The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest 1661-1701

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The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV The ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV witnessed a massive increase in the size of the French army and an apparent improvement in the quality of its officers, its men and the War Ministry. However, this is the first book to treat the French army under Louis XIV as a living political, social and economic organism: an institution which reflected the dynastic interests and personal concerns of the king and his privileged subjects. The book seeks to explain the development of the army between the end of Cardinal Mazarin’s ministry and the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession. During this period the army was reshaped, not simply through the assurance of an adequate money supply, the promulgation of reforming edicts and the imposition of tighter ministerial control. Of even greater significance was the awareness of Louis XIV and his ministers of the need to pay careful attention to the condition of the king’s officers, and to take account of those officers’ military, political, social and cultural aspirations.         is Pybus Lecturer in European History, Newnham College, Cambridge.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN HISTORY Edited by Professor Sir John Elliott, University of Oxford Professor Olwen Hufton, University of Oxford Professor H. G. Koenigsberger, University of London Professor H. M. Scott, University of St Andrews The idea of an ‘early modern’ period of European history from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century is now widely accepted among historians. The purpose of Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History is to publish monographs and studies which illuminate the character of the period as a whole, and in particular focus attention on a dominant theme within it, the interplay of continuity and change as they are presented by the continuity of medieval ideas, political and social organisation, and by the impact of new ideas, new methods, and new demands on the traditional structure. For a list of titles published in the series, please see end of the book

Engraving by Pierre Drevet, , of Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, duc du Maine and prince des Dombes (–), based on the painting by Franc¸ois de Troy. Author’s collection. Maine, the eldest surviving illegitimate son of Louis XIV and the marquise de Montespan, was the king’s favourite bastard. Louis installed him as Colonel-General of the Swiss and Grison forces in , prince des Dombes in , governor of Languedoc in , General of the Galleys (–), colonel of the r´egiment des Carabiniers in , and Grand Master of the Artillery in . With the exception of the Galleys, he held these titles almost without interruption until his death. The portrait sums up the way in which Maine believed the world should see him: as a soldier and as a sovereign prince of the Dombes, an enclave of disputed status situated northeast of Lyon. The closed crown and the sceptre make that explicit. The title of the engraving (Ludovicus Augustus Dei gratia Dombarum Princeps) also reinforced his claim to sovereignty. But within France there was deep reluctance to see him as anything other than a duke, in spite of the king’s steps to create a special legal position in society for Maine and his brother, the comte de Toulouse, who in  were even written into the line of succession to the throne. In the aftermath of his father’s death in , Maine’s pretensions were a danger to the stability of the regency for the child-king Louis XV. In particular, Maine’s claims to superior status and a share in power within the kingdom, when coupled with the extensive role he played in the army, threatened to undermine the authority of the regent, Philippe II, duc d’Orl´eans. Because of the closed crown and sceptre, Orl´eans had the plate of the engraving destroyed. Few examples of it survive, though there could be no better representation of Louis XIV’s dynastic approach to the state, nor of the link between politics, social status and the administration of the army.

The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV Royal Service and Private Interest, –

GUY ROWLANDS Newnham College, Cambridge

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , United Kingdom Published in the United States by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521641241 © Guy Rowlands 2002 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2002 ISBN-13 978-0-511-06833-1 eBook (EBL) ISBN-10 0-511-06833-6 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 978-0-521-64124-1 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-64124-1 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To my parents, with love

‘We cannot expect, however able we may be, to correct the natural inclinations of all men to seek their own interest, but it would still be sufficiently glorious for us to arrange so that they can only find it in honest practices, in meritorious actions, and in observing the rules of their profession.’ (Louis XIV, M´emoires, p. )

Contents page xiii xiv xviii

List of maps Acknowledgements List of abbreviations General introduction: ‘Absolute monarchy’, dynasticism and the standing army



PART I ‘Patrimonial bureaucracy’: The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War     

Introduction The Secretary of State for War and the dynastic interests of the Le Tellier family The ebb and flow of Le Tellier power, – The use and abuse of servants: the Ministry of War, venality and civilian power in the army Financing war: the treasury of the Extraordinaire des Guerres Corruption and the pursuit of self-interest in the Ministry of War

     

PART II The forging of the French officer corps and the standing army under Louis XIV   

Introduction In the name of sustainability: reforming the structure of the standing army and the officer corps The business of a regiment The pressures and temptations of service

   

PART III The high command of the French armies Introduction  The commanders-in-chief and the delegation of royal authority  The appointment of general officers xi

  

Contents  The summits of ambition and the rewards of good service: the bienfaits du roi and the high command



Conclusion: The preservation of the dynasty



Appendix : Defining the grands Appendix : The proportion of revenue generated by the Extraordinaire des Guerres as a ‘primary receiver’ Bibliography Index

xii

   

Maps      

The French provinces under Louis XIV page xxiv Provinces under the jurisdiction of Louvois,   Provinces under the jurisdiction of Barbezieux, –  Accountancy division within the Extraordinaire des Guerres  Cadet companies,   Provinces where the governor commanded an army or important corps, – 

xiii

Acknowledgements The research which has culminated in this book began in Oxford when I became a D.Phil. student at the same age as the marquis de Barbezieux had succeeded his father in the post of Secretary of State for War in . Nine years later the book was finished when I was the same age, to the month, as Barbezieux when he died in office five months short of his thirty-third birthday. It has been long in gestation. Indeed, during self-indulgent moments I wondered whether Barbezieux had found it easier to manage Louis XIV’s armies and deal with the French aristocracy than I was finding it to juggle the demands of a social existence, job hunting, research, writing, teaching and even court ceremonial as a Pro-Proctor amid the ancien r´egime trappings of Oxford University. Unlike Barbezieux, however, I did not take refuge in the bottle or hunting to relieve the pressure, though the finished product might have been better had I done so. The book which has emerged has been written with the generous help of several institutions and numerous individuals. At Oxford I must thank several host colleges for the financial and moral support they offered during my postgraduate years and my first two posts. Magdalen and Oriel kept the wolf from the postgraduate door with two scholarships and other material support; and the Rector and Fellows of Exeter elected me to a lectureship in early modern history and then a junior research fellowship. Throughout my time as a senior member at Oxford, the Faculty of Modern History made generous contributions to my research expenses. Thanks are also owed to the British Academy for electing me to a postdoctoral fellowship and providing additional funding for a final big push in the archives. Without the Academy this book would never have seen the light of day. Many people in Oxford have shaped my thoughts in discussions formal and informal, assisted me in myriad ways and made the task of research and teaching that much more enjoyable: John Maddicott, Michael Hart, Robin Briggs, Laurence Brockliss, Sir John Elliott, Simon Hodson, Eric Nelson, Robert Evans, Toby Osborne, Tim Watson, Jonathan Powis, Nick Davidson, Nick Dew, Cliff Davies, Felicity Heal, Clive Holmes, Leslie Mitchell, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, Paul Slack and Paul Langford. To my great sadness Angus Macintyre is no longer with us to see this book appear – I hope he would have approved. In the Bodleian Library, Helen, Vera, David and their host of colleagues in the Upper Reading Room passed scores of volumes over the counter to me in a xiv

Acknowledgements period spanning eight years, and dealt with my occasional outbursts of frustration. Heroes, the lot of you. I must also thank the Principal and Fellows of Newnham College, Cambridge, my current berth, for electing me to the Pybus Lectureship in European History from October , and the Faculty of History in the University of Cambridge for appointing me as a Newton Trust Lecturer from October . I must single out Gill Sutherland, Rosamond McKitterick and Tessa Stone for all their help in easing me into a new job and an unfamiliar environment, and for their encouragement in the last stages of writing. Other colleagues in the faculty who have been sympathetic, generous and welcoming include Ulinka Rublack, Mary Laven, Melissa Calaresu, Brendan Simms, David Smith, Mark Goldie, John Morrill and Tim Blanning. I can only apologise to the dozens of women with whom I now work, both in early modern European teaching at Cambridge and in Newnham, that this book should be so centred on men behaving badly. The chapters to come are essentially a product of many months of research in France. The staff of the Service Historique de l’Arm´ee de Terre at the chˆateau de Vincennes were truly outstanding in the warm welcome and cooperation they extended to an Anglo-Saxon (and one of Huguenot descent, to boot) intent on exploring the reign of the Sun King. Colonel Gilbert Bodinier, Thierry Sarmant and Samuel Gibiat helped me with thorny problems on many occasions and in many ways. Bernard Hama¨ıde repeatedly helped overcome administrative difficulties and rescued me from despair early on in my researches at Vincennes. But the ‘grand croix de l’Ordre de Saint-Louis’ must go to Mme Son Bernard, and the many magasiniers and conscripts who have worked with her over the years, tirelessly labouring to bring me register after register of documents in my obsessive quest to understand the seventeenth-century state. Louis XIV’s motto was ‘Nec Pluribus Impar’ – not unequal to many – but it could just as well describe Mme Bernard. Elsewhere in France I received excellent treatment in the Salle des Manuscrits of the Biblioth`eque Nationale; in the Biblioth`eque de l’Arsenal; in the Biblioth`eque Mazarine; in the Archives des Affaires Etrang`eres at the Foreign Ministry; and in the Archives Cond´e at the magnificent chˆateau de Chantilly. The archives, of course, close in the evenings and at weekends, and many people, whom space does not permit me to mention, helped make my repeated stays in Paris largely enjoyable ones. In particular, it was always good to talk about Louis XIV and the Jacobites with Edward Corp, and Rainer Babel helped with navigating the archives. Rafe Blaufarb proved such a genial companion in and out of the archives, and it was he who first suggested focusing on the high political dimensions of the army. I keenly await his book on the officer corps in the late eighteenth century. David O’Brien and I have pondered the problem of the royal military household for the last eight years, and his work on this subject for the eighteenth century should soon appear. Sarah Chapman and Greg Monahan kindly supplied me with a couple of crucial references. The extended xv

Acknowledgements Hicks family, Andrew Naylor and Robert Sholl kept me sane at weekends. I cannot end my recollections of Paris without mentioning Bettina Holstein whose friendship and generosity have been remarkable, and for which I shall be eternally grateful. On this side of the Channel, nobody has made a greater contribution to my thinking and career than David Parrott. As a thesis supervisor I could not have asked for anyone better, and he was then, and remains now, a most generous and excellent friend. My deepest gratitude goes to him. Without Robert Oresko, however, I would probably have paid far less attention to the great nobility, and I would certainly not have taken matters dynastic so seriously. For the intellectual stimulation Robert has provided, and for his many kindnesses, I thank him profoundly. William Doyle, of Bristol University, has been a source of encouragement and patronage since he examined my D.Phil. thesis, and he too deserves most hearty thanks. A small ‘team’ gave up many hours to challenge my infelicities and try to make sense of my writing. Alistair Malcolm read most of the chapters in draft form with an editorial eye that both surprised and enlightened me, while Rosamond McKitterick, Philip Grover, David Trim and James Legard looked at one or more chapters. My discussions with James about high politics have been crucial in shaping many ideas. I am exceptionally grateful to them all and look forward to repaying the compliment. Hamish Scott has been a source of great encouragement, wisdom and sound advice; and William Davies at Cambridge University Press deserves the cordon bleu of the Saint-Esprit for agreeing to the project in the first place, repeatedly swallowing my excuses for its non-completion, dealing with the completed manuscript, and helping me to believe that I had something worth saying on Louis XIV. Thanks too to Frances Nugent for her patience and copy-editing skills. No man is an island, though humanities dons working on a foreign country sometimes feel a strong sense of isolation, especially in what are increasingly difficult first years of their career. It is a tribute to all the people I have hitherto mentioned that I rarely felt this way, and while they have in some way or other shaped my thinking they can in no way be blamed for my interpretation of Louis XIV’s army which follows. Naturally, profound contributions have been made by historians of the French army both alive and dead whom I have never met. I emerge from this project with a greater respect for the difficulties they too must have encountered in writing on Louis XIV’s armies. It is in the nature of the British historical profession to engage in robust debate, so I hope those still with us will not be offended if I have challenged them on a number of matters, both here and elsewhere. Staving off a sense of isolation depends ultimately upon ‘une cercle intime’. Close friends, whose scholarly interests reside a long way from my own and who must be thanked for keeping my feet on the ground, include Philip Carter (who put up with impolite learning in our shared house for three years), Susan Skedd, Robin Eagles, John Cooper and Suzanne Fagence-Cooper, Matthew Grimley, Roey Sweet, Mark Godfrey and Lewis Baston (a world expert on sleaze). Standing above them all are my nearest and dearest. Bridget Heal has been a tower of strength in some very xvi

Acknowledgements dark nights of the soul, and her love has sustained me in the final stages of the book. She heroically grappled with my Introduction and Conclusion, and helped draft the maps in the final moments before completion. My sister Helen deserves thanks for her no-nonsense approach to life and her necessary advice about when to exercise self-restraint; and my grandparents Robert and Mildred Stoker have contributed in countless ways to my education. As to my parents, Ann and Tony Rowlands, without them none of this would have been possible. Though my father would probably have preferred a book on the battle of the Atlantic it is to them that I dedicate this volume, with love.

xvii

Abbreviations Archival sources AA AAE CP AAE MD ACC Add. Mss. AN Bib Ars Bib Maz BL BMG BNF Clair. FF NA NAF NLS Saugeon SHAT

Archives de l’Artillerie (kept in SHAT) Archives des Affaires Etrang`eres, Correspondance Politique Archives des Affaires Etrang`eres, M´emoires et Documents Archives Cond´e, Chantilly (BL) Additional Manuscripts Archives Nationales, Paris Biblioth`eque de l’Arsenal Biblioth`eque Mazarine, Institut de France British Library Biblioth`eque du Minist`ere de la Guerre (part of SHAT) Biblioth`eque Nationale de France (BNF) Collection Clairambault (BNF) Fonds Franc¸ais (ACC) Nouvelles Acquisitions (BNF) Nouvelles Acquisitions Franc¸aises National Library of Scotland (BMG) Collection Saugeon of royal ordonnances Service Historique de l’Arm´ee de Terre, Vincennes

Printed primary sources Birac, ‘Officers of Horse’

Dangeau

DBF

Sieur de Birac, ‘The Duties of Officers of Horse’, in The Art of War in Four Parts (London, ), pp. – P. de Courcillon, marquis de Dangeau, Journal du marquis de Dangeau . . . avec les additions in´edites du duc de Saint-Simon, ed. E. Souli´e, L. Dussieux and P. de Chennevi`eres,  vols. (Paris, –) Dictionnaire de biographie fran¸caise,  vols. to date (Paris, –) xviii

Abbreviations Etienne-Gallois, Lettres des Feuqui`eres Feuqui`eres, M´emoires

Gaya, L’art de la guerre Hardr´e La Chesnaye La Fayette, M´emoires

La Fontaine, Les devoirs militaires Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’ Lamont, ‘Officers of the Foot’ Lavall´ee Louis XIV, M´emoires Mallet, Les travaux de Mars Massiac, M´emoires

M´emoires de Catinat

M´emoires de Primi Visconti

A. Etienne-Gallois, ed., Lettres in´edites des Feuqui`eres tir´ees des papiers de famille de Madame la duchesse Decazes,  vols. (Paris, –) A. de Pas, marquis de Feuqui`eres, M´emoires de M. le marquis de Feuquiere, lieutenant general des arm´ees du roi, contenant ses maximes sur la guerre, & l’application des exemples aux maximes (London, ) L. de Gaya, L’art de la guerre et la mani`ere dont on la fait a` present (The Hague,  edn) J. Hardr´e, ed., Letters of Louvois (Chapel Hill, NC, ) F. de La Chesnaye des Bois et Badier, Dictionnaire de la noblesse,  vols. (Paris, –) Madame de La Fayette (?), ‘M´emoires de la cour de France pour les ann´ees  et ’, in R. Duchˆene, ed., Madame de La Fayette: oeuvres compl`etes (Paris, ), pp. – Sieur de La Fontaine, Les devoirs militaires des officiers de l’infanterie, contenant l’exercice des gens de guerre, selon la pratique de ce temps (Paris, ) M. de Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, in The Art of War in Four Parts (London, ), pp. – M. de Lamont, ‘The Duties of all the Officers of the Foot’, in The Art of War in Four Parts (London, ), pp. – T. Lavall´ee, ed., Correspondance g´en´erale de Madame de Maintenon,  vols. (Paris, –) Louis XIV, M´emoires for the Instruction of the Dauphin, ed. P. Sonnino (London, ) A. Manesson Mallet, Les travaux de Mars ou l’art de la guerre (Amsterdam, –) M. de Massiac, M´emoires de ce qui s’est pass´e de plus considerable pendant la guerre depuis l’an  jusqu’en  (Paris, ) B. Le Bouyer de Saint-Gervais, ed., M´emoires et correspondance du mar´echal de Catinat,  vols. (Paris, ) Giovanni Battista Primi Visconti, conte di San Maiolo, M´emoires sur la cour de Louis XIV, – , ed. J.-F. Solnon (Paris, )

xix

Abbreviations Noailles, M´emoires

Quarr´e, M´emoires

Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires Saint-Maurice

Saint-Simon, M´emoires

Sandras, La conduite de Mars Sarram´ea, Lettres S´evign´e, Lettres Sourches

Vauban

Villars, M´emoires

C.-F. X. Millot, M´emoires politiques et militaires, pour servir a` l’histoire de Louis XIV et de Louis XV. Compos´e sur les pi`eces originales recueillies par Adrien-Maurice, duc de Noailles, mar´echal de France & ministre d’´etat,  vols. (Lausanne, ) P. Foisset, ed., ‘M´emoires militaires de Pierre Quarr´e, comte d’Aligny’, Soci´et´e d’Histoire, d’Arch´eologie et de Litt´erature de l’Arrondissement de Beaune, M´emoires Ann´ee  (Beaune, ) L. Lecestre, ed., M´emoires de Saint-Hilaire,  vols. (Paris, –) Thomas-Franc¸ois, marquis de Saint-Maurice, Lettres sur la cour de Louis XIV –, vol. I, ed. J. Lemoine (Paris, ) L. de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, M´emoires du duc de Saint-Simon, ed. A. de Boislisle,  vols. (Paris, –) [G. des Courtilz de Sandras], La conduite de Mars ou l’homme de la guerre (Rouen,  edn) F. de Sarram´ea, Lettres d’un cadet de Gascogne sous Louis XIV, ed. F. Abbadie (Paris, ) Madame de S´evign´e, Lettres, ed. E. G´erard-Gailly,  vols. (Paris, –) L.-F. du Bouchet, marquis de Sourches, M´emoires du marquis de Sourches sur le r`egne de Louis XIV, ed. G.-J. de Cosnac, A. Bertrand and E. Pontal,  vols. (Paris, –) E. de Rochas d’Aiglun, ed., Vauban: sa famille et ses e´crits, ses oisivet´es et sa correspondance,  vols. (Paris, ) Marquis de Vog¨ue´ , M´emoires du Mar´echal de Villars,  vols. (Paris, –)

Printed secondary sources Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois Corvisier, Louvois

L. Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et l’organisation de l’arm´ee monarchique (Paris, ) L. Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois (Paris, ) A. Corvisier, Louvois (Paris, )

xx

Abbreviations Lynn, Giant Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’ Rousset Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’

J. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Si`ecle. The French Army, – (Cambridge, ) D. Parrott, ‘The Administration of the French Army during the Ministry of Cardinal Richelieu’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, ) C. Rousset, Histoire de Louvois et de son administration politique et militaire,  vols. (Paris, –) G. Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration under Louis XIV: The French Crown and the Military Elites in the Era of the Nine Years War’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, )

xxi

Michel Le Tellier

François-Michel, 1691 Marie-Annemarquis de Courtanvaux = Catherine d Estre´es (1663--1721)

Madeleine-Fare (1646--68)

1660 Louis-Marie-Victor = d Aumont, marquis de Villequier, duc d Aumont (1669)

Marguerite 1694 Nicolas (1678--1711) = de Neufville de Villeroi, marquis d’ Alincourt, t, duc de Villeroi

Camille, abbe´ de Louvois (1675--1718)

1.1691 Louis-François-Marie, marquis de Barbezieux = Catherine-Louise-Charlotte de Crussol-Uze`s (†1694) (1668--1701) SECRETARY OF STATE 2.1696 FOR WAR 1691--1701 Marie-The´re`se-DelphineEustachie d Ale`gre

ARCHBISHOP OF REIMS

Charles-Maurice (1642--1709)

1629 = Elisabeth Turpin

1679 François de La Madeleine-Charlotte = Rochefoucauld, (1665--1735) Louis-Nicolas, duc de La 1698 Catherine-Charlotte de Pas marquis de Souvre´ = de Feuquie` res, dame de Rocheguyon Re´benac (1667--1725)

1664--91

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR

François-Michel, 1662 Anne de Souvre´ marquis de Louvois = (1641--91)

(†1685)

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR 1643--77, CHANCELLOR OF FRANCE 1677--85

Family tree of the Le Tellier: 1. Principal branch

OF THE PETITE ECURIE DU ROI

CAPTAIN OF THE GARDES DU CORPS (1695)

GOVERNOR, THEN PREMIER GENTILHOMME DE LA CHAMBRE OF THE DAUPHIN (†1690)

Charles de Saint-Maure, duc de Montausier

DU ROI AND GRAND VENEUR (1690)

François de La Rochefoucauld, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1680) Emmanuel, Julie-Françoise de GRAND MAITRE DE LA duc d’Uzès = Saint-Maure de GARDEROBE DU ROI AND Montausier GRAND VENEUR

Louis-François-Marie, 1691 1. Catherine-Louise-Charlotte Louise-Charlotte marquis de Barbezieux = de Crussol-Uzès (†1694)

Madeleine-Charlotte 1679 François de La = Rochefoucauld, duc de La Rocheguyon GRAND François de Neufville, MAITRE DE LA second duc de Villeroi (1685) GARDEROBE and maréchal de France

(1678)

CAPTAIN-LIEUTENANT OF THE CENT-SUISSES DE LA GARDE DU ROI

Jean-Baptiste, marquis de Tilladet

1636 Madeleine = Gabriel de Cassagnet, sieur de Tilladet

Marguerite 1694 Nicolas = de Neufville de Villeroi, marquis d’ Alincourt, duc de Villeroi

Marie-Madeleine 1677 Jacques-Louis, = marquis de Beringhen d’ Aumont PREMIER ECUYER

Louis-Marie- 1660 Madeleine-Fare François-Michel, marquis de Louvois Victor d’ Aumont, = duc de Villequier

Michel Le Tellier

Family tree of the Le Tellier: 2. Royal household marital connections

DUTCH REPUBLIC

French Flanders SPANISH NETHERLANDS

Boulonnais

Luxemburg (French 1684–97)

Artois Hainault

ˆ Trois Evechés (French) Lorraine (French 1670–97)

Picardy

Normandy Brittany

Ile de France

HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

Champagne

Alsace

Maine Orléanais FrancheComté

Anjou Nivernais

Touraine

Berry Poitou

HELVETIC CONFEDERATION

Burgundy

Bourbonnais Bresse

La Marche Angoumois

Limousin

DUCHY OF SAVOY-PIEDMONT Pinerolo (French 1631–96)

Lyonnais

Auvergne

Dauphiné Guyenne Provence Languedoc Béarn Foix

Roussillon

SPAIN

Map  The French provinces under Louis XIV.

General introduction

‘Absolute monarchy’, dynasticism and the standing army By , the annus mirabilis of French battlefield victories in the seventeenth century, the army of Louis XIV was the largest organised military force Europe had ever seen. That year troop numbers topped , men on paper, and even in reality the army stood at about , men. It would not be surpassed in size either in France or in any other part of the continent until the republic which supplanted the Bourbon monarchy mobilised the country for another bout of coalition warfare one hundred years later. At the very core of this book are three basic questions: how did the regime of Louis XIV create and fashion an army of such vast size out of the ramshackle forces which the ministries of Richelieu and Mazarin, lasting from  to , had bequeathed to him? Why, over the next forty years, did the army take the shape that it did? And what can a study of the army tell us about the nature of French government in the second half of the seventeenth century? At first glance these questions might appear quite simple. But one cannot hope to answer them by reference merely to the institutional development of the army and the War Ministry, as most scholars have hitherto tried to do. When combined with a ‘statist’ outlook on the course of French history, this approach has distorted our picture of the army, and allowed its history in this period to be characterised as the onward march of a bureaucratic machine accompanied by the marginalising of the nobility. Without question Louis XIV’s government implemented numerous procedural reforms to the army, which sometimes took several decades to refine and which were not always successful. And I will advance fresh ideas about the relative importance and consequences of some of these changes. But we must also recognise that the French army of the seventeenth century was moulded by a complex interaction of political, social, economic and cultural forces. Most importantly, the development of the army was shaped primarily not by an agenda of ‘modernisation’ and ‘rationalisation’ but by the private interests of thousands of members of the propertied elite, from the monarch down to the humble provincial nobility and urban bourgeois. Louis XIV himself used the army to advance his legitimate and illegitimate progeny, to build support for the ruling Bourbon line, and to disrupt the traditional patterns of patronage and clientage which had contributed so much to the instability of France between  and . In its very essence Louisquatorzian France was a dynastic state. 

General introduction Reinterpreting the development of the French army under Louis XIV requires a number of imaginative steps. First, there has to be a jettisoning of e´tatiste assumptions about the growth of the state and related sociological notions about ‘state-building’, which imply that rulers consciously thought in those terms. Second, historians must engage with the recent publications of several British and American scholars on high politics and on provincial France in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It is inevitably difficult to place a study of a national institution which had the trappings of a separate corporate Order, and which (supposedly) contained no women within its ranks, in a wider historiographical context of research on class relations, provincial government and the court, but a serious effort must be made. This way we are likely to learn more about both the army and French society in general. Third, the army and the development of the state as a whole must be placed within a broader cultural understanding of human behaviour, personal and political conduct, and family relationships. This book is written with the firm conviction that explaining the development of the French army requires a historian to study more than just the army itself. ‘        ’    ‘            ’ The basic consensus that has emerged among Anglo-Saxon historians of France rejects the traditional depiction of Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’ as the expression of an authoritarian, bureaucratic and centralising regime. Instead, there is now broad agreement that the ‘success’ of Louis XIV’s reign after  owed much to a conscious royal determination to be far more sensitive to the interests and aspirations of the social elites. Beyond this, however, serious disagreements remain. Hitherto the debate has been conducted by reference to the high politics at the royal court, or to the nature of power in the outlying provinces of the kingdom. Examining the army, a ‘national’ institution, will inevitably provide a different perspective. The first blast of the revisionist trumpet came from Roger Mettam, in a  Cambridge Ph.D. thesis inspired by the controversial Alfred Cobban, which justifiably rebelled against the idea that the high aristocracy was marginalised under Louis XIV, locked up in the great gilded cage of Versailles and allowed out only on carefully controlled excursions to lead the armies. Twenty years later, Mettam grafted onto his discovery that certain elements of the high aristocracy wielded significant authority and influence as provincial governors, the fact that the most socially exalted families of the realm also played a major and meaningful political role at court. His lasting contribution has been to force historians to take the upper echelons of French society under Louis XIV seriously. Unfortunately, in the spirit of the s, his 

R. Mettam, ‘The Role of the Higher Aristocracy in France under Louis XIV, with Special Reference to the “Faction of the Duke of Burgundy” and the Provincial Governors’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge, ); R. Mettam, Government and Society in Louis XIV’s France (London, ); R. Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford, ).



‘Absolute monarchy’, dynasticism and the army thesis ridiculed those nobles who served in the army as anachronistic dinosaurs, and his later books gave the army little attention as a socio-political institution through which the wider society might support the Bourbon state. The most worrying aspect of his work, though, is the relentless argument that very little changed between the regimes of Richelieu and Mazarin, on the one hand, and that of Louis XIV on the other. Mettam takes his argument that Louis governed in a highly traditional manner too far, mistaking the king’s style for the substance of power. Indeed, by ignoring vast reams of evidence, he comes perilously close to arguing that the Sun King did not establish a more powerful monarchy, and countless scholars have felt unable to accept his conclusions. Something, surely, must have changed for the army to expand four-fold, for the navy to be created almost from scratch, for the king to defy Rome with the support of most of the church, and for the royal revenues to increase dramatically after . In large part the drawbacks of Mettam’s work can be attributed to an excessive concentration on high political manoeuvring, and inadequate exploration of the means and procedures by which royal orders were carried out in a variety of arenas. There is a singular failure to convey the depth of regulation in provincial government – and in the church and the armed forces – which was imposed by Louis XIV. A concern with political power also dominates the work of Sharon Kettering, whose studies of patronage and clientage indicate the vertical ties which could bind people of differing social and economic circumstances (though such links existed largely within the nobility). Her books and articles have provided a fuller picture of the sociology of power in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France, and have heavily modified the ideas of Roland Mousnier and others about the practice of clientage which pervaded the French state. She also naturally emphasised considerable political divergence within the elites which made a united front in the face of common threats hard to sustain. Yet Kettering’s work is founded upon research into mainly one province – Provence – which continued to enjoy a degree of autonomy as a pays d’´etats and where several institutions provided arenas for political conflict. Moreover, though her work is first-rate for the first half of the seventeenth century, her treatment peters out after the death of Mazarin. Unfortunately this leaves her preliminary interpretations of Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’ open to serious question. In contrast to Mettam, Kettering seems to hold the belief, still shared by some historians, that the great nobility were a spent force after , and she implies strongly that they had become dispensable in government by . She argues that  

Mettam argues that the key to the reign was Louis’s governing through a ‘king’s faction’. This issue will be considered in the Conclusion, pp. –. Most notably, see S. Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford, ); S. Kettering, ‘The Decline of Great Noble Clientage during the Reign of Louis XIV’, Canadian Journal of History  (), –; S. Kettering, ‘The Patronage Power of Early Modern French Noblewomen’, Historical Journal  (), –; S. Kettering, ‘Brokerage at the Court of Louis XIV’, Historical Journal  (), –.



General introduction they declined in importance as natural military figureheads and as patrons and clientage brokers in the army. Such an argument will be met head on later in this book. Alongside these important works on the business of political power stands a debate anchored more firmly in social and economic relations. Highly acclaimed, but problematic in its own way, is William Beik’s influential study of Languedoc between  and , which claimed that compromise, overt cooperation and reciprocity between crown and elites after  led to domestic peace, regular and untroubled tax-collection and a strong bond of loyalty to the king. He also made the valid point, followed up by Jay Smith, that a change in the royal style, to stress the personal bonds between prince and subjects, did much to restore the confidence of the provincial elites in the crown. Unsurprisingly, given the province concerned, the high aristocracy emerge with little credit, as Gaston d’Orl´eans, the prince de Conti and, after , the duc de Verneuil were either feckless or relatively inactive as governors. But this does give the impression that France was governed through a neat, single channel of influence, dominated by a ‘royal faction’ in Languedoc, with a monolithic centre of power in the king’s council. This was far from the case with respect to many other provinces or ‘national’ aspects of government, such as the armed forces. Most questionable, however, is Beik’s Marxist view of the state as a tool of the ruling classes, which functioned badly under Richelieu and Mazarin before matters greatly improved under Louis XIV: class solidarity, based on the relationship of members of society to the means of production, looms large in his argument. The state was only relatively autonomous of society, and the strong implication of Beik’s work is that Louis XIV’s France is best seen as a country where the landed elites controlled vast parts of the state in their own economic interest. However, first, one cannot see Languedoc as typical of France: it is unsurprising that the king tended to ‘ally’ with members of the institutional and landed elites in this province, because other groups present elsewhere, notably the various sorts of royal financial officials, were absent here. Second, Beik’s exploitative elite in Languedoc were not, contrary to the impression he gives and the assumption he openly makes, representative of the whole propertied elite, nor by any means a majority of it, but consisted of several small groups of office-holders and members of the estates, operating in various provincial institutions. He casts the net of social support for ‘absolutism’ too narrowly, and does not examine the monarchy’s desire to uphold the rights 

  

Kettering, ‘The Decline of Great Noble Clientage’, –; Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients, pp. , –: she allows for continued noble clientage within the royal army under Louis XIV, but devotes no attention to it (pp. –). W. Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France. State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, ). See below, p. .  Ibid., p. . Beik, Absolutism and Society, pp. –.



‘Absolute monarchy’, dynasticism and the army and privileges of the smaller property-holders. The rejection of Mousnier’s crude model of vertical social solidarity based around the defence of privilege against the encroaching state does not have to entail belief in the fundamental pervasiveness of class-based social conflict. Nor should one set the social point of ‘class division’ at a high level on the basis of ideological conviction. Moreover, social conflict on the basis of economic relations requires a strong degree of consciousness among contemporaries that it exists. But humans have, and always have had, a mass of different interests and solidarities which guide them – family, personal ambition or lack of it, vocation, friendship and sense of obligation, gender, religion, language and ‘nation’. A more subtle Marxist approach comes from David Parker, who, in a series of articles and books, has argued that much of the apparent ‘centralisation’ undertaken by the crown was in response to appeals from members of the elites, or stemmed from a royal desire to satisfy their interests. This position is most clearly articulated in his analysis of the development of the legal system in the seventeenth century. Parker sets his work within the context of a basic class struggle for the control of material resources, but his definition of class is based not simply upon economic circumstances: he leans heavily on Gramsci’s notion of class ‘hegemony’, which also recognised political, legal, social, cultural and ideological dimensions to power relations. There is a great deal to be said for this approach, though it is still open to challenge as overly schematic and takes insufficient account of the position of economically secure but politically impotent sections of society, who also had a stake in order and effective royal justice. Moreover, Parker tends to see competition for resources, which were generated and sustained by the populace, as an end in itself rather than a means to enhance a non-economic goal – the enhancement of family status. The other significant problem with such an approach, however, is this: the moment you concede that class is defined by more than just economic position it becomes, in an ancien r´egime setting in particular, very difficult to talk about any form of class solidarity – for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France was a tesselated society, divided by myriad factors. Could the state, in such circumstances, really be said to be serving the interests of a ruling class hegemony in the Marxist sense? 





Ibid., pp. , . By contrast, Hilton Root, in his study of the crown and the peasantry in Burgundy, one of the other pays d’´etats along with Languedoc, shows how the crown defended the communal traditions and property rights of the peasantry from noble encroachments, albeit to secure easier governance of the province: Peasants and King in Burgundy. Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (London, ), pp. , –, , –. In a subsequent work, Beik acknowledges that the ‘middling sort’ were important in towns, below the administrative elite, but he suggests an exaggerated opposition between the male elites, on one side, and women, children and servants, whatever their situation, on the other: see W. Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France. The Culture of Retribution (Cambridge, ), pp. –. The term ‘nation’ in the early modern period tended to define people by their common language. D. Parker, Class and State in Ancien R´egime France. The Road to Modernity? (London, ); D. Parker, ‘Sovereignty, Absolutism and the Function of the Law in Seventeenth-Century France’, Past and Present  (), –.



General introduction The most convincing variant on the ‘cooperation and compromise’ view of Louis XIV’s regime comes from James Collins, whose study of Brittany between  and  provides a vital corrective to the more sweeping and polemical of Beik’s claims. He plays up the continued importance of a ‘Society of Orders’, which makes class too blunt an instrument of analysis for early modern France, and by reference to the  Capitation tax rolls he demonstrates that most nobles were not part of an economic ruling class, nor did they occupy an equivalent political position. Yet, as Collins reveals, the range of people with an interest in upholding order in society stretched from bishops and peers down to small shopkeepers, artisan masters, and, in the countryside, to ploughmen, all of whom had a stake in stability and the propertied world but who were not part of any ruling elite. This applied also to their families, and even to many of their employees and dependants. Most critically, Collins shows that even a common identity of interest within the better-off sections of society was thwarted by the differing nature of their property and their relationship to the fiscalism imposed on the province. Most obviously, the state and the nobility were competitors for the extraction of the agricultural surplus produced by the peasantry: the one demanded land taxes, while the others sought to maximise their income from renting out land and, to a lesser extent, from enforcing feudal dues. Only the minority of noble families active in the major provincial institutions benefited from royal permission to share in the revenues generated for the king in Brittany. The dominant ‘class’ across France was composed of a small elite within the seigneurs, not the nobility as a whole. For James Collins, and to a significant extent for me, the issues of the distribution of political power, obedience and the nature of sovereignty lie at the heart of questions about ‘absolute monarchy’. In a refutation of Marxist standpoints, Collins has already stressed the need to focus on this point: Absolutism was not a system of government nor was it a simple process of state-building: absolutism was the belief that the king had absolute authority to make positive law. The monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was ‘absolutist’ only in the sense that it constantly sought to rule France by means of promulgated laws, thus placing political discourse in the area of unimpeded royal authority.

Using the justification of indivisible sovereign power, Louis XIV’s aggressive intervention in the kingdom’s customary traditions was manifested in other ways as well: legal status and privileges were held to derive their legitimacy solely from the king, a message rammed home in the recherche de noblesse of the late s. In the army, Louis was particularly anxious to reassert the king’s right to appoint whomsoever he wished to positions of command, whether a humble sous-lieutenant in an infantry regiment, or the general-in-chief of an entire field force. He was also concerned  

 Ibid., p. . J. Collins, Classes, Estates and Order in Early Modern Brittany (Cambridge, ). On the recherches, see J. Wood, The Nobility of the Election of Bayeux, –. Continuity through Change (Princeton, ), pp. –.



