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.

If you enjoyed this post, or any of our other posts, please consider liking us on facebook,  or following us on twitter. Finally, we are dedicated to keeping Kabinettskriege ad-free. In order to assist with this, please consider supporting us via the donate button in the upper right-hand corner of the page. As always:

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.

Seniority and Organisation in the French Infantry of the Mid-Eighteenth Century

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]

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]

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.

If you enjoyed this post, or any of our other posts, please consider liking us on facebook,  or following us on twitter. Finally, we are dedicated to keeping Kabinettskriege ad-free. In order to assist with this, please consider supporting us via the donate button in the upper right-hand corner of the page. As always:

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.