The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon

By Christy L. Pichichero

The Military Enlightenment brings to light a radically new narrative both on the Enlightenment and the French armed forces from Louis XIV to Napoleon. Christy Pichichero makes a striking discovery: the Geneva Conventions, post-traumatic stress disorder, the military "band of brothers," and soldierly heroism all found their antecedents in the eighteenth-century French armed forces.

Readers of The Military Enlightenment will be startled to learn of the many ways in which French military officers, administrators, and medical personnel advanced ideas of human and political rights, military psychology, and social justice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781501712296

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Introduction

What Is Military Enlightenment?

Philosophers! Moralists! Burn all your books … war is an inevitable scourge.

—Voltaire, War, Philosophical Dictionary (1764)

No one in the eighteenth century needed Voltaire in order to know that war was destructive, horrific, tragic. Recognizing and lamenting the atrocities of war had become an expectation, even among members of the armed forces. Deviation from this perspective was frowned upon. At the battle of Fontenoy in 1745—one of the great victories of the eighteenth-century French army, but also one that counted nearly twenty thousand casualties—King Louis XV’s sixteen-year-old son and heir, the dauphin (Louis Ferdinand de France, 1729–1765), was criticized for being insensitive to the carnage. René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, marquis d’Argenson (1694–1757), was serving as secretary of state for foreign affairs and remarked with opprobrium that the dauphin was looking tranquilly out at the naked corpses, anguishing enemies, and smoking wounds. In a candid and heart-wrenching letter to Voltaire (nom de plume of François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778), the marquis expressed his dismay in observing that a number of France’s young heroes had not yet learned to disdain war’s slaughter, what d’Argenson called an inhumaine curée, an inhuman scramble for spoils. For his own part, the marquis admitted that his heart failed him as he looked out at the grisly spectacle of the battlefield. Unable to hold back his emotion and horror, he turned away to vomit. Triumph is the most beautiful thing in the world, he wrote. The cries of ‘Vive le Roi!’ while waving hats in the air atop bayonets; the compliments of the king to his warriors; royal visits to the trenches, villages, and redoubts that are still intact after battle; the joy, the glory, the tenderness. But the price of all of this is human blood and shreds of human flesh.¹

D’Argenson’s attitude toward war reflects military enlightenment, an expression that seems an oxymoron at first.² Are not war and its agents—what Voltaire referred to as state-sponsored mass murder and brigandage enacted by organized bands of assassins—antithetical to the projects of enlightened pacifism, cosmopolitanism, humanitarianism, and progress in human civilization? The answer is unequivocally no. From the late seventeenth century through the eighteenth century, these seemingly antipodal phenomena were inextricably connected. War, military affairs, and enlightenment came together and constituted one of the greatest challenges, debates, and fights for progress of the century.

The notion of military enlightenment becomes intelligible in view of a historical definition of the Enlightenment.³ Defining the Enlightenment, also known as Lumières, Aufklärung, Illuminismo, or Ilustración, is as contentious today as it was during the eighteenth century, although people of that time seemingly recognized it as a phenomenon that was French in origin.⁴ The Enlightenment can be identified as a historically locatable phenomenon due to a number of developments that historians have pinpointed. First and foremost, as Dan Edelstein argues, the Enlightenment developed as a narrative by which people of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries viewed themselves as enlightened compared to antiquity and other preceding historical times. According to this narrative, which grew out of the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns that took place in French academies, "the present age (siècle) was ‘enlightened’ (éclairé) because the ‘philosophical spirit’ of the Scientific Revolution had spread to the educated classes, institutions of learning, and even parts of the government."⁵ Participants in the Military Enlightenment saw themselves as actors in a history of progress and they shared a conviction that the functioning of the armed forces and the conditions of warfare more generally needed to be improved. In the name of advancement in these areas, agents of the Military Enlightenment applied a critical philosophical spirit, or esprit philosophique, to acquire a deep understanding of war and the military, then proposed and implemented a myriad of reforms.