‘Absolute monarchy’, dynasticism and the army with re-establishing order through the issuing of regulations, exhortations to obedience and rewards for service, and through the supply of adequate funding for his forces. This was part and parcel of the ‘absolutist’ agenda of controlling taxation, promulgating legislation, and declaring and waging war without encountering any serious hindrance or opposition from other institutions or individuals in the realm. There is much to commend this analysis, but we must, of course, take into account several factors which qualify the ‘absolutist’ picture. First, as argued throughout this book, Louis had to compromise at many levels with government officials and military officers to achieve anything. Second, a great deal of what is nowadays considered to be the ‘state’, and on which Louis had to rely, was, in the late seventeenth century, still in private hands. This was especially the case with royal finances. Because so many of the upper elites invested in tax-farmers and other financiers, the crown therefore depended upon the high aristocracy to provide much of the backing for the state’s activities. Third, one must acknowledge that, however exalted the claims made by Louis XIV and his propagandists, both Mettam and Collins are almost certainly correct that his regime after  faced passive resistance and disobedience from elite and canaille alike, notably deliberate evasion of regulations, fraud and smuggling when it suited them. But much of the tranquillity of the country stemmed from a shift in mentalit´es. After  the French were living in a very different political culture where overt defiance of authority, especially of the king, was rapidly becoming unacceptable. It was an environment in which ‘absolute monarchy’ could appear to flourish because actual opposition was anathema to most members of the elite. At the very heart of the change in moral values was the belief that people – especially nobles serving in the army – should subjugate themselves to the supreme authority, and that the grands should bow to the will of the king in all matters. Louis XIV was fortunate in that the ethos of non-resistance, ‘politesse’ and ‘honnˆetet´e’ was beginning, in the decade or so after the Frondes (–), to gain a grip on the imaginations of the upper echelons of French society. To appreciate the change in cultural attitudes one needs to be aware of the emergence in the first half of the seventeenth century of a powerful strain of conduct literature which sought to prescribe a reformed ideal of the nobleman. Complementing the printed word and the theatrical play,   

On the financial system, see the brilliant work by Daniel Dessert: Argent, pouvoir et soci´et´e au Grand Si`ecle (Paris, ). Contrast this with the previous hundred years: A. Jouanna, Le devoir de r´evolte. La noblesse fran¸caise et la gestation de l’Etat moderne, – (Paris, ), esp. pp. – on the post- era. The issue of ‘politesse’, ‘honnˆetet´e’, the ‘honnˆete homme’ and courtesy has been tackled by a number of cultural historians and litt´erateurs. The best works are: M. Magendie, La politesse mondaine et les th´eories de l’honnˆetet´e, en France, au XVIIe si`ecle, de  a`  (Paris, ); and, on England, where courtesy and civility were becoming slightly more abstract concepts, see A. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility. Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, ). Original works of literature which stand out are: N. Faret, L’honneste homme, ou l’art de plaire a` la court,



General introduction the appearance of several dozen academies for the education and refinement of the young nobility served to instil these new codes of conduct in the wealthier members of this Order. The changes in French society which resulted over the course of the Grand Si`ecle had ramifications for both high politics and the behaviour of the regimental officers of the French army, but it took time for the new messages to filter through. In , at the time of the accession of the four-year-old Louis XIV, France was, in the words of a recent thesis, ‘a society that still subscribed to a warrior aristocratic culture that stressed individual autonomy and independence’. For well over a decade, voices had been calling for a reformed ethical order, and there were already signs that the values they promoted were beginning to permeate noble society during the reign of Louis XIII. However, the high aristocracy and ordinary nobles alike found themselves increasingly forced to reflect on the idea of honour and on the nature of their conduct. The concept of heroism came under scrutiny in the s owing to the Grand Cond´e’s rebellion and the unacceptable rabble-rousing of the duc de Beaufort, ‘le roi des Halles’. Because civility was already being encouraged in society, the treason of Cond´e – the hero of Rocroi and Lens – and his subsequent massacre of notables in Paris, was consequently all the more shocking. It became no longer good enough to prize one’s moral independence and to pursue personal ‘gloire’ in the king’s service, not even if one were a prince of the blood. Such attitudes had unleashed the forces of irrationality and had led to armed treason against the crown, a course of action which was decidedly neither heroic nor ‘honnˆete’. Self-discipline, restraint, politeness, constancy and dedication to the king emerged as the cornerstones of a reformed ethical order to which one had to subscribe. In the words of David Parker, ‘the heroic assertion of the will so vividly portrayed in the great tragedies of Corneille slowly gave way to a noble stoicism which could be portrayed as a form of virtue’. These ideas were all pushed forcefully by Louis XIV in a revived royal court from the mid-s; and it was in large part a desire to emulate the ‘bon ton’ of courtiers that encouraged the spread of

  



ed. M. Magendie (Paris, ), originally published , , , , , , , , , , ; J. de Calli`eres, La fortune des gens de qualit´e, et des gentils-hommes particuliers (Paris, , and further editions); A. de Courtin, Nouveau trait´e de la civilit´e qui se pratique en France parmi les honnˆetes hommes (Paris, , and further editions); J. Trotti de La Ch´etardie, Instructions pour un jeune seigneur, ou, l’id´ee d’un galant homme,  vols. (Paris, , and further editions). On the academies and noble education, see chapter , pp. –. J. Inglis-Jones, ‘The Grand Cond´e in Exile: Power Politics in France, Spain and the Spanish Netherlands’ (D. Phil. dissertation, Oxford, ), p. . M. Bannister, ‘Crescit ut aspicitur: Cond´e and the Reinterpretation of Heroism, –’, in K. Cameron and E. Woodrough, eds., Ethics and Politics in Seventeenth-Century France. Essays in Honour of Derek A. Watts (Exeter, ), pp. –; Parker, Class and State in Ancien R´egime France, pp. –, an excellent section on the shift in attitudes. Saint-Maurice, vol. I, p. : Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  June . See also the acclaimed work by Norbert Elias, The Court Society (Oxford, ), pp. , –.



‘Absolute monarchy’, dynasticism and the army notions of civility and ‘honnˆetet´e’ among the wider elites. With the assistance of conduct literature specifically on military officership, which has never received serious attention from historians, the new ethos spread gradually into the army, though the pace of behavioural reform was slow. How these changes affected matters will be considered in chapter , but here it is worth remarking that impetuous and apparently irrational armed behaviour lost a great deal of its earlier respectability, reflected in the greater caution urged on shock troops, such as grenadiers, during combat after . The last time nobles en masse put personal ‘gloire’ above collective duty to the monarchy and the rest of the army came in  at the crossing of the Rhine, where the deaths of a number of youthful grands such as Longueville earned the noble jeunesse the grave displeasure of the king. And by  influence over subordinate nobles within the state and the quality of one’s personal service to the monarch, conducted with probity and obedience, now counted far more than the possession of large, semi-private, military entourages.             So far historians have continued to discuss the ancien r´egime in terms of the ability of the state to enforce its will on society, and the willingness of society to accept impositions and interference from above. The enforcement and reception of political authority is an important aspect of historical enquiry, and one which legitimately continues to attract attention. The main protagonists in seventeenth-century France did not, however, view matters exclusively in this way – theirs was a world dominated by dynasticism rather more than by concern about ‘absolute monarchy’. Yet, this all-pervasive concern has been absent from most work published in the last two hundred years. Family history has been relegated to the sidelines, in biographies or in case studies of a particular noble house, when it should have been placed centre-stage. Fundamentally, the early modern French state possessed interests of its own which related both to the means of production, distribution and exchange, and to international geopolitical forces. To see it standing above society would be too crude, for it was itself an agent and player, although the king’s authority was principally exercised on his behalf by members of the propertied elites. But the state had the potential and desire, which it occasionally realised, to be autonomous of the ‘dominant classes’ in society, and it behaved in such a way because private interest was present at the very apex of public power. Peter Campbell’s definition of France   

´ ee and the On social emulation, see G. Rowlands, ‘The Ethos of Blood and Changing Values? Robe, Ep´ French Armies,  to ’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies  (), –. See pp. –. See T. Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions. A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge, ), esp. pp. –, –.



General introduction in the years c. – as a ‘baroque state’ is perhaps the most helpful characterisation by any scholar thus far: This state was a socio-political entity, whose structures were interwoven with society, which it tried to rise above but with which it inevitably had to compromise. It endowed itself with grandiose schemes, indulged in flamboyant display, but retained most of those trompe-l’oeil features that promised more than they could deliver.

In my view, Campbell is absolutely right, though such a depiction privileges appearance and spectacle over the promotion of private interest, which was the dominant characteristic of the state in this era. The first three Bourbon monarchs, in essence, saw themselves not as participants in class struggle, but as engaged in the domestic sphere upon the reimposition of order, the protection of property rights (even if circumstances forced them into transgressions of this principle) and the upholding of particular family interests. Certainly rulers would have recognised that this agenda tended to maintain the socio-economic status quo, and both Henri IV and Louis XIV acted in a manner to convince the nobility that the state was the arena for their activity. But such conservatism was tempered by other considerations, foremost among which was the wealth and status of the kingdom as a whole on the international chequerboard. The end goal in all this was to strengthen the hold of the Bourbon dynasty on the realm and enhance its prestige on the international stage. The monarchy had interests of its own which might well diverge from those of the social elites, and it did not shrink when truly necessary from trying to uphold them, no matter what obstruction was thrown up. The justification for this came in shifting contemporary (as opposed to modern) notions of what the state actually was and what role the prince played. As Herbert Rowen so clearly demonstrated, there was a tension at the heart of notions surrounding kingship: did the ruler own the state and rights to wield power, or was kingship an office held in trust, to be exercised for the benefit of the people? By looking at practice as well as theory, Rowen showed how the kings of France from the fifteenth century came to see the throne as endowing them with the possession of inalienable rights granted by necessity and by Providence. Aspects of French allodial custom were being elevated to the status of constitutional thought, and the power of the prince was further reinforced by the theories of indivisible sovereignty put   



P. Campbell, Power and Politics in Old R´egime France – (London, ), p. . Louis XIII undoubtedly felt the same but his reign, and the minority of his son, temporarily convinced many nobles they were being frozen out of the state. It is hard not to believe that Colbert and Louis XIV realised an aggressive mercantilist policy would disturb the social and economic status quo in France, but comfort could be taken from the ways of Providence which shaped and guided a ‘Great Chain of Being’. Had Beik decided to take his study beyond  and into the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession, he would have been confronted with this unavoidable truth: see, e.g., SHAT ˆ  Nov. . A , no. : Louvois to Baville,



‘Absolute monarchy’, dynasticism and the army forward by Jean Bodin, even though Bodin himself cautioned against a proprietary conception of the state. This did not mean that the crown was an absolute freehold: it was a fid´eicommis, held in trust by a family, which gave the ruler the usufruct of the kingdom during his reign. He was supposed to employ the resources of the realm for the benefit of all. But only war and the ways of Providence could decide whether he was doing so. Allied to such notions of ‘proprietary’ control were the principles of dynasticism, which, with regard to both state and society throughout Europe, loomed ever larger from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. Indeed, as the title of this book suggests, it is probably more helpful to conceive of France as a dynastic state rather than an ‘absolute monarchy’. In France the dynastic state was created in stages, beginning with the final erosion of meaningful feudal political relations in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The Habsburg–Valois wars, which occurred around the same time, were dominated by crude notions of inheritance rights (which the French exaggerated in the case of Milan and Naples), but it was the late sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries that saw the crucial domestic adjustments. First of all, the grip of the ruling dynasty, and its collateral branches, was strengthened against other grandes familles, notably the princes e´trangers from Lorraine, Mantua and Savoy who were resident in France in the service of the king. The year , when the status of ‘prince of the blood’ – prince du sang – was given full juridical definition by Henri III, marks a key moment in the evolution of the dynastic state after a very confused hundred years during which precedence and status were inconsistently regulated. On top of this, with the succession crisis of the s and early s theorists such as Hotman provided a receptive Henri IV with an interpretation of the crown as a royal birthright on which one had a claim by virtue of descent and Salic law. Only with the eruption of the War of the Spanish Succession in  did France have to confront a new reality – that most of the rest of Europe had ceased to privilege dynasticism above international equilibrium. Even then it took the French and Spanish Bourbon branches another six decades to finally absorb this fact. ‘Proprietary dynasticism’ had its most extreme European manifestation in France, and reached its zenith with Louis XIV. ‘Absolute monarchy’, in Rowen’s words, was more than just the promulgation of positive laws. It was the king’s ‘entire and perfect’ ownership of the public power, but since the early sixteenth century it had been asserted in royal circles that the king could use his subjects and their private property when necessary. Louis XIV certainly took the view that what was theirs could be his. Given that they saw themselves as the incarnation of the unity of their 



H. H. Rowen, The King’s State. Proprietary Dynasticism in Early Modern France (New Brunswick, NJ, ), pp. , –, –, , –, , –. This book deserves significantly more attention than it has received. R. Jackson, ‘Peers of France and Princes of the Blood’, French Historical Studies  (), –; Rowen, The King’s State, pp. -; on the Spanish Succession, see ibid., pp. –.



General introduction otherwise fissiparous territories and subjects, it is unsurprising that the Bourbon monarchs, even more strongly than their Valois predecessors, regarded their own personal interests as the embodiment of those of the common weal. When clouds threatened on the international horizon, sensitivity toward the actual interests of their subjects tended to decline even further. Ironically, given his wars, Louis felt a strong sense of paternalism towards his people; but such rulership was verging on despotism, however benevolent it could at times be. Because the king was willing to intervene in any way he thought fit to enhance his own position – and frequently did so, if possible using persuasion and enticement – we must be wary of dividing matters in an idealised way into the ‘kingly’ sphere of government, on the one hand, and the ‘private’ sphere of society where Louis XIV was not supposed to tread, on the other. The two arenas were inextricably linked, and the degree of crown interference in ‘private’ affairs depended on the circumstances in which the king found himself. If Louis was relatively sparing in his interventions and sequestrations, then it reflected an awareness (somewhat lacking in his successors) that the strength of his regime and the future of his dynasty depended on the goodwill of the propertied elites. Naturally Louis XIV, like any ruler, had very individual and idiosyncratic ideas of what his dynastic interests actually were. He was intensely suspicious of collateral branches of the Bourbon; he linked his progeny to himself to an extreme extent in controlling the Grand Dauphin’s household and, later, those of his grandsons; and he went out of his way to elevate the position of his bastards in acts of considerable provocation to the grands. Like every other paterfamilias in France who held public office, Louis had interests which transgressed the perceived boundary between public and private. All this notwithstanding, his principal concern was to pass on the throne with its power, prestige and prerogatives intact to his successors: in so many fields Louis XIV demonstrated that he was a man obsessed by the notion of trusteeship and the creation of long-term stability in the state. There is a second justification for calling France a dynastic state under Louis XIV: the place occupied by family in the world of the functionaries and military officers. What mattered above all to most of those associated with the state, from the highest ranking to the lowliest, was the situation of their family, and this concern went way beyond securing the material welfare of their nearest and dearest. Of course, no family was monolithic: dynasties could be disunited, and individuals could, on occasion, rebel against their relatives or act in a self-interested manner. By the late seventeenth century, especially in France, parents were expected to allow their children to make their own choices about their adult occupation, so long as the decisions  



Ibid., pp. –, , –, –. A clear example of the importance of public opinion, even in this early period, is the furore surrounding the introduction of the dixi`eme tax in , where loud objections were raised to the crown discovering the private circumstances of families. See R. Bonney, ‘“Le secret de leurs familles”: The Fiscal and Social Limits of Louis XIV’s dixi`eme’, French History  (), –. See pp. , –.



‘Absolute monarchy’, dynasticism and the army they made would not damage the family’s position in society. But the pressures of family weighed heavily upon individuals, and relatives could be immensely helpful in achieving personal goals. Dynasticism among the French propertied elites was not new in the seventeenth century, nor even in the sixteenth. But by the accession of Louis XIV in  it was the dominant form of social and political currency, cloaking itself in concepts of honour and ‘gloire’. It played a – if not the – crucial role in shaping the development of the French state. As will become clear in the book, this was emphatically the case with the army, but it was true of other areas of government. In  the introduction of the Paulette or droit annuel – a levy paid by civil office-holders to guarantee them the right to pass on their offices at or before death – was a key moment when dynastic principles were entrenched in the state. And the failure to call an Estates-General after  signified the end of collective action in the form of representative politics for most of the French elites. By  there were few vestiges left of either feudalism or representative government which could complicate the business of naked family advancement as the central political concern of the elites. With the development of a standing army and a large royal court to set alongside the Roman Catholic church, dynasticism acquired two more arenas in which it could seek satisfaction, but in these cases in the immediate orbit of the monarch. Historians such as Forster and Dewald have studied individual families in fruitful ways which reveal more about the state and society than some institution-centred works: they have given us profound insights into the assumptions, aspirations, mentalit´es and lifestyles of the nobles, and into the impact of royal demands and state development, economic and financial problems and social relations. It is now time to build on this approach and, using the work of other social historians of the family, look afresh at the institutions of the French monarchy under Louis XIV. In the seventeenth century family meant more than just the household in which you lived with your spouse, offspring, other relatives and servants. Kinship encompassed not only blood relations but also affinity caused by marriage, and still, in this period, spiritual kin in the shape of godparents. There was an awareness of one’s more distant kin, and a sympathy for their interests, which was far stronger than it is today. It is likely that most nobles did not personally know, or know of, people more than four degrees distant from them, but other relatives further removed could enter the consciousness and life of a noble. The collective notion of ‘lignage’, which was 





In early modern Europe, collective, representative bodies existed in large part to mediate the interests of their own members, or the people those members represented, with the aim of hammering out a common position in relation to all other institutions and society as a whole. Their absence encouraged members of the elites to appeal directly for their dynastic interests to the prince. R. Forster, The House of Saulx-Tavanes. Versailles and Burgundy – (London, ); J. Dewald, Pont-St-Pierre –. Lordship, Community, and Capitalism in Early Modern France (London, ); J. Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, – (Oxford, ). After all, Henri IV was twenty-two degrees distant from Henri III!



General introduction so prevalent in the Middle Ages and which bound together numerous branches of families, was no longer current. Instead, in the words of Jean-Louis Flandrin, ‘What made for the strength of family solidarities was the line of descent – in other words, the sharing of the same patronymic surname – and the closeness of relationships.’ Given these crucial elements, family ties could prove remarkably strong, whether one is discussing the nobility, the urban bourgeois, or the more prosperous artisans and property-owning peasants. Moreover, the existing generations of all these groups were acutely aware of the presence of the dead in their world, and they were profoundly concerned with posterity and with progeny yet to be born. The way early modern men and women viewed themselves in terms of ancestry and issue is the fundamental difference between a sense of family and a sense of dynasty. And in the seventeenth century dynasticism, with its associated planning, family strategies and maintenance of order, was at its height, a fact recognised by the crown in scores of letters patent which mentioned the forebears of the recipients. In contrast to the early Middle Ages, Natalie Zemon Davis has argued that, ‘The family unit, whatever its spread, conceived of its future as requiring intervention and effort, rather than simple reliance on traditional custom and providence.’ A marked feature of the period from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century was the widespread use of such planning, the awareness of family history and the patriarchal nature of the dynasticism which gave it greater coherence than before. For the nobility this became all the more necessary, as they sought to recover legitimacy after the French Wars of Religion, and redefined themselves as an Order based upon birth, with occupation a personal choice which could enhance or degrade that status. In the seventeenth century, peaking in the decades between  and , there was a huge increase in the production of family histories, in which were recorded not just a few glorious episodes from the lives of ancestors but more mundane material too. This stemmed in part from the growing need to stress birth  



 



J.-L. Flandrin, Families in Former Times. Kinship, Household and Sexuality (Cambridge, ; orig. version in French, publ. ), pp. –, citation from p. . Warnings have been issued that one must not take too functional a view of relations between the living and the dead, especially for Roman Catholic cultures, but here I am concerned principally with highlighting the sense of family continuity and the example of ancestors. See B. Gordon and P. Marshall, ‘Introduction: Placing the Dead in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe’ in Gordon and Marshall, eds., The Place of the Dead. Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, ), pp. –. E.g. BNF Clair. , fols. r –r : letters patent for the erection of the comt´e of Lude into a dukedom, July . See also, J.-P. Labatut, ‘Patriotisme et noblesse sous le r`egne de Louis XIV’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine  (), . N. Zemon Davis, ‘Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France’, Daedalus  (), –, citation from p. . E. Schalk, From Valor to Pedigree. Ideas of Nobility in France in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Princeton, ), pp. , , , , , – , , –, , –,  – , . Sound for the period before , but fundamentally wrong about the demilitarisation of the nobility after that time. Davis, ‘Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny’,  – ; J. Smith, The Culture of Merit. Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France,  – (Ann Arbor, ), pp. – .



‘Absolute monarchy’, dynasticism and the army and descent as the foundation for noble status, and this in turn was stimulated by the likelihood of periodic crown investigations of families for proof of their status. These recherches de noblesse always initiated a great deal of genealogical work. The thoroughness of Colbert’s recherche of the late s, the need to present proofs of status for admission to all sorts of institutions under Louis XIV, and the high degree of noble literacy by this period led to a greater awareness of dynasty in France than in any previous era. Dynasticism was not about a family standing still. It was about improving one’s position in society, and this was by no means simply a question of material assets. Certainly in those regions of France where partible inheritance was especially well entrenched the need for distinguished military service to secure solid dowries and rewards from the crown was an important consideration. But, by and large, power and financial success were not in themselves the principal motivating factors for early modern families – rather, they were the means to the far more important end of long-term social progression and greater respectability for the dynasty. Families who were mere sieurs aspired to acquire the more prestigious seigneuries, and families with seigneuries sought to buy comt´es or marquisates, or transform their existing lands into such dignities. Military nobles could aspire to become marshals of France, but French nobles in general hoped that ultimately they or their descendants, however remote, might be received into the ranks of the ducs et pairs. Meanwhile, prestigious and/or lucrative marriages, along with service to the king in some form or other, would help them maintain and enhance their position in society. The intensity of such pretensions was scoffed at by the English at the time, but one would do well to remember that a ‘moral identity’, provided principally by legal status, title and length of lineage, was profoundly important for one’s overall position in French society. Those who worked closely with the crown, as provincial governors, intendants, urban councillors, financial officials, judges and lawyers in the royal courts, and army officers, were part of an institutional elite who, like other members of the propertied elites, sought to strengthen their own position on the basis of family interests. Ministers, of course, had the greatest opportunity to advance their families, and indeed were often criticised for helping no-one but their kin. But they were all too aware that their time in office could be brought to an abrupt end by a change of ruler or a political crisis, which would sideline them and their family from the expected rewards of royal service. In  Honor´e Courtin commiserated with the marquis   



On the social stratification of the grands, see appendix , pp. –. BL Add. Mss. , fol. r: anon. to Vernon,  Sep. . French society was also characterised by distinctions between robe nobles – who, loosely speaking, were active in the judiciary, the financial administration and provincial government – and the e´p´ee nobles – who were active in the army or navy, or merely resided on their estates with no particular offices. The difference, however, was not fixed and families and individuals could undergo metamorphosis from one to another. See Rowlands, ‘The Ethos of Blood’. Saint-Maurice, vol. I, : Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  July .



General introduction de Pomponne upon his dismissal as Foreign Secretary: ‘I quite understand that you have every reason to be afflicted for not being able to do for your family in the time fortune smiled upon you that which we have seen and which we will see done every day for those who occupy the first places in the state.’ The explicit link between public activity and family interest made by Courtin was one most contemporaries would have recognised. The same notions apply not just to the ‘civil’ institutional elites but also to the army officer corps, whose interests were better appreciated after  by Louis XIV, and to a lesser extent by the Le Tellier. As with the other groups of officials, Louis was determined to give them a far greater stake in the state, from which they would derive legitimately granted spoils. There is a black side to this picture, of which even the most dynastically minded contemporaries could not be unaware. Corruption, largely manifested in financial fraud, as we shall see in the chapters to come, remained widespread. In the era of ‘proprietary dynasticism’ it is best defined as siphoning off revenues from the state and its activities without the permission of the sovereign prince. In every human society, the principle of the ‘fraud triangle’ seems to hold good: the three factors leading to fraud are need, opportunity, and the ability to rationalise one’s behaviour. However, a social system which is highly competitive, in a world where there is no automatic provision for old age and retirement beyond the assets amassed and invested over a working life, and where you are likely to be declining if you are not striving to push yourself up, is going to produce a governmental system that has endemic corruption. Naturally, at a time when personal contacts meant everything, the higher up the hierarchy you were, the more the crown would acknowledge your needs and aspirations, and understand your problems. Consequently, real corruption tended to come lower down the administrative hierarchy, because satisfactory legitimate exploitation of society through the state, or adequate honorific rewards, were considerably more the privilege of those nearer the apex of power. Dynastic societies which elevate the assistance of one’s ‘little platoon’ above public service, and which are grounded in agrarian production and small-scale industry, combined with a weak state which relies on its servants to police each other and which may not be able to ensure the adequate flow of revenue, are therefore especially vulnerable to corruption. But Jean-Claude Waquet has pointed out the deep reluctance of French historians to tackle this issue, even though it was, he says indignantly, a ‘scourge’ which ‘penetrated the ancien r´egime’. That someone somewhere suffered nobody can doubt, and at least some contemporaries, and the law, did understand the boundaries between licit gain derived from office and corrupt practice. It is just possible, though, that without some continuing measure of corruption the armies of Louis XIV would not have functioned quite as well as they did. Extreme  

Bib Ars , fol. r:  Nov. . Pomponne was far bolder in settling his family’s position during his second tenure of office in –. J.-C. Waquet, Corruption. Ethics and Power in Florence, – (Oxford, , orig. version in French, publ. ), pp. –, –. A work of profound significance.



‘Absolute monarchy’, dynasticism and the army fraud had to be curbed, but on a small scale it could keep the French war machine ticking over, however much that might irritate king and ministers in the short term.      This is the crucial historiographical and cultural background for the seventeenthcentury French state, but we shall henceforth be more concerned with the specific relationship between the king and those privileged subjects serving in, and associated with, the army. My aim, over the course of the coming chapters, is to place the army as a central part both of French society and of the state, and to pull together the multiple influences shaping the military force that became a paradigm of the standing army for contemporaries and historians alike. The hundred or so years from the close of the Franco-Spanish conflict in  to the outbreak of the American Revolution in  represent the golden age of the standing army, a period between the era of the military enterpriser and the emergence of the citizen army. These years also marked the high plateau of ‘absolute monarchy’, and the link between this system of government and the standing army has been most forcefully made by Jeremy Black in his grand commentary on the ‘military revolution’. Whether one agrees with the term ‘revolution’ or not, this was a series of developments which supposedly changed the shape of European – even global – warfare and the scope and nature of western government during the early modern period. Here is not the place for a full-scale discussion of the merits and drawbacks of rival theses on this phenomenon, but my own standpoint runs roughly as follows: if significant changes in the design of fortresses and the nature of gunpowder weaponry can be traced to the late fifteenth century, they did not have a major impact on government, strategy or military tactics until the s and s, the real watershed in this regard. During the succeeding hundred years rulers tried to adapt their institutions and methods of governance to cope with the new realities of war. But their task was infinitely complicated by the geographical expansion and political intensification of dynastic competition between the leading powers on the international stage, by the individual ambitions princes harboured in 



John Lynn has described the armies of these separate periods under slightly different but equally valid labels: the ‘aggregate contract army’, the ‘state commission army’ and the ‘popular conscript army’: Giant of the Grand Si`ecle (Cambridge, ), pp. –. The ‘military revolution’ should be appproached through the following works: J. Black, A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society – (Basingstoke, ); D. Parrott, ‘The Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe’, History Today  (), –; F. Tallett, War and Society in Early-Modern Europe, – (London, ); D. Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London, ); G. Parker, The Military Revolution. Military Innovation and the Rise of the West – (nd edn, Cambridge, ). The most important essays on this subject by Michael Roberts, Geoffrey Parker, Simon Adams, David Parrott, Jeremy Black and John Lynn, as well as a historiographical review by the editor, can be found in: C. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate. Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Oxford, ).



General introduction a more intensely personal way than their forefathers, by the explosion of religious conflict which fractured political units and severed or complicated allegiances, and by the deterioration of the economic situation in much of Europe from about . As John Elliott, Tony Thompson and now David Parrott have demonstrated, in such circumstances rulers struggled to uphold their interests and impose their will, and found themselves with no alternative but to deploy resources on a hand-tomouth basis. However necessary major military reforms may have been, particularly in France and Spain, little could be achieved even when governments had time to think through the problems they faced with their military. Of course, minor palliative changes could be introduced, but during the seventeenth century great leaps forward were usually made only in years of peace, whether one is talking about Sweden (– and the s), Savoy (the s and s), or the Austrian Habsburg monarchy (the s and early s). This was equally true of France. There, in the s and early s, a dramatic improvement in public finances and significant changes in royal attitudes towards the possession of military power simultaneously gave to the king firmer control over his forces and to the elites a far stronger degree of security and interest in the army. These changes laid the basis for a large and more sustainable military machine. My work is obviously indebted to those scholars who have already looked at the French army of the ancien r´egime, but the spur to this book is the belief that grave deficiencies exist in the historiography of this subject. In particular, historians have focused excessively on the War Ministry to the detriment of other aspects of the military administration. The idea that the War Ministry was the motor for improvement in the military shines through in the first volume of the recent Histoire militaire de la France, where the primary administrative role during the reign of Louis XIV is occupied by the Secretaries of State for War to the virtual exclusion of anybody else, including the regimental officers themselves. The first serious study of the armies of Louis XIV’s war machine was undertaken by Camille Rousset in the mid-nineteenth century in a hagiographic work cloaked respectably in extensive archival research. Rousset focused upon the tenure of power as Secretary of State for War of Franc¸ois-Michel Le Tellier, marquis de Louvois, between  and his death in . The effect of this four-volume work was to project Louvois as an almost heroic personality, establishing his reputation as a dedicated, loyal and far-sighted centraliser who, by the time he died, had equipped his monarch with the foremost military machine in Europe and brought the French 



J. H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares. The Statesman in an Age of Decline (London, ); I. A. A. Thompson, War and Government in Habsburg Spain, – (London, ); I. A. A. Thompson, War and Society in Habsburg Spain (London, ); D. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army. War, Government and Society in France, – (Cambridge, ). Parrott’s book appeared too late to incorporate references into this book, so I have cited, where necessary, his thesis and articles, having been assured that his views have not fundamentally changed. P. Contamine and A. Corvisier, eds., Histoire militaire de la France, vol. I: Des origines a`  (Paris, ).



‘Absolute monarchy’, dynasticism and the army officer corps under a certain degree of subjection. Following on from this, Louis Andr´e sought to alter the picture by rehabilitating Louvois’s father Michel Le Tellier. The elder Le Tellier was Secretary of War on his own from  to , and then exercised the role jointly with Louvois for the next fifteen years before he became Chancellor of France and left his son in sole charge. Andr´e argued that in the s Le Tellier had laid out many of the plans and administrative reforms which had hitherto been attributed to Louvois, even if he grudgingly conceded that more effective implementation for the most part had to await the era of peace after . But in some respects he went too far in his desire to attribute to Michel Le Tellier the transformation of the royal army: he believed that royal control reached its peak in –, just before the War of Devolution, a serious exaggeration which betrayed little awareness of subsequent change; he constantly suggested that problems had been solved rather than merely ameliorated; and he misunderstood or missed entirely some key developments relating to logistical support, the ownership of units, the politics and structure of the high command, and patronage relations. By the second half of the twentieth century the debate was still dominated by whether Le Tellier or Louvois had done more to improve the French army, but over recent decades Andr´e Corvisier and his disciples have subtly modified the earlier picture presented by Rousset and Andr´e. In his  biography of Louvois and, more recently, his essays in the Histoire militaire de la France, Corvisier argued convincingly that ‘progress’ in military administration was not linear but occurred only periodically, coinciding with the two eras of peace in Louis XIV’s reign, – and –. In addition, he mentions some of the most important changes which were made to the army and makes shrewd comments about their success or otherwise. However, with the exception of the intendants and commissaires des guerres, most changes receive very limited attention and Corvisier makes little attempt to grade their relative importance. Moreover, while he has a highly developed and nuanced appreciation of ministerial rivalries and politics, he severely misjudged the role of the great nobility in the state and particularly their relationships with the Le Tellier family. Corvisier’s study of Louvois therefore remains seriously incomplete as an explanation for both the evolution of the army and the world of high politics. Since the appearance of Corvisier’s biography of Louvois other historians have sought to modify further our picture of the early modern French army. The most distinguished scholar, Jean Chagniot, has produced several critically important essays  

 

C. Rousset, Histoire de Louvois et de son administration politique et militaire,  vols. (Paris, –). Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois. To be fair to Andr´e he did look at Le Tellier private papers and other documentation, but he was obsessed with the question of proving the father to be greater than the son and his views on the army itself did not change between the two books. Corvisier, Louvois; see also chapters – and  in Contamine and Corvisier, Histoire militaire de la France, vol. I. Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –.



General introduction on the seventeenth-century officer corps, which correct aspects of earlier arguments and place military politics and administration in a social and cultural setting, but his published work on Louis XIV’s armies has so far only scratched the surface. More tangentially, Jay Smith has used the army as a testing ground to examine the contribution of ideas of merit to the construction of the ‘absolute’ state under Louis XIV and to its ultimate demise in the s. Smith is undoubtedly correct to portray Louis as a monarch with a profoundly personal, as opposed to institutional, conception of the state, but, despite the useful research on changing cultural notions, his book is essentially a history of discourse which fails to connect with the political and social realities of the late seventeenth century. Ultimately his thesis, that the promotion of the idea of an ubiquitous ‘royal gaze’ was the key to the development of the French state, is reductionist, ignores the mass of other means employed by the crown, and has limited value as an explanatory tool for change related to the army. We are consequently still reliant upon the work of Rousset, Andr´e and Corvisier for our understanding of the army of Louis XIV. In large part, the shortcomings of their works can be explained in a similar way: there is a general failure to look at other important figures, or even the collectivity of the officer corps, of the period – in their own right – a symptom of the way that e´tatiste and progressivist notions of political history still held much sway in France until very recently. Individuals and events fill their pages; surrounding circumstances and discussions of collectivities are all but ignored. This is not a criticism that can be levelled, of course, at writings of the ‘new military history’, of which Corvisier is ironically the leading exponent and something of a pioneer. This new strain of enquiry has sought, first, to place the military of the early modern period in the full context of its times, by looking at the interrelationship between the army and society, and some of the 





Chagniot’s more notable works include: ‘Mobilit´e sociale et arm´ee (vers  – vers )’, XVIIe Si`ecle  (), –; chapters  to , in C. Croubois, ed., L’officier fran¸cais des origines a` nos jours (St-Jean-d’Ang´ely, ); ‘Ethique et pratique de la “profession des armes” chez les officiers franc¸ais au XVIIe si`ecle’, in V. Barrie-Curien, ed., Guerre et pouvoir en Europe au XVIIe si`ecle (Paris, ), pp. –; chapters  to , in J. Delmas and A. Corvisier, eds., Histoire militaire de la France, vol. II: De  a`  (Paris, ); ‘La rationalisation de l’arm´ee franc¸aise apr`es ’, in Arm´ees et diplomatie dans l’Europe du XVIIe si`ecle: Actes du colloque de  de l’association des historiens modernistes des universit´es  (Paris, ), –. See also his superb th`ese d’´etat: Paris et l’arm´ee au XVIIIe si`ecle (Paris, ). Smith, The Culture of Merit, pp. –; J. Smith, ‘“Our Sovereign’s Gaze”: Kings, Nobles, and State Formation in Seventeenth-Century France’, French Historical Studies  (), –; J. Smith, ‘Honour, Royal Service and the Cultural Origins of the French Revolution: Interpreting the Language of Army Reform, –’, French History  (), –. Only three scholars have written serious biographies of members of the high command in this period: P. de S´egur, La jeunesse du mar´echal de Luxembourg, – (Paris, ); P. de S´egur, Le mar´echal de Luxembourg et le prince d’Orange, – (Paris, ); P. de S´egur, Le tapissier de Notre Dame. Les derni`eres ann´ees du mar´echal de Luxembourg (Paris, ); J. B´erenger, Turenne (Paris, ); A. Blanchard, Vauban (Paris, ).



