Citizen Soldiers and the Key to the Bastille

Julia Osman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137486240
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia francesa

Showcasing French participation in the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution, this book shows the French army at the heart of revolutionary, social, and cultural change. Osman argues that efforts to transform the French army into a citizen army before 1789 prompted and helped shape the French Revolution.

1

The King’s Army

The citizen army that France built and experienced during the old regime and early Revolution had its roots in the line army as it had been designed and fashioned during the reign of Louis XIV. Because Louis XIV saw the army as crucial to building and maintaining his power at home and abroad, he crafted it in a manner that would give him full control over the army and keep it isolated from the greater population, while at the same time reinforcing social hierarchies. Over the course of his reign, from 1661 to 1715, Louis XIV transformed the army from a conglomerate of largely mercenary forces, who could be contracted for a campaign or the duration of a war, to a massive, state-run institution that he could use at his discretion against international challenges as well as domestic ones. Louis XIV likewise instituted the morals, methods, and mindset that supported his new state-run army as part of the scaffolding structure of much of French society.

In Louis XIV’s army, officers and soldiers operated in a relatively ordered and disciplined manner that contrasted sharply with the chaotic and gruesome religious wars of the previous centuries. Officers, nearly all men of noble status, strove to obtain honor and glory on the battlefield, which they used to showcase their bravery and desire to serve the king. Such displays relied on an implicit code of conduct while on campaign that required officers to honor the enemy and spare civilians. Louis XIV’s changes also altered the custom of hiring mercenary soldiers, who used their position in the army to enrich themselves through pillage and preyed on any towns in their path. By transforming the earlier ‘aggregate contract’ soldiers-for-hire army into a ‘state commission’ army of disciplined soldiers centralized under the king’s command, Louis XIV created more dependable troops who relied on their officers and the state for their livelihood and care.¹ This dynamic reinforced the difference in class that had always separated soldiers from their officers just as it further distinguished and separated the soldiers from their peasant peers and former communities. Because the reasons for going to war in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were largely dynastic or mercantile, neither officers nor soldiers necessarily knew or even cared about having an over-arching cause for the war. Rather than fighting for a patriotic or otherwise meaningful ‘cause,’ both officers and soldiers found motivation in how the war would benefit them personally, professionally, or economically. Wars and their outcome could affect the common populace, especially if they were on the borders of France or in a state of rebellion, but under normal conditions, the greater French populace did not feel or interact much with the French army.

Louis XIV did increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the French army, but his creation was not built to last. He developed the habit of awarding promotion on the basis of courage or sustaining battle wounds, and many officers advanced in rank without the necessary skill or experience. The practice of venality – selling offices to those willing to pay a high price for ennoblement – increased the number of officers beyond what the army could sustain, and compounded the lack of professional cohesion among the officers. The interest in incorporating more light infantry and partisan tactics into the French army, which would require greater freedom and rely on the initiative of soldiers, signaled further change. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Louis XIV gave the French army a unique character that both enhanced its status and distinguished it from the rest of French society, but that ultimately proved unsustainable. The transformation of the army during the reign of Louis XIV from disjointed bands of officers and soldiers, to a centralized army under his authority, to an unwieldy force growing in size and afflicted by incompetence not only positioned the French army for another transformation, but influenced how reforms would unfold. This chapter will outline the important aspects of Louis XIV’s army in terms of officer and solider responsibilities, as well as its relationship with the French populace and the kinds of violence it used. By the end of Louis XIV’s reign, France boasted a large and menacing army, but one whose distance from the rest of the populace, dependence on constant war, and bureaucratic inefficiencies would soon render it incapable of defeating fellow European forces and require a drastic change in order to regain its effectiveness.