What is more, agents of the Military Enlightenment engaged in and generated what Clifford Siskin and William Warner consider to be another hallmark of the Enlightenment, mainly, new, or newly important forms of communication, protocol, and mediation that proliferated during the eighteenth century: newspapers, magazines, reference works, secret societies, learned academies, coffeehouses, the postal system, and more.⁶ These media, along with the overarching narrative described above, helped to foster what J. G. A. Pocock, Dorinda Outram, and others see as the discursive context of the Enlightenment as a series of interlocking, and sometimes warring problems and debates or flash-points where intellectual projects changed society and government on a world-wide basis.⁷

One of the most significant of these flash points—in scope, perceived importance during the eighteenth century, and legacy for modern society—pertained to war and the military. As Madeleine Dobie remarks, this period saw the appearance of the first true metadiscourse on the aims and effects of war.⁸ This metadiscourse was in part philosophical, contemplating the nature of war and its rightful conduct, ideal martial characteristics, the relationship between military service and citizenship, and the costs of war in economic, political, moral, physical, and emotional terms. The metadiscourse was also practical and technical—indeed military—aiming to effect palpable change in mentalities and practices pertaining to uniforms, weaponry, tactics, drill, and medicine. These dialogues and debates were not bounded by the monarch’s chambers in Versailles, nor were they confined to the army, the navy, and their administrations. They engaged a far greater public: philosophes (public intellectuals of the day), literate elites, playwrights, poets, novelists, artists, political theorists, historians, doctors, mathematicians, and engineers. They were vital for members of the aristocratic noblesse d’épée (nobility of the sword), whose cultural identity and justification of socioeconomic privilege were tied to warfare.⁹ They were also crucial for common folk of France who watched their sons march off to war, lodged soldiers in their homes, and shouldered the tax burdens that financed the many wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. War and the military were, in the most pervasive and profound sense, arenas of national concern.

This constitutes a new understanding of military enlightenment and of the French Enlightenment more broadly. Scholars of the latter have largely been unaware of or have not attributed sufficient importance to the centrality of war and the military in Enlightenment thought and reform. This is the case even in the Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment, an interdisciplinary edited volume published in 2014 in which each essay presents a concise view of an important aspect of the French Enlightenment, discussing its defining characteristics, internal dynamics and historical transformations.¹⁰ Despite its excellent intellectual rigor, the Companion nevertheless excludes any direct or sustained treatment of war. This omission is shocking given that the greatest philosophical, scientific, literary, economic, artistic, and political minds of the period dedicated considerable energies to this most topical subject. Similarly, military historians have underestimated the scope and culture of the Military Enlightenment. Some have imagined it to be a discussion among martial specialists of the time, and others have simply mentioned its existence as a given without further exploration. Cultural histories of war and the armed forces in early modern France have illuminated important themes such as Amerindian-French relations, citizen armies, discipline and soldierly honor, and the individual’s relationship to war.¹¹ However, these studies do not explore the larger movement of which these themes were a part.

The Military Enlightenment was thus a part of the broader phenomenon of Enlightenment, following its general chronology, engaging in the same narrative and media, and embracing esprit philosophique in order to make war and military endeavors reflective of an enlightened age.¹² Philosophically and politically, participants brought a wide range of perspectives: some were atheists, others were deists; some promulgated Christian morality while others embraced concepts of secular moral philosophy; some championed a mechanistic esprit de système or géomètre and sought universal principles while others adopted an esprit de finesse that acknowledged human fallibility when confronting infinite contingencies; some advocated classical republicanism while others were unabashed royalists. Despite this diversity, an overarching project of the Military Enlightenment emerged, one that entailed a bipartite ambition. The first aim was to wage war only when necessary and to do so effectively and efficiently in order to achieve martial objectives while sparing costs and precious resources, especially manpower. The second goal was to wage war humanely and in a fashion that reflected the compassion, morality, rationality, and dignity of the human race.

This central project and the specific historical context in which it developed make it possible to refer to the movement explored in this book as "the Military Enlightenment. However, a transhistorical process that began during the long eighteenth century and continued on in the centuries that followed—a lowercase military enlightenment—was also at play. While agents of the Military Enlightenment aimed to effect immediate changes in behavior and policy in their own era, their theories, practices, and vocabulary set up paradigms for thought and action in the military sphere that persist until today. The Military Enlightenment therefore represents an important milestone in the history of what David A. Bell calls the culture of war" and the military.¹³