‘Absolute monarchy’, dynasticism and the army research conducted in this spirit has been extremely fruitful and illuminating. This ‘new military history’ has come in for criticism because it tends to ignore fighting and campaigning, but there is every justification for such an approach: anybody who has ever done military service knows that it consists of profoundly long periods of inactivity, routine, and humdrum administration, punctuated only periodically by short moments of great activity, extreme stress and terror. Concentration on battles, sieges and manoeuvring was the hallmark of the ‘old military history’, which in most cases ignored vast areas of military life and the impact of military affairs on society at large. A more powerful criticism of the ‘new military history’, as it has been practised in France, is that it tends, with rare exceptions, to ignore the political world which shaped the armed forces and which was in turn shaped by them. Moreover, little has been done to relate the army as an institution of state to the underlying cultural concerns of the time with good behaviour, order and dynasticism. Reflecting the strengths and weaknesses of the current corpus of literature is the work of John Lynn, who has looked at a huge range of issues concerning the army: its expansion, its supply, the military administration, the high command, the officer corps, the rank-and-file, weaponry, tactics and strategy. His major work, Giant of the Grand Si`ecle, is an admirable synthesis of existing knowledge, to which Lynn adds original ideas on the size of the army, motivation among the men, and tactics. It will become apparent at various places throughout this book where I believe Lynn to be seriously mistaken, but it should be made clear here that his work is military history with very little wider contextual consideration of political, social and economic matters; on the politics of the army it remains e´tatiste; and it is opaque on some key questions. Heavily dependent on published secondary literature on the army, the work of other historians on French society under the Bourbon kings is scarcely noted, and many of Lynn’s arguments do not stand up to close scrutiny in the light of archival research. This book is an attempt to present the development of the French army in terms that seventeenth-century men and women would have understood it. As such it 





A. Corvisier, ‘Introduction g´en´erale’, in Contamine and Corvisier, eds., Histoire militaire de la France, vol. I, pp. ix–x. Corvisier’s own thesis on the soldier in the first half of the eighteenth century was the first, and most formidable, example of this. Other examples include A. Blanchard, Les ‘ing´enieurs du roy’ de Louis XIV a` Louis XVI. Etude du corps des fortifications (Montpellier, ); J.-E. Iung, ‘Service des vivres et munitionnaires sous l’ancien r´egime: la fourniture du pain de munition aux troupes de Flandre et d’Allemagne de  a` ’ (dissertation for the diplˆome d’archiviste-pal´eographe Ecole Nationale des Chartes, Paris, ); M. Verg´e-Franceschi, Les officiers g´en´eraux de la marine royale (–),  vols. (Paris, ). There are signs that this problem has been taken on board, but there is now a danger that French historians are reverting too much to high politics: e.g., Y. Combeau, Le comte d’Argenson. Ministre de Louis XV (Paris, ). Lynn, Giant; J. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV (London, ). For a detailed critique of these two books, see my review of them in French History  (), –.



General introduction is grounded in a wide range of sources in the hope that a narrow institutional and ‘progressive’ perspective can be avoided. Most of my archival research has concentrated on the functioning and administration of the land forces at Louis XIV’s disposal, using the material at Vincennes as a bedrock. In addition to reexamining material from the years of Louvois’s ministry, I have looked at a great many of the archives relating to the s, a decade which has barely been touched by earlier historians. Much of the material I have drawn from the War Archives has not therefore seen the historical light before. In addition, I have actively looked for evidence not only of how the system was working but also of how it was not working – what was going wrong and why. Such a counter-intuitive approach can present us with fresh insights into the way the system was supposed to function in the normal course of events. I have complemented the Vincennes material with a considerable array of evidence drawn from other French and British archives: records relating to the financial world; a small amount of legal documentation; and the private papers of generals, peers and even regimental officers where they have survived. Published memoirs, journals and correspondence have been trawled extensively for the information and assumptions that they contain, as has an underrated strain of contemporary conduct literature written with army officers in mind. Finally, I have not only drawn on the extensive secondary material published on the army and government in this period, but have also consulted the work of social and cultural historians on early modern France. Throughout the book run several themes which differentiate it from earlier works. Divided into three sections, my book looks in turn at the obvious areas of military administration: the War Ministry and its servants, the regiments and officer corps of the army, and the high command. But it also devotes attention to neglected aspects of these themes, attempts to understand matters from the point of view of the lesser players, and builds upon the work of recent scholars into the era of the Thirty Years War. In part I, chapter  examines the social and political status of the Le Tellier family, who, over three successive generations, occupied the post of Secretary of State for War between  and ; chapter  maps the ebb and flow of the Le Tellier’s power, and provides something of a narrative context; chapter  examines the civilian agents working for the War Ministry, both those toiling in the central bureaux at Paris and the court, and those administering logistical matters out in the field – the intendants d’arm´ee and the commissaires des guerres; chapter  explores for the first time the military treasury of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, which was a public body but was controlled by private networks of financiers and agents; and chapter  suggests the extent of the corruption which the civilian administrators perpetrated. Part II on the officer corps and the standing army examines the full range of military administration in the regiments. Chapter  looks at the framework of rules and conventions surrounding the ownership of military units and the maintenance, raising and disbanding of forces; it stresses the importance of providing something 

‘Absolute monarchy’, dynasticism and the army of a career structure for officers; and it tackles the question of the military inspectorate which grew up under Louis XIV. The focus in all of this is on the creation of a climate of sustainable military activity. Chapter  then examines the internal administration of the regiments of foot, cavalry and dragoons, centring on pay and funding, recruitment and the containment of desertion, and the standard financial burdens of service on officers. Next, chapter  looks at the cultural pressures officers found themselves under both to conform to the king’s laws and orders and to uphold traditional noble ideals; it considers the onuses placed on the families of officers, and the way officers sought to relieve the burdens of service, especially by means of fraud. Finally, part III moves back to high politics and relates it to state power, by investigating the high command and the leading aristocratic families involved with the army. Chapter  examines the degree of power and influence allowed to generals by the king, in the fields of army administration, patronage, the conduct of operations and the formulation of strategy; chapter  asks whom Louis XIV appointed to supreme command of armies and why; and chapter  rounds off by elucidating how the king sought to control these men by means of financial and status-based incentives – orders alone could not suffice to produce reliable and successful commanders. It will become clear that the French army under Louis XIV was an arena of compromise. On the one hand, by the end of the s the ordinary soldiers were at long last reliably paid and their officers were no longer able to defraud them directly; and Louis sought to protect local communities from the depredations of the troops and their officers. Yet, over time, the king provided a greater degree of financial and administrative stability for his regimental officers; he doled out adequate rewards to the high command and to the very best officers in the regiments; he provided the generals with a far greater sense of political security; and robe noble families and annoblis on their way to full nobility who provided the logistical and administrative support for the army were allowed to advance their social position. In return he expected order, obedience and good service, without which his own interests and those of the Bourbon in general would be damaged. Moreover, if Louis was prepared to compromise with the elites, then part of the deal was their acceptance of fundamental changes in political practice and their implementation of major reforms in administrative procedure whose import should not be underestimated. The degree to which Louis XIV could enforce these policies and principles in the army – an institution which was the heart of the monarchical state and the ultimate instrument of royal prerogative – reveals the true extent of royal power in seventeenth-century France. 

See above, footnote .



Part I

‘Patrimonial bureaucracy’: The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War

Introduction

The origins of ministerial government in the western world lay in the transformation of royal private secretaries from the personal aides of a prince into major political players in their own right running fully fledged, if small, departments of state. In the course of the sixteenth century secretaries of state emerged at the courts of both France and Spain, but by the s these two great powers had diverged in their models of government. In Spain during the later years of Philip II’s reign secretarial authority stalled and multiple layers of conciliar government came to prevail, while in England the Privy Council retained a collective importance over and above the relationship between the secretaries and the monarch. In France, however, the secretaries of state, alongside the financial officials, emerged under Henri III and Henri IV as the vital agents of royal executive power, recruited principally from among lawyers and junior councillors. Not least they provided the king with some insulation from the competing influences of the grands, who found themselves increasingly excluded from institutional roles at the heart of government to the benefit of the secretaries. This system, with modifications, was imitated in Savoy from the s and in Spain after . Initially the responsibilities of French secretaries of state were allocated on a geographical basis, with each one of these four or five officials entrusted with nearly all business related to a particular region of the kingdom. As time wore on they found themselves charged more and more with specific aspects of royal government, such as the royal household, foreign affairs or war, but before the s most such divisions were blurred, and only after Richelieu assumed power was there a clearer delineation of responsibilities. The largest ministry in seventeenth-century France – in terms of personnel, expenditure and range of activities – was the Ministry of War which helped the military officers to run the king’s land-based armed forces. Over the course of the reign of Louis XIV it became a far more effective instrument for the implementation of royal policy, both at home and abroad. In large part the relative success of this time can be put down to the activity of a single family – the Le Tellier – who occupied the office of Secretary of State for War continuously from  to , an achievement unparalleled by any other ministerial dynasty 

See R. Bonney, ‘Was There a Bourbon Style of Government?’, in K. Cameron, ed., From Valois to Bourbon: Dynasty, State and Society in Early Modern France (Exeter, ), pp. –.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War in any government ministry for the entire ancien r´egime. Michel Le Tellier was in post from  to ; his son Franc¸ois-Michel, marquis de Louvois exercised authority jointly with his father from  to  and then on his own until , when he in turn was succeeded by his third son Louis-Franc¸ois-Marie, marquis de Barbezieux. Barbezieux’s premature death in  brought the family tenure of ministerial office to an end. A great deal has already been written about the activity of Michel Le Tellier and Louvois, though very little about Barbezieux, but the literature is heavily skewed towards their institutional reforms and charts the ‘progress’ made during the ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV, especially in exercising control over the civilian administration of the War Ministry. Few problems thrown up by the king’s policies towards the army are mentioned, and the question of the limits of power wielded by the Le Tellier has never, for the period after , been seriously addressed. Moreover, the history of military administration has appeared to lack sufficient context: though some studies have examined the position of the Le Tellier in French society during their tenure of power, historians have tended by and large to treat the family histories of ministerial dynasties as appendages to administrative history: interesting in themselves but somehow not directly related to the government of the realm. Contemporaries in the seventeenth century took a very different view, conceiving politics, especially in monarchies lacking powerful representative institutions, as inextricably bound up with social position and the competition for status. To date the academic literature has seriously downplayed the Le Tellier’s power base in the officer ranks of the army and at court as an explanatory tool for the successes of the reign. Yet the three successive secretaries depended for much of their power upon their position not only in government but also in society at large. Louvois and Barbezieux in particular faced powerful enemies within France, and if they were to be capable of enforcing the royal writ then they needed to acquire an entrenched social position which would outlast the skills of any one member of the family. Chapters  and  of this section will look at how the family carved out a major position for itself in French society and how it entrenched itself at the heart of the state. One should bear in mind throughout this book that there is no need to see the Le Tellier as dishonest to accept that they had interests which sometimes diverged from those of the crown. Indeed, the basic problem which Louis XIV continued to face could be summed up as follows: while Louvois and Barbezieux could usually see what was best to ensure that the king’s forces were able to operate most effectively for Louis’s needs, the king himself also had to take far greater account of the competing interests of his other ministries, of the finances of his realm and of the interests of his military officers and non-combatant subjects alike. 

For example, Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois; Corvisier, Louvois; L.-N. Tellier, Face aux Colbert. Les Le Tellier, Vauban, Turgot . . . et l’av`enement du lib´eralisme (Sillery, Quebec, ).



Introduction Directly answerable to the Secretary of State for War were the civilian functionaries who provided the logistical and administrative support for the armies and the regiments. To understand how they functioned one must also appreciate the nature of their offices: most were owned by their holders in a system termed ‘patrimonial bureaucracy’ by historians and sociologists. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an expansion in state demands for administrators and sources of finance brought about the venalisation of a large number of offices and the creation of thousands of new ones specifically for sale. In the seventeenth century the system evolved to permit heredity in many such offices upon payment of an annual fee to the treasury of the ‘Parties Casuelles’ worth one-sixtieth of the value of the office, known as the droit annuel or ‘Paulette’. As a form of government borrowing, the venal offices all paid out gages – a form of interest on the principal investment – and often also paid out salaries, known as appointements, for the exercise of specific tasks. Financial offices often gave the holder an entitlement to take a legal cut from the monies he was handling, while they also provided opportunities for more underhand enrichment. The desire for state office was strong, and French society passed through two periods – the s to s, and the s and s – in which the number of judicial, administrative and financial posts (most available for sale) greatly increased. The demand for these offices was buoyant for most of the century and Colbert was greatly exercised by the way the system was diverting bourgeois finance into economically unproductive investments simply because venal posts brought a steady income and often began the legal process of elevating their holders’ families into the ranks of the nobility. Demand was not inexhaustible, especially when taxes, coinage manipulation, an expansion in the state bond market and the desire for land acquisition often channelled surplus capital away from the purchase of office. Yet by  there were more office-holders per head of population in France than anywhere else in Europe – at least , posts or one officier for every  inhabitants. For the monarchy, as Richelieu reluctantly came to recognise, this was both a blessing and a curse. The existence of such a large number of officials, secure in their posts and with a direct financial stake in the stability of the state, immeasurably strengthened the hand of the crown against any dissident elements within France, in particular among the great nobility who had lost their strong patronage hold over offices as a result of the introduction of the Paulette. On the other hand, as the Frondes demonstrated, the office-holders could act as a significant check to government policy if the crown abused them. By creating too many offices which  

Though it should be noted that quite a number of purchasers of office were already noble, especially in the sixteenth century. G. E. Aylmer, ‘Bureaucracy’, in P. Burke, ed., New Cambridge Modern History Companion Volume, vol. XIII (), pp. –. On the venal system, see W. Doyle, Venality. The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, ).



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War devalued existing ones, or by demanding excessive forced loans the crown could generate widespread resistance from the various corps. In order to regain a measure of control over the officiers and ensure a smoother implementation of the royal will the government sent out from court commission-holders, whose posts were not bought and who could easily be recalled. First despatched on an ad hoc basis in the sixteenth century, such commissioners became increasingly common and from  to  were established in almost every province in the kingdom in the form of the intendants. Their presence and activities, in the context of ever more arbitrary and vexatious fiscal policies at the height of the Thirty Years War, was one of the principal causes of the Frondes and the recall of most of these men one of its immediate successes. But their absence from all but six provinces severely disrupted government, so from  Mazarin’s revived administration brought them back. Their brief was essentially to oversee the work of the hundreds of officiers in each g´en´eralit´e. After  Louis XIV’s domestic and foreign policies made the intendants and other commission-holders indispensable: the need to control municipal debt, the attempts by Colbert to reform the finances, the need to oversee limited legal reform, the monitoring of legal cases, the persecution of the Huguenots, the stimulation of local commercial enterprises, the management of the grain trade, the administration of winter quarters in the provinces for the army, the raising of the milice after ; all these tasks deluged the intendants who were now being kept in the same location for longer than had been the case before the Frondes. This duality of officers and commission-holders, while it should not be drawn too starkly, also pervaded the civilian administration of the army under Louis XIV. There was a War Ministry at the centre, located in both Paris and at court, consisting of a number of bureaux staffed by clerks, or commis, whose offices were not venal. Out in the provinces and with the armies were the commissaires des guerres, entrusted with a multitude of tasks, and the contrˆoleurs des guerres responsible for keeping troop registers. These posts were all venal and, from , inheritable. Exercising a watching brief over these provincial and field operatives, and acting as administrators and facilitators for many military activities, were intendants. The War Ministry had direct responsibility for a number of provinces, mainly on the frontier, and the provincial intendants based there reported directly to the Secretary of State for War. When a field army was assembled or France was in a state of war an intendant d’arm´ee, again responsible to the Secretary for War, would be installed to oversee its administration and assist the high command. Chapter  will look at the structure of   

Almost all of them were, however, owners of some venal office or other, usually masters of requests who serviced the royal councils. A fiscal constituency usually corresponding to one of the provinces, but by no means coterminous with it. On the intendants, see R. Bonney, Political Change in France under Richelieu and Mazarin – (Oxford, ), esp. pp. – for the period after . A limited but useful study of the period after , concentrating on the decade –, has been produced by Annette Smedley-Weill: Les intendants de Louis XIV (Paris, ).



Introduction the civilian administration of the army and the problems associated with its management. Chapter  will investigate a vital source of ministerial power for the Le Tellier which complemented the commissaires and intendants – the privately run military treasury system which was answerable to the Secretary for War rather than to the Controller-General of Finances. A certain amount of progress was made in bringing under greater control this highly complex organism, which was riddled with fraud and heavily dependent upon the maintenance of interlocking private tax and credit networks across the country. But, ultimately, effective administration in the War Ministry – whether the financial branch or the executive branch – depended upon the sustenance of private family and individual interests from the lowliest commis through the intendants to the Le Tellier themselves. Chapter  will give some first indications of how difficult it was to marry this imperative with the principle of virtuous and uncorrupt royal governance. In doing so a clearer picture should emerge of the nature of ‘patrimonial bureaucracy’ in seventeenth-century Europe and its relationship to the rise of the standing army.





The Secretary of State for War and the dynastic interests of the Le Tellier family The reign of Louis XIV was conspicuous for the growth in power and prestige of the secretaries of state, a process which was at its strongest in the cases of the army and navy. The secretaries had always been ambitious since their foundation in , but the caution they exhibited under Mazarin had all but dissipated with their successors by the s. As the king showered support and favours upon them their confidence grew until by the end of the century some of them had achieved an importance akin if not superior to all but the most trusted of Louis’s courtiers. The development of the authority of the marquis de Louvois was most marked of all: by the s he expected to be addressed as ‘Monseigneur’ in correspondence by all save dukes and the highest office-holders. His father had been happy with the simple ‘Monsieur’, but the king himself encouraged this widening of psychological distance between soldiers and secretary. Louis indeed was instrumental in so many ways in providing the Le Tellier and his other secretaries of state with the power they exercised on his behalf, as he consciously sought to boost the political and social status of the men who occupied these posts, as well as their families. Why he did so, how he did so and what the effect was on the Le Tellier’s fortunes are the subjects of this chapter.                                     Before  the power and position of the Secretary of State for War had been gravely circumscribed by the chief ministers, Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, and by successive Surintendants des finances. The overall responsibility for the direction of the war effort lay successively with the two cardinals, while the Surintendants had trumped the authority of the Secretary of War by their overweening domination of the financial machinery of government. As Secretaries of War, Servien and Sublet de Noyers enjoyed little authority over the armies and operated in the shadows of Richelieu and Bullion. Instead, Richelieu’s relationships with members of the high command and leading courtiers were central to the management of the armies. His unsteady hold on power between  and  depended on his own ability 

Dangeau, vol. VII, p. : notes of Saint-Simon.



The dynastic interests of the Le Tellier family to prevent the under-resourced and poorly equipped French forces from suffering calamitous reverses, and this political imperative dictated the relegation of the War Ministry to an essentially administrative, functionary role. When Michel Le Tellier was installed as Secretary of State in  he faced a similar problem to Sublet, but the confidence vested in Le Tellier by Mazarin and the regent Anne of Austria provided a source of authority which allowed him to consider serious reforms to the ‘service’. He did, though, remain very much in the background when decisions were being taken about strategy and appointments to command. In any case, Le Tellier was personally reluctant to involve himself in such matters, for his relatively humble origins – family ennoblement in the sixteenth century, his training as a Paris lawyer, and service as intendant of the army of Italy in – – would swiftly have brought him into deep trouble at a time when the great nobility were raising private forces to contest the control of provincial governorships and places on the regency council during the Frondes. Indeed, in – Le Tellier lost the support of Mazarin and only recovered his office through his devoted service to Queen Anne, who persuaded the cardinal of his essential fidelity. Once back in power Le Tellier set about building a strong civilian administration whose principal officials were dependent upon personal ties to himself. The number of relatives Le Tellier came to employ as clerks and army intendants in the War Ministry reflected not only his political weakness and lack of patronage power in other branches of the state, nor merely a desire to fill his department with men whom he could trust, valid though this reasoning may be. He also realised that an effective if limited civilian army administration depending upon his personal authority meant he was more likely to survive any transfer of power at the apex of the regime. Nevertheless, Le Tellier remained hemmed in, even in matters of basic administration. Since at least  the Secretary of State for War had been in charge of all accounts and payment for the field and garrison forces; he expedited officer commissions to all except a few major posts; he was in charge of the artillery statement (´etat) and the king’s correspondence with the Grand Master of the Artillery; and he managed the administration regarding the principal field army. By  he had finally been charged with the care of all armies operating beyond or on the French frontiers, and he had acquired responsibility for all occupied territories in military and logistical matters. But from  the power of the Surintendant des finances grew, as he took control of paying the elite units of the army. In addition, from then right up to September  the Surintendant retained control over expenditure related to military quartering, victualling, hospitals and pay for the troops. Moreover, the highly secretive and near-unaccountable nature of the Surintendant’s financial 

 

Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, pp. –, –; D. Parrott, ‘Richelieu, the Grands and the French Army’ in J. Bergin and L. W. B. Brockliss, eds., Richelieu and his Age (Oxford, ), pp. –. Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –, , , . Ibid., pp. –; Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War dealings meant he could easily manipulate the destination of funds, often in a way which proved detrimental to the crown’s interests if they did not coincide with his own. Ironically, after  Nicolas Fouquet, Surintendant des finances, seems to have tried to resist Mazarin’s own kleptomanic forays into the royal budget that repeatedly damaged the war effort. Louis XIV’s decision to govern without a chief minister from March  had major ramifications for ministerial authority and gave the secretaries of state a political and social importance they had hitherto been denied. Instead of the Secretary of War depending for survival upon a chief minister, he was now immediately subordinate to a monarch whose determination to play the leading role on the stage of government implicated him very heavily in decisions surrounding the armies. Michel Le Tellier and, after him, Louvois and Barbezieux derived considerable benefit from the absence of a dominating chief minister whose political and financial interests would inevitably have diverged from their own. Louis had a good idea that governing ‘par lui-mˆeme’ would entail a significant personal workload, but his anxiety to defuse the political tensions associated with the ministries of the cardinals and his undoubtedly strong personal vanity overcame any lingering doubts he may have held. For at least the next fifteen years Louis betrayed a sensitivity bordering on paranoia that his ministers might be attempting to ‘govern’ him. In any case, a straightforward replacement for Mazarin as chief minister was impossible, for none of the potential candidates were viable successors. Fouquet may well have fancied himself as such, and gossips may have tipped Le Tellier for the top in , but neither man possessed sufficient social status to act as the king’s intermediary, while the mar´echal de Turenne was equally unsuitable because he was a protestant. Fouquet’s failure to appreciate all this ultimately cost him his office and his liberty. For any of the ministers (all of whom were robins) to have been elevated to chief minister would have risked another bout of strife between the crown and elements of the great nobility, something Louis was anxious to avoid. The king neither wanted any of the grands to be in the council nor wished to be dominated by any of his servants. Le Tellier’s appreciation of the king’s position, reinforced by apparently explicit warnings from Louis himself not to give anybody grounds for believing he was a primus inter pares, enabled him to weather the revolution of 



Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, p. ; J.-C. Devos, ‘Le secr´etariat d’´etat a` la guerre et ses bureaux’, Revue Historique des Arm´ees  (), –; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –, –, ; Rousset, vol. I, p. ; D. Dessert, Fouquet (Paris, ), pp. –. See the recent article by Marc Fumaroli, ‘Nicolas Fouquet, the Favourite Manqu´e ’, in J. H. Elliott and L. W. B. Brockliss, eds., The World of the Favourite (London, ), pp. –, which argues that Fouquet’s links to frondeur elements in the Paris Parlement seriously compromised his position. Fouquet was also unwise enough to be conducting independent negotiations for the rehabilitation of the Cardinal de Retz behind the backs of both Louis and Le Tellier, who had been charged officially with this task: see Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –, and, for rumours about Le Tellier’s chances of becoming chief minister, pp. –.



The dynastic interests of the Le Tellier family  and emerge as Louis’s principal counsellor for military and domestic affairs. Institutionally, Louis’s decision to do without a chief minister was reflected in a reorganisation of the royal council. All princes and great nobles were cleared out, and a conseil d’en haut was set up, consisting of the king and three or four ministres d’´etat. These men were drawn on the king’s choice from among the following: the secretaries of state, the Controller-General of Finances (after ), the Chancellor or other senior counsellors. Running a ministry was no guarantee of membership of this council. Later in the reign the Dauphin and the duc de Bourgogne (the Dauphin’s eldest son) also joined this body. Initially, however, it was composed of Le Tellier, Fouquet and Lionne, Louis’s adviser on foreign affairs. Fouquet’s fall from power in September  further strengthened the hand of Le Tellier in the military sphere, accompanied as it was by the abolition of the post of Surintendant des finances. This allowed Le Tellier to liberate his ministry from its previous subordination to the financial officials. The conseil royal des finances, split into the ‘grande’ and ‘petite direction’ for affairs of differing magnitude, was established to oversee the entire state budgetary process, and, most significantly, Louis reserved to himself the authorisation of all orders concerning every form of expenditure, interest payment and other outgoings from the Tr´esor royal. Though Colbert was able to dominate the conseil royal des finances, Le Tellier could be sure that the king would maintain the balance between the demands of revenue and the exigencies of military and foreign policy better than had the cardinal-ministers. The Controller-General was left in charge of most revenue-raising, but his activities were more clearly transparent to the king and his ministerial colleagues, while the presence of the Secretary of War on the conseil d’en haut (at least until ) prevented financial interest in the shape of the Controller-General from setting the priorities of government as it had done before . Nevertheless, the Secretary of State for War did not have free rein in the administration of the armies. In supervising the expenditure on weapons, equipment, ammunition, clothing and wages he no longer had any ministerial rival, but in the matter of supplying bread and beef to the troops, and forage to the horses, he continued to have to share power with the Controller-General. In wartime the government depended wholly upon entering into contracts (trait´es or march´es) with private companies of entrepreneurs for the supply of bread in particular. The Controller-General negotiated most of the contracts, and he and his intendants des finances (his immediate Paris-based subordinates) had the most frequent contact with the directors of the supply companies, which usually operated out of the capital. These companies received funding both directly from the Controller-General  



Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. . On the conseil d’en haut as an institution, see J. C. Rule, ‘The King in his Council: Louis XIV and the Conseil d’en haut’ in R. Oresko, G. C. Gibbs and H. M. Scott, eds., Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe. Essays in Memory of Ragnhild Hatton (Cambridge, ), pp. –. SHAT OM : r`eglement,  Sep. ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Jan. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War and through financiers working for the Secretary of War. For the administration of the e´tapes – the staging-posts for marching and supplying troops around the kingdom – either the Controller-General or a secretary of state (depending on whose d´epartement the province came under) was responsible. All the War Ministry could do in many circumstances was lean upon the Controller-General and cajole the entrepreneurs. In spite of these qualifications, from September  onwards the Secretary of War could be reasonably sure that his ministerial colleagues would leave him alone to administer the armies. Indeed, subject to Louis’s endorsement, the scope of his power became immense, and the in-depth knowledge of the war machine expected of him dwarfs that required of a modern defence minister. Backed by a small number of clerks, he delivered commissions for all officers serving in the armies; he issued orders to generals and other military officers, and replied to their despatches; he issued commissions for raising fresh levies of troops; he expedited marching itineraries known as ‘routes’ to units; he sent out orders for the lodging and quartering of the troops; he organised the disbandment and amalgamation of units; he drew up and had printed all ordinances and regulations concerning the troops; he appointed and supervised the army intendants, the commissaires des guerres and the contrˆoleurs des guerres out in the provinces and with the armies; he directed the artillery with its Grand Master; he contributed to the formulation of grand strategy and theatre strategy; he watched over the activities of bread, meat and forage suppliers; and he supervised as best he could the Treasurers-General of the Ordinaire and Extraordinaire des Guerres and their underlings across France, upon whom all the troops and many of the suppliers depended for payment. Related to this, he had to have a detailed knowledge of political geography, topography, the officers then in service, the prices of victuals, the potential of foreign powers, the state of the arms industry, the state of royal magazines and fortresses. In the words of one memorandum: ‘In a word, to be a good, excellent secretary of state for war, ministre, it is necessary to be almost universal.’ It was especially vital that the secretary talked to lots of people continually. In addition, each secretary of state (whether for war, the navy, the royal household, foreign affairs or the Huguenots) was responsible for a number of provinces of the kingdom – they acted as those provinces’ point of contact within the government and they dealt directly with the local authorities. This meant that they were often in competition with the Controller-General who, in addition to being responsible for several provinces himself, was regularly working with local officials on a wide range of financial matters in almost all provinces. As the reign went on there was 

D. Ozanam, ‘Jean Orry: munitionnaire du Roi, –’, Histoire Economique et Financi`ere de la France: Etudes et Documents,  (), –; SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Aug. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Pontchartrain,  Feb. ; A , fol. r–v : memorandum of May ; A. Navereau, Le logement et les ustenciles des gens de guerre de  a`  (Poitiers, ), pp. –.



The dynastic interests of the Le Tellier family a rationalisation of the distribution of the provinces, so the Secretary of the Navy was charged with vital coastal provinces and the Secretary of War with land frontier provinces, but the system never adhered strictly to wholly rational principles in this regard. Every secretary of state was also responsible for bringing petitions before the conseil des d´epˆeches for several months each year. If the Secretary of War also happened to be a ministre d’´etat on the conseil d’en haut he was also required to have a deeper appreciation of royal policy in areas outside his ministry and especially in international politics. It was a truly awesome set of responsibilities. However, now that there was no chief minister to deal with the high command, the Secretary of State had to be equipped with sufficient prestige if he was to be capable of controlling the armies in conjunction with the king. Herein lay a serious problem which could only be resolved by a judicious balance of different ministerial interests: on the one hand Louis was hypersensitive about the political status of his ministers, fearing that any one of them might emerge to dominate government and, worse, be seen to do so by the public; yet, on the other hand, he needed to boost the status of these men, especially the Secretary of War who dealt with the grands on a daily basis in matters touching on sovereign powers. One way in which Louis could enhance the authority of a minister was to maintain him in the same office for a long time or allow him to pass his charge on to a son or other relative. Such continuity in office, far from threatening the king, was highly prized by Louis, who applied it as far as possible in equal measure to the Le Tellier, the Colbert and the Ph´elypeaux. This had the advantage not only of ensuring administrative continuity (owing to personal ties binding ministers to their civilian underlings such as clerks and intendants), but also of contributing to political stability and predictability, thereby discouraging intrigue.                                 The premier concern for the Le Tellier was retaining the War Ministry in their hands. Just as Louvois had possessed the survivance – or right of reversion – to his father as Secretary of State since , had become co-secretary in  and had finally succeeded his father in , he in turn was anxious for one of his own sons to succeed him. On  December  his eldest son, Michel-Franc¸ois, marquis de Courtanvaux, was provided with the reversion, and for four years he struggled to come up to his father’s exacting standards. When it became clear that he was not sufficiently gifted, Louvois, almost certainly with the support of Michel Le Tellier, invoked the undated resignation letter he had forced out of Courtanvaux as a precaution as early as . 



SHAT A , no. : memorandum of  (citation); Bib Maz , fols. r –r : memorandum, [?]; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –, ; Corvisier, Louvois, p. ; SHAT A , fol. r–v : Barbezieux to all intendants of his d´epartement,  Dec. ; A : Barbezieux to intendants,  Dec. . Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. , –, –, –.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War Passing over his second son Louis-Nicolas, who had just given up a promising church career for the military and who was then in Poland learning the art of war, Louvois persuaded the king to bestow the reversion on the third son, Louis-Franc¸ois-Marie, then a commander of the Order of Malta, on  November . As marquis de Barbezieux the young man (b. ) quickly apprised himself of the basic war administration; indeed he had even despatched orders to an intendant to pay for the march of some troops from Mont´elimar to Dˆole on  June , while his brother was still active as holder of the reversion. Similar letters regarding troop movements and payment signed by him were regularly expedited during , and on  March  he entered the conseil des d´epˆeches, though in the words of the diarist Dangeau, ‘without opining’. By the time he succeeded Louvois as Secretary of State en titre in  he was thoroughly experienced in dealing with administrative formalities and had gained useful insights into strategic and logistical problems as well. While Michel Le Tellier held only the position of ministre d’´etat concurrently with that of Secretary of War, Louvois accumulated a multitude of offices, probably too many given the burden of government by . All of these increased his notional authority and his powers of patronage beyond the confines of the War Ministry extending into charitable and chivalric orders, for after  Louis XIV used the grands offices of the Saint-Esprit to enhance the position of several of his ministers. After the death of Colbert in  Louvois’s empire was further increased at the expense of collateral branches of that rival family. All this enhanced the authority and social prestige of the Secretary of War. Nevertheless, the crushing weight these accumulated responsibilities imposed was felt as early as August  when the king agreed to create an inspector-general of buildings to relieve some of the pressure. In the end, in the context of a massive war effort, the burden contributed to Louvois’s sudden death, and the only office apart from Secretary of State which Barbezieux was permitted to assume was Chancellor of the Saint-Esprit. Prior to  other members of the Le Tellier family were installed in the supreme ecclesiastical and lay offices in France, providing Louvois and later Barbezieux with 







Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –; Sourches, vol. I, p. , – Nov.  et seq.; vol. I, p. ,  Mar. ; vol. I, p. –, – Oct.  et seq.; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Nov. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. . Michel Le Tellier was fully lucid until just hours before his death in , and Courtanvaux’s resignation had been invoked several days earlier, almost certainly with the ailing Chancellor’s approval. In June  Louvois had purchased the marquisate of Barbezieux from his father, undoubtedly to endow Louis-Franc¸ois-Marie with it when he came out of the Order of Malta to take up the survivance. Pinard was certainly wrong to argue that Courtanvaux had never been survivancier: Chronologie historique-militaire,  vols. (Paris, –), vol. I, p. . BNF FF , fol. r : Barbezieux to La Fonds,  June ; fols. r –r : salary lists,  Feb. ; Dangeau, vol. II, p. ,  Mar. . Dangeau misled historians into believing Barbezieux had not exercised any functions of his post before then. See, for example, BNF FF , fol. r : Barbezieux to Catinat,  July , when he despatched news of the battle of Fleurus and Beachy Head; also SHAT A , no. : Lombrail to Louvois,  June . Sourches, vol. I, p. , Aug. .



The dynastic interests of the Le Tellier family Table . Offices and responsibilities accumulated by Louvois. Year

Position

  – only    

Surintendant g´en´eral des postes Chancellor of the Order of the Saint-Esprit Interim Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (four months) Enters conseil d’en haut as a ministre d’´etat aged thirty Grand Vicar of the Order of Saint-Lazare Surintendant des arts, bˆatiments et manufactures (on death of Colbert) Jurisdiction over the Biblioth`eque et Imprimerie Royale, exercised on behalf of his nine-year-old son Camille Control over coastal fortifications Intendant of the kingdom’s stud farms, except the haras du Roi Responsible for all internal and international commerce not directly involving the king’s navy (all on death of Seignelay)



Sources: Corvisier, Louvois, pp. , –, , ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –, –; Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  Nov. . On the royal orders, see C. W. Herman, ‘Knights and Kings in Early Modern France: Royal Orders of Knighthood, – ’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Minnesota, ), pp. –, –; SHAT A A.: ‘Comptes de la Grande Tresorerie des Ordres du Roy rendus par Mr. Jean Baptiste Colbert Chevalier Marquis de Torcy’: ‘Grande Tresorerie des Ordres du Roy ’ and ‘Grande Tresorerie des Ordres du Roy ’.

added moral authority. In , after three years as coadjutor, Louvois’s brother Charles-Maurice was given the archbishopric of Reims, the most senior benefice in the kingdom, which provided him with the rank of first ecclesiastical pair de France (peer), though he never became a cardinal. Even before his full elevation to the see, Charles-Maurice wielded extensive rights of patronage in the church. Six years later, Louvois’s father Michel Le Tellier traded the position of Secretary of State for that of Chancellor of France. Between  and his death in October  he revived the office, codified many laws, laid down a framework of regulation for seigneurial justice, and clawed back control over crown agents in the provinces, especially intendants, from the Controller-General as Colbert’s health deteriorated and he became terminally ill. No other family in the period between  and  held as much power as did the Le Tellier. The longer the Le Tellier remained in possession of these offices the more their personal wealth increased, through a combination of royal gratifications, the acquisition of royal monopolies, favourable investment opportunities and straightforward 

Corvisier, Louvois, p. ; Saint-Maurice, p. : Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele,  Aug. ; Sourches, vol. III, pp. –,  Jan. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War income from their posts. At least several dozen courtiers and leading state officials – even ministers – such as the marquis de Sourches (Grand Pr´evˆot de France and father of the diarist) and Charles d’Albert, duc de Chaulnes, were in debt to the Le Tellier and paid them annual instalments of interest; from  Louvois held the monopoly on the coastal ferry system from Toulon and Marseille to Italian ports; and Barbezieux was an investor in tax farms such as the Lyonnais gabelle (salt tax). From  there was a sudden acceleration in loans made by Louvois, reflecting the renewed financial burden of war and the search by individuals at all levels of elite society for ready cash. On the basis of evidence provided by Louvois’s post-mortem estate inventory, it is reckoned that he was worth  million livres by . At the same time his wife was independently worth  million livres, his widowed mother between  and  million, and his brother the archbishop  million. While this pales beside the assets of Mazarin in  (estimated at  million livres), it roughly matches that of Richelieu, who was worth c.  million net in , and the Cond´e fortune in  of c.  million (at  prices). By comparison the largest ducal fortunes seem paltry: Vendˆome in  was worth c.  million livres, and the average ducal fortune at marriage between  and , as calculated by Labatut, was just under  million livres. Such riches could never have been achieved by the Le Tellier in the presence of a chief minister, and, though such affluence in itself could not give the family a degree of socio-political security and advancement, it was put to extremely good use in the furtherance of their interests and indeed those of the king.                              ,     --    If the Le Tellier were to command the respect of the officer corps and act with the authority the king’s service required, then it was not enough merely for Louis to maintain them in power. The king also had to improve his ministers’ social and consequently political status, for many leading nobles of ancient lineage (most explicitly Saint-Simon) held a conviction that robins, even at the highest level of the royal councils, needed to be kept in their place, and should be endowed with only lifelong rather than hereditary nobility. Elevating ministerial families was a process that was mutually beneficial and necessary to the king and to the families in question. In particular, it became important after March  to build up support 





Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  Dec. ; J.-P. Labatut, Les ducs et pairs de France au XVIIe si`ecle (Paris, ), p. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –; AN G :  projected pensions list; Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –, –. Louvois’s inventaire apr`es d´ec`es can be found in AN Minutier Central LXXV, fol. r . D. Dessert, ‘Pouvoir et finance au XVIIe si`ecle: la fortune du cardinal Mazarin’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine,  (), –; J. H. Elliott, Richelieu and Olivares (Cambridge, ), p. ; Labatut, Les ducs et pairs, pp. , –, ; K. B´eguin, Les princes de Cond´e. Rebelles, courtisans et m´ec`enes dans la France du Grand Si`ecle (Seyssel, ), pp. –. Labatut, Les ducs et pairs, pp. –.