When Louis XIV assumed full command of the French throne in 1661, France was at peace, thanks largely to the diplomatic efforts of his regent, Mazarin. The young king, however, had been taught that glory and greatness came through victory in warfare, and he did not intend to keep the peace for long. The powerful Cardinal Richelieu had made France the greatest power in Europe (next to Spain) during the reign of the previous monarch, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV intended to maintain or advance France’s powerful international status.² He also wished to continue Richelieu’s efforts to further centralize the entire kingdom under the monarchy’s control. When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis refused to replace him with another adviser, and heard all of the reports and concerns of his secretaries of state directly.³ He continued to develop his kingship around the concept of absolutism: that all matters of the kingdom came directly under his authority.⁴ Maintaining this position, and having everyone at court eager to please him, depended partially on cultivating glory, or gloire, through warfare. More than the grandeur and splendor usually associated with glory, French gloire connoted legitimacy, renown, and an honorable reputation, all essential for Louis XIV’s kingship. While he had legitimately inherited the throne through his birthright and had already defeated powerful factions to secure it, he desired to exhibit his martial prowess in an international war to prove himself as an able monarch both to his subjects and to his European neighbors.⁵ Such military activities had domestic advantages, as well, and promised to confirm his authority over his court, where everyone recognized that the highest attainment of gloire came through warfare.⁶ To cite Joël Cornette, the glory of the king and the state depended on Louis XIV’s ability to ‘incarnate the culture of war,’ and the king knew from a young age that France expected him to fulfill his role as the ‘king of war’ in order to fulfill his role as king of France.⁷

The young king did not wait long to begin his campaigns. In 1665, he leaped at the opportunity to start a war with Spain when Philip IV died, leaving a sickly child as heir to the throne. Louis XIV claimed that he should have access to the Spanish succession through his wife, a Spanish princess. His claims were weak, but when Spain refused to engage with them, Louis XIV saw it as sufficient pretext to send his armies to Flanders. The Emperor of Austria intervened with a secret plan to take all of Spain and share it with France later, when the weak boy-king died. Louis XIV agreed and called off the war. His actions had demonstrated to the rest of Europe, however, how eager he was to engage in conflict. They even motivated the Spanish Netherlands, usually an ally of France, to break the alliance and join France’s greatest nemesis, England, in order to keep France from obtaining the Spanish throne. Louis XIV was incensed, but now he had a stronger pretext for war.⁸ Louis’s thirst for gloire, of course, played no small role in his decision to attack, and in 1672 he launched the Dutch War, his first major military engagement, in which he personally led his army during certain campaigns.⁹

The Dutch War provided Louis XIV with plenty of opportunities to demonstrate the power of his army, especially in siege warfare. Louis’s reign boasted not only some of the greatest ministers of war in France’s history – Letellier and his son, Louvois – but Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, the engineering mastermind behind France’s greatest fortresses and the army’s unrivaled ability to besiege enemy strongholds. His contributions to the French army were on display at the fortress Maastrict in 1673, where Louis XIV himself conducted the siege. Adam François van der Meulen, a Flemish painter celebrated for his battle scenes, even immortalized the siege of Maastrict on canvas as a ‘well-orchestrated spectacle.’¹⁰ After five years of fighting, the war could have ended in 1677, and Louis XIV’s army was in a position to negotiate a peace favorable to French interests. As the tide of the conflict happened to flow in Louis’s favor, though, he continued the war for another year to obtain a better peace and more glory for himself and France. His strategy worked: French elites through the eighteenth century remembered the Dutch War as a hallmark of French military victory, which even pacifist Voltaire recognized over 70 years later.¹¹

The quest for gloire did not always deliver such dividends, but complicated conflicts did not discourage Louis XIV in his life-long pursuit of military glory. Later in his reign, Louis XIV proved stubborn in his pursuit of victory over German princes in the Nine Years’ War. When Louis XIV first attacked, he intended for the war to conclude after four months, but it stretched from 1688 to 1697. While Louis XIV claimed purely defensive motives in this conflict – he wanted to fortify the borderlands between France and the German states – the rest of Europe read his initial actions as offensive in both senses of the word: an attempt to absorb more land and power at the expense of his neighbors, a view that was not inconsistent with Louis XIV’s earlier conquests. The many years of fighting that followed defied the usual norms of European warfare, with greater atrocities on both sides. The war finally ended with few gains for France, especially considering its costs in resources and lives, but Louis XIV’s persistence in this conflict speaks again to his passion for obtaining gloire, and his reluctance to settle for a simple peace. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, war would continue to fuel and justify French royal power, on international as well as domestic fronts.

