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| Interpretive Staff portray French Troops in North America |
Today, we have an excellent guest post by author and historian William Raffle.[1]
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Dear Reader,
In this post I want to bring your attention to the composition of a typical French Battalion and its intricacies and idiosyncrasies. Through translating a number of sources on this period, I have found it interesting to see how rank and seniority was embedded within almost all aspects of the French army even in attempts with attempts to make the army more efficient.
When tensions began to rise between Britain and France in North America precipitating the Seven Years’ War, major efforts to codify the French army of Louis XV were taking place. An ‘ordonnance’ was issued in 1754 which laid out new regulations for French and foreign infantry battalions to bring them into ‘exact conformity’.[3] At this time a French battalion consisted of twelve companies of fusiliers (A ‘fusil’ is the French name for a flintlock musket, ‘mousquet’ is the word for the old matchlocks) and one grenadier company. This might give the impression that a French battalion would be particularly sizeable, but a French company was fairly small - under fifty men at full strength.[3] Indeed, the new ordonnance gave instructions that a battalion’s smallest fighting unit was to be two companies together called a peloton or platoon. Platoons were a permanent fixture and its two companies would camp, march and fight together.[4]
The company then was almost irrelevant to the functioning of a battalion so what was the point of it? The answer to this conundrum reveals a characteristic particular to the French army; there were far more officers than other armies. As with most eighteenth-century armies, Captains commanded companies and were responsible for their costs. A Captain’s pay could not keep up with this expense and so the companies became smaller over the course of the eighteenth century. ‘Already in 1740 the French Army was becoming marked in this respect having one officer for every eleven soldiers, as against the Prussian ratio of one to twenty-nine.’[5]
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| Interpretive staff portray Compagnies Franches de la Marine at Niagara in 1759 |
The ordonnance of 1754 reflects the obsession with hierarchy and seniority within the army with minutiae verging on the ludicrous and is best illustrated by the arrangement of the flank companies. There were two flank companies per battalion – the grenadier and piquet company. The grenadiers, as most readers will be familiar, were recruited from the best soldiers of other companies. The captain of grenadiers would pay a fusilier captains for their experienced men who were chosen to be grenadiers. The piquet was not a permanent company but were drawn from good soldiers from the fusilier companies when a battalion assembled for the duration of its current operation. (Piquet or picket literally translates as ‘fence’ and should be thought of as meaning ‘guard’ company rather than light company although they did evolve this way.) Even within the ranks, fusiliers and grenadiers were lined up in order of each soldier’s seniority (length of service rather than age). The first rank was made up of the most senior soldiers, the rear rank the next most senior and the middle ranks were made up of the least experienced, presumably to strengthen their resolve by being surrounded by their comrades without easy means to break out of formation! The forty-eight fusiliers of the piquet were arranged so that they would mirror the order of the companies and platoons from which they came and then within order of seniority.[6]
The need to distinguish seniority continued to the position of the platoons when formed in line. It is a commonly written that British grenadiers were always placed on the right flank and indeed, in the French military the right flank was the highest position of honour in respect to the entire army.[7] If a battalion was deployed on the right side of the line, the grenadier company would be placed on the right side of the battalion and the piquet would take the left. However, if the battalion was on the left-hand side of the battle line, the whole arrangement would flip to a mirror image, the grenadiers would be deployed on the left and the piquet on the right. It wasn’t just the flank companies that were rearranged, all of the fusilier platoons in the centre would also be rearranged.[8]
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| Interpretive Staff portraying French Soldiers |
These concerns were not just borne out in a drill manual. Military seniority clashed with social rank and had real ramifications on campaign. A Duke or a Count would not wish to be ordered around by a mere Baron, or, God forbid, a bourgeoisie! A letter from 1758 reveals the herculean task involved with drawing up an order of battle which satisfied quarrelsome officers,
‘M. de Randan wanted to return to the line… M. d’Armentiéres found that it was disagreeable for him to be in the infantry en second under M. de Contades, and desired to be moved to the cavalry. M. de Poyanne wanted to remain with the Carabiniers, that obliged me to move all the officers of the left and right wings and disrupted my plan to put the infantry officers with the infantry and the cavalry officers with the cavalry.’[9]The nobility believed that military command was their own preserve. In these circumstances, military professionalization would take a back seat to the preservation of the social order. There was much resistance to a new rank created by the war ministry, that of the aide-major (as the name suggests the role was as a second to the Major, to assist with the logistical running of the regiment). The reason it was not welcome was that it would provide more opportunities for officiers de fortune, or career soldiers from more humble backgrounds, as noblemen tended not to care too much for finding lodgings for their men or organizing bread rations.[10] As the historian Lee Kennet summarised, the French officer corps of this period had little understanding of modern warfare and were highly resistant to change until the humiliation of the Seven Years War forced a reckoning and self-reflection within the army.[11]
In a follow-up post to this I will explore the background of the French army which went to North America and how they relate to these notions of seniority and the way in which soldiers were used in this conflict.
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Thanks for reading!
Will Raffle
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[1]Will Raffle graduated with an MA in Early Modern History in 2018 from the University of Sheffield. He published a translation of a French aide-major, comte Maures des Malartic’s North American journal in 2017, entitled Glories to Useless Heroism.
[2]Instruction sur l’Exercice du Infanterie, (Paris, 1754), p. 1. It was issued in the name of the King by D’Argenson, Louis XV’s minister of war.
[3] Ibid, 14.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Lee Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years’ War, (North Carolina, 1967), p. 66.
[6] Instruction sur l’Exercice du Infanterie, (Paris, 1754) 18.
[7] Le Blonde, ‘Poste d’Honneur á la Guerre’, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017 Edition), Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe (eds), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/. This place would be taken by the most senior regiment although there was an exception in the most senior regiment in France, the Gardes Française, by tradition deployed in the centre of the line.
[8] Instruction sur l’Exercice du Infanterie, (Paris, 1754) 15.
[9] Clermont to Belle-Isle, June 15, 1758, Correspondance militaire (A-1) Vol. 3503, 141. Archives de la Guerre, Vincennes.
[10] Kennett, The French Armies, 60.
[11] Ibid, 68-71.
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