The dynastic interests of the Le Tellier family for ministers among the most reliable and loyal families of the great nobility. In this way the ministers would be less vulnerable to intrigue and they would be able to draw upon the connections possessed by courtiers, something which was particularly vital in the case of the army. Despite his cautious approach to grandee politics and his anxiety that his sons would be pulled into court circles at too young an age where their social status ill equipped them for political machination, Michel Le Tellier began the construction of a web of matrimonial alliances in the early s which would cement the family into the highest social circles even beyond the French Revolution. In  he agreed to the marriage of his daughter Madeleine-Fare to Louis-MarieVictor d’Aumont, marquis de Villequier, who succeeded his father as duc d’Aumont and governor of the Boulonnais in , only a year after Madeleine-Fare’s early death. Villequier was highly trusted by the king and employed as an active, often residential, governor of the Boulonnais until his own death in , and though there were tensions between him and Louvois the families remained very close. The Aumont marriage was followed in  by Louvois’s own match to Anne de Souvr´e, posthumous daughter of Charles de Souvr´e, marquis de Courtanvaux, who had been Premier gentilhomme de la chambre du Roi and whose family nobility reached back to the fourteenth century. Whether Charles would have approved such a m´esalliance had he been alive is uncertain, but in his absence her guardian the mar´echal-duc de Villeroi, Michel Le Tellier’s protector during the s and s, gave his consent and Villeroi’s brother the archbishop of Lyon celebrated the wedding. In the s it became time to secure the next generation and the Le Tellier sought a marriage alliance which would hitch Louvois’s eldest daughter MadeleineCharlotte to a duc et pair or the heir to such a title. In  Louvois negotiated a dazzling marriage with the duc de La Rocheguyon, eldest son of the prince de Marsillac, himself one of Louis XIV’s favourites and heir of the old duc de La Rochefoucauld. With a noble lineage dating back to  Marsillac was also Grand Maˆıtre de la garderobe du Roi and Grand Veneur (master of the hunt), but in the late s he felt threatened by the power of Mme de Montespan, then the king’s mistress, and he was eager to secure a further channel through which La Rochfoucauld influence could be exerted over Louis. However, like Louvois, Marsillac was an edgy man who did not rub along easily with other people. In time he came to feel that he had been deceived by the Le Tellier over the financial arrangements of the marriage, an ‘offence to their pride’ which, Mme de S´evign´e noted, still soured relations well 

 

La Chesnaye, vol. II, pp. –; Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  Dec. ; vol. IV, p. ,  May ; vol. IV, pp. –,  July ; BNF FF , fol. r ; BNF Clair. , fol. r : Archbishop Le Tellier’s will,  Nov. . Labatut, Les ducs et pairs, p. ; Tellier, Face aux Colbert, pp. –; Corvisier, Louvois, pp. , –, . M´emoires de Primi Visconti, pp. , . Vendˆome was one potential suitor.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War after Louvois’s death. Nevertheless, Louvois went out of his way to cultivate La Rocheguyon, promoting his military career and securing his eventual rehabilitation in – after he and his brother Liancourt had been disgraced. From the ,  and  marriages came further matrimonial links between the Le Tellier and other important noble families. The offspring of the Aumont marriage married in their turn and spun more of the web of alliances involving the Le Tellier. Indeed these subsequent marriages also involved the Le Tellier in dowry arrangements, other support and political machinations. In  Marie-Madeleine d’Aumont, Michel Le Tellier’s granddaughter, married Jacques-Louis, marquis de Beringhen, who was Premier Ecuyer of the king’s Petite Ecurie. Six years later her sister Anne-Charlotte married the young marquis de Cr´equi, who was colonel of the r´egiment d’Anjou infantry and whose father was a marshal of France. The Beringhen–Aumont–Cr´equi–Le Tellier axis was completed by the Villeroi: in  the first duc de Villeroi, later protector of Le Tellier, had married a Cr´equi: their son, the second duke, was Louis XIV’s favourite and Louvois’s friend. Nonetheless, these aristocratic links were essentially forged through the female lines of the Le Tellier before Louvois’s death, so to a certain extent the family enjoyed high social status only by association with the grands. In order to embed themselves firmly in the social elite of the nobility it was imperative that Louvois’s sons not only made suitable matches but also gave the family an edge of lustre through military and court service.                                  ,     --    Like many families of the upper robe nobility, the Le Tellier took up the profession of arms in order to acquire greater social respectability and acceptability. Blazing the trail for them were Louvois’s cousins, the marquis and the chevalier 









Dangeau, vol. II, pp. –, notes of Saint-Simon; La Chesnaye, vol. XVIII, p. ; M´emoires de Primi Visconti, p. ; Sourches, vol. I, pp. – ( Sep.  et seq.); Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Apr. ; S´evign´e, vol. III, p. , : S´evign´e to Mme de Grignan,  Apr. . BNF FF , fol. v ; BNF FF , fols.v –r ; SHAT A , no. : Humi`eres to Louvois,  Sep. ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  July ; vol. III, p. ,  June ; vol. III, p. ,  Jan. . La Rocheguyon was colonel of the r´egiment de Navarre infantry, Liancourt that of La Marine infantry. Through his mother Beringhen was first cousin to Nicolas de Laye du Bl´e, marquis d’Huxelles, who was promoted to lieutenant-general in . If any general of the time could be described as Louvois’s prot´eg´e it was he. La Chesnaye, vol. II, pp. –; vol. VI, pp. –; N. Poulain, ‘Le marquis de Beringhen (– ). R´ecit de la vie d’un curieux et e´ tude de sa collection au Cabinet des Estampes de la Biblioth`eque Nationale’ (D. E. A. dissertation, Paris IV, ), pp. , ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Dec.  et seq.; vol. II, p. ,  Aug. ; vol. III, p. ,  Nov. ; vol. III, p. ,  Mar. ; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. XXI, p. ; BNF FF , fol. r ; La Fayette, M´emoires, pp. , ; Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  Mar. ; SHAT A , no. : Louvois to comte de Baule,  Dec. . La Chesnaye, vol. VI, p. ; S´evign´e, vol. II, pp. , : S´evign´e to Mme de Grignan,  Apr. . La Rocheguyon also served as Villeroi’s aide-de-camp at the Sarre camp in the s: see BNF FF , fol.r .



The dynastic interests of the Le Tellier family de Tilladet, who like their father (who was married to Michel Le Tellier’s sister) reached the rank of lieutenant-general. Their successful military careers allowed Louvois to drive his own sons along in their wake. At a very young age the third son, the future Barbezieux, became a knight of Malta, like the chevalier de Tilladet, and he was initially marked down as the future soldier of the family. In , however, Louvois had to reshuffle his sons’ careers: his second son, at his own request, left ecclesiastical training and was packed off to Poland and Hungary, Barbezieux left the Order of Malta to become Secretary of State in reversion, and Courtanvaux followed the middle brother, by now marquis de Souvr´e, to Hungary. When he returned, Louvois bought for Courtanvaux the colonelcy of the prestigious r´egiment de la Reine infantry for , livres in , and the following year the chevalier de Tilladet ceded his cavalry regiment to Souvr´e. There had, for many years, been an agreed family strategy between the Tilladet and Louvois, who had bankrolled their careers, and in November  the minister bought another cavalry regiment for Roquepine, nephew of the Tilladet. Both Courtanvaux and Souvr´e took military service seriously, and received no adverse social treatment from their fellow officers. Courtanvaux was invalided out of active service in , while Souvr´e sold his regiment to Beringhen’s son and retired in , after having the satisfaction of seeing his unit become the most senior of those owned by gentlemen. The Tilladets’ activity also helped to cement the Le Tellier more firmly into the court. The marquis de Tilladet had bought the position of captain-lieutenant of the Cent-Suisses de la Garde du Roi in , through the financial and political assistance of Louvois, reviving a post that was in virtual abeyance. Technically, this company, founded in , possessed parity of status with the four elite companies of the Gardes du corps du Roi, and it remained the only foot unit of the king’s household forces – the Maison militaire du Roi. Within the king’s lodgings the CentSuisses were the guard about his person and shared responsibility for the interior of royal palaces with the Gardes du corps. On ceremonial occasions and when the king stepped out in public the captain ‘en quartier’ of the Gardes du corps processed immediately behind the king, while the captain-lieutenant of the Cent-Suisses went in front of him. Together the captain-lieutenant and a Gardes du corps captain also accompanied the king in his coach in the absence of the queen. Quite apart from the perceived status which flowed from such close proximity to the source of   

Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  July ; BNF FF , fol. r ; BNF FF , fol. r ; Dangeau, vol. II, p. ,  Nov. . SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Saint-Pouange,  June ; Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Mar. ; BNF FF , fol. v ; Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  Mar. . E. Spanheim, Relation de la cour de France en , ed. E. Bourgeois (Paris, ), p. , and L’´etat de France (Paris, ), pp. –, cited in Spanheim; G. Marie, ‘La maison militaire du roi de France sous Louis XIV (de  a` )’, M´emoires de l’Acad´emie des Sciences, Inscriptions et Belle-Lettres de Toulouse,  (), ; SHAT A , no. : r`eglement,  Feb. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War all honour, the practical benefits of such direct and private access to the monarch were not underestimated by contemporaries. Louis also made use of the CentSuisses on campaign. Whenever he visited the trenches during a siege the company surrounded him and they stationed themselves at the head of the earthworks to protect him from any enemy sortie, a singularly dangerous task. Precisely because the patronage power at the captain-lieutenant’s disposal was negligible and so the grands were unlikely to be jealous, Louis felt he could safely install Tilladet in the post. In  Louvois himself purchased the reversion on his cousin’s charge for his eldest son, Courtanvaux, and on Tilladet’s death in  Courtanvaux was confirmed in the post. It remained in the senior branch of the Le Tellier until . The acquisition of senior military office in the royal household was accompanied by the purchase of civil office in the very heart of the king’s apartments. Again following the lead of the marquis de Tilladet, in May  Louvois bought one of the posts of maˆıtre de la garderobe du Roi for , livres, an office in which Souvr´e, his second son, was placed. This put the young man directly under his sister’s father-in-law, the prince de Marsillac, by now duc de La Rochefoucauld. Louis XIV had, apparently, decided up to three years earlier that the Le Tellier should be entrenched in his immediate household, and this post brought Souvr´e regularly into the royal presence. When incumbents were on duty they not only came into daily contact with the king but also possessed the ‘grandes entr´ees aupr`es du Roi’, giving them almost unimpeded access to the king’s innermost apartments as he rose in the morning and went to bed at night. Small wonder that these posts were highly prized by court and ministerial factions. The elevation of Souvr´e threatened to unbalance the equilibrium of ministerial clans and their allies, and the Colbert clan were extremely alarmed by these developments. On  November  they secured the reversion on another maˆıtrise de la garderobe for the seven-year-old heir to Colbert de Seignelay (who had just died). Only two days later, however, the duc de La Rochefoucauld ceded the exercise of his posts as Grand Maˆıtre de la garderobe and Grand Veneur to his son La Rocheguyon, Souvr´e’s brother-in-law. When not absent on military campaigns, La Rocheguyon as master of the hunt would have further close contact with Louis and the Dauphin during the daily expeditions of the court. 



 

‘Marche et Convoy funebre de Louis le Grand’ (print), Cabinet des Estampes, clich´e BNF, reprinted in M. Caroly, Le corps du Roi-Soleil: grandeur et mis`eres de Sa Majest´e Louis XIV (Paris, ); G. Daniel, Histoire de la milice fran¸coise,  vols. (Paris, ) vol. II, pp. , . SHAT A , no. : r`eglement,  Sep. , codifying the practices of the preceding fifty-eight years; Sourches, vol. II, p. , Mar. ; Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Aug. ; La Chesnaye, vol. XVIII, pp. –. Dangeau, vol. I, p. , appendix to ; vol. II, p. –,  May ; Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  Apr. . These occasions were the ‘petit lever’ and the ‘petit coucher’. Dangeau, vol. III, pp. –,  Nov. ; vol. III, p. ,  Nov.,  Nov. .



The dynastic interests of the Le Tellier family Besides giving the Le Tellier prestige and some long-term social security, court offices crucially kept the avenues of communication to the king open to Louvois at all times through his kin. Mistresses fulfilled the same role: Madeleine de Laval, mar´echale de Rochefort, was dame du palais de la Reine from , and, after she became Louvois’s mistress, lady-in-waiting to the new Dauphine in . Another of Louvois’s mistresses, the wife of Elie du Fresnoy, one of his chief clerks, had been installed in  as a bedchamber attendant of the queen. If securing links to the royal consorts was important, equally so was the maintenance of good relations with the court of Saint-Cloud and its presiding prince, Philippe, duc d’Orl´eans, younger brother of the king and known as ‘Monsieur’. In the s and for most of the s links were strong between Monsieur and the Le Tellier, and only the destruction of virtually all the Orl´eans papers prevents a full study of this subject. The Grand Pr´evˆot, Sourches, felt Louvois and Monsieur had a ‘close relationship’, by which was meant the minister was prepared to support the chevalier de Lorraine, Monsieur’s favourite and lover, even when Louis had disgraced him in . Monsieur was ‘very much concerned with the interests of ’ Louvois, who seems to have played a crucial role in negotiating the marriage of Monsieur’s daughter Anne-Marie to Victor Amadeus II of Savoy in . In July of that year Louvois gave a large party at Meudon for the duc and duchesse d’Orl´eans. Monsieur’s second wife, Liselotte von der Pfalz, known as Madame, hated Louvois personally but claimed to be on good terms with the rest of the family. The Le Tellier ties to the Orl´eans were reinforced by the close friendship between the chevalier de Lorraine and the second mar´echal-duc de Villeroi. Louvois and Monsieur also shared a predilection for patronising the artist Pierre Mignard, who operated outside the Colbert-inspired Acad´emie royal de peinture et de sculpture, and they both also advanced the career of Jules-Hardouin Mansart. This is no mere frivolity when one considers the amount of energy Louvois threw into his work in charge of the arts after . Having Monsieur as an ally was not without significance: Louis and his brother spoke at length, often in private, every day in which they were together. Louvois’s growing political difficulties in – may well have been compounded by deteriorating relations with Monsieur as, first, he persuaded Louis    

 

Courtanvaux for one certainly attended the king’s levers even before he had become captain-lieutenant of the Cent-Suisses: see Massiac, M´emoires, pp. –. DBF, vol. II, p. ; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. I, p. –. Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  July ; vol. I, p. ,  Nov. . Louvois was operating a full foreign policy, independently of Croissy the Foreign Secretary, in Savoy in the late s and early s. Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  July ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; D. van de Cruysse, ed., Madame Palatine: lettres fran¸caises (Paris, ), pp. –; Villars, vol. I, p. ; Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  July . Vauban, vol. II, p. : Vauban to Louvois,  Nov. ; J.-C. Boyer, ‘Louvois surintendant des bˆatiments: quelques r´eflexions’, Histoire, Economie, Soci´et´e  (), –. Monsieur divided his time largely between the court, his chˆateau at Saint-Cloud and the Palais Royal in Paris.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War to sack Madame’s beloved Palatinate and, second, he pushed the king into a violent confrontation with Savoy which Monsieur was frantically trying to prevent. By the time of his death Louvois had succeeded in building a vast and powerful network of supporters, many of whom came from families of illustrious lineage and/or title. Through marriage alliances, all of which were encouraged by Louis XIV, through military service, and through the acquisition of court offices, the Le Tellier transformed themselves from robins to courtiers in the lifetime of Louvois. Indeed, through holding a secretaryship, they possessed in Versailles some of the largest apartments, in which they did not hesitate to install relatives and friends. As the downfall of Chamillart proved in , secretaries of state who had persuaded the king to entrench their sons in court offices and matrimonial ties before they lost ministerial office could expect their family to remain important in French public life. By  the Le Tellier were seemingly secure and rich, but the next ten years would bring both greater social kudos and, with the death of Barbezieux, ultimate disappointment.                                       ,          In September , six weeks after the demise of Louvois, Louis XIV recommended to the Le Tellier that they find a wife for the new Secretary of War, Barbezieux, and two months later he became the first serving secretary of state to marry the daughter of a duc et pair, Catherine-Louise-Charlotte de Crussol d’Uz`es. Moreover, the Crussol family’s land of Uz`es had been a duchy since , and they held what was by then legally recognised as the most senior peerage in France, created for them in . This union was politically advantageous to both sides, even if there was a yawning gap in social station between bride and groom. The Crussol and the Le Tellier were acceptable to each other because they both had long-standing feuds with two grandee houses, the La Tour d’Auvergne and the Montmorency-Luxembourg. The persistent confusion of different codes of precedence for different situations bedevilled family relationships well into the eighteenth century and was particularly acute in these cases. The La Tour d’Auvergne claimed the status of most senior duke in France as ducs de Bouillon, and the mar´echal-duc de Luxembourg claimed that he was the rightful successor to his distant cousin, Henri, duc de Montmorency 

 

On Monsieur’s role in  over Savoy, see R. Oresko, ‘The Diplomatic Background to the Glorioso Rimpatrio: The Rupture between Vittorio Amedeo II and Louis XIV (–)’, in A. de Lange, ed., Dall’Europa alle valli Valdesi: atti del convegno ‘il Glorioso Rimpatrio. –’ (Turin, ), pp. , , ; also, G. Rowlands, ‘Louis XIV, Vittorio Amedeo II and French Military Failure in Italy, –’, English Historical Review,  (), –. Sourches, vol. VI, pp. –,  Aug. . Dangeau, vol. III, pp. –,  Sep. ; vol. III, p. ,  Nov. ; La Chesnaye, vol. XVIII, pp. –.



The dynastic interests of the Le Tellier family (executed ), with  ducal status and the title ‘premier Baron Chr´etien’. The problem for both the Bouillon and Luxembourg was that they founded their pretensions upon extremely uncertain laws regarding female inheritance which were not properly defined until . Furthermore, the Montmorency succession had been nullified as punishment for treason. Although Louis XIV kept these pretensions at bay, the Crussol would have been aware of the vagaries of royal policy in such matters, and as ducs d’Uz`es they also faced a century-long seigneurial dispute with the bishop of Uz`es in Provence about the town and county of that name. After November , however, they could depend upon a secretary of state to act as protector of their interests, including those other matters associated with their provincial governorships and military service, a field for which they had sufficient males and where they were anxious to re-establish themselves. The immediate benefits to the Le Tellier were arguably of greater magnitude. The family’s feud with the La Tour d’Auvergne went back to  with the behaviour of the mar´echal de Turenne in the War of Devolution and the election of Charles-Maurice Le Tellier to be coadjutor to the archbishop of Reims, to the fury of Emmanuel-Th´eodose de La Tour (future cardinal de Bouillon). The Crussol marriage gave Barbezieux and his uncle Charles-Maurice firm allies at court in their struggle to curb the influence of the La Tour d’Auvergne and Luxembourg families, but it also boosted the prospect of the Le Tellier remaining in office into the next reign. The mother of the new marquise de Barbezieux, the duchesse d’Uz`es, was the only child and heir of the duc de Montausier, successively governor and Premier gentilhomme de la chambre to the Dauphin. She had married the duc d’Uz`es in , and for many of the next twenty-six years seems to have chosen the Dauphin’s clothing. Montausier died in May , but in his lifetime he had ceded the provincial governorships of Saintonge and Angoumois to his son-in-law Uz`es. Moreover, the Dauphin had for Montausier: ‘a complete deference while he lived, and, although he was little afflicted by his death, he always maintained all sorts of cares and attentions for those who belonged to him, even including his servants’. Montausier reinforced his position by installing some of his own men as ‘menins’ of the Dauphin in : Louis de Crussol, comte de Florensac and uncle of the future marquise de Barbezieux, was the most prominent. He reached the rank of general in the army in . To cap all this, in  the marquise de Barbezieux’s sister, 

 

Labatut, Les ducs et pairs, p. ; La Chesnaye, vol. III, p. ; BNF Clair. , fol. r ; BNF Clair. , fol. r : ‘Memoire sur la question de l’extinction de la Pairie de Piney pour Messieurs les Ducs & Pairs de France contre Monsieur le Duc de Montmorency’, ; fols. r –r : ‘Sommaire du Procez pour la pres´eance de la Duch´e-Pairie de Piney. Pour Monsieur le Duc de Luxembourg, Demandeur. Contre Messieurs les Ducs & Pairs, D´efendeurs’ [?]; fol. r : ‘Oraison Funebre de tres-haut et tres-puissant Seigneur Franc¸ois Henry de Montmorency, Duc de Luxembourg et Piney’, by p`ere de La Rue S.J., . BNF Clair. , fols. r –v ; SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Harcourt,  Aug. . M´emoires de Primi Visconti, pp. , ; Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  Nov. ; Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  May , and quotation from Saint-Simon’s commentary.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War Julie-Franc¸oise de Crussol, had married Antoine-Louis de Pardaillan de Gondrin, marquis d’Antin, a promising military officer who was son of the marquis and marquise de Montespan and consequently half-brother to the king’s bastards, the duc du Maine and the comte de Toulouse. Not long after the wedding Montausier gave Antin charge of the Dauphin’s wardrobe, which he cared for until October  when La Rocheguyon supplanted him in this role. Antin remained a member of the Dauphin’s inner entourage and he had good relations with their illegitimate half-brother Maine, who was also on cordial terms with Barbezieux. In addition, Barbezieux remained friendly with his brothers-in-law, the next two successive ducs d’Uz`es, for the rest of his life. Barbezieux’s marriage into the Crussol, when combined with the links to La Rocheguyon, plugged him into the most powerful social affinity in France which promised to secure his position when the Dauphin succeeded to the throne. Courtanvaux, Barbezieux’s eldest brother, had only agreed with reluctance to being leapfrogged by his sibling in the marital stakes, but his own marriage also helped the family immediately as well as reinforcing their long-term social position. In September  he offered himself to the Crussol but was rejected in favour of Barbezieux. As compensation he married Marie-Anne-Catherine d’Estr´ees, daughter of the seafaring mar´echal d’Estr´ees and niece of the duke. During the late s the Estr´ees had become allies of the Le Tellier owing to their rivalry with Seignelay’s naval prot´eg´e, the comte de Tourville. The Estr´ees tie was not only important in itself but also linked the Le Tellier to the Estr´ees’ cousins, the duc de Vendˆome and the grand prieur de Vendˆome, who grew increasingly close to Barbezieux over the decade, and who had a natural affinity, as legitimised princes, with Maine and Toulouse. While the fourth of Louvois’s sons Camille followed his uncle into the church, the youngest child Marguerite sealed the Le Tellier–Villeroi association by marrying Nicolas, duc de Villeroi and son of the second mar´echal-duc, on  April . At the celebrations were representatives of the Estr´ees, Lorraine-Armagnac and Coss´e-Brissac families. One further marriage alliance was made during the Nine Years War. The death of the marquise de Barbezieux in May  left the Secretary of War a widower at the age of only twenty-five. Eighteen months later, in January , a second marriage was arranged for him with Marie-Th´er`eseDelphine-Eustachie d’Al`egre, daughter of the wealthy marquis d’Al`egre who had become a general in  and went on to become a marshal of France thirty-one     

La Chesnaye, vol. VI, p. ; BNF FF , fol. r–v ; Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  June ; Lavall´ee, vol. III, p. : Maine to Maintenon,  Nov. . Dangeau, vol. VI, pp. –,  Aug.,  Aug. . Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  Nov. ; La Fayette, M´emoires, pp. –; D. Dessert, La Royale. Vaisseaux et marins du Roi-Soleil (Paris, ), pp. , . Tellier, Face aux Colbert, p. ; S´evign´e, vol. III, p. : S´evign´e to Mme de Grignan,  Apr. . Tellier, Face aux Colbert, p. .



The dynastic interests of the Le Tellier family years later. Not only was the family of ancient lineage, holding court offices since the end of the fourteenth century, but some of their women had also married into the Bourbon line before the sixteenth century and they were distant cousins of the Uz`es family. Furthermore, the marquise d’Al`egre was the daughter of Du Fresnoy, Barbezieux’s premier commis in the War Ministry. Unfortunately the marriage was not a success: by December  Barbezieux and his wife had separated and in August  she received orders to withdraw to the Auvergne, while her father moved out of Barbezieux’s apartments at Versailles. For the next three years Barbezieux spitefully did all the bad service he could to Al`egre. More successful was the February  union between Souvr´e and Catherine-Charlotte de Pas de Feuqui`eres, daughter of the late comte de R´ebenac, a diplomat aligned both to Louvois and to the duc d’Orl´eans. She was sister-in-law to Catherine Mignard, who was daughter of the painter protected by the Le Tellier and Orl´eans. The bonds forged between the Le Tellier and the high aristocracy before  remained important throughout Barbezieux’s ministry and even beyond his death. He was on good terms with his brother-in-law La Rocheguyon and was especially close to the Cr´equi family. In  the mar´echal de Villeroi was raising , livres to pay for his new post of captain of a Gardes du corps company, and archbishop Le Tellier, the marquise de Louvois and Barbezieux agreed to stand as guarantors for his creditors. The Beringhen–Huxelles–Le Tellier network remained as strong as ever too, and Huxelles spied on his superior commander for Barbezieux. Of course, tensions existed and some relationships deteriorated: as early as August  Barbezieux was distancing himself from Villeroi because the marshal was manifestly out of his depth as commander-in-chief of the army of Flanders; and in  there was a major split in the Villeroi which precipitated in turn a definitive rupture between them and their Lorraine-Armagnac in-laws who ran the Grande Ecurie and dominated the Orl´eans court. Nevertheless, Barbezieux stood at the centre of a predominantly robust network of political and matrimonial ties, which gave him the stature to compose quarrels between young grands and even allowed his family to participate in some court entertainments on an equal footing with princely houses. 

  

  

Dangeau, vol. V, p. ,  Nov. ; vol. V, p. ,  Jan. ; Sourches, vol. I, p. , Oct. ; La Chesnaye, vol. I, pp. –; Tellier, Face aux Colbert, p. ; Labatut, Les ducs et pairs de France, p. ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  May . Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Dec. ; vol. VI, p. ,  Aug. ; Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  and  Dec. ; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. VI, pp. –. Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  Feb. . SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Cr´equi,  Apr. ; no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Apr. ; A , no. : Cr´equi to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A , no. : Cr´equi to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A : Barbezieux to Cr´equi,  June ; A , fol. v : Canaples to Barbezieux,  June ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Jan. . Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Jan. . SHAT A , fols. r –r : Barbezieux to Huxelles,  May . BNF FF , fol. v : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Aug. ; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Oct. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War In October  Courtanvaux, as baron de Montmirail in Champagne, even acted as host to Monsieur’s second daughter as she journeyed to Lorraine for her marriage to the duke. By the end of the Nine Years War the Le Tellier were therefore among the most powerful of Versailles courtiers. Louis XIV had consciously built them up because he knew that in the absence of a chief minister of grandee status the successful management of the high command, the war efforts and even individual units could not depend solely on royal will. A satisfactory degree of control and the extraction of compliance from the officer corps and nobility rested in part upon the maintenance of the Le Telliers’ political standing and the enhancement of their social rank. They did not have the power, nor did they need, to appoint their relatives and in-laws to the overall command of armies, a policy pursued by Richelieu and Mazarin, but the extent of their authority in France was profoundly shaped by their social position. 

Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  July ; Dangeau, vol. VI, pp. –,  Dec. ; BL Add. Mss. , fol. r : [British Embassy clerk] to Secretary Vernon,  Oct. . For evidence of the Le Tellier network in operation in the Nine Years War, see SHAT A : Barbezieux to various,  June ; A , no. : chevalier de Tilladet to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , no. : Saint-Pouange to Barbezieux,  June ; Bib Ars , fol. r : Guiscard to Barbezieux,  Aug. .





The ebb and flow of Le Tellier power, – The position of Secretary of State for War developed over the course of the seventeenth century in ways which closely related to the rising social stature and expanding connections of the Le Tellier family: indeed, by  the Le Tellier had reached a position where they could be seen as amongst the most powerful of French courtiers. Of course, there was no simple upward and uninterrupted trajectory of advancement. The political position of the three Le Tellier ministers oscillated in the second half of the seventeenth century, and Louvois in particular felt deeply insecure about his situation. A more complete impression about ministerial direction of the army therefore requires an effort to track the variation in fortunes of Michel Le Tellier, Louvois and Barbezieux; the picture which emerges will also provide a general chronological framework for ministerial politics during the ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV. This term ‘personal rule’, used to describe the period  to , nevertheless masks the fluctuating degree of involvement of Louis XIV in government business. He was always more assiduous with royal administration than his father or his successor, Louis XIII and Louis XV. He was a diligent attender at his councils – the conseil d’en haut, the conseil des d´epˆeches, the conseil de conscience and the grande direction of the conseil royal des finances – he had daily bilateral meetings with ministers, he gave audiences to foreign envoys or provincial dignitaries on most days, and he watched carefully over the court. All the same, during the s, when he possessed monumental energy, and in the s, when he had to preside over Barbezieux’s apprenticeship as Secretary of War, he seems to have devoted many more hours in the day to business than he did between  and . Similarly, after  in old age he leaned more on the Dauphin and Chamillart. This meant that in these two phases he was either less worried with the detail of government, placing his trust in one or two key men, or he was simply somewhat less interested. He did, nevertheless, retain interest in his government and a ‘global’ vision from well before  until the very eve of his death. Louis’s personal involvement in government business helps to set the broad conceptual parameters of debate about the ebb and flow of the various ministers’ power, but these ministers also need to be considered in relation to each other and to the other administrators and crown servants with whom they had to work. 

The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War                ,     --    Earlier studies have done a great deal to illuminate the s and the first half of the s, but before examining the political position of Louvois and Barbezieux after  it would be wise to recap on the earlier period. In December  Le Tellier ceded day-to-day responsibility as Secretary of State to Louvois, a move which was intended to signal to his royal master that he was neither vainglorious nor personally ambitious. From then on his position as the most intimate of advisers to Louis was almost unassailable. Louvois, however, was in a far weaker position. Though he was valued by the king, who saw it as both a duty and a necessity to help mould the young man only three years younger than himself, Louvois was politically vulnerable, in part because of a cocksure attitude which stayed with him all his life. Louis apparently had to rebuke Louvois from time to time for his pride and arrogance, even for cheek to the royal person. Louvois’s excessive self-confidence and great diligence spawned a corresponding suspicion on the part of Jean-Baptiste Colbert. In the late s Colbert was engaged upon the humbling or removal of ministerial rivals, and he seems to have been set on destroying Louvois as a potential rival as quickly as possible: in July , as the government prepared for war, Colbert launched a savage attack on Louvois in a letter to the king, accusing the young War Minister of ruining France through his arrogance and inexperience. Louis, however, does not appear to have acted upon this vitriolic denunciation, possibly because leading courtiers were making sure the king knew exactly what both ministers were like during these years. When the brief War of Devolution (–) yielded territorial fruit, Colbert seems to have realised that it would not be so easy a task to remove Louvois as it had been to oust Fouquet and Du Plessis-Gu´en´egaud. They consequently settled into an essentially polite but cold and chary relationship. Between  and  Michel Le Tellier shared a certain amount of power over the army with Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, mar´echal de Turenne, as both men pushed forward the boundaries of royal authority. Turenne’s military authority had grown in the s when he was the crown’s leading general, and his post of Colonel-General of the cavalry gave him continued power in peacetime even while there were no armies in the field. In particular, he was used as an important instrument for the infusion of method and discipline into the officer corps, and on occasion he was even called to meetings of the conseil d’en haut. But during   



Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –. Mme de Maintenon paid tribute to his modesty: Lavall´ee, vol. II, p. : Maintenon to Aubign´e,  Feb. . Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. , ; Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Nov.  in Saint-Maurice, vol. I, p. ; [Dec. ], p. ;  Mar. , pp. –; and  May , p. . Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –. Colbert helped bring down Gu´en´egaud in , something missed by almost all of his and the king’s biographers: see Sourches, vol. I, pp. – ( Sep.  et seq.). Saint-Maurice, vol. I, p. : Saint-Maurice to San Tommaso,  July .



The ebb and flow of Le Tellier power the years of peace after  his influence with the king was less than that of Le Tellier. The Le Tellier family’s relationship with Turenne was as difficult as it was with Colbert. In spite of the apparent success of the  Flanders campaign, the War of Devolution had thrown up some serious administrative and logistical problems. In  Louvois was forced to defer to Turenne’s authority and experience, something that seems only to have contributed to his determination both to construct an effective military machine and to strengthen his position in relation to the grands. After the end of the War of Devolution and during the years of preparation for the Dutch War Louvois was able to strengthen his position, now that no armies were operating under powerful generals, while picking up honours and positions including, crucially, that of ministre d’´etat. Turenne remained influential over the army, though less so than in the era before . His conversion to catholicism made Louis more inclined to listen to him on matters of general state policy from  to , but from then on, in spite of minor victories against Louvois, Turenne’s power began to wane. Louis was already heeding the advice of Louvois on more and more occasions. During the Dutch War, which broke out in , Turenne, never one to trust in the judgement of others, feared a repeat of the logistical problems of the previous conflict. He consequently tried to advise the king directly on such matters, bypassing the War Ministry and thereby undermining Louvois. Moreover, in  Turenne enjoyed poor relations with his intendant of the army of Germany, Charuel, and desertion among recruits for this army reached critical proportions. Turenne’s refusal to provide detailed reasoning on his conduct of the campaigns in the Rhineland and his personal contacts with French diplomats in Germany were also extremely unhelpful to the king and to his secretaries of state in their attempt to coordinate grand strategy. Alongside the steady drip of criticism from Turenne, there were serious mutterings among other soldiers and courtiers that Louvois’s poor advice to the king had been responsible for slowing down the advance through the United Provinces in , for denuding the field army in order to garrison towns, and for  

 



B´erenger, Turenne, pp. –; baron J.-F. Barton de Montbas, Au service du Roi. M´emoires in´edits d’un officier de Louis XIV, ed. vˆıcomte H. de Montbas (Paris, ), p. . Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –. Saint-Maurice, vol. I, p. : Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Aug. . Like Richelieu, Louvois and Archbishop Le Tellier seem to have pursued a dual policy towards the high aristocracy: alliances where possible, and denigration or disgrace where such people threatened their own dignity or position. For example, see Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Jan.  on Archbishop Le Tellier’s clash with the abb´e de Soubise as procureur of the Maison de la Sorbonne. See chapter , pp. –. B´erenger, Turenne, pp. –, –; P. Sonnino, Louis XIV and the Origins of the Dutch War (Cambridge, ), pp. , , –, –, –, , ; P. Sonnino, ‘The Marshal de Turenne and the Origins of the Dutch War’, Studies in History and Politics,  (), –. Corvisier, Louvois, p. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War allowing William of Orange an opportunity to rebuild the Dutch army. Matters came to a head in the winter of – when Turenne and Cond´e together attacked Louvois for intervening in matters of strategy and for his refusal to send reinforcements to Germany, thereby causing (they claimed) the loss of Bonn. Louvois, they told the king, was incompetent to deal with this sort of business. Fortunately, Cond´e was persuaded to back down by his close friend the bishop of Autun, also a friend of Michel Le Tellier, but the strength of Turenne’s condemnation appears to have shaken Louis, who now explicitly reiterated his permission to the marshal to communicate with him directly on all matters. The strategic war council, with which Louvois had to contend, was set up under Cond´e’s chairmanship but it did not survive the spring of .                  ,    --     After early  Louvois never suffered another overt and concerted attack at court which threatened his hold on power. The death of Turenne in  and the retirement of Cond´e early the next year removed, for about the next fifteen years, any figures in the high command who could challenge his authority. All the same, the appointment of eight new marshals of France was a mixed blessing for Louvois: while the duc de Luxembourg, Rochefort and the Graf von Schomberg were on good terms with the Secretary, La Feuillade vigorously defended his independence and was an ‘intime’ of the king. Moreover, for two years the French war effort went through a very rocky patch and Louvois’s sense of insecurity does not appear to have diminished at this time. The mar´echal de Cr´equi’s humiliating surrender of Trier after his defeat at the battle of K¨onz-Saarbr¨ucken in  led to his abandonment by Louvois and subsequent sidelining from command, his second disgrace within three years. So little did Louvois trust in the ability of the generals that in  he personally directed much of the siege of Aire before persuading Louis to send Schomberg to relieve Maastricht. For a while circumstances were so desperate that Mme de S´evign´e reported that people were begging Cond´e to leave retirement and retrieve the situation in Flanders. Over in the Rhineland Louvois’s prot´eg´e, Rochefort, died and was replaced as commander-in-chief by Luxembourg, who by now was firmly established in the circles of Mme de Montespan and Colbert. Luxembourg 

 

Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –, –; Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, p. ; Rousset, vol. I, pp. –, –; C. J. Ekberg, The Failure of Louis XIV’s Dutch War (Chapel Hill, NC, ), pp. , , , –; B´erenger, Turenne, pp. –; BNF NAF , fols. r –r ,  June . Louis himself was responsible for many of the problems of the army of Germany in : against the advice of Le Tellier and Louvois he had ordered it to continue campaigning through the winter of –. Corvisier’s list of the ‘monnaie de Turenne’ is erroneous (Louvois, p. ). See instead, F. Bluche, Louis XIV (London, ), p. . Rousset, vol. II, pp. –; M´emoires de Primi Visconti, pp. –; Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, p. ; S´evign´e, vol. II, p. : S´evign´e to Mme de Grignan,  July .