Louis XIV’s need for war also conveniently suited the needs of his officers, who almost exclusively boasted noble status. They, too, had been schooled in war and needed an outlet that would allow them to prove themselves and to justify the privileges they enjoyed by right of birth. In order to maintain their reputations, noble officers had to cultivate and publicly display their courage, self-sacrifice, and honor. Such qualities determined their reputation and acceptance in society, but proved difficult to gain and easy to lose. Missteps in society or on the battlefield resulted in ridicule, disgrace, and a significant drop in reputation from which some nobles would never recover.¹² Noble officers kept their honor and courage intact by participating in France’s wars, but also through duels and personal confrontations. Louis XIV harnessed their pre-existing desire for glory through violent confrontation and attempted to channel it exclusively into the French army; he outlawed dueling, and while the practice continued, he communicated that the lives (and deaths) of his nobles were at his disposal, not their own. Competition between army officers and feats of bravery would have to occur on the battlefield. Because the purpose of the noble class for centuries had been to shed blood for the king, officers already based their self-worth on their performance as warriors. As servants of the king, noble officers had the responsibility of building and maintaining their reputations and winning glory for king and country.¹³ High expectations for courage and self-sacrifice further motivated army officers and made nobles further dependent on the monarch to provide wars and opportunities for them to showcase their merits.

French nobles intended for the officer corps prepared for these duties from a young age by studying the warfare of ancient Greeks and Romans as well as the histories of their own families. During the reign of Louis XIV, and continuing until the mid-eighteenth century, noble and military education consisted of a combination of book study and practical military experience. As young boys, officers-to-be either attended a Jesuit college or received private tutoring at home and learned their letters and morals by the émulation of the heroes of antiquity. Their schooling emphasized a learn-by-imitation approach by having students copy Latin and Greek texts, thereby absorbing the language, writing style, and laudable values of Caesar and Cato.¹⁴ According to educator Charles Rollin, who published a multi-volume series chronicling the exploits and virtues of ancient civilizations, studying the ancients naturally cultivated students’ critical reasoning, judgment, inquisitiveness, and good taste, while immersing them in the heroic deeds of the ancients, teaching them to love glory and virtue.¹⁵

By the mid-eighteenth century, the number of military schools had increased, including Louis XV’s Ecole Militaire, which provided instruction for poorer families of the noblesse d’épée and emphasized mathematics and military engineering. The study of Latin and languages decreased for noble officers, but the emphasis on the ancients remained. Officers were expected to understand tactical maneuvers of modern-day generals and mathematics as well as have a thorough knowledge of ancient history. Studying the ancients provided them with a solid foundation for understanding the art of war while also teaching them military virtues. They drew directly on their studies of Sparta and Rome in organizing and maintaining their regiments and in making battlefield decisions.¹⁶ Because of the general belief that military and political principles remained absolute and unchanging, studying ancient warriors provided useful information and examples for contemporary officers. Military lessons, such as ‘distress[ing] the enemy more by famine than the sword’ to achieve victory could best be learned by studying ancient authors and exploits, not accounts of more contemporary battles.¹⁷ From their earliest days, nobles learned to imitate the ancients’ moral code and to use warfare as a platform for pursuing gloire for the king and themselves.

Studying family histories contributed to this calling by providing more immediate examples of heroic deeds, self-sacrifice, and feats of gloire. These family histories served two principal purposes in the education of young men destined for the officer corps. While they presented examples of ‘fine and glorious actions,’¹⁸ at the same time, the fact that these stories sprang from their own parentage galvanized the youth to match or exceed their accomplishments.¹⁹ These family histories further solidified the noble officer’s place in the continually unfolding story of his family and gave him a sense of his family’s expectations for his own life – they cultivated a deep sense of pride and destiny in a young man of noble birth, challenging him to be worthy of, and to add to, his family’s name and legacy.²⁰

Battle of the period allowed officers ample opportunity to showcase their military talents and win honor and glory for their family name. The period from 1650 through 1789 was a unique time when political, economic, and intellectual trends conspired to make the warfare of this period one where combatants ‘shoot each other politely.’²¹ Unlike the bloody and passionate wars of religion that preceded this period and wars of revolution that followed, the military culture of honor, reputation, and discipline of this era insisted on a style of warfare that most historians tend to classify as ‘limited.’ Warfare in the eighteenth century had specific and achievable goals usually involving the possession of a piece of land, or determining which monarc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Key
• 1. The King’s Army
• 2. Defeat in New France
• 3. Soldiers into Citizens
• 4. A Citizen Army in America
• 5. Aristocratic Rupture
• 6. A Dream Deferred
• 7. Conclusion: Guidons Burning
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index