Ludwig Anton Baillet de Latour (1753-1836)
Command Ratings
Ludwig Anton, Count Baillet de Latour (also recorded with the fuller form Ludwig Wilhelm Anton, Count Baillet de Latour-Merlemont) was an Austrian infantry officer who rose to the general officer ranks during the French Revolutionary Wars and remained in Habsburg service into the Napoleonic period. He was born on 12 February 1753 and died on 1 September 1836.
He entered Habsburg military service as a youth (service dated from 1767 in compiled career summaries) and spent his early career in the infantry before becoming one of the numerous Generalmajor and later Feldzeugmeister employed across the coalition wars against France. During the War of the First Coalition he served in the Austrian Netherlands and on the Rhine. He was wounded by round shot during the Siege of Le Quesnoy (1793). In the autumn operations of 1793, elements of his regiment served at Wattignies (15–16 October 1793). He was promoted to Generalmajor effective 1 January 1794 (with seniority sometimes recorded from 10 December 1791 in regimental/army lists).
On the Upper Rhine he was engaged in the 1795 operations around Mannheim, including the Action at Mannheim (18 October 1795), and continued in the 1796 German campaign under senior Habsburg commanders, operating in the same theatre as his elder brother Maximilian Anton Karl, Count Baillet von Latour (“Count Latour” in many operational narratives). In that summer and autumn he held important field responsibilities in the fighting against Moreau’s Army of the Rhine and Moselle, including actions at Ettlingen/Malsch (9 July 1796) and Neresheim (11 August 1796). He is specifically associated in French-language battle summaries with the Imperial corps defeated at Biberach (1796), where the opposing French commander was Moreau and the Austrian commander is given as Feldmarschall-Leutnant Baillet de Latour.
He continued to serve through the later coalition wars, appearing in compiled lists of engagements that include Ostrach and Stockach (1799), the First Battle of Zürich (1799), the 1800 battles around Stockach and in the Danube/Swabian theatre (including Meßkirch and Biberach), and the culminating defeat at Hohenlinden (3 December 1800), reflecting repeated employment in Major field armies during both the First and Second Coalition wars.
In the Napoleonic period he remained a senior officer of the Habsburg monarchy, with service summaries extending his active career through 1814. His later career is generally treated in overview form in readily available reference compendia rather than in the same operational detail as his 1793–1800 field service, but the continuity of his employment indicates he was retained as a high-ranking general for the reconstituted Austrian forces during the Empire’s subsequent wars with France. He died at Brussels on 1 September 1836.
Sources
XXX 00 Hohenlinden; XXX 05 President of the Aulic Council; died of natural causes in 1806. (1737?-1806)