The ebb and flow of Le Tellier power was soon pinned down by the duke of Lorraine and unable to prevent the fall of Philippsburg, an event which alarmed all at the court, for the Imperial forces now controlled all the key crossing points on the Rhine and Alsace lay at their mercy. Louvois reacted with fury, firing off to Luxembourg a letter of blistering ferocity: ‘You have put yourself in a position where His Majesty can justly reproach you that, during the entire campaign you have made the finest French army which was ever in Germany entirely useless to him.’ Archbishop Le Tellier even went so far as to circulate around Paris a savage attack on Luxembourg’s conduct to persuade people of the general’s imminent disgrace and of their need to dissociate themselves from him. Without doubt the Le Tellier hoped to persuade Louis that he could no longer maintain Luxembourg as a commander. This did not work, and a further clash between Louvois and Luxembourg after the siege of Charleroi in  soured relations between the two men beyond repair. The ‘Affair of the Poisons’ gave Louvois his chance to destroy Luxembourg, who had foolishly signed blank papers for a treacherous secretary earlier in the s. The investigations into the ‘Affair’ were largely inspired and driven on by Louvois, who installed two clients, La Reynie and Bezons, as inquisitors for the chambre ardente set up to try any malefactors. In January  Luxembourg was arrested on trumped-up charges of sorcery and murder and sent to the Bastille, where he was denied all rights and courtesies befitting his ducal status and left to rot in a dungeon. While Louvois had not originally set out to frame him, he seized upon the allegations with unmistakable glee. On his instructions Luxembourg was even refused paper and ink with which to prepare his defence. When the witchcraft allegations were proved false, Louvois feared his quarry was again eluding him, so Bezons and La Reynie tried, but failed, to pin on him charges of false-coining and the misappropriation of crown funds. Eventually he had to be released in May, but for a while he was in virtual public disgrace, an apparently broken and sick man in retirement on his rapidly diminishing and bankrupt estates. On  June  Louis recalled him to court to resume all his offices, and most notably that of captain of the Gardes du corps, thanks to the interventions of Cond´e and, more intriguingly, the king’s Jesuit confessor, P`ere La Chaise. However, Luxembourg’s military career in the field was not resuscitated for another nine years. Louvois’s hounding of Luxembourg betrayed his deep inner lack of security. At root he feared he would be tainted by disastrous failure and would lose the confidence   



SHAT A : Louvois to Luxembourg,  Sep. , quoted in Rousset, vol. II, p. . S´evign´e, vol. II, p. : S´evign´e to Mme de Grignan,  Sep. ; M´emoires de Primi Visconti, p. ; J.–L. R. Desormeaux, Histoire de la maison de Montmorenci,  vols. (Paris, ) vol. IV, pp. –. Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Feb.  et seq.; vol. I, p. ,  Aug.  et seq.; chevalier de Beaurain, ed., M´emoires pour servir a` l’histoire du Mar´echal Duc de Luxembourg depuis sa naissance en  jusqu’`a sa mort en  (The Hague, ), pp. –. S´egur, Le tapissier de Notre Dame, pp. , –.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War of the king, and when the men who seemed to be dragging him down had never been or were no longer his allies he was prepared to ruin them personally. Nowhere was this more true than in the case of Simon Arnauld, sieur de Pomponne, the Foreign Secretary from  to . The Augustinian Gallican catholicism with which the Le Tellier were associated after  was always vulnerable to accusations of Jansenism, a movement which the family regarded with suspicion but in which the Arnauld family were embedded. From  Louvois began to distance himself quite deliberately from Pomponne, fearing the religious enemies of the Arnauld would also become his foes and would seek to erode the king’s confidence in him. Six years later Louvois helped to engineer the downfall of Pomponne. The failure of military force in the Dutch War to achieve major alterations to the frontiers of Louis’s realms was potentially dangerous for Louvois. He therefore urged Louis to achieve by stealth what could not be gained by war, and pressed on the receptive king a policy of piecemeal annexations in the Rhine-Moselle region known as the ‘r´eunions’. Pomponne, with his natural caution and clearer understanding of the interests of second- and third-rank powers, threatened to act as a brake upon this policy: as secretary of state responsible for the province of the Trois Evˆech´es (Metz, Toul and Verdun), Pomponne possessed great influence over the Parlement of Metz, the law court which would prove crucial to the r´eunion process. Furthermore, as the ‘r´egale’ dispute with the pope reached its height, Pomponne’s links to the Jansenists also caused grave difficulties for Louis, who by mid- felt the need to communicate with Rome and his ambassador there behind the back of his Foreign Secretary. On the two central concerns of French policy at that time Pomponne was therefore out of step or potentially unreliable. Though he had not in any way let Louis down – and the continuation of his , livres annual ministre d’´etat’s pension, his title of ministre d’´etat, and Louis’s personal friendship testifies to the king’s recognition of his services – Pomponne had to be replaced as Foreign Secretary and removed from the conseil d’en haut. Louvois was thwarted in his attempt to persuade the king to install his ally, the diplomat Honor´e Courtin, as the new Foreign Secretary. Instead, Colbert achieved the elevation of his brother Croissy to the post, but at least Croissy, an insensitive and rebarbative figure, was an enthusiast for the r´eunions as a former intendant of Alsace. In the years to come Louvois was even able to interfere 

The question of Louis’s castigation of Pomponne is a difficult one, and his remarks in his ‘R´eflexions’ should certainly not be taken at face value. One of the characteristics of ancien r´egime French politics was the preservation of the fiction that clashes and disgraces were entirely a matter of personal interest and merit and not a direct result of policy conflicts at the heart of government. Such an approach was an early, and extreme, exercise in projecting an image of collective responsibility. Over and above this, I would argue that the passage did not reflect Louis’s feelings in November : this document was one of a number which Louis wanted destroyed before his death, presumably because he knew the remarks to be mendacious. See P. Sonnino, ‘Louis XIV and the Dutch War’, in R. Hatton, ed., Louis XIV and Europe (London, ), p. ; Louis XIV, ‘R´eflexions sur le m´etier de roi’, in Oeuvres, ed. P. A. Grouvelle and P. H. de Grimoard,  vols. (Paris, ), vol. II, pp. –.



The ebb and flow of Le Tellier power in areas of foreign policy, especially Spain and Savoy, without any apparent objection by Croissy. All this notwithstanding, it is worth remarking that Pomponne’s disgrace may not have been in the best interests of the Le Tellier, and this may have been the reason why Louvois was reproached by his father for the impetuous way he joined Colbert to bring down the Foreign Secretary: the family needed Rome’s goodwill if Archbishop Le Tellier were ever to become a cardinal and that was best assured by Pomponne remaining in office. In that case Louvois may have decided to sacrifice his brother Charles-Maurice’s chances of becoming a prince of the church in order to prop up his own position which, he had come to believe, depended upon a policy of territorial acquisition. Despite Louvois’s insecurity, the king showed no sign in this period of doubting his ability or judgement. In fact the king leaned heavily on both him and Croissy for his r´eunion policy, and on Louvois in particular for the seizure of Strasbourg and the occupation of Casale in . During the war of – against Spain, Louvois’s prot´eg´es and allies held all the major commands, except the supreme command of the army of Catalonia. Between  and  Louvois was even charged by the king with the secret upbringing of his bastards Toulouse and Mlle de Blois, and he coordinated the acquisition of land for their brother Maine. The concentration of royal art and architectural patronage in the hands of Louvois from  boosted his prestige enormously, associating him with the most striking visual manifestations of the monarchy produced in those years, while the acquisition of the Biblioth`eque et Imprimerie Royale for the abb´e de Louvois was important more for the control it gave over printing than over the royal library. Besides displacing the Colbert as Surintendant des arts, the greatest coup of the Le Tellier was to secure the appointment of Claude Le Peletier as Controller-General of Finances in succession to the deceased Colbert. Le Peletier felt an enormous sense of obligation to Michel Le Tellier, he was the executor of his will and that of Mme Le Tellier, and he was a firm supporter of the interests of the royal bastards. Not long into his tenure Le Peletier began to investigate Colbert’s closest financial collaborators, and in  Louvois was able to obtain for him the post of pr´esident 



 

Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –, , –; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; H. H. Rowen, ‘Arnauld de Pomponne, Louis XIV’s Moderate Minister’, American Historical Review,  (), –, especially pp. – (a deeply inaccurate article); C. G´erin, ‘La disgrˆace de M. de Pomponne  novembre ’, Revue des Questions Historiques,  (), –, especially pp. –, –, –; S´evign´e, vol. II, pp. , : S´evign´e to Mme de Grignan,  Feb.,  Mar. ; vol. II, p. : S´evign´e to Mme de Grignan  Dec. . Lavall´ee, vol. II, p. : notes; Dangeau, vol. I, pp. –, – Apr. . It was not Mme de Maintenon but the wife of the Le Tellier family’s intendant who was responsible for their care and upbringing. The abb´e de Louvois was the fourth son of the marquis de Louvois. Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Mar. ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Oct. ; vol. VI, p. ,  Nov. ; Lavall´ee, vol. IV, p. : marquis de Montespan to Le Peletier,  Sep. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War a` mortier in the Paris Parlement, providing him with immunity from prosecution while he held it. The Le Peletier reciprocated with fierce loyalty to Louvois and Barbezieux. During this period Louvois was most certainly the first among the notionally equal ministers, honoured with the king’s most intimate confidence in his marriage to Mme de Maintenon and during the fistula crisis of November to December . When Louvois became unwell in July  and had to take the waters at Forges it was, in the words of Sourches: ‘quite inconvenient for him, and even for the king, for he took almost no important decision without consulting M. de Louvois, and so day and night couriers went from Versailles to Forges and from Forges to Versailles’. Louvois’s absence took place at the height of the crisis surrounding the succession to the prince-archbishopric of Cologne. Louis simply could not do without him and he was recalled to court within three weeks. Clearly, between  and  Louvois was deemed indispensable and enjoyed a greater degree of influence over government than any other minister at any time during the ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV. By contrast, the position of the house of Colbert was weak in the mid-s: Seignelay may have been doing a first-rate job with the navy, but he had fallen out badly with his uncle Croissy, the Foreign Minister, and the dynasty was in a state of seething disunity.                        ,     --     With the advent of major European war in the spring of  the relationship between the Le Tellier and the army high command once again became thorny. If conflict were restricted to only one major theatre of war then the choice of commanderin-chief of that army would be relatively straightforward: Louis XIV would pick someone whom he trusted, who was apparently competent and who was on good terms with Louvois. This had been the case with the commands of Cr´equi and Humi`eres during –. For the assault on the Rhineland in late  Louis chose the mar´echal de Duras: though a nephew of Turenne, he and Louvois were fairly close collaborators. By May  the war had only expanded to take in Flanders, with a small-scale campaign in Catalonia and little French involvement, as yet, in Ireland. 



Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Apr.  et Seq.; vol. I, p. ,  Sep.  et Seq.; vol. II, p. ,  Aug. ; Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –, , , ; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. IV, pp. –; SHAT A , no. : Michel Le Peletier de Souzy to La Grange,  Aug. . Regrettably I have not had a chance to consult Matthieu Stoll, ‘Claude Le Peletier (–) contrˆoleur g´en´eral des finances de Louis XIV’ (dissertation for the diplˆome d’ archiviste–pal´eographe, Ecole Nationale des Chartes, Paris, ). Sourches, vol. I, pp. –,  Sep.  et seq.; vol. I, pp. –,  Nov. ; vol. II, p. ,  July ; vol. II, p. ,  Aug.  (citation). Thierry Sarmant, conservator of the archives of the Service Historique de l’Arm´ee de Terre at Vincennes, has recently embarked on a full-scale study of Louvois’s multifarious activities in the years –.



The ebb and flow of Le Tellier power The grands chosen to oversee the armies of Germany (Duras), Flanders (Humi`eres) and Catalonia (the duc de Noailles) had all performed with some credit during the Dutch War but it was to be Louvois’s ill luck that both his close ally Humi`eres and Duras proved less than adequate in the face of unexpectedly rapid and powerful mobilisation by the Grand Alliance. To make matters worse, Noailles was not easy to keep in check for he was not only reluctant to obey Louvois’s instructions, but he was also in high favour with Mme de Maintenon and ran much of south-central France as a family sphere of influence. As a result of military defeats, Duras and Humi`eres were relieved of command, Duras ceding his post to his brother the mar´echal de Lorge even before the end of the campaign season. Lorge was no friend of Louvois. To compound the War Minister’s woes, the same year he also suffered the indignity of losing control over the escalating war in Ireland. His old enemy the comte de Lauzun had been restored to grace in a limited way through service to James II of England in his hour of need, and he now managed to persuade James’s consort, Queen Mary Beatrice, to intervene with Louis to ensure that direction of the Irish war was passed to Seignelay. Between the opening of the  campaign and his death on  July  Louvois’s grip over the high command visibly slipped. The antagonism between him and Lorge boiled over in May  into naked hostility, but in spite of this Lorge was elevated by the king to ducal status in March  and remained as commander-in-chief in Germany until . Louvois could not even manage the opening of hostilities with the duke of Savoy smoothly, having to apologise to both the king and the commander of the army of Italy, his prot´eg´e Catinat, for major errors in his instructions. But the greatest political threat to Louvois’s position came from his enemy Luxembourg. The setbacks of the  campaign in Flanders led directly to Luxembourg’s appointment to command the army there in , in spite of a serious set of problems his family situation posed for the king. Luxembourg was explicitly given the right to correspond only with the king should he wish, and he won a great victory at Fleurus in July, making him irremovable. During  Louvois found his scope for controlling Luxembourg and the other generals further eroded by the king. Despite several months of very hard work and then a promising start to the siege of Mons in March, Louvois was grossly complacent about the intentions of the Alliance and lulled Louis into a false sense of security. When, to their surprise, William of Orange appeared with a sizeable relief army in the course of the siege, the king was, it seems, furious and excluded Louvois from a critical conference with Luxembourg on  April as plans were hastily   

See chapter , pp. –, for further discussion of the – appointments to command.  See chapter , pp. . La Fayette, M´emoires, pp. –.   See chapter , pp. –. SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Catinat,  May .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War laid to block the Allied army. Louvois may even have been foolish enough both to countermand a personal order by the king for the establishment of a post of cavalry and to hide some of the earlier preparations for the siege from the king, who eventually discovered the deception and lack of confidence the minister held in his own master. Louvois got nothing for his contribution to the eventual capture of Mons, but Luxembourg was now lavishly rewarded both for the earlier victory at Fleurus and his performance during the siege. During the last two years of his life there was also a corresponding deterioration in Louvois’s position at court. It appears that Louvois’s relations with Mme de Maintenon may have been having an adverse effect on his fortunes. In the s, when she was still the widow Scarron, Louvois protected her brother, the somewhat feckless d’Aubign´e, and gave her his support, in part because she, like Louvois, was on increasingly bad terms with Mme de Montespan. In  he was one of just a handful of witnesses to her secret marriage to the king. But by the time of the king’s fistula, throughout , they had drifted apart, with Maintenon maintaining an even-handed approach to Louvois and Seignelay. Over the next four years, probably out of disgust for Louvois’s belligerence which she feared was jeopardising the king’s soul, she swung firmly against the Secretary of State for War. In  she and the abb´e F´enelon seem already to have been plotting the reduction of Louvois’s influence by using their private access to the king in order to promote the ducs de Chevreuse and de Beauvillier, the sons-in-law of Colbert and men wedded to more pacific policies. On  September , only a week after news reached court of the fall of the vital Rhine fortress of Mainz, Claude Le Peletier resigned as Controller-General of Finances, to be replaced by a reluctant Louis de Ph´elypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain. State finances were now in the hands of a man on whom Louvois could not wholly rely for support. To make matters worse, on  October Seignelay, now on exceptionally bad terms with Louvois, entered the conseil d’en haut as a ministre 





 

SHAT A , no. : Cond´e to anon.,  March ; Beaurain, M´emoires . . . du mar´echal de Luxembourg, pp. –; Desormeaux, Montmorenci, vol. V, pp. –; C. Sevin, marquis de Quincy, Histoire militaire du r`egne de Louis le Grand,  vols. (Paris, ), vol. II, p. ; S´egur, Le tapissier de Notre Dame, pp. –; Dangeau, vol. III, p. , notes of Luynes. Dangeau, vol. VII, pp. –, notes of Saint-Simon; BMG Am: ‘De l’ancienne administration de la Guerre: Administration militaire’, , printed in full in C. Sturgill, ‘Etude sur l’administration militaire avant la R´evolution’, Revue Historique des Arm´ees,  (), p. ; Desormeaux, Montmorenci, vol. V, pp. –; Beaurain, M´emoires . . . du mar´echal de Luxembourg, p. . Lavall´ee, vol. I, p. , –: Maintenon to Aubign´e,  June , Apr. ; vol. I, p. : Maintenon to abb´e Gobelin,  Aug. ; Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –; Lavall´ee, vol. III, pp. – : F´enelon to Maintenon, n.d. []. Lavall´ee was convinced that this letter was genuine, and it certainly bears F´enelon’s style and was written by someone unusually well acquainted with the king. Rousset, vol. IV, p. . Le Peletier was not, as Corvisier stated, sacked by Louis in  (Corvisier, Louvois, p. ). Sourches, vol. I, pp. –,  June  et seq.; vol. II, pp. –,  Apr.  et seq.



The ebb and flow of Le Tellier power d’´etat. Louvois felt somewhat isolated on the council, and the anonymous author of a  m´emoire blamed this in part on his own attitude: ‘He was suspicious, appeared harsh, and certainly he was too preoccupied with trivial details. These last took up too much of his time. The suspicion alienated those whose fidelity was offended by his lack of confidence in them.’  Louvois’s deteriorating political position should not, however, be exaggerated. In late October  he still enjoyed considerable royal favour, retaining certain financial privileges when others such as La Rochefoucauld and Seignelay had to sacrifice theirs for the sake of the war effort. Moreover, Seignelay’s demise in November  cleared an enemy from the scene. Ministerial politics was now recast once more, and the king reverted to the pattern of –, strengthening Pontchartrain’s position by adding the secretariat of the navy and the household to his responsibilities and making him a ministre d’´etat: Louis once again had a triumvirate of rival secretaries who were not necessarily hostile to each other, but who were not politically allied either. Though his easy rapport with the king had abated, the marquis de Sourches believed Louvois still had ‘grand cr´edit’ around the time of Seignelay’s death. Ultimately there is insufficient evidence to justify Saint-Simon’s claim, made on the basis of gossip (repeated by others such as Brienne), that in July  the king had decided to disgrace Louvois and send him to the Bastille, only to be cheated by the minister’s sudden heart attack. All the ‘evidence’ for a looming fall is posterior to , in the form of later private memoirs and a reported and probably accurate diatribe eight years later by the king that Louvois was ‘un homme insupportable’. All the same, a distinguished colonel reported in his memoirs what the gentilhommes ordinaires de la chambre du Roi had personally told him of the afternoon of  July , and it must be admitted that the story rings true: it was a very hot day, and in the early afternoon the king, in private, lost his temper and reproached Louvois for his insolent behaviour towards other sovereign princes, which had led to the isolation of France and a burdensome war; Louvois replied in a less than diplomatic way, so Louis threatened him with disgrace and dismissal (clearly on the spur of the moment and in anger); and Louvois left the king’s apartments in a state of great alarm, displaying all the signs of catastrophically high blood pressure, to die a short while later in his own apartments. Louis’s sense of liberation in the immediate aftermath of Louvois’s massive, fatal coronary is palpable, for he radically altered the composition of the conseil d’en haut to bring back Pomponne and install Beauvillier, and he ordered an immediate halt    

Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  Oct. ; for Sourches’ views on Louvois–Seignelay relations, see Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  Oct. .  Sourches, vol. III, pp. –,  Oct. . Bib Ars , fols. v -r : ‘Memoires’, .  Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. VI, p. . Bib Ars , fols. v –v : ‘Memoires’, . Quarr´e, M´emoires, pp. –.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War to the construction work on the royal buildings in the Place Vendˆome in Paris which Louvois had sponsored as Surintendant des arts. But, at the same time, on the very afternoon of Louvois’s death, a visibly worried king could be seen pacing the terraces of Versailles, for once not meandering around his gardens and fountains. Moreover, Louis’s remark in  that Louvois was ‘insupportable’ applied to him at all times, not just in !  Disgracing a minister during wartime was by no means inconceivable, but it took unmitigated catastrophe in – to bring about the fall of Chamillart as Secretary of War and Controller-General. Louvois, on the other hand, at the time of his death had just masterminded the extensive logistical preparations for the successful sieges of Mons and Nice, and was presiding over a ministry which was still held together in part by personal loyalty to the Le Tellier. A new Secretary of State from outside his family would have entailed a certain amount of disruption of personnel and the war effort. Furthermore, however powerful Louvois had been at any given moment in his career, and however tactless and brusque his manner, he was always the consummate councillor: he tried to ensure that policy decisions with potentially grave consequences were agreed with the king and he played the collegial game skilfully in this regard with his fellow ministers. He never set his cap at the post of chief minister, even if he was a compulsive departmental empire-builder. He may have been insubordinate to his king, he may have hampered the war effort by pursuing vendettas against military commanders, and he may not have been a very original thinker, but he was the greatest military administrator of the early modern era and Louis XIV knew it. He was ‘insupportable’ precisely because his abilities outweighed his extremely heavy flaws. Louis probably already believed Louvois had done him enormous harm, as well as solid service, but his predilection for ‘personal rule’ had implicated him in every major decision Louvois had carried out. In July , as the Grand Alliance inflicted setbacks on France in Ireland and Piedmont and mobilised itself to an unprecedented degree, the king was not about to drop his administrative pilot.                                    ,     Whatever the king’s intentions may have been, Louvois’s death without question averted considerable trouble in the conseil d’en haut. It would have been immensely difficult for the king to change diplomatic tack while working with the champion of the policy of ‘no compromise’ as his senior minister. Yet a change in diplomatic policy was becoming ever more necessary as the French armies stalled before an 

Dangeau, vol. I, p. , notes of Saint-Simon; vol. III, p. ,  July ; vol. VII, p. ,  Apr. ; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. XXIV, p. . On development of the Place Vendˆome, see R. L. Cleary, The Place Royale and Urban Design in the Ancien R´egime (Cambridge, ), pp. –, , –; R. Ziskin, The Place Vendˆome. Architecture and Social Mobility in Eighteenth Century Paris (Cambridge, ).



The ebb and flow of Le Tellier power enemy coalition of unprecedented weight, and how Louis and Louvois would have handled this imperative together is obviously a matter of speculation. In the end Louvois’s credibility, as the architect of an aggressive and military foreign policy, would most likely have been gravely damaged. The removal of Louvois from the scene was therefore probably beneficial in the medium term for his own family. Within hours of his death Louis honoured the family’s reversion on the Secretaryship of State for War and installed the twentythree-year-old Barbezieux in the post. The very next day he began working with the king in this capacity. For the ten years of Barbezieux’s tenure of office he enjoyed the benefit of working with the marquis de Chamlay, Louis’s principal military aide who was a mine of ideas on strategic and administrative matters, and who had a legendary encyclopaedic knowledge of European geography. Though Chamlay had separate access to the king he seems to have seen Louis about immediately important matters in the presence of Barbezieux. As part of the office of secretary of state Barbezieux took over responsibility for a number of provinces (mostly on the frontier), alongside his tasks in war administration. He inherited no other responsibilities from Louvois except the post of Chancellor of the Order of the Saint-Esprit. Michel Le Peletier de Souzy became director-general of the fortifications of land and sea; Edouard Colbert, marquis de Villacerf, having been Louvois’s active deputy for over five years, became Surintendant des bˆatiments, arts et manufactures, and Claude Le Peletier, the former Controller-General, became Surintendant des postes. These three men were all, however, close allies of the Le Tellier. It may even be that it was the king’s intention to keep these seats warm for Barbezieux should he prove himself capable of occupying them at a later date. Of greater importance for Barbezieux and much to his chagrin, he never became a ministre d’´etat on the conseil d’en haut. This was not, pace John Lynn, because ‘Louis preferred the opinions of the Marquis de Chamlay, his personal military adviser.’  Chamlay never became a ministre d’´etat either. Barbezieux failed to reach this position because of his youth and inexperience. It was undoubtedly galling to watch Torcy and Chamillart invited onto the conseil d’en haut in  and , as they had reached the rank of secretary of state five and eight 



  

Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  July ; R. Martin, ‘The marquis de Barbezieux as Secr´etaire d’Etat de la Guerre, –’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History,  (), pp. –; The letter can be found in SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Blanchefort,  July . SHAT A , no. bis: Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Sep. . Chamlay’s papers at the French war archives can be found in series A and in the Fonds Priv´es under the catalogue heading ‘Don de Bontin’. It is worth noting that his papers often reveal a curious ignorance of administrative detail. Chamlay was never a serious contender for the post of Secretary of War. Cf. Corvisier, Louvois, pp. – with SHAT A , fol. r−v : Barbezieux to intendants of his d´epartement,  Dec. ; and with A : Barbezieux to intendants,  Dec. . Corvisier, Louvois, p. : Villacerf was not Saint-Pouange’s son but his brother. J. Lynn, ‘A Quest for Glory: The Formation of Strategy under Louis XIV, –’, in W. Murray, M. Knox and A. Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States and War (Cambridge, ), p. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War years respectively after him. But if Barbezieux had joined the conseil during his short life of only thirty-two and a half years he would have been the youngest man in Louis’s reign to become a ministre except for his father, who was promoted aged only thirty. Seignelay, in so many ways like Barbezieux, had to wait until he was thirty-nine before entering the conseil d’en haut, and nobody disputes his unusual ability. In time Barbezieux would also have made it. The Le Tellier did, however, retain a voice on the conseil d’en haut in the shape of Claude Le Peletier who had remained a ministre even while divesting himself of the Finance Ministry. Not only did Le Peletier continue to be a protector of Le Tellier interests after , but he also protected their clients such as Catinat. Pomponne, who returned to the conseil d’en haut in July , was less well disposed, and he was suspicious of Barbezieux’s manipulation of news from war fronts, but he appears not to have harboured much animosity towards Louvois’s offspring. It should be noted, though, that Louis’s heavy dependence upon Pomponne for strategic diplomatic thinking and advice on negotiations did affect the conduct and administration of the war effort, inevitably involving the king as arbiter between diplomatic and military interests of what was both possible and wise.                                       :                  In July  Barbezieux was still very young and needed to be eased into his job. Consequently the king became more directly involved in the business of military administration. How far did this go? Just over a week after Louvois’s death Dangeau noted that Louis was working for three to four hours a day longer than before  July, and six months later he described the partnership between Louis and Barbezieux thus: ‘The king has accustomed himself to dictate and have under him M. de Barbezieux write all the important letters which concern the affairs of the war.’  Within a month of becoming Secretary of State Barbezieux was charged with corresponding directly with the commanders of subordinate army corps, something Louis did not generally do. Barbezieux was obviously continuing his apprenticeship begun under Louvois. By analysing and quantifying as far as possible the different handwriting in the minute books of the king’s despatches for – Ronald Martin 



 

SHAT A : Barbezieux to Claude Le Peletier,  May ; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. IV, pp. –; BNF FF , fols. r–r: Claude Le Peletier to Catinat,  Mar. ; FF , fol. r: Catinat to Guillaume Catinat de Croisille,  Sep. . Pomponne approved of the Courtanvaux–Estr´ees marriage and was a close friend of the mar´echalduc de Villeroi. See Bib Ars , fol. r : Cardinal Estr´ees to Pomponne,  Dec. ; fol. v : intendant Herbigny of Lyon to Pomponne,  Jan. . Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  July ; vol. IV, p. ,  Jan. . See, for example, SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to La Hoguette,  Aug. ; no. : Barbezieux to Larray, Aug. .



The ebb and flow of Le Tellier power has convincingly argued that Louis was allowing Barbezieux to handle much more of the direction of the war by the end of , and from  Barbezieux was in fairly ‘firm control of the war effort’. Unfortunately Martin blurs his argument by claiming that only three of Barbezieux’s letters in the whole period – discussed strategy or troop movements. Such a claim is simply wrong – such letters appear in abundance during the second half of the Nine Years War. The king was taking the strategic decisions regarding financial allocations and oversaw the despatch of routes to units marching across France. Yet what is striking is the frequently complementary nature of the missives from the king and Barbezieux to commanders by . Barbezieux dealt with the intendants and the king rarely wrote under his own name, even to commanders, on more trivial administrative matters, but both men corresponded with generals on questions of major strategic, logistical and patronage importance. Whether Barbezieux was an effective minister is also a matter of some debate. Working in the shadow of his late father at a time of increasing military problems for France, he has not had a good press from historians. A more balanced view came from the anonymous English author of a  sketch of the French court: he described Barbezieux as debauched, deceitful and vindictive, but even this commentator who was hostile to France reluctantly acknowledged that Barbezieux had a good grasp of affairs of state. Barbezieux’s difficulties stemmed in part from his upbringing and from his assumption of office at a very young age. Saint-Simon, who thought he had all the talents required to be an excellent minister – indeed a politically dangerous one given his ambition and exceptional skill – also believed he had too much confidence in his ability to work in short and hyper-efficient bursts. His notorious haughtiness and boldness came from the fact that he had grown up surrounded by the trappings of power and, though he was very popular at court, especially with women, even his friends were apprehensive of him. He also suffered terribly from the temptations of pleasure and luxury at court. Young ministers born into court circles lamented the hand which fate had dealt them, with their dependence on royal favour constraining them to work far harder than their contemporaries and friends among the court aristocracy. Louvois had been no better than Barbezieux when of a similar age, except that he had still had his father to cover up for him and bring him into line. When Barbezieux began to feel the combined strain of work and social life in the mid-s he had no father to bring him under      

 Ibid., p. . Martin, ‘The Marquis de Barbezieux as Secr´etaire d’Etat de la Guerre’, p. . SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  May . E.g. Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France, pp. , . Lynn, Giant, p. . BNF Clair. , fol. r : ‘Caracteres de la famille Royale de France des Ministres d’Estat et des Principales personnes de la Cour , traduits de l’Anglois a Villefranche chez Pinceau’. Dangeau, vol. VIII, pp. –, notes of Saint-Simon; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. VIII, pp. –. Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War control and his slippage from duty was more readily apparent to the king. The young ministers were surprisingly self-aware and self-critical, consciously seeking to navigate the perils of impetuosity and the administrative pressures they were under, though some were more acutely sensitive to this than others. At the age of twenty-one J´erˆome Ph´elypeaux, then survivancier to his father Pontchartrain for the navy and household, wrote to his friend the baron de Breteuil about the problems in maintaining control of oneself and one’s responsibilities: In truth, in a job like mine where when you want to do everything by yourself you are overwhelmed by an infinite number of details and thorny affairs, and where from morning till night people put to you a thousand questions and make a thousand impossible and sometimes even ridiculous requests, it is extremely difficult to keep your temper and mildness, above all at a still young age like mine where liveliness of spirit and the eagerness to do well cannot be held back by moderation, which experience alone and a long period attending to business can give.

When Barbezieux took over as Secretary of State Louis certainly had confidence in him. In December  the king granted him a ministre d’´etat’s pension of , livres per annum, even though he did not sit on the conseil d’en haut. By then Louis trusted Barbezieux sufficiently to let him in on his secret thoughts about opening another front against Spain in the western Pyrenees, whereas only the duc de Gramont had previously been aware of this. In February  Louis told Barbezieux in advance that Boufflers was to become colonel of the Gardes Franc¸aises but swore him to secrecy, proof that the king confided in Barbezieux over his patronage decisions. This was, of course, not universally the case. On the appointment of seven new marshals of France in March  Louis seems to have kept Barbezieux in the dark, if Saint-Simon is to be believed. Perhaps he was, as the memorialist said, irritated by some aspects of Barbezieux’s behaviour. More likely, Louis was showing that social promotions of such significance were for him alone to make and that the ministers had little or no part in his decisions. At the very least this was the effect. Louis’s conduct on this occasion certainly tallies with his behaviour over earlier social and military promotions. Barbezieux, at least in his first year in office, worked hard, rising at . a.m. He was also capable from early on of displaying an ability to keep a multitude of      

Even so, it apparently took the king some time to appreciate that Barbezieux’s disrupted work patterns stemmed not from ill health but from a racy lifestyle: see Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. I, p. . AN B() , fol. r :  May . I would like to thank Dr Sarah Chapman for giving me a transcript of this letter. Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  Dec. . BNF NAF , fols. r –r , r : Louis to duc de Gramont,  Aug.,  Dec. . SHAT A : Barbezieux to Villars,  Feb. ; Barbezieux to Boufflers,  Mar. . Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. I, p. .



The ebb and flow of Le Tellier power problems in his mind at once and to anticipate a host of possible contingencies. Yet although there was no glaring manifestation of royal displeasure with Barbezieux’s abilities at this stage, the young secretary does seem to have faced growing problems with his job. Like his father, Barbezieux had too great a faith in his own judgement, when in fact he still had a lot to learn. One letter of November  displays an overconfident assessment of the motivation for desertion from the ranks which betrays a considerably less sophisticated grasp of the issue than that of commanders and people like Chamlay. A bigger problem was a somewhat erratic application to state business. Towards the end of the  campaign the mar´echal de Luxembourg began complaining to the king that Barbezieux’s inefficiency meant he had not received orders to send officers on recruitment drives (although he had proposed their names long before), nor had he been sent any instructions for the troops’ winter quarter locations and the routes they should take to get there. In the  campaign senior officers of the army of Italy, including Catinat, repeatedly voiced concern over Barbezieux’s failure to reply to their logistical and patronage requests. As he learned more, Barbezieux also became more convinced of his own capacity and disregarded the views of vastly more experienced officers and intendants: Vauban, an ally of his, lamented to Le Peletier de Souzy that Barbezieux was not taking seriously his concerns about the artillery in the southern Alps, nor even looking into the problem. Matters did not get any better in : for example, Barbezieux left it very late before informing Le Mari´e that he was to be intendant of the army of the Meuse, and there were persistent delays in the operations of the War Ministry. Can this be explained by reference to other factors apart from apparent indolence, carelessness and arrogance? In Barbezieux’s defence it should be said that the administrative infrastructure supporting him at court had evolved when the armies had been considerably smaller between  and . Even the first three years of the Nine Years War put fewer demands on the War Ministry than in the period after Louvois’s death, and it was in an entirely new context that Barbezieux had to work. On the Flanders front alone the campaigns of – saw a major ratcheting up in the size of the forces deployed. The army sent against Mons in March , along    

 

See, for example, SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Nov. ; no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Dec. . Ibid., no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Nov. . SHAT A : Luxembourg to Louis,  Oct.,  Oct. . SHAT A , fol. r : Cray to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; A , fol. r : Cray to Barbezieux,  May ; fol. r : Cray to Barbezieux,  June ; fol. r : La Hoguette to Barbezieux,  June ; A , fols. v –r : Crenan to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; fol. v : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; fol. r : Catinat to Louis,  Sep. . Vauban, vol. II, pp. –: Vauban to Le Peletier de Souzy,  Feb. . SHAT A , no. :  May . On delays in the War Ministry, see for example A , no. : Bˆaville to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A , nos. , : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  Aug.,  Sep. ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  July ; Vauban, vol. II, p. : Vauban to Barbezieux,  June .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War with the forces deployed under Luxembourg and Humi`eres to cover the siege and the French border, totalled eighty foot battalions and  squadrons of horse. A year later the siege of Namur required a far larger besieging and covering army and far longer to prepare. Though this siege began only in late May, this was by no means Barbezieux’s fault. According to Dangeau: ‘The king told us that he had been thinking of everything necessary for the siege of Namur since the month of September, and strongly praised M. de Barbezieux for his diligence and the exactitude with which he had executed his orders.’  The size of the French armies, at least on paper, did not fall until some of the milice regiments were disbanded in –. Furthermore, colonel d’Aligny, no friend of the Le Tellier, thought Barbezieux would have been the most marvellous Secretary for War, had he not been a bit too fond of ‘la d´ebauche’, because, unlike his father, he knew how to delegate and did not have an obsessive desire to control everything. Other factors can also be pleaded in mitigation on Barbezieux’s behalf. Communications were still fairly difficult, especially to the southern Alps and the Pyrenean region, and letters from the court did go astray, never to arrive, or were held up by bad weather or general inefficiency for which no secretary can be fairly blamed. Barbezieux has also been accused of compounding the problems of French defence by shuffling units to and fro across France to the various fronts, but this is also a charge levelled at Richelieu, and in any case Barbezieux had to do this in response to the strategic dithering of the king. Given all these challenges it is hardly surprising that a Secretary for War still in his mid-twenties had difficulty coping. As the pressure mounted, things began to go seriously wrong in . J´erˆome Ph´elypeaux’s letter of  May to Breteuil hints at some of the problems. Barbezieux was still apparently strong in the king’s favour and was considered immensely capable, but he was also too aloof and not quite living up to his potential: I am delighted that M. de Barbesieux is currently in fashion and that the king is happy with him. I have always remarked in him great spirit supported by a great liveliness which is well suited in the great multitude of business. If he joins to all this, as I do not, lots of application and lots of mildness and politeness towards those who have business with him he will be a perfect man and on your word I already take him for my model or if you prefer for my hero.

