Losses throughout the eighteenth century
prompted serious reconsideration in all aspects of the French military. As
opposed to the British, content in their Marlbourghian tactics, and the
Prussians, successful using Frederick the Great’s directives, the French were
without a successful or reliable tactical system.[1]
Losses in Louis XIV’s wars, the War of Austrian Succession, and the Seven
Years’ War prompted tacticians to search for a new method of battlefield
operations. France’s strong and dynamic intellectual community provided an
infrastructure for these losses and military dilemmas to be deconstructed,
extrapolated, discussed, and revised.[2]
In 1703, Marquis de Vauban, Marshal of France, published his Traité de
l'attaque des places, in which he attempted to standardise French siege methods
according to scientific and systematic procedures. Though his methods were not
always successful, his approach provided a template for future tacticians.[3]
Following his example, and approaching warfare by using a similar method,
tacticians outlined three major problems in the French army. While other
problems certainly existed, the prominence of the discussion of these three
problems in the century’s major tactical works indicates that they would be
paramount to the new shape of battlefield systems:
1.
Desertion: Early Modern armies were often devastated by desertion, and
the consistently plummeting numbers caused great expense and limited the
effectiveness of French armies. As early as 1644, Cardinal Jules Mazarin wrote
to the Vicomte du Turenne, then Marshal of France, looking for recruits and
claiming that as much as two-thirds of the army had deserted.[4]
This percentage had not dropped any by the eighteenth century. Military philosophes[5]
concluded that ancien régime armies were susceptible to desertion
because mercenaries, who were often less willing to die for France than a
Frenchmen, made up so large a percentage of the army.[6]
Instead they proposed that the French soldier should be like Polybius’ Roman
soldiers – citizens willing and able to “stand their ground and die for their
country.” [7]
2.
Lack of Decisiveness: Early Modern battles were bloody, prolonged,
and indecisive affairs. Instead of decisive field battles, commanders were
often forced to fight sieges that might last hours, days, or weeks, and regularly
resulted in either pyrrhic victories or costly stalemates.[8]
Consequently, going to war was often unproductive and ruinously costly, which
was particularly worrisome for the increasingly bankrupt French monarchy.[9]
3.
The lack of a systematic approach: Despite the work of Vauban at the
turn of the century, battles did not produce predictable results; risks,
chances, and errors had not been reduced. Warfare, Marshal-General Maurice de Saxe
complained, was without “principles and rules,” and needed to be revaluated in
order to produce reliable outcomes, just as any other science might.[10]
Likewise, the Marquis de Puysegur complained there was “no school where one can
instruct oneself in the military art, no teacher who can teach fundamental
rules . . . as if all the arts did not have certain rules and a theory founded
on solid principles.” [11]
[1] Madeleine Dobie, “The Enlightenment at War,” Publications
of the Modern Language Association 124, no.5 (Oct. 2009): 1851.
[2] Indeed, the military trends of the
time were very much incorporated into the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment,
and the intellectual infrastructure (salons, book-trading circles, and
intellectual journals) were put to good use by military writers. Sandra L.
Powers, “Studying the Art of War: Military Books known to American Officers and
Their French Counterparts during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” The
Journal of Military History 70, no. 3 (July 2006). In fact, Deborah
Avant suggests, the themes of the Enlightenment provided the intellectual
grounding for the entire approach to new tactics. Deborah Avant, “From Mercenary to Citizen
Armies: Explaining Change in the Practice of War,” International
Organization 54, no.1 (Winter 2000): 43.
[3] Jamel Ostwald, Vauban under Siege: Engineering
Efficiency and the Martial Vigor in the War of the Spanish Succession (Boston:
Brill, 2007). Puysegur
in his “Art of War” frequently notes the influence which Vauban had on siege
warfare and the changes in the tactical system which resulted from Vauban’s
work. Jacques fr.
Chastenet de Puyseger, Art. de la guerre
par principes et par règles, vol. 1 (Paris:
Charles-Antoine Jombert, 1749), 2. 513.
[4] Delbruck, 229.
[5] Starkey, in his “War in the Age of Enlightenment,”
uses the term “military philosophes” to encompass the tacticians,
thinkers, and philosophers who applied themselves to tactical issues. While
many, like Saxe and Folard, had served in the military, other contributors to
the discussion, like Rousseau, participated from a civilian standpoint.
Consequently, this term will be used in this paper as well, as it seems to best
reflect the overlap and connection between this military debate and the
contemporaneous currents of the Enlightenment. Armstrong Starkey, War in the
Age of Enlightenment, 1700-1789, ed. Jeremy Black (Westport, CT: Praeger,
2003).
[6] Maurice de Saxe,
“My Reveries upon the Art of War,” in Roots of Strategy: A Collection of
Military Classics, ed. Major Thomas R Phillips (London: John Lane the
Bodley Head, 1943), 114.
[7] Polybius, Histories,
trans. Mortimer Chambers (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966), 235.
[8] It is telling that at the turn of the century the Duke
of Marlborough,
renowned for his decisiveness, fought 30 long and arduous sieges, but only four
major battles. Jamel Ostwald, “The ‘Decisive’ Battle of Ramillies, 1706:
Prerequisites for Decisiveness in Early Modern Warfare,” The Journal of
Military History 64, no. 3 (June 2000): 653.
[9] John Landers,
“The Destructiveness of Pre-Industrial Warfare: Political and Technological
Determinants,” Journal of Peace Research 48, no.4 (Jul. 2005): 456.
[10] Maurice de Saxe, Memoires sur L’Art de la Guerre
(Paris : George Conrad Walther, 1757), 1; Saxe, “My Reveries,” 100; Irenee Amelot de
Lacroix, Rules and regulations for the field exercise and manoeuvres of the
French infantry issued August 1, 1791 (Boston: T.B. Watt and Co, 1810), 1.
No comments:
Post a Comment