Series Introduction: Piquet to Chasseur

Interpretive Staff Portray French Troops defending Niagara, 1759

Photo Credit, Davis Tierney

A Plea for the Armies of Ancien Régime France

Dear Reader,

This is not at all meant to be an academic dissection of current historiography regarding the French Army from the Kabitnettskriege era, or even the era from the War of Austrian Succession until the French Revolution. Frankly, it is something that I have long been interested in, but only now am I engaging the topic academically. My background, like many other Americans, turned into Eurocentric military historians, focuses primarily on the British Military. As well, while I’ve had the amazing privilege of work at Fort Ticonderoga, for Campaign 1776, and partaking in several educational projects around 1740-1790 timeframe, I first and foremost would weigh my expertise on the First World War of 1914-1919.

One theme that I have begun to pick up on as I continue my work with the Great War is the deeply rooted national narratives which define the wartime experience. With those narratives so ingrained in modern society, it is only now becoming mainstream to incorporate topics and research to create an international military history of a particular engagement or theme. While British military historians, and in fact, all those of the Anglophone world have grown an appreciation for topics involving the primary enemy power of Imperial Germany, relatively few have thoroughly dissected the Allied heavy hitter of the Western Front, France.

This is unsurprising. As so many modern narratives of the major Allied powers gain traction from their sacrifices during the First World War, it is inevitable that for many Britons the BEF was the elite force on the Western Front, or for Americans the AEF. In Anglophone public perception, those were forces which many times had to pick up the slack of the conscripted masses of the French Army. This is, of course, untrue and fails to appreciate the weight of the war which fell on French shoulders. Yet this opens a theme which brings us back to the wars of the 18th century.

Louis-Nicolas Van Blarenberge, The Siege of Yorktown, 1786;
(Private Collection of Nicholas Taubman)

In the case of the many wars fought during the reigns of Louis XV, and Louis XVI, France and its army have become a force which exists only to teach the British a lesson in warfare on the frontiers of America, only to be outmaneuvered and battered by the Royal Navy at sea and the Germanic forces on land unless in direct coordination with American efforts. Any professional historian would find the fault with this, yet only now is the historiography of the French Army during the Kabitnettskriege-era expanding. The French Army which suffered from “Victor’s Disease” after the War of Austrian Succession went on to be defeated in the Seven Years War. The changes which were introduced to the Troupes de Terre following this debacle did not only modernize the French Army and bring it to victory in the American Revolutionary War/Eight Years War. It also formed the groundwork for France’s (and arguably all of Europe’s) most successful military force, Napoleon’s Grande Armée. The French Army both started and ended the Enlightenment era as the predominant land force in Europe, starting in size and ending in quality. Therefore, they deserve much more of our attention. However, our biggest hurdle is ourselves in our narrowly Anglophone world.

I’ll be the first to admit, I have limited French. I took some French in college, and used it while working overseas on First World War battlefields. I am not alone in saying this is my biggest impediment to further research on the Ancien Régime. A younger generation of historians such as Dr. Jonathan Abel, William Raffle, Andrew Bamford, and Charles Mayhood have all recently (Standby for the reviews of their excellent books soon!) However, these works only form the tip of the iceberg if we are to begin to fully understand the military, political, and social mechanisms which made the French Army operational.

Jonathan Abel's work on French theorist Guibert is one of the newer studies of the French Army during this time period.

Therefore, I put out a plea to the readers to join with me in pursuing the study of the French Army of the Ancien Régime. As a British focused historian, I for one can’t fathom understanding the Redcoats who fought at the Plains of Abraham and Brandywine, without understanding the foe they considered to be their greatest, the French soldiers of Fontenoy, Minden, and Yorktown. We must break free of our Anglo-American biases and preconceptions and open ourselves to truly be experts in the field we all love.

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Thanks for Reading,

James Taub[1]


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[1] James Taub is a military historian specializing in the Modern Era, with an interest in World War One and Early Modern Warfare. He is currently finishing a tenure as the Education Coordinator for the US World War I Centennial Commission. He took an undergraduate degree in History from Dickinson College, and a Master's Degree from the University of Glasgow in War Studies. He is pumped for Top Gun 2.