If he was something of a role-model for young hauts robins this was partly because he was definitely ‘`a la mode’ with some of the grands, in particular with the Vendˆome   

 

Dangeau, vol. III, pp. –,  Mar. ; vol. IV, p. ,  Mar. .  Quarr´e, M´emoires, p. . Ibid., vol. IV, p. ,  May . SHAT A , no. : Grignan to Barbezieux,  Feb. , asks again for a decision by Barbezieux on forage distribution which had already been despatched on  January. A , fol. r−v : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Feb. , reveals how a letter from Louis dated  January  never reached Catinat. Parrott, ‘The Administration of the French Army’, p. . AN B() , fol. r : Ph´elypeaux to Breteuil,  May .



The ebb and flow of Le Tellier power brothers whose sybaritic influence may have been responsible for Barbezieux stumbling that year. The grand prieur de Vendˆome was a regular drinking partner of Barbezieux, while the duc de Vendˆome and the Secretary of War shared an addiction to hunting: the duke loaned Barbezieux his houses at both Anet and Fontainebleau for this purpose. It was during the court’s usual stay at Fontainebleau in September and October that year, when Barbezieux hunted and drank to excess, that the king’s patience reached its limit. Business was undoubtedly more sluggish than usual in the War Ministry, and Barbezieux can even be found justifying himself to his own underlings for disruptions and delays. It seems more than likely that he was suffering from a mild form of depression: with his youth slipping away under a mountain of paperwork, and with no French military progress to show for it, he took refuge more and more in the bottle and the chase. The loss of Casale in northern Italy was bad enough, but what made matters worse was the poor conduct of the mar´echal de Villeroi (his sister’s father-in-law) as commander of the army of Flanders. If Barbezieux was depressed he was not alone. The king’s state of mind was also far from tranquil. But the crisis in French military fortunes in  seems to have shaken him back to a more devout – ‘d´evˆot’ – course in a way that F´enelon’s scathing ‘Remonstrance’ to him about his policies two years earlier had not succeeded in doing, as testified to by Mme de Maintenon. The appointment of Bishop Noailles of Chˆalons, her confidant, to the archbishopric of Paris on  August, in the middle of the siege of Namur’s citadel, is one indication of Louis’s determination to reclaim the favour of Providence. His decision to crack down once again on debauchery at court and in particular to discipline Barbezieux may well be another. Louis knew that important strategic and logistical factors had contributed to the loss of Casale and Namur, but to a king who had become acutely conscious of sin during the previous fifteen years, and who saw the hand of Providence everywhere, the behaviour of himself and his ministers was quite likely incurring the displeasure of God. His response to the situation was to pen a memorandum which detailed Barbezieux’s shortcomings and which he presented to Archbishop Le Tellier on  October in the hope that he would bring his nephew to heel. Barbezieux was debauched and haughty, ran a slack bureau, kept army officers waiting too long to see him, socialised too much with princes, and told lies. It was a damning indictment. Yet, in spite of this, Louis had no wish to sack him, both because of the service the Le Tellier had given him throughout his reign, and also because he was acutely 

  

SHAT A , fols. r , v : Barbezieux to Grand Prieur,  May,  June ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  June ; no. : Grand Prieur to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  June ; A , nos. , : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  June,  Sep. . SHAT A , fol. r−v : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  October ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  Sep. . BNF FF , fol. v : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Aug. . Lavall´ee, vol. IV, pp. , –: Maintenon to Archbishop Noailles,  Dec.,  Dec. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War aware of Barbezieux’s intelligence and ability which had been displayed on many occasions in the previous four years. The secretary came close to dismissal but the king was throwing him a lifeline via the archbishop of Reims, whom he told: that I do not want to lose his nephew; that I have friendship for [Barbezieux], but that the state comes first with me before anything else. That it is necessary to finish this one way or another; that I hope that it will end in [Barbezieux] doing his duty and completely applying himself to it; but that he cannot do it unless he quits all the amusements which turn him away from it, in order to do nothing except his charge, which alone must be capable of entertaining him.

Louis’s memo had the desired effect, for shortly afterwards in November Barbezieux sold his pack of hounds, reputedly France’s finest. The king’s confidence in him seems to have returned, for Barbezieux was at the heart of the negotiations for the treaty of Turin in the following year, and played nearly as important a role in its achievement as Croissy. In  he was also influential in shaping the treaty of Ryswick, and Sourches commented on how Louis laboured on the details of the negotiations until midnight with both Torcy and Barbezieux on  August. The scaling back of the French forces between  and  was overseen by Barbezieux, and was more difficult but in some respects better planned and executed than those demobilisations implemented by his grandfather in – and by his father in –. He worked with the king every evening in Mme de Maintenon’s apartments, even during the – peace; the night that news came through of the accession of Philippe, duc d’Anjou to the Spanish throne (and the next evening) he spent several hours with the king and Torcy after the conseil d’en haut had met; he was present at the king’s crucial audience on  November  with the marquis of Bedmar, governor of the Spanish Netherlands; and just before his death on  January  he had begun to operate a secret foreign policy behind the backs of Torcy and the king’s envoy to Vienna, Villars, developing direct links with the Hungarian malcontents led by Rakoczy. By the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession Barbezieux was highly respected for his abilities and possessed a number of key allies at the highest social level, including Vendˆome and Harcourt who were to have major diplomatic and military roles in the next decade. Death was to cheat him of his chance to impress posterity. Barbezieux may have been passed over for the conseil d’en haut in November  because of excessively devious political manoeuvring against Torcy at the time that 

  

M. Barbier, ed., ‘M´emoire in´edit remis par Louis XIV a` l’archevˆeque de Reims Le Tellier, sur l’inconduite du marquis de Barbesieux, son neveu, secr´etaire-d’´etat de la guerre, en ’, Revue Encyclop´edique,  (), pp. –.  Sourches, vol. V, p. ,  Aug. . Dangeau, vol. V, p. ,  Nov. . See chapter , pp. –. Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Jan. ; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. VII, p. ; Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  Nov. ; Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, p. .



The ebb and flow of Le Tellier power news arrived earlier that month of the death of Carlos II. But Barbezieux was not without his backers: by this time Mme de Maintenon, who always approved of reformed debauchees like Barbezieux and Seignelay before him, was a supporter and wished to see him ultimately made a ministre, telling Harcourt: ‘I think just like you about this, but it is necessary to have a little patience.’  Be that as it may, Barbezieux felt deeply wounded by the king’s decision to pass him over, and just after Christmas he took himself off to his home in the vicinity of Versailles, ‘L’Estang’, where he and some companions drank and gambled for several days and nights. On his return to court on New Year’s Eve he went down with pneumonia. Arrogantly confident in his own abilities to the last, he continued to work from an armchair until he died less than a week later. Mme de Maintenon regretted his passing, remarking that he was on the eve of even greater fortune. Louis XIV, on being told the news, also expressed sorrow, noting that ‘he was beginning to correct his failings well’. Certainly Barbezieux’s departure deprived the king of an experienced and by now thoroughly competent Secretary of State for War just when one was needed, and his post was passed to Chamillart, already Controller-General of Finances, who did not want this additional burden and had to be cajoled by the king into accepting it. Thus rose and fell the power and influence of the house of Le Tellier. Their fortunes as soldiers and courtiers flourished in the eighteenth century but their role as ministers was at an end. They had achieved much, not least in the realm of their own dynastic ambitions. As the king knew, ministers contributed to ‘state-building’ for their own glory, pursuing projects and policies which were not always in his interests and which he sometimes later came to regret. ‘These ministers all want to accomplish something which will bring honour to themselves in the future’, as he told Pontchartrain in July . But on balance the Le Tellier had contributed a great deal to the strengthening of royal authority and the relative stability associated so closely with the first forty years of Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’: Michel Le Tellier deftly worked with Turenne to create a reformed military infrastructure in the crucial years –; Louvois adapted the system to percolate royal authority deeper through the land forces, in part by an attentiveness to detail which could never have been expected from any one individual, and he developed incentives which helped to tie the military elites firmly to the crown; and Barbezieux cannot be denied a significant part in keeping the machine of state running during the most demanding 





Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Nov. ; Lavall´ee, vol. IV, p. : Maintenon to Harcourt,  Dec. . Louis had apparently rebuked him for similar behaviour back in : see Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –. Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Dec. ; C. Cole, ed., Memoirs of Affairs of State (London, ), p. : Manchester to Vernon,  Jan. ; Lavall´ee, vol. IV, p. : Maintenon to comte d’Ayen [Noailles],  Jan. . Lavall´ee, vol. IV, pp. –: Maintenon to Archbishop Noailles,  July , quoting the king directly.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War foreign war France had yet fought. Louvois and Barbezieux in particular were no disinterested bureaucrats but vibrant administrative, military and social politicians. Yet they were instrumental in the reforms of the French armed forces – for good and ill – and the development of a style of management which were emulated in other European states. How far these changes gave Louis XIV the largest and one of the finest forces in Europe by  still needs to be considered. 

For Savoy, see C. Storrs, War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy, – (Cambridge, ), pp. –, –; A. de Saluces, Histoire militaire du Pi´emont,  vols. (Turin, ), vol. I, pp. –; for England, see J. Childs, The Army of Charles II (London, ), pp. , .





The use and abuse of servants: the Ministry of War, venality and civilian power in the army The extent to which the civilian administrators of the War Ministry had achieved a firm grip over the armies and generals under Louis XIV has been one of the obsessions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography on the early modern French armies. Yet no serious attempt has been made for nearly a century to draw together the various branches of the d´epartement de la guerre, while the period after  remains almost completely unexplored. The result is that old statist interpretations still hold much sway in our understanding of the development of the army. In his book on the intendants d’arm´ee between  and  Douglas Clark Baxter saw an inexorable march of ‘progress’ by which the intendants, with the approval and prodding of the Secretary of War, gained civilian control over the armies, commenting: ‘the process had not ended by , yet the trend was apparent’. His subsequent work has by and large reinforced this message. Louis Andr´e thought the civilian administrators were ‘pr´epond´erantes’ by . It is true to say that intendants and commissaires des guerres played important roles in the army reforms of the years –, but the claims of Baxter, Bonney and Andr´e are exaggerated, as both Baxter and Andr´e Corvisier have since acknowledged. Though they have provided little supporting evidence, both these historians now accept that these functionaries were reduced in importance as military officers came to play a greater role in the policing of the armed forces. As will become evident later in this book, factors other than the civilian administrators were important in underpinning the improved military administration of Louis XIV. Second, one should recognise that intendants and commissaires des guerres possessed their own sets of interests which were not necessarily in accord with those of the crown, and many such functionaries (though probably only a minority) by no means had clean hands. Moreover, the degree of subordination and hierarchy within the civilian administration remained weak. Functionaries did not automatically look to their immediate superiors but to other protectors and patrons, including the Secretary 



D. C. Baxter, Servants of the Sword. French Intendants of the Army – (London, ), p. ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. . See also Bonney, Political Change in France under Richelieu and Mazarin, pp. –, , . D. C. Baxter, ‘The Commissaires des Guerres in the s’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History,  (), ; Corvisier, Louvois, p. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War of War and men outside the War Ministry, on a very personal basis. Furthermore, those studies currently available on the war administration after  downplay the personal interests of the functionaries and give an exaggerated picture of an ideal Weberian bureaucracy in its early stages. The reality was a ministry riddled with concern for financial self-interest and where the hierarchical principle was but loosely at work. These considerations will be placed at the heart of this chapter.                              The central machinery of the War Ministry was small, comprising only around thirty commis at any one time under Louvois and Barbezieux compared with over  on the eve of the Revolution, and the personnel were intimately connected with the Le Tellier, often performing tasks for the family which transcended the boundaries of royal and private service. The Le Tellier family investments and purchases were so extensive that Jean Darbon, sieur de Bellou, one of the premier commis of the ministry, was employed to manage their private affairs. Mme Darbon even brought up several of the king’s bastards under Louvois’s direction. When the ministry passed out of Le Tellier hands on Barbezieux’s death a number of the most important commis took retirement rather than work for a new secretary of state. The commis were based in the Le Telliers’ property either at their Parisian hˆotels (now demolished but situated just off rue Richelieu and in the Marais) or at a townhouse in Versailles. From  the principal secretariat took up residence in the hˆotel de la surintendance within the royal palace at Versailles. Working conditions were spartan – barrels and planks were used as work surfaces – and the hours were long, regularly up to fifteen per day during war. There are no documents available anterior to the end of the seventeenth century which fully explain the division of responsibility and roles between the various bureaux, but we do know that by  there were five separate offices, and in  seven, all staffed by a premier commis and junior commis. The most important was the minister’s own secretariat, charged principally with his confidential correspondence and the administration of fortifications. This came under the direction of successive 







The weakness of the hierarchical principle in the War Ministry under Louis XIV is little appreciated by John Lynn or Claude Sturgill: see Lynn, Giant, pp. –. Some men held office in more than one branch of the Le Tellier empire: for example, one man was both a commissaire des guerres and a commis of the postal service (SHAT A , no. : Louvois to de La Haye,  June ). J.-C. Devos, ‘Le secr´etariat d’´etat a` la guerre et ses bureaux’, Revue Historique des Arm´ees  (), ; BNF FF , fol. r : Memorandum for Charuel [s]; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; Tellier, Face aux Colbert. Les Le Tellier, Vauban, Turgot, pp. , . Sourches, vol. VII, pp. –,  Aug. ; D. C. Baxter, ‘Premier Commis in the War Department in the Latter Part of the Reign of Louis XIV’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History,  (), . Devos, ‘Le secr´etariat’, p. ; A. Corvisier, ‘Louis XIV, la guerre et la naissance de l’arm´ee moderne’, in Contamine and Corvisier, Histoire militaire de la France vol. I, p. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. .



The use and abuse of servants Table . The bureaux of the War Ministry, s. Premier commis

Responsibilities

Darbon de Bellou Saint-Pouange Du Fresnoy

Minister’s private secretariat; fortifications Troop musters; hospitals; tents; patronage processing Drafting and despatch of regulations, of military and civilian commissions, and of special powers Winter quarters; troop movements

Charpentier (later Jossigny, his nephew) Toulmont Bourdon La Renaudi`ere

Darbon de Bellou (again)

Liaison with the military treasury system; processing of pensions; supply company liaison Petitions to the king; issues of dispute within the military ‘Bureau du conseil’ (created ): non-military aspects of the secretary’s work, notably quarterly duties in processing petitions to the king, administering appointments to religious benefices during the same quarter; roads, litigation and debt issues in the provinces within his d´epartement ‘D´epˆot de la guerre’ (created ): archives

members of the Darbon family, and Barbezieux personally paid three commis as his own secretaries in this bureau, notably Pinsonneau, and used the secretariat as a general clearing-house for business. Table . gives a basic description of the various bureaux in the s. In the s there was also an entrepot in Paris, apparently run by Saint-Pouange, for saddles, bandoliers, harnesses, medicinal remedies and hospital furniture. Further bureaux were added piecemeal in the eighteenth century, but when the crown took over more and more recruitment and supply activities from the officers and entrepreneurs after  the amount of paperwork and the numbers of staff greatly expanded. Despite the close work with the ministers of Darbon, one should say that the two most important commis were Elie du Fresnoy and Gilbert Colbert de SaintPouange. Du Fresnoy became a commis in  under the Secretary of War Sublet de Noyers, he accompanied Louvois to northern Italy in , his wife became Louvois’s mistress, he was nominated to a lucrative position in the administration of the Swiss forces in French service, and he eventually died in post aged eighty-three 

Devos, ‘Le secr´etariat’, pp. –; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. ; Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –; SHAT A , no. : notes and memorandum on War Ministry in , n.d.; A , nos. , : Louvois to Catinat,  July,  Oct. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  July ; Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  Sep. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War in . Saint-Pouange was Louvois’s first cousin, reflecting the continued close ties between the Le Tellier and some branches of the Colbert, and he was the son of a commis who became an intendant. Beginning in the ministry as a commis, he too became an intendant d’arm´ee in Lorraine in , but then spent the Dutch War as Louvois’s most trusted administrator at court. During the Nine Years War he spent several campaign seasons at the Dauphin’s side, operating as a sort of ‘super’-intendant d’arm´ee, with full autonomy to organise logistical matters. Vauban considered him an irreplaceable administrator. These and other men entered the War Ministry largely on the basis of recommendation by clients or allies of the family (including existing commis), and Louvois, in a marked contrast with his usual treatment of other people, took an extremely strong paternal interest in their affairs. While it is true that fewer Le Tellier blood relatives were employed as commis from the early s, nevertheless there was emphatically no shift away from clientage ties as the basis for service under either Louvois or Barbezieux, or even Chamillart. Some men served for over five decades, and two families over seventy and ninety years respectively. Ensuring the right men were chosen for such sensitive posts was fundamental for the Secretary of War, for they were in a high-profile position, were well known at court, and upon their trustworthiness rested the security of France. They were subject to regular, exhausting lobbying by military officers and civilians alike, and in order to try to mitigate the worst excesses of this Louvois and his two successors forbade the presentation of petitions on anything related to War Ministry responsibilities to anyone other than themselves or the king. Because the post of commis was not venal it was not an investment bearing interest which could be sold on to a successor. Instead the Le Tellier took it upon themselves to ensure that all their commis obtained rewards commensurate with their status and service. The salary drawn by the Secretary of State also included pay for his commis, so he could set the basic salaries of his staff. The most important commis were lavishly rewarded: in  the income of Saint-Pouange totalled , livres, though this included gages on venal offices he owned, plus royal gratifications, as well as the reimbursement of costs and expenses in his bureaux. He was intendant of the Order of the Saint-Esprit (under Louvois and Barbezieux as Chancellors) and also held one of the three, rather ill-defined posts of secr´etaire du cabinet du Roi. The king presented him with the grand bailliage of Cassel in , which he was permitted to sell for  

 

Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. ; Saint-Maurice, vol. I, p. : Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Aug. ; Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  Feb. ; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Feb. . Smedley-Weill, Les intendants de Louis XIV, p. ; Baxter, Servants of the Sword, p. ; SHAT A , fols. r–v , v : Barbezieux to Bagnols,  May,  May ; Vauban, vol. II, p. : Vauban to Chamillart,  Jan. . Baxter, ‘Premier Commis’, pp. –, . Montbas, Au service du roi, p. ; La Colonie, M´emoires, p. ; Bib Ars , fols. r , r , r–v : various to Briquet, –; Bib Maz , fols. r , r–v : Chamillart’s  r`eglement for his bureaux.



The use and abuse of servants –, livres, and probably much else besides. Others enjoyed similar rewards. At his death Du Fresnoy left over  million livres. The forms of reward are worth considering: for a number of years Louvois’s premiers commis all received annual gifts of , livres, and the lesser commis received pensions worth at least several hundred livres per annum. On his retirement Darbon de Bellou was given a , livres annual pension for his thirty years service. The commis might be preferred to other posts in government which would provide them with an additional income for a small amount of work, for example holding minor office in a chivalric order. Complete sinecures, such as the moribund venal office of contrˆoleur provincial of the Extraordinaire des Guerres treasury would bring in a couple of hundred livres a year. At least two commis bought the office of commissaire des guerres but did not fulfil the role as they worked in the central bureaux. In their aspirations, the commis of the War Ministry were no different from other annoblis or bourgeois. They sought land, titles and good marriages, in short the establishment of their own families in a secure place within the landed nobility. Owing to his position Du Fresnoy found he had no difficulty marrying his daughters off to good noble families at the cost of very little dowry. The sons of commis might enter the army, in which case they could expect personal protection from the ministry. In December  Saint-Pouange’s son Franc¸ois-Gilbert, marquis de Chabanais, became mestre de camp of a cavalry regiment, thus securing the Saint-Pouange branch of the Colbert in the sword nobility. In his declining years Du Fresnoy had the satisfaction of seeing one son become a sous-lieutenant in the Gardes Franc¸aises and another become colonel of an infantry regiment. At least eight families were either ennobled or had their nobility confirmed partly or wholly because of service as premiers commis. Acquiring land and feudal rights within France might have been reasonably straightforward – and the Le Tellier were free with advice to their commis about investment prospects – but the enjoyment of confiscated land and revenues could bring about short-term gain and long-term complications. In  Pinsonneau found himself locked in a legal dispute about some land in Provence confiscated from a deceased Savoyard nobleman’s estate and presented to him earlier in the decade. Duke Victor Amadeus II of Savoy insisted it be returned to his subjects under the terms of the treaty of Turin, but the French claimed it had been escheated to the crown because Savoyard subjects living in France in , the year of the nobleman’s 





SHAT A A.: Saint-Esprit officers, ; BNF FF , fol. v : payments []; Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  Oct. ; Sourches, vol. VII, p.  Jan. ; AN G :  projected pensions and salaries etc.; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. ; Baxter, ‘Premier Commis’, pp. –; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Apr. ; BNF FF , fol. r : pensions list [–]. In  Choderlos de Laclos, Barbezieux’s secretary, was also secretary of the Saint-Esprit: SHAT A A., Saint-Esprit officers, ; Sourches, vol. VI, pp. –,  Feb. ; AN G : note []; Baxter, ‘Premier Commis’, p. ; Bib Ars , fols. r –v : Vienne to Briquet,  Feb. . BNF FF , fol. r ; FF , fols. v –r , (i)v ; FF (i), fol. r ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  May ; Baxter, ‘Premier Commis’, p. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War death, did not at that time enjoy the ‘droit d’aubaine’ which would have allowed full inheritance by his heirs. In  La Cossi`ere was presented by Barbezieux with the right to the proceeds of the ‘lods et ventes’ in the duchy of Savoie, a seigneurial income derived from a levy on the sale of property. But obstruction by local officials led him to resign the right a month later, and instead he was provided with cash by the Extraordinaire des Guerres treasury, which was given the thankless task of trying to recover the feudal dues in question. Given that the military treasury was hard pressed at this time, it is tempting to think of this as evidence of irresponsibility on the part of Barbezieux, but the need to reward commis of the War Ministry adequately was of the utmost importance if corruption was to be kept to a minimum. Nevertheless, corruption did exist, and this will be discussed in chapter . 

COMMISSAIRES DES GUERRES

Out in the garrisons, in the provinces and in the armies a range of administrative tasks and a limited degree of initiative were devolved upon the commissaires des guerres, without whom, it is fair to say, the French army of the ancien r´egime would have been far less effective. Like the commis at court and in the capital, they may have been key figures but they were no mere disinterested servants of the crown. Though they played an important part in bringing order and discipline to the army under Louis XIV, their personal situations seriously compromised the integrity of their behaviour, for understandable reasons. This should, in turn, lead one to question the degree to which they were responsible for transforming the army. Were the civilians really the key to bringing the army under the control of the monarch? In the fourteenth century military officers were entrusted with troop inspection and policing the musters, but as the range of administrative tasks grew the role of overseeing the ‘gens de guerre’ was entrusted to civilians, and in , during the reign of Francis I, the commissaires des guerres became royal venal officers. The next hundred years or so saw some commissaires enjoy fixed residences, and others given the task of accompanying troops on the march, though in practice a chaotic confusion of roles and jurisdiction persisted until the early s, apart from a brief but unsuccessful attempt at reform in –. The army intendants did the best they could to provide some coordination of the activities of the commissaires ordinaires des guerres. In some of their tasks the commissaires were assisted by contrˆoleurs des guerres. This post was a provincial venal office, introduced in the s and s to 



SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Tess´e,  Aug. ; BNF NAF , fol. r : Le Bret to Tess´e,  Sep. ; fol. r–v ; memorandum on Pinsonneau’s case, Sep. ; fols. r –r : Pinsonneau to Tess´e,  July ; SHAT A , fols. v , r : Barbezieux to Bonval,  Jan.,  Feb. . V. Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise en  (Paris, ), p. ; J. Milot, ‘Le corps des intendants militaires (des origines a` )’, Revue du Nord  (), p. ; Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, pp. –, –; G. Bodinier, ‘Administration militaire’, in F. Bluche, ed., Dictionnaire du Grand Si`ecle (Paris, ), p. .



The use and abuse of servants try to stem corruption among the commissaires des guerres, and the holders were under the authority of and responsible to the bureau des finances, not the War Ministry. The contrˆoleurs were expected to be present at troop musters taking place within their province and after  there was supposed to be an equal number of these men and the commissaires. By the War of Devolution their role had faded to one of keeping the registers of troops for the commissaires des guerres. The arrangements existing before the treaty of the Pyrenees were wholly unsatisfactory, and when the government decided to maintain a sizeable standing army of –, men after  this necessitated an urgent recasting of the civilian administration to manage these forces. In peacetime there were no army intendants to supervise the commissaires, and Le Tellier could not rely upon the provincial intendants who were, for the most part, directly beholden to other ministers. In August  the king consequently reduced the number of commissaires to twenty, and when the army was doubled for the War of Devolution the commissaires were similarly doubled in March . They were known as commissaires ordinaires des guerres. Meanwhile, commissaires a` la conduite were being attached to seventeen prestigious regiments and companies, while others were periodically made available on a temporary basis for moving troops belonging to other units. Moreover, by  the twenty-two military districts of France (corresponding essentially to the g´en´eralit´es) each had a commissaire provincial stationed within it, and these men might also take on the role of accompanying troops on the march if such powers were added by special commission. Commissaires provinciaux were not, however, required to exercise their charges in person and could choose a substitute for the work. Corporate loyalty was strong: all posts were venal, though neither hereditary nor subject to the ‘droit annuel’; after  they all conferred nobility (vital if their holders were to be taken seriously by proud noble military officers); and there was a syndic chosen from among them who acted as the chief spokesman for the corps. The origins of most of these men are shrouded in obscurity at present, though some of them had certainly been military officers and indeed would fight alongside the troops when circumstances required; others had been minor office-holders in the provinces or contrˆoleurs des guerres. This system lasted until . Between  and  the essential tasks of the commissaires ordinaires des guerres were defined and insisted upon in a more exact manner by the Secretary of War. One of their principal duties was to help with regimental management. They would conduct a muster, once a month for garrisons (every two weeks from February ),  

Milot, ‘Le corps des intendants militaires’, p. ; Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, p. ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. , , –. Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –. –, ; B. Foissier, ‘Un commissaire des guerres de Louis XIV: Jean Chrisostome de Gresillemont –’ (m´emoire de maˆıtrise, Universit´e de Paris I, ), pp. , ; SHAT OM , arrˆet,  May ; X , arrˆet,  May ; A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  Aug. ; L. Mention, L’arm´ee de l’ancien r´egime de Louis XIV a` la R´evolution (Paris, ), p. . Claude Sturgill estimated that of  commissaires des guerres in the years – some  had prior military experience: Baxter, ‘Commissaires des Guerres’, p. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War every three months for troops on campaign, but only with the permission of general officers or fortress governors; in these revues they would count the men one by one, company by company, rooting out the passevolants (fake stand-ins hired for the revue by officers), dismissing unsuitable men, and checking on arms and equipment; they were to draw up three copies of the summary of their musters, sending one to the local or army intendant, one to the Secretary of War, and one to the local agent of the military treasury who would then pay the troops on that basis. They also performed a number of other tasks associated with the administration of regiments. As in the previous era, some of them were to accompany troops on the march and try to ensure good order prevailed in places where they sojourned; they disbanded units whenever ordered by the crown; they checked on the observation of the king’s regulations; they were to be present at courts martial but did not have a deliberative voice; and they watched over troop recruitment (though generally speaking did not actively recruit men themselves), recorded the activities of officers on furlough, and received new officers into the colours. Not only did officers resent the fact that commissaires would inform the Secretary of State of their aptitude and dedication to the process of recruitment, but in  it was made a legal requirement that every recruit had to be inspected by the local commissaire des guerres, so officers could not pad their units with dwarves, beanpoles, old men and young boys, as one contemporary put it. Furthermore, from  the commissaires, rather than military lodging marshals, were the arbiters of urban billeting, and both military officers and local civilian officials were subject to their decisions. In the enforcement of order and probity in the regiments these men were frequently up against recalcitrant, obstructive and violent officers in the midseventeenth century, and even military theorists and the more self-disciplined officers tolerated them only because they held the king’s commission. The overt protection offered by the Le Tellier to the commissaires was therefore critical. Louvois in particular upheld their right to suspend officers, he disciplined officers who threatened them, and he persuaded Louis XIV to accord them an honoured position in marches and in the allocation of billets. In  they were given the status of an officer of the general staff of the army in which they were serving. It became increasingly clear that officers either had to knuckle under, or they could try to bribe the commissaires. Of course, all this did little to restrain the swelling egos of some 

 

Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, pp. –; Bodinier, ‘Administration militaire’, p. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise, p. ; SHAT OM , ordonnance,  Aug. ; OM  [ordonnance],  Feb. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux circular letter to commissaires des guerres,  Jan. ; Lynn, Giant, pp. –. SHAT OM , ordonnance,  Mar. ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –; Sandras, La conduite de Mars, pp. ,  (citation). Sandras, La conduite de Mars, pp. –; Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, pp. –; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –; Milot, ‘Le corps des intendants militaires’, p. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –.



The use and abuse of servants commissaires, and friction between them and military officers – especially desperate ones – was not unknown: whether through a haughty manner or an over-zealous and obstinate application of the rules they could provoke considerable ill-feeling. Commissaires des guerres also played a key part in managing and policing the logistical back-up for the French armies and garrisons, for not only in the regiments did fraud threaten the performance of the army. The commissaires were charged with carrying out musters of mules to ensure supply contractors fulfilled their obligations to provide the agreed level of transport for their work. They were also expected to monitor the quantity and quality of forage supplied for horses by storekeepers. Head-counting and the prevention of fraud were similarly a part of organising the hospitals catering for the army. Other tasks which deserve mentioning include the distribution of oats to officers to ensure no short measures were given nor extra rations snaffled, and the organisation of the arms industry and arms transportation in such places as Lyon, Saint-Etienne and Charleville. Over the course of his ministry Louvois would come to specify more exactly the way the commissaires should perform their roles, both because he wished to ease their worries and because he did not sufficiently trust many of them. He also tried to acquire control over more and more areas of military administration and he actually sought to expand the range of tasks performed by the commissaires des guerres. It was not an aspiration the king seemed to support. In April  Louvois wanted to extend the powers of commissaires to include the marking out of camps, a role assigned to the mar´echal des logis de la cavalerie, a senior and experienced serving officer. This was a sure sign that, however unreliable the commissaires might have been, Louvois could control them more firmly than he could military officers. Louis XIV himself had to block this move, and indeed made it clear several days later that he did not see a future in the further expansion of the War Ministry by promoting the incumbent mar´echal des logis to general rank, thereby increasing the man’s authority. The king may well have been influenced by concerns about the overburdening of the commissaires des guerres. By the time France was faced with full-scale, multi-front European war in  it was abundantly clear that there were insufficient commissaires for an army which had grown by then to about , men. In fact complaints about overstretch had been voiced as early as . Technically there were only supposed to be forty commissaires for field duty at this time, and should any commissaire become ill the situation for an army in the field was already extremely worrying. By midSeptember , for example, not a single one of the nine commissaires with the    

BL Add. Mss. , fols. v , v , v : Rutherford and Knightley to Browne,  Feb.,  Mar.,  Aug. ; fol. v : Rutherford to Browne,  Aug. . SHAT A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Jan. ; A , fol. r : mule muster by de Riou, . Aug ; Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, p. . SHAT A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Esgrigny,  Mar. ; A , no. : Louvois to Catinat,  May ; A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Oct. . Dangeau, vol. III, pp. –, ,  Apr.,  Apr. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War army of Italy in Piedmont was fit for duty, an extreme case perhaps. Though we have no exact figures for those serving, we know that in addition to these nine there were another sixteen serving in the army of Germany in . On top of this there were approximately another half-dozen operating in south-east France and Savoie organising logistics, and probably more than this in Lorraine, Alsace and Franche-Comt´e. It beggars belief that there could therefore only be about another three to cover the whole of the army of Flanders (the largest field force by far), the expeditionary corps in Ireland and the army of Catalonia, not to mention commissaires working in the wakes of these forces. What can be said with absolute certainty is that there were more than the statutory forty men fulfilling the role of commissaire ordinaire des guerres in the early campaigns of the Nine Years War, and that some of them, a sizeable minority in all likelihood, did not own one of the specified venal offices. In all probability they held commissions and were appointed directly by Louvois, perhaps drawn from the ranks of the contrˆoleurs des guerres, the commissaires provinciaux and their substitutes. In extremis, as in Piedmont in , Louvois was even prepared to permit the army intendant to choose serving soldiers and responsible civilians to act as commissaires. It was not that Louvois did not care about the obvious over-burdening of the commissaires, but the failure to reform the system in line with military expansion can probably be attributed to personal politics: by retaining the system set up in the s for a far smaller army Louvois continued to enjoy the flexibility to appoint whomsoever he wished to carry out the role of commissaire des guerres, and an expansion in the number of venal offices would only have curtailed this power. Equally, he may well have foreseen that there was insufficient demand for an expanded number of such venal posts, and he may have feared that the wrong sort of reforms would jeopardise the fragile degree of accountability and honesty he had managed to instil in his subordinates.     COMMISSAIRES DES GUERRES   :                             In the aftermath of Louvois’s death in July , desperation for revenue finally pushed the government to recast the system of commissaires and contrˆoleurs des guerres along lines that would raise money. The early s has been described as a period of ‘archomania’ when the demand for venal offices reached an extremely high point. Controller-General Pontchartrain exploited this to the full by creating new offices for sale, and the War Ministry joined in, or was forced to join in, this auction of power. An edict was issued in December  preserving the commissaires of the Gardes   

Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; SHAT A , nos. , , : Bouchu to Louvois,  Sep.,  Sep.,  Sep. .  SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Bouchu,  Sep. . Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise, p. . Doyle, Venality, pp. , .



The use and abuse of servants Franc¸aises and Gardes Suisses and those of the Gendarmes and Chevaux-l´egers de la Garde, but it also created an absolutely uniform system of  commissaires ordinaires des guerres and eleven new commissaires for the units of the king’s military household. The commissaires provinciaux continued to draw their gages, but became redundant unless they also purchased one of the  new posts. All other commissaires were suppressed. The roles the commissaires could be assigned were the same as before, except now there was greater flexibility to appoint any commissaire to perform any task. But the extent to which this was a treasury-driven reform is illustrated by the clause allowing a titular commissaire to entrust his tasks to another person, a clear recognition that there were unlikely to be  men both wealthy enough to afford the office and sufficiently able and willing to do the job. In fact the crown sought to make the new offices particularly marketable. Not only were purchasers who undertook their duties in person for six years guaranteed the right to pass on the office (and the hereditary nobility which came with it), but it was also made easier for purchasers to raise the necessary capital by the crown’s offer of unusually favourable guarantees to anyone prepared to lend money for this end. These included first call upon the capital value, gages and appointements of the office should the holder succumb under the weight of personal debt. Furthermore, in February  the crown made terms even more attractive for money lenders by making basic remuneration for the office-holder less dependent on him performing active service. Henceforth, the appointements were brought down from  livres per month to , and the gages increased from  to , livres per annum. The price of each office was set at , livres. The next major reform came in September . The crown admitted that most of the posts of contrˆoleurs des guerres were vacant, and there were too few to support the commissaires, even though they too had been made hereditary offices in the previous December. Moreover, the system of contrˆoleurs was also confused and hamstrung by too many specialised demarcation lines. The existing offices were therefore all suppressed (and reimbursed) and  new offices of contrˆoleurs ordinaires des guerres created, costing , livres each, to serve alongside each commissaire. The holders would be paid their gages, but would not be entitled to any appointements for active duty, surely a disincentive to sales. To help aspirants raise the required capital, lenders were promised that any interest owed to them would be deducted from the gages by military treasurers and passed over to them. All the same, there were few takers for the new offices: a good number of men feared that they would have to follow a commissaire des guerres everywhere, and at their own expense with no salary.  