Several aspects of the culture of war and the mentality toward it made the military sphere a main flash point of the French Enlightenment. These factors bear explaining. The first was a generalized belief that war was an inevitable part of human nature and society. The eighteenth century is famously bookended with plans for perpetual peace proposed by Charles-Irénée Castel, abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743), in 1713 and by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in 1795. Their hopes were obliterated by the mass numbers and global scope that characterized war in the decades after they penned their treatises, from the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–1764) to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815). Apart from Saint-Pierre and Kant, however, the unlikelihood of perpetual peace came as no surprise to most denizens of the long eighteenth century. People believed, as Voltaire did, that war was not just a scourge, but an inevitable scourge. As many primatologists of today still maintain, Voltaire thought that humankind was naturally aggressive, a trait we share with animals:

All animals are perpetually at war; every species is born to devour another. There are none, even sheep and doves, who do not swallow a prodigious number of imperceptible animals. Males of the same species make war for the females, like Menelaus and Paris. Air, earth, and water are fields of destruction. It seems that God having given reason to men, this reason should teach them not to debase themselves by imitating animals, particularly when nature has given them neither arms to kill their fellow creatures nor instincts which lead them to suck their blood. Yet murderous war is so much the dreadful lot of man, that except for two or three nations, there are none whose ancient histories do not represent them as armed against one another.¹⁴

Historical and ethnographic writings of the era confirmed the conviction that war was inherent to human civilization in all places at all times in history.¹⁵ Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)—who countered Thomas Hobbes’s (1588–1679) vision of humanity as war of all against all—acquiesced that men existing in society meant men at war.

In addition to being an inexorable part of human civilization, war was viewed as necessary for sovereign states during the long eighteenth century, which has been called the Second Hundred Years’ War (c. 1689–c. 1815). From 1672 to 1783 alone, France was at war for 50 out of 110 years and engaged in six large-scale conflicts. During this period, questions of colonial power and dynastic gloire eclipsed religion as a principal motivation for international war. As the French foreign and military minister Étienne-François duc de Choiseul (1719–1785), remarked, Colonies, commerce and the maritime power which accrues from them will decide the balance of power upon the continent.¹⁶ James Whitman argues that in this balance of power, war was a kind of formal legal procedure used exclusively by sovereigns to claim rights through victory.¹⁷ Lawyers working within the framework of jus victoriae, the law of victory in battle, sought to answer critical questions: "How do we know who won? and What rights can the victor claim by virtue of this victory?"¹⁸ The stakes of jus victoriae were high, and the demands on globally oriented fiscal-military states were extreme. By the epoch of the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714), French annual military expenditures were double those of the Dutch War (1672–1678). Military expenditures skyrocketed across Europe as states were increasingly responsible for the recruitment and maintenance of troops as well as for funding continued naval expansion, army barracks, more extensive fortifications, and other military equipment whose prices had risen significantly.¹⁹ Under crushing financial pressure due to massive war-related deficits, a pattern emerged in which intermittent phases of intensified conflict (1688–1714, 1739–1763, 1787–1815) were followed by periods of peace during which states attempted to recuperate their domestic finances and prepared for future war.²⁰

Many believed that war, in addition to being necessary in a mercantilist and colonialist age, was beneficial for the reputations of sovereigns and their states. The historians Joël Félix and Frank Tallett assert that governments and the ruling elite, together with a significant, if unknowable, section of public opinion, accepted that France’s prestige demanded both pre-emptive and reactive military action. This was certainly the case for Louis XIV [(1638–1715)] and Napoleon Bonaparte [(1769–1821)], but it was also the case during the reigns of Louis XV [(1710–1774)] and Louis XVI [(1754–1793)] … War ultimately provided the most telling verdict on national worthiness and the ruler’s qualities of leadership.²¹ As John A. Lynn shows, the kingly dynastic and aristocratic culture of gloire—the desire for glory and esteem—was a fiery force that consumed Louis XIV and blazed on through the eighteenth century.²² Geopolitics and the paradigm of gloire conspired to fuel a belief that war was, perhaps justifiably, here to stay.

