Maurice was born at Goslar, an illegitimate son of Augustus II the Strong, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania and Elector of Saxony, and the Countess Maria Aurora of Königsmarck.

Augustus had been elected King of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the previous year, but the unsettled condition of the country obliged Maurice to spend the greater part of his youth outside its borders.

[1] At the age of twelve, Maurice served in the Imperial Army under Prince Eugene of Savoy, at the sieges of Tournai and Mons and at the Battle of Malplaquet during the War of the Spanish Succession.

[1] On 12 March 1714, a marriage was arranged between him and one of the richest of his father's subjects, Countess Johanna Viktoria Tugendreich von Loeben, but he dissipated her fortune so rapidly that he was soon heavily in debt.

[1] After serving Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor in a campaign against the Ottoman Empire in 1717, he went to Paris to study mathematics, and in 1720 obtained a commission as Maréchal de camp.

He soon found it impossible to resist her opposition to his claims, but with the assistance of £30,000 lent him by the French actress Adrienne Lecouvreur, he raised a force by which he maintained his authority till 1727, when he withdrew and took up residence in Paris.

In the War of the Austrian Succession he took command of an army division sent to invade Austria in 1741, and on 19 November 1741, surprised Prague during the night, and seized it before the garrison was aware of the presence of an enemy, a coup de main which made him famous throughout Europe; he thus repeated the exploit of 1648 of his maternal great-grandfather, Hans Christoff von Königsmarck.

In 1744, he was chosen to command the 10,000 men of the French invasion of Britain on behalf of James Francis Edward Stuart, which assembled at Dunkirk but did not proceed more than a few miles out of harbour before being wrecked by disastrous storms.

[1] In the following year, Maurice with 65,000 men besieged Tournai and inflicted a severe defeat on the army of the Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Fontenoy, an encounter determined entirely by his constancy and cool leadership.

[9] Written following Prussian expansion during the War of the Austrian Succession, Saxe rejected their rigid discipline; arguing the French character was fundamentally different and their tactics should reflect that, he advocated the use of a deep order or ordre profond, rather than relying on firearms.

As early as 1701, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough argued winning one battle was more beneficial than taking 12 fortresses; Saxe followed this line but his argument was given increased weight by French losses in the 1756–1763 Seven Years' War.

The elaborate monument, under which de Saxe's remains were interred on 20 August 1777, shows Death holding a sandglass and calling him to the grave while a crying France tries to retain him, and Hercules weeps on the tomb's side.

Gérard de Nerval believed his majestic pose might have inspired the Commendatore's statue in Don Giovanni, based on the fact that Mozart had performed in the church in 1778 shortly after the monument's inauguration.

[1] A biography in English is Jon Manchip White's Marshal of France: The Life and Times of Maurice, Comte de Saxe (1696–1750) (Rand McNally & Company, Chicago, 1962).