Holders of suppressed posts who wished to purchase one of the new posts only had to meet the difference between the price of their original post and that of the new one. SHAT MR , no. : arrˆet, Dec. ; no. : declaration of  Feb. ; Baxter, ‘Commissaires des Guerres’, p. . These were gages of  per cent of the capital invested, but only two quarters of the gages were actually paid, i.e. , not , livres.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War The crown felt there would still be too few able and willing purchasers whether it attached appointements to the post or not, so instead it dropped the requirement that the contrˆoleurs would be attached to a particular commissaire. This, of course, torpedoed any idea that these posts should be linked and work together, and indicates conclusively that the civilian administration of the army was being manipulated for financial ends. This was, disastrously, to be the pattern for the rest of the s. In the case of the contrˆoleurs des guerres, in April  the royal council had come to an arrangement with a ‘traitant’ named Etienne Mulard and his backers: they would collect the amounts that were still outstanding from the sale of the new posts, take a cut of  per cent and advance the rest in monthly instalments to the crown. A year later he was still owed . million livres, or  per cent of the putative sum, and even then far fewer posts of either category had been sold than the government had anticipated. The commissaires and contrˆoleurs were up to their collective eyeballs in debt, and not to Mulard alone. Commissaire Gresillemont had borrowed from the Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, La Touanne, and still owed him money at the latter’s death in . Commissaire La Gatine in the army of Catalonia was compelled to hand over the deeds to his post to Germain, his creditor in Nice, an alien living in conquered Savoyard territory! The positions had now become tradeable commodities, not serious positions in a proto-bureaucracy. Had there been an improvement to the service all this might not have mattered, but there was no real improvement. In August  a further adjustment of the administration took place when the post of commissaire aux revues et logements des gens de guerre was established to watch over lodgings, the supply and hosting of troops on the march, and special winter quarters payments to the troops. Though they were effectively subordinate to any commissaire ordinaire des guerres in the vicinity, the posts did not have to be exercised by the deed-holders and were part-time. In practice a large number of such offices were bought up by members of local municipalities, including mayors, so the local authorities once again, after a gap of over forty years, regained the power to regulate troop billeting. By , just at the time France confronted appalling famine and economic depression, the civilian administration of the army was in a complete mess. The rights to their income possessed by the creditors of the commissaires des guerres were renewed by the government in this and successive years. The situation was further aggravated by extra demands on the office-holders’ purses. By  it had become apparent that the government could not find anywhere near the  men to purchase  

 

SHAT MR , no. : arrˆet, Sep. ; no. : arrˆet,  Jan. . Ibid., no. : arrˆet,  Sep. ; AN G , no. : extracts from royal council registers []; Foissier, ‘Un commissaire des guerres’, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  June ; A : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  June . SHAT MR , no. : arrˆet, Aug. ; no. : arrˆet,  June . Ibid., no. : arrˆet, Sep. ; no. : arrˆet,  June ; no. : declaration,  Jan. ; OM : letters patent,  Sep. ; AN G , no. : extracts from royal council registers [].



The use and abuse of servants the offices of commissaires and contrˆoleurs des guerres. Indeed, by September it appears that there were only  commissaires, of which only  had paid the Parties Casuelles in full for their charge. The crown therefore reduced the numbers to  for each post, but forced an ‘augmentation des gages’ on the holders: in return for a forced loan of another , livres the commissaires des guerres would see their appointements rise from  to  livres per month and their gages increase to , livres per annum. This was an expensive bargain for the crown which indicates its desperation, but it also brought many commissaires to financial collapse. As if this were not bad enough, the government had also suppressed one of the commissaires’ financial perks: from July  until the war’s end (late ) the commissaires were not to charge new officers money for taking the oath of loyalty from them. Apart from the obvious fact that commissaires now no longer had a vested interest in ensuring officers actually held the king’s commission and swore the oath, this further eroded their personal solvency. By October  Barbezieux was having to threaten defaulting commissaires that he would revoke their offices, but despite this no action was taken for three and a half years when only seven of the most pernicious offenders were dismissed. Even after the treaty of Ryswick there seemed to be no let-up, and in December , only thirteen months before the opening of hostilities in the War of the Spanish Succession, the king ordered a further enforced contribution from the commissaires of , livres, which would add another , livres per annum of gages. Quite simply, they claimed they could not raise this sum, though a good number do appear to have managed it. The effect of these ‘reforms’ was to undo any good work Louvois had achieved in moulding the commissaires des guerres into an effective corps in the decade between the treaty of Nijmegen and the outbreak of the Nine Years War. As early as May  a deeply unenthusiastic Barbezieux wrote to intendant Bouchu of the army of Italy: I would like to have more commissaires des guerres to send to you than you have under your orders, but since they have been made charges, I am so perplexed with the choice of these commissaires, and with those who do not hurry to buy them, that if you were in my place you would try to use the small number who remain to you and who are actually capable of serving.

This was a damning indictment of a policy Barbezieux probably felt had been forced upon him. Yet in at least two instances he allowed the posts to be bought as sinecures, by the secretary of a lieutenant-general and by one of his own commis, though this 

 

SHAT A , nos. –: Barbezieux circular letters to commissaires,  Oct. , nos. –: memoranda of defaulting commissaires, Oct. ; MR , no. : arrˆet, Sep. ; no. : arrˆet of  July ; A (i), fol. r : Barbezieux to La Touanne,  Jan. ; OM : declarations,  Nov.,  Dec. ; AN G , no. : e´tat of payment [Mar. ]. On this period, see Foissier, ‘Un commissaire des guerres’, pp. , –. SHAT A , no. :  May .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War may have meant he could install somebody else of his choosing to perform the duties. There was a certain amount of trafficking in posts, and unfortunately some people bought them who would not transfer their duties to others in a responsible manner: at least one man, a retired military officer, was dishonest and foolish enough to lie to Controller-General Chamillart about how he had acquired the post. Absenteeism among the commissaires des guerres grew. In the army of Flanders in  five out of twenty-one had still not arrived at Mons to join the army by  June, and four years later Barbezieux was complaining that some commissaires were not even bothering to seek service. Even worse was the army of Catalonia: in , of the eleven transferred there from elsewhere none had arrived by  May and the few already present in the army were largely unfamiliar with their duties or were useless; and in May  intendant Trobat reported that not one of the commissaires could afford baggage trains, so they all asked to stay put in Roussillon. This may account for the fact that men other than commissaires were used to organise supply in this army. Naturally, the immediate consequence of this was that the commissaires des guerres actually serving were overloaded and undersupported. In fact the number of commissaires des guerres active in the armies was scarcely greater in – than it had been in . Furthermore, by  armies were becoming too large for the available number of commissaires to review them in a single morning. It was becoming impossible to draw up and parade all units at the same time, and only dismiss them once they had all been checked. The sheer number of faces each commissaire now had to remember allowed for a greater degree of false mustering: ‘billardeurs’ (named after the balls which bounced around the baize tables of the then highly fashionable game) could now be used in one unit in, say, the morning, and another unit, disguised in some way, in the afternoon, though this would require inter-regimental cooperation, and for an officer to get away with it he would have to rely on his men (who could get discharges and a sum of money for denouncing stand-ins) keeping quiet. Even so, intendants worried that the chronic under-provision of commissaires had made fraud easier again. It was all Barbezieux could do to prevent teenagers from exercising the posts. Perhaps on a less disturbing level, the Conn´etablie, the military’s judicial and policing system which was now run collectively by the marshals of France, was gravely concerned that between December  and the end of the Nine Years War some of the commissaires and contrˆoleurs had failed to register with them, even with the connivance of the military treasurers. This was a breach 



SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; Bib Ars , fols. r –v , v : Vienne to Briquet,  Feb. ; AN G , no. : Perrin to Chamillart,  Mar. ; no. : Barbezieux to Chamillart,  Mar. ; SHAT A , no. : e´tat,  June ; A : Barbezieux to Bagnols,  May ; A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  May ; A , no. : Trobat to Barbezieux,  May ; A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Feb. . SHAT A : Bagnols to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , fols. v –v : e´tat, ; BNF FF , fol. v : e´tat,  Apr. ; SHAT A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Sep. .



The use and abuse of servants of hierarchy and decorum, and allowed for underhand trafficking in the posts. The king insisted they comply with registration procedure. The recasting and sale of offices in the civilian war administration took place because the French state was desperate for money. It exploited the demand for government bonds as a secure form of investment, selling well over  million livres worth between  and . In addition, the reorganisation of venal office-holding and the repeated augmentations des gages were ways of forcing corporate bodies to tap into the private credit market so that they could lend money to the government at interest rates lower than if ministers had directly approached financiers (which they were forced to do at an increasing rate anyway). Selling financial offices was not unreasonable, given the circumstances in which the state found itself, and a similar view could be taken of judicial offices, if the aim was to maximise revenue for war. Over the course of the seventeenth century, in a series of wars, venalisation was pursued at lower and lower levels in the administrative hierarchy, and in the s a large number of new offices, unrelated to the handling of finances or judicial activity – what one might call ‘police’ or purely administrative offices – conferring closed-shop rights and fiscal privileges, were created mainly for sale. It is difficult to argue that any of these venal expedients damaged the French war effort in the period –, because alternative opportunities for investment, such as overseas commerce, were in any case much curtailed as a result of Anglo-Dutch naval domination. The same cannot be said for the decisions to squeeze the office-holders in the military administration. The great pressure put on the military administration by the demand for funds in the Nine Years War reversed the trend in the s towards a more conscientious application to duty, and worsened corruption again: not merely because the commissaires were overstretched, but because their personal aspirations were increasingly at odds with their financial situation, leading some into the ways of peculation. Such corruption will be discussed in detail in chapter . The government’s exploitation of venal offices in the military administration had gone beyond the point of utility for the war effort and actually damaged it. Yet to what gain? It seems that between  and  money from the Parties Casuelles – which organised venal office income – amounted to roughly half the crown’s ordinary revenues, yet in the Nine Years War the average proportion was as low as . or . per cent (according to one source). This amounted to a maximum total of  million livres in the decade –. At most, the sale, reorganisation and repeated milking of the posts of commissaires and contrˆoleurs des guerres, which only undermined good government by attacking the interests of the most vital administrative servants of the crown in the armed forces, brought in  million livres in the same period, or  

SHAT MR , no. : arrˆet,  Apr. ; no.  [sic]: arrˆet of Conn´etablie,  May ; OM : ordonnance of mar´echaux de France,  Apr. .  Ibid., p. . Doyle, Venality, pp. –, –, .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War roughly a mere  per cent of the income of the Parties Casuelles. The disruption to the war effort was not worth such a small sum.        ,             

COMMISSAIRES DES GUERRES

The private financial interests of the commissaires, the periodic manipulation of the civilian offices and the interaction of multiple client–patron relationships all combined to stunt the development of solid hierarchical principles within the military administration. To begin with, the contrˆoleurs des guerres remained technically answerable to the Controller-General of Finances rather than the Secretary of State for War, and so any attempt to make them the immediate underlings and assistants to the commissaires was doomed to failure. In fact, it was the king’s unwillingness to trust the commissaires that required that they should, ideally, be scrutinised by the contrˆoleurs, thus further complicating any straightforward chain of authority: in  the refusal of some commissaires to allow contrˆoleurs to assist at musters, in defiance of regulations and probably because their presence would cramp the opportunities for corruption by the commissaires, led Louis to issue an edict insisting on their right to be present at such parades. Next, the relationships between commissaires and intendants, and between the commissaires and the Le Tellier, were equally problematic. Under Richelieu the commissaires saw army intendants as a separate group of administrators, and the intendants did not regard the commissaires as their lieutenants in the armies. Under the Le Tellier this was to change. By  Michel Le Tellier and Louvois had moulded a corps of commissaires who, on the whole, had pre-existing links to the army or its civilian administration: for example, Ren´e Jouenne d’Esgrigny, who lost seven brothers in the king’s service and one of whose relatives had reached the rank of general. Similarly, appointments to intendant that were within the purview of the Le Tellier were given to men by and large already tied to them or their allies. Common dependence on and obligation to the Le Tellier increasingly bound the War Ministry together under Louvois, whose relationship to the commissaires was paternalistic, if strict. But this did not mean that everybody shuffled into clean chains of command. In fact a strong personal relationship between a commissaire and Louvois, such as that of Desnanotz to the minister, might well disrupt the line of authority running through the intendants. Foissier argued in an important master’s thesis that under Barbezieux rapports between the Secretary of State and the commissaires grew colder and more distant, with letters from the one to the others becoming    

 Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, p. . SHAT OM , arrˆet,  May . BNF FF , fol. r : placet au Roi []. See also, Foissier, ‘Un commissaire des guerres’, p. . See below, pp. –, –. Foissier, ‘Un commissaire des guerres’, p. ; Lynn, Giant, pp. –, especially p. .



The use and abuse of servants rarer and concerning service alone, with little mention of personal interests. He adduced from this that a clearer hierarchy was emerging in which commissaires were by then the deputies of the intendants, but this seems a bit too straightforward an interpretation. It is certainly true that by the Nine Years War the strengthening of Le Tellier links to military offices offered Barbezieux an opportunity to move further away from the narrow network of the War Ministry, and intendants were making more detailed reports to the minister on the commissaires des guerres than before. Some fronts, such as Italy, were so extended that intendants were allowed to use commissaires as full deputies. However, Barbezieux also suffered under the crushing burden of a war effort that had continued to grow after his father’s death, and, given his need for personal ‘quality time’, he seems to have cut back on direct correspondence with the more junior commissaires. Furthermore, Foissier’s argument is advanced on the basis of an extremely narrow investigation of the sources, and it does not acknowledge the fact that Barbezieux, like any incoming minister, did not consider himself bound by relationships and situations which had been established prior to his accession to power. He was far more willing to allow the intendants and those generals whom he trusted to choose their commissaires and to delegate tasks to whomsoever they wished rather than to impose subordinates on them. The result of this was certainly to strengthen clientage links between the commissaires and the intendants and generals, who often had their particular favourites. This did not necessarily mean that Barbezieux had no interest in the commissaires des guerres. He admonished them when they had erred, and sacked them when necessary, but he was resigned, as early as April , to the deterioration in their standards which accompanied the unwelcome venal reforms of his first eighteen months in office. Instead of wasting his energy on futile micro-management of the war effort he directed his correspondence to the encouragement of military officers, the processing and auditing of accounts, and supervising the intendants and the most senior commissaires – the commissaires ordonnateurs. This was an office of crucial importance in the s whose precise functions have so far remained unclear. The marquis de Feuqui`eres was mistaken when he argued that a commissaire ordonnateur was somebody given all the powers of an intendant except judicial authority. Foissier, who spent a great deal of effort pondering this post, did so on the basis of examining only one particularly controversial individual, Gresillemont, at Mont-Royal on the Moselle in the Saarland. Though he was correct 



Foissier, ‘Un commissaire des guerres’, pp. , –; SHAT A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  May ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Apr. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Esgrigny,  Mar. ; A , fol. r: Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  July ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A , fols. r –r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Sep. ; A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  June ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  May . For example, see Barbezieux’s close work with commissaire Fumeron at Namur: Bib Maz –.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War to point out that the office was not given institutional definition until , he tied the post too narrowly to the management of major fortifications in an era, –, when fortification work on the Franco-German frontier was a high priority. In practice the role varied according to circumstances. Gresillemont was a delegate forced on an unwilling intendant. He could order and certify some expenditure but only under the authority of the intendant, who maintained a jealous oversight. Gresillemont, and Fumeron based at occupied Namur in –, were in a very different position from those commissaires ordonnateurs in the Franco-Italian border regions. There the sheer extent of territory, the mountainous terrain and the isolated fortress presence of Casale Monferrato cut off from French soil  miles away down the Po valley, necessitated a major devolution of authority. Bouchu, the army intendant in –, was also intendant of the Dauphin´e; Le Camus, who had been intendant of Pinerolo, rushed to act as commissaire ordonnateur at Casale in , where he remained for the next five years; the conquest of Savoie and the county of Nice from the duke of Savoy led to the installation of Bonval and Segent respectively as commissaires ordonnateurs in these territories; and on at least two occasions Bouchu gave this status on a temporary basis to other commissaires, once for an expedition to expel the Savoyards from the Barcelonnette valley, and once when he promoted Andrezel to acting intendant of the army when he himself had to depart for a short trip to Grenoble in August . Only when Casale had fallen to the Allies in  did Barbezieux turn the county of Nice into an intendance for the returning Le Camus, revealing an unwillingness to promote Segent to intendant in the preceding years. At Casale Le Camus, as commissaire ordonnateur, was responsible for organising bread supply, making contracts with entrepreneurs and overseeing the military treasury, all without reference to any intendant, though this would have been difficult given the five years of on-and-off blockade it suffered. In Savoie Bonval negotiated contracts for bridge and road repairs and was in charge of payment not only for the troops but also for the duchy’s provincial office-holders. He also disciplined the superior courts of the duchy when they proved obstructive, yet intendant Bouchu set the taille and the forage impositions. As for Nice, Bouchu had little to do with the county, which was managed by Segent directly under Barbezieux. At Lyon, commissaire du Bois oversaw all the interests of the d´epartement de la guerre, especially munitions and the processing of bills of exchange related to supply companies and the military treasury. The use of such individuals with a high degree of autonomy  

 

Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, p. ; Foissier, ‘Un commissaire des guerres’, pp. , , –, , –. SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  June ; A , no. : Louvois to Segent,  Apr. ; A , fol. r : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  July ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; Sourches, vol. V, pp. –,  Jan. . He could not be intendant as it was technically not French territory. SHAT A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Le Camus,  Apr. ; A , fols. r –r : Le Camus to Barbezieux,  Jan. ; A , nos. , : Barbezieux to Bonval,  July,  July ; A ,



The use and abuse of servants reflected the massive expansion of the war effort and the scale of responsibilities borne by the War Ministry in the middle decades of Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’. But friction between commissaires ordonnateurs and intendants could and did arise. In – Gresillemont and the provincial intendant of the Sarre, La Goupilli`ere, were at daggers drawn in spite of the fact that both men were Le Tellier appointees. La Goupilli`ere was deeply resentful that Louvois had bypassed him for the construction of Mont-Royal and made several unscrupulous attempts to ruin Gresillemont’s credibility with the minister. But it was La Goupilli`ere, rather than Gresillemont, who was under Louvois’s close surveillance for dishonest practices. In Savoie in  Bouchu too resented what he saw as commissaire Bonval’s unwarranted interference in the receipt of confiscated goods and property in the duchy, though in this case what prompted the discord was the use of a lawyer of the Grenoble Parlement as administrator of this wealth – the matter therefore impinged upon Bouchu’s role as provincial intendant of the Dauphin´e. Furthermore, Bouchu may have been intendant of the army of Italy as well, but as intendant of the Dauphin´e he was responsible to the Foreign Minister, Croissy, under whose jurisdiction the province came. Bonval, on the other hand, was an acolyte of Louvois. The ‘hierarchy’ of commissaires and intendants remained weak, and personal links between ministerial agents and the Secretary of State counted much more than their place in any system. The building of administrative hierarchy, such as it was, reflected the personal empire-building of individual intendants and the growing pressure of the war effort after , rather than the establishment of any principles laid down by Versailles from on high.                     By  every g´en´eralit´e in France, including now Brittany, played host to a provincial intendant, commissioned by the crown from the ranks of masters of requests, commissaires des guerres and, occasionally, judicial office-holders. In most provinces each intendant was answerable to the Controller-General for much of the financial business he oversaw, but he was also responsible, as has been explained earlier, to the secretary of state to whose d´epartement the province had been assigned. However, the War Ministry required the assistance at some time or another of every provincial intendant, especially for the supply of essential war mat´eriel. For example, though Provence was in Croissy’s d´epartement, in the s Barbezieux and Pontchartrain repeatedly issued the intendant, Le Bret, with orders regarding the bread-supply



fol. r : Barbezieux to Bonval,  Jan. ; fol. r : Barbezieux to Bonval,  Nov. ; A , no. : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Mar. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Mar. ; A , fols. v –v : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Feb. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to du Bois,  Nov. . Foissier, ‘Un commissaire des guerres’, pp. –, –; SHAT A , no. : Bouchu to Louvois,  Sep. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War company for the army of Italy and its purchase and transport of wheat and flour. Intendants would be used to facilitate the transport of supplies by suspending internal customs duties and creating a temporary free market in certain commodities in parts of France, while they might also round up beasts of burden or carts and wagons. During the s and between  and  provincial intendants were also responsible for negotiating contracts with entrepreneurs for the stagingposts – e´tapes – visited by units on a route march. They regulated the sale of horses to ensure there were no violent fluctuations in prices which might bring ruin to cavalry officers seeking fresh mounts at peak moments of the year. They were also given the task of deciding on the pattern of winter quarters distribution for the troops being stationed in their province between campaign seasons, and for setting the level of deduction each community could make from its taille liability as a result of supporting the troops during these months. When it came to such matters, general officers, even those few whose commissions were extended over the winter months, played no part of any significance. Finally, from December  the provincial intendants shared responsibility with the governors for the raising, equipping and paying of the royal milice, the ,–strong group of regiments levied by compulsion upon the provinces to serve as auxiliary troops. Cooperation with the War Ministry was facilitated after the death of Colbert in  when his successor as Controller-General of Finances, Le Peletier, who was an ‘intime’ of the Le Tellier, purged the most notorious Colbert partisans from the provincial intendance, just as he began a persecution of Colbert’s closest collaborators among the financiers. As Secretary of State for War, Le Tellier, Louvois and then Barbezieux had the right to nominate to the intendances and many other posts of those provinces within their d´epartement. In  Louvois’s remit included Roussillon, Pinerolo, FrancheComt´e, Alsace, the Trois Evˆech´es of Metz, Toul and Verdun, Hainault, Artois and Flanders; and in the interior Angoumois and Saintonge, Poitou and La Marche. Louvois also administered the other ‘pays conquis’ of captured Spanish Flanders, Lorraine, Luxembourg, the Sarre, Avignon and those slender parts of Catalonia under French control. By December  Barbezieux administered Roussillon, Flanders, Hainault, Artois, Luxembourg, Champagne, the Trois Evˆech´es, Alsace 

 





SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to B´erulle,  Oct. ; A , no. : Le Bret to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Le Bret,  Jan. ; A , no. : Trobat to Barb´ezieux,  July . Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. . SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Dec. ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , no. : Catinat to Louvois,  Nov. ; Baxter, Servants of the Sword, pp. –. A. Corvisier, Les fran¸cais et l’arm´ee sous Louis XIV, d’apr`es les m´emoires des intendants (Vincennes, ), p. . On the milice, see M. Sautai, Les milices provinciales sous Louvois et Barbezieux ( --) (Paris, ). Smedley-Weill, Les intendants, pp. , .



The use and abuse of servants and Franche-Comt´e. Some intendants, such as Voysin in Hainault, were particularly close to Barbezieux. The careers of the intendants who served in these frontier provinces were largely linked to the War Ministry, and of the nineteen intendants who staffed the ‘pays conquis’ under Louis XIV, only seven were masters of requests. Far from seeing the provincial intendants as aloof administrators, working tirelessly for the benefit of the crown, the comte de Tess´e, later a marshal of France, was scathing about them: ‘Whoever says provincial intendant, speaking generally, says man who in the capital of his territory works a bit more for his own vanity than for public utility.’ By the s a good number of intendants had strong country roots, and this could be both a blessing and a curse. Etienne Bouchu was a native of Burgundy, where his father had been intendant for twenty-seven years, and as intendant of the Dauphin´e he would have been well equipped to work with the intendant of Burgundy and deal with these two provinces, both vital for supplying the army of Italy of which he was also intendant from  to . Some people, however, had greater power in a province than the intendant. B´erulle was powerless before Archbishop Villeroi of Lyon, who gave the river boats B´erulle had earmarked for the bread suppliers to the e´tapes contractors, while Bouchu was unable to persuade a number of his fellow intendants to levy , mules in  without lettres de cachet from Barbezieux. The provincial intendants were in fact constantly suspected of seeking to ease the burden on their own territory at the expense of other areas, a charge to which they were, not unnaturally, sensitive. Barbezieux even rebuked Bouchu in December : ‘I beg you . . . to think less of sparing your province than of procuring for His Majesty, and therefore the munitioneers, the means of speeding up their convoys of supplies.’                                      During the ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV the frequency of wars and intermittent campaigns of undeclared war led to the regular appointment of intendants d’arm´ee for the duration of mobilisation. While ordinary provincial intendants could be used to assist field armies, the intendants d’arm´ee were directly attached to these forces. 



  

Dangeau, vol. VII, pp. –,  Jan. ; Corvisier, Louvois, p. ; SHAT A : Barbezieux circular letters to intendants of his d´epartement,  Dec.,  Dec. ; A : Barbezieux to Voysin,  June . See maps  and . Smedley-Weill, Les intendants, pp. –, , –; Baxter, Servants of the Sword, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Le Mari´e to Barbezieux,  May . Technically Roussillon, Pinerolo, FrancheComt´e, Alsace, Flanders, Hainault, Luxembourg, the Trois Evˆech´es and other towns added piecemeal. BNF NAF , fol. r : Tess´e to Barb´ezieux,  Sep. . SHAT A , fol. v : Argouges (Burgundy) to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , no. : B´erulle to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , fol. v : Bouchu to Barb´ezieux,  Aug. . SHAT A , fols. v –r : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  Feb. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Dec. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War

Map  Provinces under the jurisdiction of Louvois, .

In the first decade of the ‘personal rule’ their tasks involved directing payments, auditing the accounts of the military treasurers working within their jurisdiction, and placing their signatures alongside those of senior generals on payment orders; overseeing the supply of rations for man and beast, and the stocking of magazines; negotiating contracts locally for work on fortifications; receiving complaints about 

The use and abuse of servants

Map  Provinces under the jurisdiction of Barbezieux, –.

the behaviour of troops and commissaires, limited judicial observation, and directing the provost and archers of an army to investigate suspected criminality. In essence their responsibilities changed little over the course of the reign, but some tasks took on a larger significance while others receded, and to these were added the administration of forced contributions to military coffers from enemy territory, 

The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War the issuing of safeguards to areas which had paid up, and the establishment of hospitals. It did, however, take a number of decades before anything approaching an effective apparatus was up and running, and in the period prior to  the intendants d’arm´ee were grievously over-burdened. Something had to give. In the s, therefore, control over troop clothing was returned to the regimental officers, leave passes were increasingly signed by only the general officers, and the backstage role some intendants had been playing in judicial matters from as early as the s further receded, as they restricted their activities to investigating officers’ misdemeanours at the behest of the crown, directing the provosts with the generals, acting as mere observers in civilian and military courts, and reporting on cases to the minister. In  the courts martial had been reformed to place military prosecutions and trials firmly in the hands of military officers, whereas there had previously been something of a vacuum because the intendants were so stretched. There appears to have been little judicial activity on their part during the War of Devolution. It had become politically acceptable to the Secretary of War that the intendants d’arm´ee’s principal concern should be military finance, now that the Surintendant had passed from the scene in . All the same, the intendants d’arm´ee remained over-burdened, not so much because of the range of different activities they had to manage, but because of the increase in the sheer scale of war. As early as  intendant Robert, who was extremely ambitious and whose powers were, in theory, growing during the Dutch War, was trying to give away some of his burden, for example by palming off artillery repairs onto an artillery officer. In  care of the invasion of Nice was given to a naval intendant rather than to the heavily laden Bouchu. Intendants settled into the role of facilitators, managing logistical affairs in such a way as to enable the general to run military operations as effectively as he could. Performing this task required them to be constantly on the move, visiting important urban centres, chivvying suppliers along, and overseeing the civilian office-holders attached to the armies, not to mention running their own provinces in most cases. It was just as well that the War Ministry realised that the intendants were not superhuman. Both Louvois and Barbezieux regarded an intendant’s priorities as being the supervision of bread and beef supply and the preparation of hospitals. 

 



For an example of an intendant d’arm´ee’s commission, see SHAT A , no. :  Apr. . On the roles, see also Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –; Gaya, L’art de la guerre, p. ; Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, p. . Baxter, Servants of the Sword, pp. –; Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, pp. –, –; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. , , –, , , –, –. Baxter, Servants of the Sword, pp. –, , ; SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Mar. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Nov. ; A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Bonval,  Jan. ; A. Corvisier, La France de Louis XIV: ordre int´erieur et place en Europe (Paris, ), p. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. . M. Sautai, Les Fr´ezeau de La Fr´ezeli`ere (Lille, ), p. ; SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Catinat,  Dec. ; A , no. : Louvois to Catinat,  Jan. .



The use and abuse of servants In the s the crown once again abandoned direct supply of bread, a policy thereafter resurrected only in extremis, and turned back towards entrepreneurs who formed Paris-based consortia to secure the contracts. Out in the field the intendants d’arm´ee gave orders to the local director-general of the vivres and reported once a week to the minister on the purchases the munitioneer company was making and the amount of transportation they had achieved, on the basis of close investigation which sometimes uncovered considerable discrepancies between claims and reality. This mismatch could apply to the preparation of the bread as much as to its delivery to the troops. The generals would also maintain a watching brief on the bread supply. In much the same vein the intendant d’arm´ee kept the beef entrepreneurs in order, or even, when disaster struck, ran the supply himself; and he also ensured that the flow of vital salt and other less crucial commodities to the army kept coming, whether from contracts or seizures of enemy stocks. For all these activities he would audit the accounts of suppliers before passing them on to the Secretary of War. An integral part of the intendant’s job was to secure the means of transport for all the mat´eriel needed by an army, whether shoes, shirts and belts going to forward bases from inside France or all the gear required by an army as it took to the open field. Carts, wagons, mules, oxen and horses had to be found, and sometimes, in the case of the inanimate objects, built from scratch. This was equally the case with the wagons and gun carriages needed by the artillery, where the intendant worked with its senior staff. As to hospitals, the multitude of other responsibilities facing an intendant d’arm´ee meant he could not personally oversee them. Instead, directors had been appointed during Mazarin’s ministry, often from the religious orders. But from the s hospitals were increasingly dependent upon entrepreneurs, who acted as directors themselves or provided someone else for the position, and who supplied materials, 







SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Aug. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Oct. ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; A , no. : e´tat,  Dec. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Crozat,  Feb. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Aug. ; A , fol. r–v : memorandum on flour [May ]; Iung, ‘Service des vivres et munitionnaires sous l’ancien r´egime’, vol. I, pp. , . Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Bouchu to Louvois,  Sep. ; A , no. : Louvois to Bouchu,  Dec. ; A : Barbezieux to Gresillemont,  June ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Nov. ; A , fol. r–v : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Jan. ; fol. v : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Jan. . SHAT A , nos. , , : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  June,  July,  Aug. ; A , fol. r: Bouchu to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , no. : Bouchu to Louvois,  Mar. ; A , nos. , : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Mar.,  Apr. ; A , fols. v –r : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  June ; fol. r : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  June ; fols. v –r : Catinat to Barbezieux,  June ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Dec. ; fols. r –r : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  May ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Sep. . SHAT A , no. : Le Camus to Louvois,  Apr. ; A , no. : memorandum on bread,  July ; A , no. : Bouchu to Louvois,  Aug. ; A , no. : Louvois to Bouchu,  Dec. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  July ; A , fol. v : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  Aug. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War medicine and finance. The intendants negotiated hospital contracts on an annual basis and the commissaires des guerres were supposed to monitor these establishments at close quarters. The intendant audited the hospitals’ accounts once a year. All in all, though, it was extremely difficult for intendants to ensure that the hospitals were being run with the utmost honesty (which they were not) because of the shortage of commissaires. Instead, they had to rely upon military officers’ financial vested interest in the return of their sick and wounded to health and duty as the best method of policing these primitive establishments. For the army, it was important that the intendant gather the best surgeons before giving them posts throughout the field force, and sometimes compulsion was necessary. Once a battle or a siege had begun he also tried to get as many doctors and surgeons as possible from nearby towns. After the carnage was over his chief task was the grim one of caring for the sick and wounded and organising their evacuation, back to France if necessary. Apart from supplies and medical facilities, another significant concern of the intendants d’arm´ee, if they were frontier provincial intendants as well, was the management of fortresses (though not of the garrisons themselves which were subject to the authority of military officers). Some intendants had control over the chests of the fortress treasurer in their locality, and so, with ministerial approval, could order necessary expenditure. In  the intendants des fortifications disappeared, after an existence in which they had wielded less authority than their title might suggest, to be replaced by twenty-three directors under the oversight of the local provincial intendant, or, on the frontiers, the intendant d’arm´ee during the campaign season. Yet the most worrisome matter regarding fortresses was the local population. Pinerolo may have been an extreme case, but Bouchu had to treat the population very sensitively and champion their needs if the town was not to be depopulated as a result of hardship. All these activities involved the intendant d’arm´ee heavily in the world of finance and accounts. The actual financing of the armies, the imposition of contributions on enemy territory and the role played in managing the paymasters by the Secretary of War and the intendants will be examined in the next chapter. But personal financial circumstances were also a constant concern in the minds of the intendants. The range of tasks they performed and the number of miles they covered made it an expensive business being an intendant d’arm´ee. As a mere commissaire des guerres in Ireland in  





Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –. Foissier, ‘Un commissaire des guerres’, pp. –; SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Esgrigny,  Aug. ; A , no. : Merveilhaud to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  Aug. . SHAT A , fols. r –r : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  May ; fol. v : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Nov. ; A , fol. r : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , no. : Bouchu to Louvois,  Oct. . SHAT A , no. : Bouchu to Louvois,  July ; A , no. : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  July ; A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Apr. ; Baxter, Servants of the Sword, p. ; Blanchard, Les ‘ing´enieurs du Roy’ de Louis XIV a Louis XVI, p. .



The use and abuse of servants – Fumeron spent , livres of his own money, and the intendant of the French expeditionary force there, Esgrigny, lost all his field possessions, baggage and transport in the aftermath of the battle of the Boyne. The miserable fellow also had most of his baggage train, including his silver plate, carted off by Catalan bandits in ! This was particularly painful because intendants were expected to fit themselves out for a campaign from their own resources, and when Esgrigny put together a fresh campaign train for himself in the winter of –, starting from scratch, he claimed it cost him , livres. If they could afford it, commissaires des guerres and former intendants still on the active service list (but not posted) might maintain a train ready in Paris for immediate departure. If their costs were great, their pay, however, was reasonably generous: by the Nine Years War their income was , livres per month and fifty free bread rations each day, though from this they were expected to pay for secretarial assistance and office equipment, and meet any extraordinary expenditure they might incur, including running spy networks in enemy territory. If they were also provincial intendants they would receive either a further , or , livres per annum, depending on their location, by way of salary. On top of this they could expect further financial rewards running into thousands of livres for good service, though the sums handed out in the form of royal gratifications would vary according to their performance, the expenses they had incurred and the cost of living in the area where they were stationed. One should not feel too sorry for them. None of those who served died ruined men because of their time as intendants.                          :                 ,                                 To imagine that personal interests and political considerations were not at the forefront of an intendant’s mind would be unworldly. Yet even those such as Douglas Clark Baxter, who have gone to great lengths to work out who the intendants d’arm´ee actually were, underplay the delicate personal and political situations in which they found themselves during the ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV. By the s the army intendants were closer to the Secretary of War than they had ever been, or, until the mid-eighteenth century, were ever likely to be. Most began either as commis in the War Ministry or as commissaires des guerres, or they were relatives of the Le Tellier. Although Michel Le Tellier did have a certain and novel ability to appoint 



Bib Maz : Fumeron to Barbezieux,  Mar. ; SHAT A , fol. v : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux; A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  May . Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise, p. ; BNF FF , fol. v : e´tat,  Apr. ; SHAT A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; AN G : e´tat of intendants’ appointements []; SHAT A , no. : Trobat to Barbezieux,  July ; A , no. : Trobat to Barbezieux,  July .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War his clients to intendances in the s, the actual extent to which this happened was exaggerated by Louis Andr´e. The Le Tellier network of intendants had barely started before , did not begin to dominate appointments until after , and never monopolised appointments. The scope for choosing an intendant d’arm´ee was circumscribed by other factors than mere personal loyalties, most notably the extent to which their health could survive the rigours of a campaign, and whether a general was prepared to work with them. By Louvois’s last years intendants were drawn either from the commissaires des guerres, or from the ranks of the frontier provincial intendants, who were not always in the d´epartement of the Secretary of War. In fact contemporaries recognised that there would be delays and obstruction if an intendant d’arm´ee were not simultaneously the intendant of the nearest province out of which an army was operating. Le Tellier clients who were important intendants d’arm´ee and frontier intendants are worth highlighting. Dreux-Louis Dugu´e de Bagnols was intendant of East Flanders from  to , and intendant of the army of Flanders in the Nine Years War. His first cousin once removed, Franc¸ois, had been intendant of the Lyonnais from  to , where he had cooperated closely with and secured the trust of both the first mar´echal-duc de Villeroi, governor of the province, and Villeroi’s brother the archbishop of Lyon, both of whom were very close to the Le Tellier. Dreux-Louis married the daughter of Franc¸ois and Marie-Ang´elique Turpin, sister of Mme Le Tellier. His wife was therefore Louvois’s first cousin. Louis III Chauvelin, intendant de police, justice, finances et des troupes in Franche-Comt´e during the invasion in  and for nine years thereafter, was Louvois’s second cousin. In  Barentin, Barbezieux’s first cousin once removed, was appointed intendant of Maritime Flanders at Dunkirk. Appointing the best man for the job should have been the principal concern of the Secretary of War, but clearly personal politics all too often intruded on selections. Claude de La Fonds, the intendant of FrancheComt´e since , was in high favour with Louvois because he was brother-in-law to the marquis de La Trousse, probably the War Minister’s most trusted collaborator in the high command during that decade. In  and for the next four years he was also intendant of the army of Germany. Nevertheless, his performance left something to be desired and caused friction within the ministry. In  there was an unfortunate clash in front of the Dauphin between him and Saint-Pouange, who was attached to the Dauphin’s general staff with the army. Saint-Pouange, Louvois’s most faithful and competent administrator, accused La Fonds of failing to supervise bread delivery properly and of lying about the orders he should have given to the supply entrepreneurs: ‘As he is extremely ignorant of the job he exercises here, he 



Baxter, Servants of the Sword, pp. –, , –, –; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –; Sourches, vol. VI, pp. –,  Jan. ; Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, p. . Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Dec. ; Smedley-Weill, Les intendants, p. ; Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –; Sourches, vol. VI, pp. –,  Jan. .