The metadiscourse on war was increasingly urgent as unprecedented numbers of combatants fought on warfronts that spanned the globe. During this era, most European states maintained forces four to five times larger than those of two centuries earlier.²³ In France, military forces went from 50,000 to 80,000 under the Valois kings and Louis XIII (1601–1643), then doubled to 253,000 during the Dutch War and to 360,000 during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) under Louis XIV.²⁴ The Sun King’s minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), mounted a formidable French battle fleet—ninety-three battleships larger than 1,000 tons by 1695—that rivaled the English and Dutch fleets in quality if not quantity.²⁵ In the long eighteenth century, then, humankind’s belligerence engaged a greater number of people in a greater number of places and at a far greater cost than in previous times. Given these high stakes, it is not surprising that the arena of warfare attracted the zealous attention of Enlightenment thinkers and reformers.

Making Good War

The disheartening sense of war’s inevitability, necessity, and overwhelming scale did not breed resignation or apathy. The armed forces, the intelligentsia, and an engaged public took an active, even optimistic, approach that was also grounded in their understanding of war. Dictionary and encyclopedic definitions of war from the period are revealing in this regard. The entry on war, Guerre, in the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694) defined it as a quarrel between princes or sovereign states whose outcome is determined by arms. Among the usages of the term cited near the beginning of the entry is faire bonne guerre, to make good war: to maintain in warfare "all of the humanity and civility [honnesteté] that the laws of war permit." War, as described in the Dictionnaire, could be an activity that reflected humankind’s dignity and morality or, conversely, it could liken humans to ferocious beasts of prey. The entry for war in the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, published in France between 1751 and 1772 and edited by the philosophes Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783), replicates this definition.²⁶

These characterizations underscore central tenets of the Military Enlightenment. First, they communicate an ontology of war as a phenomenon whose principles, terms, and conduct are subject to human agency and inquiry. As the crusades and religious warfare faded from view, so did the concept of divinely ordained and determined just war.²⁷ War became an activity whose justifications, processes, and outcomes were of human devising. This humanist approach was inherited from the Renaissance. The historian Hervé Drévillon theorizes that military humanism of the Renaissance not only postulated the human character of war, but also man’s capacity to define its principles and to explore its rationality.²⁸

The call to bring rationality to warfare is a second foundational characteristic born of previous centuries and further developed by agents of the Military Enlightenment. In the context of Renaissance and early seventeenth-century thought, military theorists believed that a rational approach would beget desirable martial and moral outcomes. Humans could employ the faculty of reason to discern universal principles of war, thereby rendering it a science whose end point was strategic and tactical perfection—a science of martial victory. Armed forces could sculpt the contours of warfare so as to foster human dignity and elevate the human spirit toward the divine. Rationalism in this context meant a neo-Stoic doctrine of restraint in warfare, which displayed human worth and constituted logical solutions to the horrors of civil war that racked France during the Wars of Religion (1562–1629) and the disorderly and violent hordes of soldiers of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).²⁹

Making good war in the eighteenth century, however, required surpassing the rationalism and science of Renaissance-style military humanism. A new enlightened approach was necessary. As the 1694 Dictionnaire’s definition of war conveys, making war in a just and good manner meant humanity and civility. These terms and their lexical sisters of sensibility, sociability, and society are of capital importance: they irreversibly transformed and indeed modernized perspectives on war and military constitution. These terms were newly interconnected through sensationalist moral philosophy that invented words and altered the meaning of existing terms. Humanity, which had previously indicated human nature, evolved to signify a more specific moral stance and capacity. According to the Dictionnaire of 1694, humanity meant gentleness, civility, goodness, and sensitivity to the misfortunes of others (douceur, honnesteté, bonté, et sensibilité pour les malheurs d’autrui). Civility or honnesteté continued to designate courtesy in manners and conversation, but its meaning took on a new valence as being constitutive of genuine human bonds.

The cult of sentiment implied by the word sensibilité (sensibility, sensitivity, or feeling) was also a key component of military and elite culture of the period.³⁰ Based on sensationalist philosophy advanced by John Locke (1632–1704), David Hume (1711–1776), and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780), the concept of sensibilité came to be viewed as the quintessential human trait. For physicians, it was the foundation for human knowledge and identity; for moral philosophers like Rousseau, Diderot, and Adam Smith (1723–1790) it was responsible for creating fellow feeling between human beings.³¹ Being a man or woman of feeling—an âme sensible (sensitive soul)—who cared for others became a sign of superior physical and moral makeup and represented a new type of social capital. As Dan Edelstein has argued, noblemen and bourgeois elites sought to be a part of the noblesse du coeur (nobility of the heart).³²

