After the death of his elder brother, he entered a cavalry regiment and served in Bohemia, Bavaria, and on the Rhine during the War of the Austrian Succession.

[2] He was given the rank of lieutenant general in command of 7,000 French troops and sent to join the Continental Army under George Washington during the American Revolutionary War.

[3] He landed at Newport, Rhode Island, on 10 July but was held there inactive for a year because he did not want to abandon the French fleet blockaded by the British in Narragansett Bay.

[1] The college in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (now Brown University) served as an encampment site for some of Rochambeau's troops.

[4] In July 1781, the force left Rhode Island and marched across Connecticut to join Washington on the Hudson River in Mount Kisco, New York.

President Theodore Roosevelt unveiled a statue of Rochambeau by Ferdinand Hamar as a gift from France to the United States on 24 May 1902, standing in Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C.

France was represented by ambassador Jules Cambon, Admiral Fournier, General Henri Brugère, and a detachment of sailors and marines from the battleship Gaulois.

President Barak Obama signed the Omnibus Public Land Management Act in 2009 with a provision to designate the Washington–Rochambeau Revolutionary Route as a national historic trail.

Part of the first volume was translated into English and published in 1838 under the title Memoirs of the Marshal Count de R. relative to the War of Independence in the United States.