Following the successful Virginia campaign and the Battle of Yorktown, he returned to France and rejoined his unit in the Royal Army.
  When the French Revolution began he was elected to the Estates-General and served in the subsequent National Constituent Assembly as a representative from Metz. He supported some of the August Decrees, but also supported, generally, royal prerogative and the rights of the French émigrés. At the dissolution of the Assembly in 1791, he rejoined the army as a lieutenant general and the following year replaced Nicolas Luckner as commander-in-chief of the Army of the Vosges. In 1792, he successfully led campaigns in the middle and upper Rhine regions, taking Speyer and Mainz and breaching the Wissembourg lines.
context_section_description: Born in Metz on 4 February 1740, Custine was a son of Philippe-François-Joseph, comte de Custine, and Anne-Marguerite Maguin, daughter of Francois, comte d' Roussy and Marguerite de Walter. His father, the tenth count, had died at the Battle of Rossbach in 1757, one of six French generals killed in the engagement. Custine's other titles included Signeur de Guermagne and de Sareck, and he was, after 1770, also the lord of Niderviller, a property he purchased. He married Adelaide-Celeste Louise Gagnat de Longny. In 1790 Custine's daughter, Adelaide-Anne-Philippe, married Henri Evrard, marquis de Dreux-Brézé, master of ceremonies for Louis XVI. She and her husband spent much of the early 1790s as refugees in Britain, although he returned to France several times to visit his estates; he was eventually confirmed as a peer of France, resumed his pre-Revolution position as master of ceremonies, this time for Louis XVIII, and was awarded military rank.
  Custine's son, Renaud-Louis-Philippe-Francois, (b. in Paris in 1768 and died 3 January 1794), also called Armand, was a captain in one of the regiments in the Army of the Rhine. As a young man, he had traveled widely, and made a long study of the art of war in Berlin. Comte de Mirabeau, ever the politician, predicted that the young Custine would become a well-respected diplomat. By 1792, Armand was Nicholas Luckner's aide-de-camp; following Luckner's dismissal, he entered a brief embassy duty in Berlin in 1792 as chargé de affaires and eventually, as diplomatic relations between France and the rest of Europe became strained, he was a hostage for the safe return of Prussian and Austrian diplomats in Paris. His deceased mother had left him capital of 700,000 livres, making him a wealthy young man; it was assumed that his father would also settle a suitable amount on him upon his marriage as well as the family estates in Niderviller, which included six farms.
  Custine, as an aristocratic general, and his son, an up-and-coming diplomat, seemed natural targets of suspicion. In 1792, after spending part of a year in Berlin, the younger Custine found himself under suspicion, despite his careful and circumspect behavior in Berlin: he had gone out of his way to make sure that he documented and reported any contact with the Prussians, and that all reports of his conversations were carefully and specifically annotated. He wrote to his mother-in-law that, by a miracle, he was not on the list of those to be arrested, and had avoided the September 1792 massacre at the Prison de l'Abbaye. He reported that he feared writing to his wife by the insecure post.  He languished in Paris over the winter, but eventually he secured a position in his father's command in the Army of the Rhine, joining that army in Frankfurt. By August 1793, though, following his father's arrest, young Custine found himself proscribed, that is, on the list of suspected royalists. The September Law of Suspects accelerated the son's trial. The chief evidence against him seemed to be a letter he had written to his father the previous spring, suggesting that he resign from the army, and this, as well as other letters—real and forged—guaranteed his condemnation. He was condemned and guillotined a day later.  He left a young son, Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, Marquis de Custine (18 March 1790 – 25 September 1857).
caption: Custine's daughter in law, Delphine de Sabran, (Paris, 18 March 1770–1826)[36] Madame de Custine, was considered an icon of femininity and beauty.
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