Moral sentiment and its lexicon—sensibilité, humanité, bienfaisance (benevolence), sociabilité, and social (the latter two being neologisms dating to the eighteenth century)—represented a departure from traditional themes of military humanism and were an authentic development of the period. An epistemic shift from the rational toward the sentimental was under way in what Joan DeJean has called an affective revolution.³³ This revolution is reflected in the values of the Military Enlightenment. The chivalric code—which, as understood by medieval chevaliers, was far more ferocious than nonmedievalists appreciate—was replaced by the notion of being gentle, respectful, sociable, benevolent, and compassionate while waging war.³⁴ These ideas saw their first full and deliberate articulation during the Enlightenment age.

The moral sentiments in question were not solely ideals. They had far-reaching implications for military medicine in its physical and psychological aspects and for the treatment of civilians, soldiers and sailors on campaign, prisoners of war, and veterans. Certain foundations for these practices were laid earlier in the seventeenth century before blossoming, transforming through the cult of sentiment, and becoming normalized in the eighteenth.³⁵ The neo-Stoic Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) wrote De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, 1625), which formed the backbone of the Treaty of Westphalia as the first general peace settlement of modern times.³⁶ He maintained that there must be moral guidelines for restraint, since the law of nations permitted indiscriminate devastation, pillage and capture of property, enslaving of captives, and killing of subjects regardless of age, sex, or status as noncombatant (book 3, 3–9). He addressed temperamenta belli (book 3, 10–16), or moderation in the conduct of war, arguing that if the laws of war were permissive, there were natural laws (those of humanity) and moral laws (those of Christianity) that should make combatants choose restraint. The Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel (1714–1767) rearticulated temperamenta belli in secular terms in his 1758 work The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law Applied to the Conduct and to the Affairs of Nations and of Sovereigns (Droit des gens; ou, Principes de la loi naturelle appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains), championing humanité as an impetus for restraint.

Grotius and Vattel recognized that the international laws of war would always be insufficient. The imperfections of international law were perfectible, however, through human choice and action. This meant that the legal-political dimension of the metadiscourse of war gave way to scientific discourse and, most importantly, a humanitarian-philanthropic framework based on the moral philosophy of sentiment.³⁷ This reframing shifted the nexus of change away from states and toward individuals. Noble military officers could demonstrate their moral sentiments through ad hoc gentlemanly cartels or conventions that contained specifications on the handling and exchange of prisoners as well as the treatment of the wounded and medical personnel. These cartels were not new in the eighteenth century; however, they became increasingly widespread, detailed, and public as military officers had their cartels published in order to publicize their good deeds. The cartels and those who enacted them referred directly to the sentiment of humanity. Actions at the individual level in the humanitarian-philanthropic dimension then influenced the legal-political. By the end of the century, cartels went from being ad hoc individual arrangements to being codified into state policies that prefigured institutions such as the Geneva Conventions and the International Red Cross.

The culture of moral sentiment also had important implications for relationships between men serving together in the armed forces. War was a privileged circumstance in which men, and a few women, discovered and defined their relationship to self and other. Military and moral philosophers believed in humankind’s natural capacity for being sociable and forming relationships. Whereas honor, traditionally construed, led to social competition among nobles and disparaging of soldiers of the common classes, sociability unified men. Humanité, sensibilité, and honnêteté joined with sociability and natural law to cultivate familiarity, camaraderie, community, respect, and the recognition of merit throughout the ranks.³⁸ Forming humane social bonds within the armed forces, it was believed, supported combat effectiveness, recruitment, and retention. As internal discord faded, esprit de corps and primary group cohesion would rise, and military men could shift their focus toward a shared esprit de métier (professional spirit) augmented by improved training and educational opportunities. Such bonds also bolstered physical and psychological health, which were recognized and theorized in the military space for the first time. The rise of interiority—the study of self, identity, and affect in relation to physicality—bloomed in seventeenth-century sensationalist philosophy, medicine, and literature, animating the first modern psychological novel, La Princesse de Clèves (1678), by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de La Fayette (1634–1693). These developments were seen to be distinctly modern. As the writer Charles Perrault (1628–1703), a partisan of the moderns in the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, remarked, Just as anatomy has discovered in the heart ducts, valves, fibers, movements, and symptoms of which the Ancients had no knowledge, in the same manner moral philosophy has discovered attractions, aversions, desires, and repulsions which the Ancients never knew.³⁹ These perspectives undergirded the rising awareness of the cost of war on human bodies, minds, and hearts.