France in the Kabinettskriege Period

Map of France 1675-1726

Dear Reader,

Throughout the Kabinettskriege period, France was the largest single state in western Europe. The French had not suffered the same type of economic and demographic drain from the Thirty Years' War as the German states. In addition, by virtue of the unified nature of the French state, it could afford to raise much larger armies than the smaller, dis-unified states of Germany. Also, as a result of the nature of Absolutism in France, afford to maintain a much larger standing army in peacetime than the English, making mobilization for war much quicker. This has led scholars to refer to France, in the early modern period, as, "The eight hundred pound gorilla of Europe." Why then, in the course of the Kabinettskriege period, did the French lose much of their empire overseas, and not win ground in Europe?

The French Victory at Ticonderoga-1758

Explanation One: The French haven't the Nature for War. 

To this day, in English and American circles, the French are accused of cowardice, effeminacy, and laziness. A common joke is that the French "salute" is raising your hands in surrender. In Last of the Mohicans, there is a scene where a British general expresses these exact views. It should not come to as a surprise to anyone that this is completely anachronistic. During the Kabinettskriege era, the French had an excellent military-one that often terrified their opponents.

During the early part of the Kabinettskriege period, the French military under Louis XVI threatened to destroy the balance of power in Europe. Some of the largest battles of the Kabinettskriege period occurred during the War of the League of Augsburg, and the War of Spanish Succession. (See a timeline of the period here.)

While the English choose to focus on this period of history as a time when John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, was winning his spectacular victories against the French, the truth is that both sides achieved victories, which is one of the reasons why the war dragged on for almost fifteen years.  During this period, the French were repeatedly able to raise large, well trained armies, which required large alliances of minor powers to stop.

In the middle of the Kabinettskriege period, the French were able to defeat the British again and again during the War of Austrian Succession. British histories of this period choose to focus on the successes in North America, the success against the Jacobite rebellion, or indecisive win at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743. The truth is that the French won three out of the four major field battles of this war: Fontenoy, Rocoux, and Lauffeld. In the absence of a large force of Austrians to protect the Austrian Netherlands (modern-day Belgium,) the French turned battlefield success into strategic gains time and time again. At the end of the war, the French were forced to give back these conquests to have their own overseas losses returned to them.

Finally, as we have already seen repeatedly on this blog, the French were able to defeat the British in the global Eight Years' War which surrounded the American War of Independence. Thus, we have clear evidence of French capability in the early, middle and late Kabinettskriege era.

Having thoroughly disproved the notion that the French soldiers or armies were somehow inferior, we must move on to-

English Cannons at the Siege of Louisbourg (1745) 

Explanation Two: The French had different objectives during the Kabinettskriege era

This idea indicates that the French somehow valued their overseas colonies less than the British during the course of the eighteenth century. Sadly, this idea is also not true.

Unlike the British, the French did not benefit from being unconnected to continental Europe. They had no defensive moat to complicate invasions. The only moat they had was the French army. While the French repeatedly tried to invade Britain throughout the course of the Kabinettskriege era, they also had to defend French borders from British amphibious raids, and the armies of continental Europe-something that the British histories of the Kabinettskriege era spend little time discussing. While the French usually had some sort of ally for their European wars, their allies rarely gave them hard physical support, in the way that the British and Western German states supported each-other throughout the Kabinettskriege era. The British population of North America also greatly outweighed the French speaking population, which allowed the British to raise numerous militia type forces to assist in combating the French. While the French also raised militias, they were very small compared to the British militias.

Why didn't the French send more support to America, and carve out an overseas empire during the eighteenth century? I can only answer that they sure didn't do it for lack of trying. They simply had their hands full.  That leads us to:

Victor-Francois, Duc de Broglie

Explanation 3: Poor Higher Command

While the French often had excellent commanders, such as the gentleman above, they also suffered from a number of poor commanders, particularly in the European theater of Seven Years' War. Since these often mediocre generals commanded, as we have seen above, a large portion of the French military, their poor decisions had an out of proportion effect. To a lesser extent, they also suffered from "victors' disease" from the War of Austrian Succession. They had successfully defeated the British on the continent during the last three battles of the War of Austrian Succession, so there was no reason to improve the army in the intervening years before the Seven Years' War. This, combined with continental obligations, caused the French to lose their overseas empire in Canada during the Seven Years' War, which was the only truly decisive conflict of the Kabinettskriege era.

Sorry-this one ran WAYYY long. I'm thinking about doing posts like this (but shorter) for each of the main European nations in the Kabinettskriege era. Do you like this plan? Let me know in the comments below.

Thanks for reading,

Alex Burns



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