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.
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.
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.
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.
This percentage had not dropped any by the eighteenth century. Military philosophes
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.
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.”
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.
Consequently, going to war was often unproductive and ruinously costly, which
was particularly worrisome for the increasingly bankrupt French monarchy.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Under Frederick the Great, the
Prussians, who suffered the same three major issues as the French, reformed and
restructured their army with considerable success. Yet, despite the Prussians’
rigid and reliable system which had bested the French on several occasions,
French thinkers were adamantly opposed to the adoption of Prussian-style tactics.
This was the case for a number of reasons. First, philosophes were
hesitant to adopt a system which did not allow for individual agency and élan.
Led by Saxe, whose Reveries sur l’art de guerre stressed the
importance of individuality and morale, military philosophes abhorred
the rigid discipline and robotic nature of the Prussian system.
Second, French thinkers concluded that the French character was fundamentally
different than that of the Germans in that the French were better suited to
attack than defence.
It was almost unanimously agreed that whatever battlefield system was adopted,
it should cater to this uniquely French élan.
“True valour,” Folard proclaimed, “consists not in combats which are made at a
distance; but in shock and sudden attacks. That is the only road which brings
us to victory.”
Better the troops advance with only their steel, it was agreed, than attempt to
maintain a defensive line. It was generally agreed that the Prussians had
perfected their own system anyway, meaning that even if the French did invest
time, labour, and money to imitate it, they could at best be comparable to,
never better than, the Prussians.
Moreover, musket-fire proved to be horribly inaccurate and largely unproductive
at the best of times, even under the Prussian and British armies.
It seemed futile, therefore, to invest in so inefficient a system. Saxe even
predicted that muskets would soon be obsolete: “If the previous war had lasted
a little longer, indubitably everyone would have fought hand to hand. This was
because the abuse of firing began to be appreciated; it causes more noise than
harms, and those who depend on it are always beaten.”
French
thinkers thus began to look for and design a different system; a system which
they felt would out-fight the British and Prussian armies time and time again.
Saxe’s Reveries were published posthumously in
1757. Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought from the Enlightenment to
Clausewitz (Toronto: Clarendon Press, 1989), 38. This feeling permeates
French military during the eighteenth century, and appears even as late as the
Napoleonic wars in an account from Jean Barrès: “I observe and understand that
these troops are drilled in the Prussian manner, but I will soon put a stop to
that.” Jean-Baptiste Barrès, Memoirs of
a Napoleonic Officer, ed. Maurice Barrès,
trans. Bernard Miall (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1925), 52.
In general,
both the British and Prussians relied on line tactics, which emphasized
firepower and uniformity. This often involved lines of soldiers two or three
deep, firing in unison on command. Gat, Origins,
38; Major Thomas R Phillips, Roots of Strategy: A Collection of Military
Classics (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1943), 166.
In fact, as few
as 0.1-.05 percent of shots actually hit their intended targets, justifying the
French move away from muskets. Baron Lejeune even went so far as to state that
the arrows of the Niemen people “would pierce an apple at a distance of a
hundred yards more often than our pistol shots could hit a button at
twenty-five.” Louis-François Lejeune, Memoirs of Baron Lejeune,
Aide-de-camp to Marshals Berthier, Davout, and Oudinot, ed. and trans.
Mrs Arthur Bell (New York: Logmans, Green, and Co., 1897), 71.
Opposed to their enemies’ tactical
systems, yet frustrated by their own, many eighteenth-century French tacticians
turned to the armies of antiquity for inspiration. This turn was in fact not
unusual. Ultimately, tacticians turned to classical military models because the
systems of antiquity could fix all the problems which philosophes had
outlined with the ancien régime army. Greek and Roman warfare appeared
successful, decisive, methodical, and, as an added bonus, dignified.
Furthermore, it relied on massed infantry offensives using deep formations –
such as the Greek and Macedonian phalanxes — to charge and break the
enemy lines. This was just the sort of approach which French soldiers were supposedly
ideally suited for. Even better, the soldiers of the hoplite phalanx, inspired
by their state, did not seem to desert their ranks.
Contemporary intellectual trends already strongly encouraged a turn towards
antiquity. Steeped in classical literature, the philosophes of the Enlightenment
have, perhaps rightly, been accused of knowing the history of Greece and Rome
better than that of their own state.
Inevitably, ideas from the political and social branches of the Enlightenment
filtered into military discussions. Calls for a more humane approach to
warfare, new political systems which might include a citizen militia instead of
a mercenary army, and new social discourse which might encourage more equal
battlefield formations evoked regular comparisons to Rome, Sparta, and Athens.
As J.E. Lendon suggests in “The Rhetoric
of Combat,” the way the Greeks and Romans approached, understood, and therefore
wrote about war placed particular emphasis on soldiers’ moods and morale. He
demonstrates in particular how Caesar emphasized morale and spiritual condition
as a deciding factor on the battlefield.
Entrenched in such texts, and having grown into the humanist tradition of the
Renaissance and Early Modern periods, it is easy to understand how Enlightenment
scholars, concerned with the humanity of individuals and the social contract,
could easily and quickly identify with the classical approach to warfare.