The dynamics and practical applications of moral sentiment, therefore, were not mere niceties. They were seen as strategic to the armed forces and as holding broad implications for society. They could win wars, improve international standing, forge national identity, and issue forth new heroes endowed with human benevolence and the willingness to die for their homeland. They aided officers in forming martial alliances with cultural, linguistic, and ethnic Others in colonial and mercantile outposts, at once facilitating empire and in some way diminishing its hegemonic, Eurocentric character. What is more, making good war in this enlightened mold could also, to some extent, make war less destructive and devastating for present generations and those to come. For members of the armed forces, government administrators, and nonmilitary intellectuals alike, this was a worthy purpose.

The Military Enlightenment engaged these human values, but at the same time was practical, technical, and impactful. Enlightening war meant adopting the esprit philosophique of the times: studying, questioning, challenging, and trying new things. In these experimental efforts, often the result of their own wills rather than royal injunction, military thinkers and actors moved into the realm of what Kant called the private use of reason, that which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office which is entrusted to him. Kant was wary of this type of enlightening process and made direct reference to the military sphere in claiming that it would be ruinous for an officer in service to debate about the suitability or utility of a command given to him by his superior; he must obey. But the right to make remarks on errors in the military service and to lay them before the public for judgment cannot equitably be refused him as a scholar. Subordination and obedience were, and continue to be, essential to military functioning, thus Kant’s hesitation was clearly justified. However, eighteenth-century sources evince that members of the armed forces throughout the military hierarchy called into question their orders or regulations from Versailles in their quest to make good war. Embarking on an experimental and philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of [its] historical era, these martial actors embodied Michel Foucault’s interpretation of enlightenment as a process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally. Men are at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary actors.⁴⁰ These reformers in effect operationalized Enlightenment thought within the armed forces, turning theories into realities as spaces of war on the continent and abroad became laboratories or ateliers in which newfangled theories were put to the test.

While Drévillon views military humanism as enduring from the Renaissance until the fall of Napoleon, when military romanticism began, it is clear that another unique phenomenon occurred in between: military enlightenment, a flash point that defined the Enlightenment, from war-torn border towns and port cities overseas to intellectual hubs in Parisian salons and the government’s seat in the gilded corridors of Versailles.

The processes and value systems discussed so far can be seen as pan-European and perhaps even global phenomena.⁴¹ This is not surprising given the transnational movement of people and material culture during this era. Military men were often among the most mobile of their countries, traveling to regions across Europe and to continents that were oceans away as they moved to extend and defend the political ambitions, mercantile strongholds, and territorial claims of their countries. While soldiers may not always have rubbed elbows with their foreign counterparts, officers came into frequent contact. In France and countries across Europe, officers were gentlemen who shared a transnational culture of nobility. When their own kingdoms were not at war, many officers sought commissions in foreign armies, into which they integrated. As a result, officers of enemy forces dined together on the eve of great battles, displayed civility to one another, socialized, joined the same Masonic lodges, lent one another money and supplies, and demonstrated a general social and cultural solidarity. Medical personnel did the same due to their professional bond and mutual commitment to science. Battle and life on campaign were therefore not conditions that necessarily led to animosity and obstacles to interrelation. On the contrary, they fostered connection and exchange across borders, making real the notions of cosmopolitanism and social bonding through humanity and civility.

This supranational context is indisputable; however, national versions of military enlightenment had their own particularities due to local conditions, constraints, and cultures. The Germanic Military Enlightenment did not develop until a generation after the French one and was largely fueled by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which elicited a public debate on war, heroism, and military culture.⁴² Military Enlightenment in Austria had an even slower start and did not take form until the turn of the century with the writings of Archduke Charles (1771–1847).⁴³ Countries had their own military needs based on the natural borders of their territories, making the island-dwelling British invest the vast majority of military expenditures in their navy, whereas France, with its numerous miles of land and coastline borders, had greater need for ground forces in addition to a navy. France also faced specific problems because of the fiscal system in place.⁴⁴ What is more, just as universalism and cosmopolitanism were on the rise, so too were national sentiment and nationalism. France and other countries all sought to distinguish their own national identities and to elucidate a military establishment best suited to their nation’s génie, or natural talents. For this reason, military enlightenment must be considered not only as a transhistorical and transnational phenomenon but also as a national one. Constructing a series of deep national histories is a necessary step toward formulating an empirically sound transnational history of military enlightenment.

Contributing Factors

In France, the rise of the Military Enlightenment related to the structures of its fiscal-military state, to the generalized sense of military crisis, and to a perceived degeneracy of military leadership. It also linked to cultural trends pertaining to the political and military spheres, such as vitriolic critiques of war and warriors by philosophes, the growing schism between the Bourbon monarchs and military activity, and a concomitant rise of what David Bell calls a cult of the nation that centered on notions of patriotism and citizenship.⁴⁵ These factors furnish an important backdrop for understanding the Military Enlightenment in France.

France’s fiscal-military state developed slowly from the late medieval era through the eighteenth century. A standing army and a system of permanent taxation had existed in France since the (first) Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), and the last kings in the Valois line levied a military tax (the taillon) and commissioned intendants to help supervise the military effort against the Hapsburgs.⁴⁶ In the seventeenth century, the government succeeded in paying for a large part of its military expenditures through ordinary revenues composed of direct and indirect taxes such as customs and income from state-owned landed estates. Louis XIII’s minister Armand Jean du Plessis, cardinal-duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac (1585–1642), expanded earlier initiatives and grew ordinary revenues from 25 million livres in the 1620s to 60 million livres in the 1640s. Louis XIV and his ministers surpassed this accomplishment.⁴⁷ Colbert’s reforms easily raised the 58 to 68 million livres per annum (70 percent of the crown’s ordinary annual revenues) required by the Dutch War of the 1670s. Despite the strains of long-term warfare and crop failures in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the Sun King was able to raise over 100 million livres per annum during the Nine Years’ War, with a peak at 113 million per annum.⁴⁸ Louis XIII and Louis XIV thus oversaw critical—and increasingly problematic—developments in the financing of France’s wars, including supplementing ordinary revenues with extraordinary revenues. The latter came from direct taxes such as the capitation (1695) and the dixième (1710), currency devaluations, and, most characteristically, the sale of offices and privileges, forced loans and gifts, and the extensive use of credit from financiers, bankers, corporate bodies, and the public.

Despite the exorbitant costs of war, France was Europe’s leading economic power for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The French population was the largest on the continent, almost three times that of archrival Britain. In what has been called the demographic revolution, the French population rose from twenty-one million to twenty-eight million between 1715 and 1789. France also had a flourishing economy with a vibrant agrarian base and rapidly developing commercial and manufacturing sectors.⁴⁹ It was able to produce more revenues than any rivals (Britain included), its tax earnings producing a high of 285 million livres compared to 229 million in England, 140 million in the United Provinces and Spain, 92 million for the Hapsburgs, and 48.6 million for Prussia.⁵⁰ However, as the historian Hamish Scott explains, International power rested on the ability to extract resources, rather than the level of resources per se.⁵¹ Louis XIII and XIV had been relatively successful in extracting resources during the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, a testament to the organization of their growing fiscal-military states. This was decreasingly the case by the eighteenth century, when the crown was forced to arrange financial deals with dangerous and dishonest men, as Guy Rowlands describes them, and embark on less advantageous fiscal tools such as high-interest and self-amortizing loans.⁵² This meant debt, debt, and more debt. In the 1760s, France’s debt was estimated to be at least 2 billion livres, six times the crown’s annual revenue. By that time, 60 percent of the crown’s per annum revenues went to repaying charges. In 1788, costs of paying down France’s debt were almost 62 percent of the crown’s tax revenues and constituted half of its expenditures.⁵³