Consequently, tacticians’ investigation
of classical military texts, and in particular Folard’s Commentary on
Polybius in which the ordre profond was first propagated, did not
seem out of place. Indeed, Nathaniel Wolloch claims that the vocabulary used
for understanding war was based on a classical understanding of warfare, and
necessarily shaped how military philosophes
understood and expressed warfare.
Moreover, military study of the classics was in no way unprecedented in the
eighteenth century. Throughout the Renaissance, classical military treatises
were the subject of much debate and comparison. Machiavelli begins his Art of War, for example, by suggesting
that “if we consider the practice and institution observed by the old Romans
(whose example I am always fond of recommending), we shall find many things
worthy of imitation; these may be easily introduced into any other state.” This demonstrated to many tacticians that
they were indeed on the right track. Finally,
it helped that classical tactical systems were both attainable and inexpensive.
Technologies did not need to be invested in, mercenaries did not need to be
hired, and little training was required. Instead, the French infantryman, armed
with his own spirit and a pike, could decide the result of a war.
Gat, Origins, 8; David Bell suggests that the
birth and popularity of the novel was in part responsible for this trend by
giving readers a new way to identify with the classics. David A. Bell, The
First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (New
York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007), 202.
Nathaniel
Wolloch, “Cato the Younger in the Enlightenment,” Modern Philology 106,
no.1 (Aug. 2008): 6.
It is important to insert a brief
clarification in the discussion at this point. While military philosophes
constructed a tactical system using information from antiquity, their
conclusions were not always accurate. David Larmour makes a compelling argument
that the Revolutionary Government “re-membered” antiquity in order to fit it to
their own needs and ideals.
The same might be said of the development of the ordre profond, as
military philosophes exaggerated and blurred the reality of classical
battlefields. For example, the canonical writings of Polybius and Vegetius held
in common that they were written about ideal Roman tactical systems, not actual
tactical systems. This little-mentioned detail means that the military philosophes
based their arguments on Roman legions which never actually existed, just as
Machiavelli had done two-hundred years before them.
Furthermore, ancient authors like Caesar had a vested interest in making their
battles appear both humane and decisive, yet in reality this was often not the
case. Therefore it should be kept in mind what the military philosophes thought
and what was actually the case are two different things. In fact, in many
cases, the realities which eighteenth-century tacticians and the instructions which
classical authors provided were two very opposite things. For example, Vegetius
recommended that “every plan . . . is to be considered, every expedient tried,
and every method taken” before battle was accepted, and if it was, “Good
officers [would] decline general engagements where the danger is common, and
prefer the employment of stratagem and finesse to destroy the enemy as much as
possible in detail and intimidate them without exposing [their] own forces.”
However, military philosophes were
looking for system to prevent this exact, indecisive approach. However,
tacticians were willing to overlook such discrepancies in their effort to ‘re-member’
antiquity.
(continued
from above) David H.J. Larmour, “History Recreated or Malfunctioned Desire? The
Roman Republic Re-Membered in the French Revolution,” The French Revolution
in Culture and Society, ed. David G. Troyansky, Alfred Cismaru, and Norwood
Andrews, Jr (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991).
Oliver
L. Spaulding Jr., “The Ancient Military Writers,” Classical Journal 28,
no.9 (June 1933): 666.
Vegetius,
“The Military Institutions of Rome,” in Roots of Strategy: A Collection of
Military Classics, ed. Major Thomas R Phillips (London: John Lane the
Bodley Head, 1943), 76, 38.
Classical
tactical systems were easily integrated into eighteenth-century warfare by
military philosophes. While the reader may question how a phalanx armed
with pikes could function against an eighteenth-century enemy armed with
muskets, French philosophes were not as sceptical. Though the pike had
been phased out at the beginning of the seventeenth century, many believed that
warfare contained unchangeable and eternal rules, and therefore that technological
change did not alter the fundamental nature of warfare.
Tactician Joly de Maizeroy, for example, states:
No change could
affect the universal fundamentals of the art of war: Though the invention of
powder and of new arms have occasioned various changes in the mechanism of war,
we are not to believe that it has had any great influence on the fundamental
part of that science, nor on the great manoeuvres. The art of directing the
great operations is still the same.
These
universal principles dictated that the offensive position should always be
sought; that battle must be presented when possible, for “it is a paradox to
hope to win without fighting;”
that depth was the key factor for success in infantry formations; that a small,
disciplined group of soldiers acting together would overcome greater numbers;
and that warfare could be perfected through theory, not necessarily by
practice.
These lessons were supposed to be applicable regardless of time or place.
Accordingly, even the introduction of firearms could not alter the nature of
the battlefield. The
poor accuracy and limited power of muskets during the eighteenth century did
little to contest this theory. Thus, despite some resistance, which will be
discussed shortly, a large number of tacticians felt that a system which relied
on depth, a quick offensive burst, and a small group of disciplined and
cohesive soldiers, would be as successful on the eighteenth-century battlefield
as it had been in antiquity, and set about designing it.
Le Blond, “Guerre;” Lancelot
Turpin de Crissé, Commentaires sur les Memoires de
Montecuculi, Generissime des Armees, & Grand-Maitre de l’Artillerie de
l’Empereur (Paris: Chez Lacombe, 1769), xi.