Two important aspects of this Bourbon fiscal-military state had a direct relationship to fueling France’s Military Enlightenment. The first had to do with the crown’s fiscal dependence on the commodification of ennoblement and the problems this created within the officer corps. As the historian David D. Bien conveys, the French state could not rely on English constitutionalist or eastern European feudal mechanisms to levy high taxes or accrue low-interest loans to finance seventeenth- and especially eighteenth-century wars. As time went on, the crown could no longer afford to borrow from creditors who charged extortionate rates. Instead, it found the unique, if flawed, solution of drawing revenue from French subjects via selling venal offices, then imposing loans on its officiers, who in turn took out loans that were backed by corps of officiers and by their offices themselves. This financial dependence on the sale of offices and on the corps caused the crown to create and defend special privileges, or privilèges.⁵⁴

In the military sphere, the system of privilèges translated to producing a top-heavy officer corps filled with anoblis (recently ennobled) or wealthy court nobles. These individuals could afford to pay for an officer’s commission and sought it as social capital, but often lacked formal military experience, physical fitness, martial culture, and any semblance of professionalism. Maréchal Victor François, duc de Broglie (1718–1804), lamented the total ignorance, from the sous-lieutenant to the lieutenant general, of the duties of their post and all the details that concern it.⁵⁵ The quantity and incompetence of these officers, particularly in the army, were catastrophic. By 1750, there were as many pensioned officers as on active commission, and the pay for the sixty thousand officers in the Seven Years’ War totaled more than the expenses of the rest of the army put together (47 million livres versus 44 million livres). Reformers viewed the crisis in leadership that pervaded the French armed forces—a crisis that was the direct result of royal favor and the mechanisms of the fiscal-military state—as the essential force driving France’s inglorious military record during much of the eighteenth century.

The extraordinary costs of military conflict and the dangerously high debts accrued by the French crown made limited war the order of the day.⁵⁶ Preserving France’s precious military resources, especially manpower, became imperative. Casualties and deaths related to combat and disease represented a devastating loss on investment. Even more disastrous was the epidemic of desertion. Desertion represented a perennial problem for all warring countries, and European states undertook a variety of measures to fight it, largely to no avail. The historian André Corvisier estimates that nearly a quarter of all soldiers in the French army deserted during the War of Spanish Succession.⁵⁷ The eighteenth-century sieur Garrigues de Froment averred that there were over ten thousand deserters each year during the War of Austrian Succession, totaling sixty to seventy thousand men. Le sieur la Balme, lieutenant of the Senlis constabulary, counted eight to nine thousand deserters in 1761 during the Seven Years’ War.⁵⁸

According to French reformers, these problems could be blamed on a backward military system, a nonexistent motivational system, and, most especially, faulty leadership. The result was martial failure. Between the latter wars of Louis XIV and the wars of the French Revolution, France experienced a dramatic military decline that stunned not just the armed forces but the entire nation. During the War of Spanish Succession, important political aims were met; however, France suffered military defeats all over west-central Europe as John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough (1650–1722), and Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736) marched their armies toward Paris, successfully defeating the French at Oudenarde, Lille, Malplaquet, and Mons.⁵⁹ Save for a handful of victories, bungling and ineffectiveness also severely hampered French military performance in the War of Austrian Succession. During the Seven Years’ War, French naval power was virtually annihilated, and the armed forces endured tremendous losses in Europe, India, Africa, and the Americas, succumbing to the tiny state of Prussia on the continent and losing nearly all strongholds overseas. For the largest, wealthiest, and most populous country in western Europe, one that had achieved great military glory in its far-removed and more recent past, these losses were seen as no less than a national disaster.⁶⁰

Losing this war was not just an exacerbating force but a critical motivator for both the critiques and the reforms of the Military Enlightenment. The spectacular defeats of the Seven Years’ War, along with the generalized military crisis and failure in leadership, sharpened the tongues of critics. Needless militarism, martial insolvency, and botched diplomacy had caused France’s entry into the war, military misconduct, and the disadvantageous terms of the Treaty of Paris. The state lost its most flourishing youth, more than half the money in circulation in the kingdom, its navy, its commerce, its credit, wrote Voltaire. Associating the Seven Years’ War with that of Austrian Succession, he sneered that "a few ambitious men, who wanted to make themselves valued and indispensable, precipitated France into this fatal war. It was exactly the same in 1741. The pride [amour propre] of two or three people was enough to destroy all of Europe."⁶¹

Relentless critiques of war and warriors flowed from the mouths, pens, and printing presses of philosophes, journalists, and other voices of the public sphere, heightening those that had appeared before 1763. Louis XV struggled to control public