The use and abuse of servants has sought by lots of wicked reasoning to cover up the very little care and attention he has given to the supply of bread for the army.’ They remained on extremely bad terms, but Louvois secured La Fonds’ renewal. One happy example of the Secretary of War being forced to appoint somebody of whom he was wary was Etienne Bouchu, the intendant of Dauphin´e since , who became intendant of the army of Italy in April  and proved himself to be exceptionally honest, talented and diligent. He was a cr´eature of the Foreign Secretary, Colbert de Croissy, to whose d´epartement the Dauphin´e was assigned (except briefly in –). However, there is a strong suspicion that his appointment was initially intended as a stop-gap, for intendant Le Camus of Pinerolo had been sent forward to organise the ‘place d’armes’ of Casale Monferrato, which Louvois hoped to use as the base of operations in the northern Italian plain. The outbreak of full-scale war with the duke of Savoy and the failure of the French army to push beyond the western regions of Piedmont meant Bouchu remained intendant d’arm´ee for another six years as the Dauphin´e became critical for the war effort in Italy. By  Barbezieux, who had come to respect his abilities and absence of artifice, was prepared to lobby on his behalf for preferment as a councillor of state, even though Bouchu remained principally beholden to the Colbert and their ally Pomponne. Of far greater concern was the relationship between the intendants d’arm´ee and the commander-in-chief of the force to which they were attached. Andr´e Corvisier and John Lynn have argued that the intendants and the commissaires des guerres played a central role in establishing the ‘strat´egie de cabinet’ imposed on the high command by Louvois after , which enabled the crown to control the armies in a fairly rigid manner. Yet this is a very disputable point. During the s all major decisions regarding military policy and the organisation and disposition of an army were the general’s, with the intendant there to collaborate and help with their effective implementation. However, the intendant was not necessarily a ministerial agent at the general’s service, for there were major overtones of clientage in the relationships between them and generals; nor was the balance of power in the crown’s favour, for the War Ministry was not prepared to give overt support to an intendant in dispute with his commander. Particularly during the s and early s the generals had a significant influence on the choice of intendants, with some becoming their commander’s client, others fully deferring to him, and others still being foisted on  



Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  Dec. ; Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  June ; SHAT A , no. : Saint-Pouange to Louvois,  Sep. . Quarr´e, M´emoires, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Bouchu to Louvois,  Apr. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Feb. ; A , no. : La Grange to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , no. : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  May ; Bib Ars , fol. r : Bouchu to Pomponne,  Aug. . The Le Telliers’ principal agent in the Dauphin´e in this era was Ren´e Pucelle, First President of the Grenoble Parlement, commandant of the Dauphin´e (second deputy to the governor), and nephew of the mar´echal de Catinat, Louvois and Barbezieux’s trusted commander. See correspondence in ACC MsD .  Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, pp. –. See pp. –.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War Le Tellier by a general. Some were clients of grands like Gaston d’Orl´eans, and generals could block appointments or insist upon the removal of intendants. From , though, Baxter sees the crown beginning to assert control over appointments of intendants d’arm´ee, with the intendants during the s strengthening their role in those crucial managerial tasks they continued to exercise. He goes so far as to avow that by  ‘the intendant had risen to partial equality with the general’. Nevertheless, the question of whether the independent authority of the intendance inside the armies really did advance remains open. The evidence from the Nine Years War is that it did not, and that clientage between intendants and generals persisted quite strongly. Louis B´echameil de Nointel, intendant of Brittany from  to , was also intendant of the army of the West, composed in large part of militia and garrison units, under the command of the king’s brother the duc d’Orl´eans, who was responsible for meeting head-on any Allied descents on the coastal regions from Poitou to Normandy. B´echameil’s father was a Farmer-General of taxes who had been treasurer of Orl´eans’ household and Receiver-General of Finances of the Orl´eanais, the duke’s apanage. Louis B´echameil himself was intendant of the duke’s household. Esgrigny, who worked so well with Vendˆome as intendant d’arm´ee in –, was seconded to him again to be his intendant d’arm´ee in , this time in Italy. Raymond de Trobat’s links with the mar´echal-duc de Noailles were so outrageously partisan that they merit separate discussion below. Even when intendants d’arm´ee were not tightly bound to their commander-in-chief they exercised far less autonomy than historians have hitherto imagined. Spying on the general, and reporting back to the Secretary of War, is supposed to have been a vital means by which the high command could be kept in check by the War Ministry. In reality there was no stark dichotomy of suspicion to produce such a hostile situation. The Secretary of War was, on the whole, keen to ensure that multiple channels of communication from the armies remained open, not just because commanders could not be trusted (mostly they could), but also because it was possible that the general-in-chief had not been aware of activities and developments which had come to the attention of the intendant, or junior generals for that matter, or he did not see fit to report them, whereas the intendant might. Situations varied. In the army of Catalonia in – Barbezieux needed Esgrigny to spy on the generals because they had become singularly ineffective and inept; likewise Barbezieux was kept fully abreast of the mar´echal de Lorge’s activities in the army of Germany in  by Saint-Pouange and intendant La Grange of Alsace. But in the case of the army of Italy Barbezieux asked Bouchu to keep him informed of everything that was going on, promised him that nobody would know of the contents of his letters and that it really did not matter if Catinat found out because he was such a   

Baxter, Servants of the Sword, pp. –, –. Smedley-Weill, Les intendants, p. ; Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  Dec. ; vol. V, p. ,  Aug. . See pp. –.



The use and abuse of servants reasonable man. This was, effectively, the only way an intendant could help the crown control the generals, short of refusing to sign payment orders – an unwise step, most of them felt. In all events it was a matter of trust. In some cases Louvois and Barbezieux actually asked commanders to spy on intendants for them, if the general concerned was considered more politically sound than the functionary. It was important, not least to the crown, that an intendant had a harmonious relationship with his commander-in-chief. To begin with, good relations worked to an intendant’s advantage: if the War Ministry was not giving him the necessary support, or was deaf to his warnings, then he might be able to turn for help to the general, who could bring further pressure to bear on the court. The complicated and acrimonious factional politics in the army of Flanders in the early s only encouraged intendant Bagnols to keep his head down, while Bouchu was instructed by Louvois in  to conform to all Catinat’s orders in the army of Italy. Though Bouchu had been asked to keep Louvois fully informed of the general’s activities, he politely declined to tell Louvois of Catinat’s plans and thoughts, which the minister, unable to replace him, could only accept. Bouchu continued to avoid informing on Catinat to Barbezieux after July . His letter to the young secretary is revealing: M. de Louvois agreed to the very humble remonstrance I made to him that I could not inform him of anything, either by conjectures or in any way that would make M. de Catinat lose confidence in me. That the first would be of no use to him, and as for the second it would be necessary to do violence to my usual character to no effect since the Sieur de Catinat would soon cease, rightly, to have confidence in me. I beseech you to do me the justice of being persuaded that not the slightest thing will happen here which has a connection with my functions of which you will not be informed with the greatest exactness . . . and I hope you will be pleased to approve that Mr. de Catinat informs you himself of his thoughts and plans, there being nobody other than he who can do so with exactness and knowledge.

Generals too sought to run a happy partnership with the intendant d’arm´ee. Catinat in  was most anxious that Bouchu and he should not fall out over the post of First President of the Grenoble Parlement – Catinat was promoting the candidature of his nephew, and Bouchu that of his uncle, yet Catinat had not told Bouchu of this. 

   

SHAT A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Esgrigny,  Mar. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Saint-Pouange,  June ; A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to La Grange,  May ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  July . SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Feb. ; A , nos. , : Tallard to Louvois,  May,  June ; nos. , : Barbezieux to Tallard,  Aug.,  Nov. . For example, see SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Jan. . SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Bouchu,  Apr. ; A , no. : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  Aug. . BNF FF , fol. r–v : Catinat to Croisille,  Sep. . The mar´echal-duc de Noailles, though he was on terrible terms with intendant Esgrigny, warned his son, who was serving in the army of Catalonia, not to come to a breach with him: see FF , fol. r : Ayen to Noailles,  July .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War In fact the Secretary of War saw one of the terms of reference of an army intendant as the preservation of concord within a general staff, something that was notoriously difficult to achieve, not least because the intendant was frequently an isolated figure. The general-in-chief was often the only friend and supporter an intendant possessed in an army, and in his absence over the winter an intendant felt even more vulnerable to hostility, as the general officers would tell the troops that all their ills were caused by the unsympathetic intendant. It was therefore a wise intendant who attached himself, as Esgrigny did, to his commander-in-chief. When discord broke out among the general officers during the siege of Barcelona in July  as Vendˆome lay ill, Esgrigny was at pains to remain neutral, telling Barbezieux: ‘I cannot be accused, Monseigneur, of having entered into any of the partialities of which I have the honour to speak to you. I go on my way attached to M. de Vendˆome, and think only of what concerns the job you have been so gracious to confide to me.’ He was not the only one who wished to leave well alone and concentrate on his logistical responsibilities. Bagnols, closer to the Le Tellier than any other intendant of the era, would not make any value judgements on the senior officers of the army of Flanders because, in his view, that was the job of the mar´echal de Luxembourg who would report on such matters to the king. He remarked in August  that the intendant d’arm´ee had very little influence in strategic conferral and control over decisions regarding operations. Even the marquis de Chamlay, the king’s personal direct envoy in the army of Germany as chief adviser to the Dauphin in the s and s, could do very little to get the mar´echal de Duras to organise marches properly and get a grip on discipline. What really irritated the ministers, however, was when an intendant actively lobbied on behalf of army officers or troops of any rank unless they were suffering extreme hardship or deserving of special praise. Intendants had to remember where their principal sympathies were supposed to lie – with the king’s finances. Conversely, they had to be careful not to rub generals up the wrong way. Historians have usually argued that the intendants were gaining the upper hand over the generals by pointing to the episode in , when there was an undertone of severe friction between intendant Robert and the comte de Coligny, commander of the French expeditionary force to Hungary assisting the Austrian Habsburgs against the Turks. Robert was an arrogant if brilliant twenty-eight-year-old with an over-inflated view of his own status and heightened sensitivity to any form of     

Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  Apr. . SHAT A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Nov. . SHAT A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  July . SHAT A : Bagnols to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A  on the  Germany campaign. If Duras could not be placed under even a modicum of control he had to be removed, and he was. SHAT A , fols.r –r : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  May ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Jan. .



The use and abuse of servants condescension, the very soulmate of the young Louvois. He saw himself as Coligny’s equal, and bitterly resented the general’s indulgence and didactic tutorial manner as patronising. Coligny complained about his petulance, while Robert poured out his ire and defiance in despatches back to France. Le Tellier was forced to reprimand him and told him to confine himself to supply, and even Louvois advised him to conform to Coligny’s wishes, but he was too far away to be replaced, he was a relative of the Le Tellier, and he was, moreover, too good to be sacked. Because of this Coligny, on his return to France, was never to receive command again. This episode might be understood as evidence for the supremacy of the intendants, but it was a special case, an isolated instance where the general came off worse rather than a turning-point in civil–military relations. A failure to get on the right side of a commander-in-chief could actually have severe consequences for an intendant’s career. In  intendant Charuel of the army of Germany had to be recalled to his province of Lorraine after only three months following a rapid deterioration in his relations with the mar´echal de Turenne. The case of intendant La Fonds of the army of Germany brings alive the risks intendants faced when informing on their commanders to the court. In July  the mar´echal de Lorge missed a golden opportunity to engage the Allies in combat at Worms, to the irritation of the whole army, including the generals. La Fonds, a Le Tellier prot´eg´e, informed Barbezieux of the feelings of the general staff of the army. Unfortunately the courier was captured by the enemy and Graf von Lippe sent the despatches back to Lorge. La Fonds managed to intercept his own letter, but several months later (in an effort to sow discord?) the Allies informed Lorge of its contents. The marshal was furious. He refused any reconciliation with La Fonds and demanded ‘avec empressement’ that Louis replace him with a new intendant. Barbezieux, unable to support La Fonds, sacked him as intendant d’arm´ee and ordered him to confine his work to his province. The king ‘has commanded me to advise you, that though He is very content with the services you render him, and have rendered him, His Majesty has nevertheless been unable to dispense himself from giving this satisfaction to M. the mar´echal de Lorge’. As in the s the crown was not prepared to support an intendant in a bitter dispute with a commander-in-chief.                       The intendants were ambitious men. Some of them had reached the rank of secretary of state over the course of the seventeenth century, others would do so in the following decades, and others still had taken exalted positions in the superior courts. La Fonds tried to rebuild his image in  by seeking the post of provincial  

 Ibid., pp. –. Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –. SHAT A , no. : La Fonds to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; A , fols. v –r , r : Barbezieux to La Fonds,  Apr.,  May .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War commandant in Franche-Comt´e, the seat of his intendance, but this was refused. Bouchu also claimed this position in the Dauphin´e, on the grounds that his existing administrative functions were relevant to the troops. Intendants also sought to acquire land and property. Desmadrys, intendant of Maritime Flanders in the s, possessed the bailiwick of Ensisheim in Alsace, which was in the king’s gift and was worth , livres per annum (though it was not transmissible through inheritance). Personal ambition was complemented by familial ambition. Securing the future of their dynasty was a concern intendants shared with grandees and princes. As well as investing wisely, they would also seek to give greater respectability to what were fairly short noble lineages by means of prestigious marriage alliances and military service for sons and nephews. For the ninety-three intendants who held commissions as such in the period –, Baxter has tracked down  sons. Twenty-six became army or navy officers and six others knights of Malta. Others followed in their father’s footsteps as intendants, six became ministers of the crown, twenty-one became members of the superior courts, four became bishops and two archbishops. The chevalier de S`eve, younger son of the intendant of the Trois Evˆech´es, became a cavalry mestre de camp in , and captain de La Goupilli`ere of the r´egiment de P´erigord infantry when in service enjoyed revenues from the confiscated lands in the Saarland, where his relative was the intendant. A measure of the wealth and the use to which it was put by some intendants is shown by the colossal dowry of , livres given by Bagnols to his daughter upon her marriage. The most extreme and disruptive example of an intendant’s ambition during the ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV is provided by Raymond de Trobat, from  to  intendant of Roussillon and Cerdagne, First President of the Sovereign Court of Roussillon, and himself a native of Perpignan, having been born a subject of Philip IV of Spain. His case also presents an instance of a highly developed and blatant clientage relationship between an intendant and a commander. Because Trobat was both intendant d’arm´ee of Catalonia from  to  and the intendant of Roussillon, the mar´echal-duc de Noailles was his superior twice over, as commander-in-chief of the army and as provincial governor. Trobat claimed a very strong attachment to the Le Tellier in whose d´epartement his province was contained, but in October  Barbezieux dismissed him as intendant d’arm´ee, citing as reasons his advanced age and his provincial duties in Roussillon. In reality the Secretary of War had become steadily concerned by the close relationship of Trobat and Noailles, especially as relations between the ministry and Noailles, while never close, had deteriorated     

SHAT A , no. : La Fonds to Barbezieux,  May , with negative annotations by Barbezieux; A , no. : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  Aug. . Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Jan. . On this phenomenon, see Rowlands, ‘The Ethos of Blood and Changing Values’, pp. –. Baxter, Servants of the Sword, pp. –; BNF FF , fol. r ; Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  May ; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Dec. . SHAT A , no. : Trobat to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A , fol.r–v : Barbezieux to Trobat,  Oct. .



The use and abuse of servants markedly that year. Taking advantage of Noailles’ ill health and temporarily weak political position, Barbezieux sacked Trobat. Only during the course of  did it emerge just how much Trobat had become a firm Noailles client. In March, when it still looked as if Noailles would command the army again during that campaign, Trobat asked to serve as a volunteer with him, to the consternation of his replacement, Esgrigny, who warned Barbezieux that the mere prospect of this was already causing deep divisions in the army. The next month a beleaguered Esgrigny informed Barbezieux that Noailles was going to use ‘all his credit to re-establish M. Trobat, and he has boasted that I will not last long’. Only his well-placed faith in the minister’s protection prevented him fearing Noailles’ wrath. In June, shortly after Noailles handed over command to Vendˆome, Barbezieux was informed that Noailles, Trobat and Trobat’s brother, an abbot in Roussillon, were so close that the marshal was going to the brother’s abbey to recuperate before the arduous journey back to Versailles. Yet it was not just the case of an intendant being part of the entourage of a general. Trobat was a crook, and Barbezieux raged that his corrosive influence and domination of Noailles had allowed him ‘to commit a thousand knaveries against all the honest men of the army’. He had favoured Spaniards – and low-born ones to boot – to fill town offices in conquered Catalonia against the king’s wishes, and when negotiating contracts had shown far too much consideration for the interests of the entrepreneurs (a sign of probable kickbacks). His secretary was also one of the beef suppliers. He sought to impose contributions on Catalan towns which would go to the army’s officials rather than into the king’s coffers – in other words, unauthorised protection racketeering – and in the  campaign, when he had been retired to Roussillon, he sabotaged Esgrigny’s supply plans with the cooperation of his provincial officials. Lieutenant-general Saint-Silvestre went so far as to allege, ‘I know very well that Trobat would be happy if everything collapsed here.’ Esgrigny was told to keep his nerve and to chip away at Trobat’s power base by tearing up contracts and renegotiating them where necessary. By the following year Trobat was acting up less, most likely because by now he knew Noailles would not be returning as commander-in-chief and he would be unable to oust Esgrigny as intendant d’arm´ee. All the same, after the capture of Barcelona in September  his ambition resurfaced. At one point he had tried to achieve the juncture of the intendances of   

SHAT A , nos. , : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Mar. and  Apr. . Noailles never succeeded in removing Esgrigny. SHAT A , no. : Malartie to Barbezieux,  June . SHAT A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Esgrigny,  June ; fol. r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Aug. ; A , fols. v –v : Barbezieux to Esgrigny,  Dec. ; A , fol. r–v : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Esgrigny,  Jan. ; fol. r : Barbezieux to Trobat,  Apr. ; fol. r–v : Barbezieux to La Tremblays,  June ; fol. r : Barbezieux to Esgrigny,  June ; A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; no. : Saint-Silvestre to Barbezieux,  Apr.  (citation); no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Apr. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War Roussillon and Languedoc (where Noailles was acting governor too). Now, with the prospect of the army marching deep into Aragon taking Esgrigny with it, he hoped that Catalonia would be joined to Roussillon under his administration, and he would naturally place his cr´eatures in offices in Barcelona. Esgrigny warned that this would be catastrophic. Trobat’s politicking and corruption would cause mayhem in the occupied territory, and it was vital, if the subsistance of the French army was to be secured, that they got maximum cooperation from the local elites so that none of the current offices and arrangements should be disturbed. The treaty of Ryswick intervened before any such problems could arise. The civilian administrators answering to the Secretary of State for War did not secure greater political control over the French army as delegates of the minister after the initial reordering of posts and responsibilities in the s. Their tasks came to be, in fact, more closely confined to logistical matters and the policing of troop musters and pay claims – an actual diminution of their responsibilities when compared with the period before . In discharging these duties they were certainly more successful than in the first six decades of the century, and without their presence the military administration would have been unworkable at a time when the army operated on a semi-entrepreneurial principle. In large part the relative success of the War Ministry in these fields should be put down to the intendants in particular, who were, on the whole, more honest than other groups of crown servants – not so difficult if one is well rewarded. But the Le Tellier could make little further progress towards controlling the army by means of these men. There were precious few intendants, and the ranks of commissaires des guerres, though far more numerous, were understrength, seriously overworked and, especially in the s, universally indebted. Furthermore, both sets of agents were clearly motivated by financial profit, political power, and personal and family ambition. They were not immune from vanity, temptation and the desire for self-preservation, and this last consideration even the intendants would place above absolute service to the king. The consequence of these motives, when combined with the excessive pressure of the crown upon these men, was to worsen military administration and to engender a degree of financial fraud which threatened Bourbon dynastic interests. As the next two chapters will affirm, the king could expect little disinterested professionalism from his civilian agents working for the War Ministry.  

SHAT A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  May ; A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Sep. . See pp. –, and chapter .





Financing war: the treasury of the Extraordinaire des Guerres         -              Financing the French state during the ancien r´egime was an exceptionally complicated business, so much so that most historians have shied away from the subject. The crown was wholly dependent upon the business and financial activities of hundreds of officials and private individuals, whose interests were overlapping, interlocking and often mutually conflicting, in what historians have recently come to see as a ‘fisco-financier’ cosmos. Thanks to the work in recent decades of Julian Dent, Richard Bonney, James Collins, Franc¸oise Bayard and Daniel Dessert, building on the earlier researches of tax historians over the last century, we now have a reasonably clear, if still uncomfortably intricate and incomplete, picture of the fiscal system of the Grand Si`ecle. However, the focus of all this work has been on the raising and mobilising of resources, and much less on the deployment and spending of money. In particular, the way money was channelled to the units making up the French army, and to the suppliers who provided for it, remains almost wholly unexplored. To be sure, there are tantalising clues scattered thinly throughout the pages of a number of books, but nobody has yet launched an investigation of military finance in the way that Jean Legoherel has delved into the navy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there has been almost a complete divorce between scholarship on finance and scholarship on war for the reign of Louis XIV. 

 

J. Dent, Crisis in Finance. Crown, Financiers and Society in Seventeenth-Century France (Newton Abbot, ); R. Bonney, The King’s Debts: Finance and Politics in France, – (Oxford, ); Bonney, ‘“Le secret de leurs familles”: The Fiscal and Social Limits of Louis XIV’s dixi`eme’, French History  (), –; R. Bonney, ‘The Eighteenth Century II. The Struggle for Great Power Status and the End of the Old Fiscal R´egime’, in Bonney, ed., Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford, ), pp. –; R. Bonney, ‘Revenues’, in ibid., pp. –; R. Bonney, ‘France, –’, in Bonney, ed., The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c.– (Oxford, ), pp. –; J. Collins, The Fiscal Limits of Absolutism: Direct Taxation in Early Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA, ); F. Bayard, Le monde des financiers au XViie si`ecle (Paris, ); Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et soci´et´e au Grand Si`ecle. J. Legoherel, Les tr´esoriers g´en´eraux de la marine, – (Paris, ). The exceptions are Andr´e Corvisier who has used financial evidence in a very helpful way to illuminate the problems of the War of the Spanish Succession in his general survey of the reign, and John Lynn, picking up on the research of Ronald Ferguson into the use of enforced contributions to make up revenue shortfalls in the armies. See Corvisier, La France de Louis XIV, pp. –; Lynn, Giant, pp. –; R. Ferguson, ‘Blood and Fire: Contribution Policy of the French Armies in Germany (–)’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, ).



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War The consequence is to shroud military organisation and operations in a cloud of contextual ignorance, while historians continue to make the most basic mistakes about the administration of military finances. We still have little idea what happened to the money between its receipt and its final transfer into the purses of soldiers and the chests of suppliers. Dessert, in his magnum opus on the fiscofinancier system, suggested there was a fairly clear-cut distinction between the generation of finances for war and their disbursement to the military machine. This, however, is an oversimplified way of looking at it, and reflects the fact that Dessert seems to have paid very little attention to the military treasurers in his research. This chapter will consequently attempt to break new ground by exploring the system of military finance and its principal channel – the treasury of the Extraordinaire des Guerres. In the French state’s financial system there were five sets of primary receivers of revenue: the guards of the Tr´esor royal, the treasurers of the Parties Casuelles, the Receivers-General of Finances across France, the principal indirect tax-farmers, and, to a lesser extent, the treasurers of the few provincial estates left operating. They and their agents raised the crown’s money from taxation, the sale of offices, forced loans and regalian rights. The Treasurers-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres were fundamentally secondary receivers, though the most important, because they were overwhelmingly dependent on money from the primary receivers for their income. Yet financiers repeatedly and secretly came together for specific tasks and projects in consortia, as well as in open ‘societies’, and many of them were both primary receivers and heavily involved in secondary receipts. Moreover, the Extraordinaire des Guerres was itself a primary receiver of some funds, and acted both as a borrower and a lender of money. As a consequence of such overlapping involvement in state funds, the activities of the financiers were deliberately shrouded in secrecy, while they spent conspicuously to project an image of great affluence. Their basic aim was to preserve an air of credibility, but ultimately – because the bulk of their investments were in their own activities and in those of other state fisco-financiers – they depended upon a healthy royal fiscal situation if they were to prosper. 





For example, J. Lynn, ‘How War Fed War: The Tax of Violence and Contributions during the Grand Si`ecle’, Journal of Modern History  (), . See my material below on contributions: pp. –, and appendix , pp. –. Dessert, Argent, pp. , ; James Collins argues convincingly that the Receivers-General of Finances had the real power in the system, controlling about  per cent of direct tax income, physically passing perhaps only one-sixth of their revenues directly to Paris. The rest of the income was disbursed in the provinces on the basis of assignations issued by the king and presented by recipients to the designated Receiver-General to draw on his funds for the authorised expenditure: The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Property in Paris and the Ile-de-France was what they acquired to achieve this and to act as a locus for further magnificence: see, e.g., Dangeau, vol. VIII, p. ,  Nov. .



Financing war                  :                   After  the extreme chaos of the French financial system, so ably described by Dent, Bonney and Bayard, gave way to the more limited and manageable disorder which characterised the next thirty years. Though Fouquet was making a start on improving matters in his final years in office, much of the credit for the amelioration of royal finances should still be handed to Jean-Baptiste Colbert. During his period of dominance in the financial field, lasting from  to , revenue from leases on the royal domain went up; management of the royal forests improved; the taille, so oppressive to the unprivileged bulk of the population, was kept below the level of the s (though it was more efficiently collected); income from the aides – excise duties – went up four-fold; income from the gabelle salt duties increased; the indirect taxes were grouped in a wider farm in  and then put under a larger Ferme G´en´erale in  resulting in considerable efficiency gains; a tobacco monopoly was introduced in ; and stamp duty was extended to profit from the growing litigiousness and acquisitiveness of French propertied society. In , at a rough estimate, royal income stood at around  million livres and expenditure at  million; by Colbert’s death income had reached roughly  million livres and expenditure around  million. It was a remarkable achievement given the slowdown experienced in the French economy over these twenty-two years as it entered a prolonged period of stagnation. The extent to which Colbert’s achievement depended on the crown spending within its means can be appreciated if net revenue – after the deductions for administration and interest on borrowing – is taken as a proportion of notional gross revenue: in  it was a dismal  per cent, but by  it had climbed to a tolerable  per cent. By , however, almost twenty-five years of war with little respite had pushed this ratio down to an execrable  per cent, as the crown resorted to a series of steadily more drastic financial expedients: heavier and heavier borrowing, alienations of revenue and lump-sum advances at discount rates on the collection of taxes and sale of offices and bonds. The War of the Spanish Succession was the apogee of ‘le syst`eme fisco-financier’. Deterioration was the hallmark of the years –, and it began well before the Spanish Succession conflict. The crown was already resorting to repeated debasements of the coinage, the issuing of rentes and the expansion of the venal office system. In , , letters of nobility were put up for sale and the Capitation (a graduated poll tax on most members of lay society) was introduced, yielding over  million livres; the taille was increased by a small amount; taxes on ecclesiastical 

 

Biographies of Colbert include: P. Cl´ement, Histoire de la vie et de l’administration de Colbert (Paris, ); G. Mongr´edien, Colbert, – (Paris, ); I. Murat, Colbert (Paris, ; Eng. edn. Charlottesville, VA, ); J. Meyer, Colbert (Paris, ). Corvisier, La France de Louis XIV, pp. –. A. Gu´ery, ‘Les finances de la monarchie franc¸aise sous l’ancien r´egime’, Annales ESC  (), .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War acquisitions were strengthened; and in  an ‘armorial g´en´eral’ was instituted, forcing the registration of all coats of arms for a fee. The Ferme G´en´erale, which had brought in  million livres in , produced only  million seven years later. The annual deficit run by the government widened from  million livres in  to  million in , to  million in , so that total debt had reached  million livres by . What was more, ten years of military mobilisation had conspired to depress net revenue to only  per cent of gross revenue, a dangerously low figure, produced in large part because of an inflation in the number of contracts – known as ‘affaires extraordinaires’ – issued to financiers to rake in uncollected revenues in return for handsome profits and the up-front payment of discounted lump sums. The War of the Spanish Succession was the d´enouement but the writing was already on the wall by Louvois’s death in July . It was the Extraordinaire des Guerres which at first enjoyed the improvements in royal income but then had to cope with the steadily deteriorating returns. To do more than scratch the surface of French military finances would require the researcher to spend literally years in notarial archives, but even this would not uncover the secret networks of investment. What remains possible is to describe the way revenue was procured and how it was received, the political position of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, and the interests of the Treasurers-General and their staff. From this we may be able to begin to assess, however weakly, the causes and extent of fraud and corruption among the civilian administrators of the French army, and the degree to which private interest damaged or contributed to its organisational and operational improvement after .             :                                 EXTRAORDINAIRE DES GUERRES The treasuries of the Ordinaire and Extraordinaire des Guerres provided a system of credit and money-handling on the crown’s behalf to the French army whose origins went back to . Yet it was only with the mounting demands of the Habsburg–Valois wars in the first half of the sixteenth century that some longlasting principles were established. In particular treasurers and their clerks were not to release funds on the orders of a mere captain or lieutenant, and the people involved in processing the king’s funds were not to ‘park’ them to make use of them for their own private interests. Most importantly, the now frequent use of hastily assembled French forces and hired mercenaries brought about a split in the military treasury system between the Ordinaire and Extraordinaire des Guerres. The year  

Doyle, Venality, pp. –; B. Collin, ‘La politique mon´etaire de Louis XIV’, Histoire Economique et Financi`ere de la France: Etudes et Documents  (), –; G. Dethan, ‘Echos de Versailles en Toscane (–): les archives de la villa de Camigliano’, Revue d’Histoire Diplomatique  (), ; Corvisier, La France de Louis XIV, pp. –; Dessert, Argent, pp. , ; Gu´ery, ‘Les finances’, pp. –; Clamageran, Histoire de l’impˆot en France, vol. III, p. .



Financing war saw some significant developments: the treasurers were given the same privileges as commissaires des guerres; and a system of biennial or triennial alternation was laid down for a number of treasurers and accounts which lasted in various forms up to the Revolution. In  it was decreed that all assignations passed to the military treasuries had to go through the treasurers of the Epargne, the central treasury-cumclearing-house established under Francis I, which was replaced by the Tr´esor royal in . The Ordinaire des Guerres was the oldest channel for military expenditure, reaching back to the mid-fifteenth-century foundations of the standing army. By the s it covered all expenditure that had been thought necessary in peacetime a hundred years earlier. The efforts of the crown to overhaul the fortresses and artillery, and the rapid growth in forces in the s and s, relegated the Ordinaire des Guerres to lowly secondary significance as it came to be dwarfed by its precocious sibling, the Extraordinaire. Moreover, the Ordinaire was in a state of great confusion throughout the seventeenth century and the accounts were, in some cases, in atrocious states of neglect dating back to the s. It handled around  million livres per annum by the end of the century, on which some commission was taken by its TreasurersGeneral. Until  the two Treasurers-General had served together as a team but henceforth they would alternate each year in office. The most significant of these men were Claude Paparel and his son and successor Franc¸ois, who between them spanned Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’ and who were closely related to La Touanne, Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres from  to . Of far greater significance was the Extraordinaire des Guerres. The Extraordinaire first appeared under Francis I and it expanded in importance alongside the growth of the infantry in the first half of the sixteenth century. By  it had been split into two halves: the Extraordinaire of ‘dec¸a les monts’, which covered the northern part of France, and of ‘del`a les monts’ which looked after the southern half and particularly the few garrisons remaining in Italy (see map ). Each of these halves had two treasurers, serving in alternate years. This division of accounts remained for most of the rest of the ancien r´egime. An ordinance of  finally set in stone the system which would remain for just over the next hundred years: the treasurers became Treasurers-General (two of them for each territorial half), and there would be two Treasurers-Provincial subordinate to them in eight key provinces. All would serve alternate years only. The actual payeurs, created as venal offices between  and , appear to have remained untouched. In the following decades, in the 



P. J. M. R. Fr´emont, Les payeurs d’arm´ees. Historique du service de la tr´esorerie et des postes aux arm´ees (–) (Paris, ), pp. –, , –, ; R. Doucet, Les institutions de la France au XVIe si`ecle,  vols. (Paris, ), vol. , p. . Bib Maz , fol. r, and SHAT A , no. :  memorandum to Le Tellier; SHAT OM , e´dit of Aug. ; OM , ordonnance of the mar´echaux de France,  Apr. ; Dessert, Argent, pp. , ; M. Pinard, Chronologie historique-militaire,  vols. (Paris, –), vol. I, p. xvi; AN G , nos. , –, –, –: various documents arising from liquidation of offices, .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War

‘deça les monts’

‘delà les monts’

Map  Accountancy division within the Extraordinaire des Guerres.

absence of a Constable, the secretaries of state directed the activities of all these officials, preserving a certain amount of authority even during the Indian summer of the Constableship in the three decades running up to . 

G. Zeller, Les institutions de la France au XVIe si`ecle (Paris, ), p. ; Devos, ‘Le secr´etariat d’´etat a` la guerre et ses bureaux’, –; Fr´emont, Les payeurs d’arm´ees, pp. , .



Financing war The abolition of the Constable in that year should have placed the Extraordinaire des Guerres wholly under the control of the Secretary of State for War, but it was not to be. The Treasurers-General at the centre depended upon a series of overweening Surintendants des finances for assignations, and the Secretary of War was unable to bend them to his will. The Treasurers-Provincial and the payeurs were venal offices so the Treasurers-General were saddled with men they could not remove, thereby forcing them into the enlistment of commis to sidestep the payeurs. However, the Treasurers-General still had to work with the Treasurers-Provincial where they existed. The weak procedures for disbursing pay; the dominance of the military officers in channelling the pay to their men (or not) in a near-unaccountable fashion; officer control over the proceeds of enforced contributions; and the lack of control exercised by intendants and commissaires des guerres over local officials of the Extraordinaire des Guerres added up to a system out of control and riddled with corruption. For as long as the Franco-Spanish war continued nothing could be done to improve matters. After  Le Tellier’s hands were tied, for Mazarin did very little to ensure that the Surintendants forwarded money to the Extraordinaire, and it was to be  before stock was taken. The king’s declaration of January that year ordered commis thenceforth to provide full accounts and receipts to the Treasurers-General within six months of the end of the annual exercise, and it excluded any right of jurisdiction over the personnel of the Extraordinaire by all courts and judges except the Conn´etablie. With the coming of peace the TreasurersGeneral of the Extraordinaire des Guerres became increasingly zealous in enforcing discipline on their subordinates, though not with nearly enough rigour. Like Le Tellier they wished to erode military control over finances, and in particular to secure the right to handle money received from contributions. But they were not suddenly becoming ideological converts to a bureaucratic theory of monarchy. They had a vested interest in preventing their own agents from defrauding them, and in securing the right to handle as much revenue as possible because of the legitimate rake-offs they were allowed. Or so it appeared at the time. From this moment on, after the Surintendance was suppressed in  until the ministry of Necker in –, the Treasurers-General and the Extraordinaire des Guerres were independent from the bureau des finances, and their protector and superior was unquestionably the Secretary of War. It was he, and not the ControllerGeneral of Finances, who worked with them on their accounts, and when they were worried about the flow of funds they turned first to the War Ministry for help in securing the necessary allocations, which were then wrung out of the bureau des finances with varying degrees of success. Naturally this distinction became redundant when Chamillart was both Controller-General and Secretary of War between  and , but under Louvois and Barbezieux the Controller-General was warned off on repeated occasions when he seemed to be interfering in the Extraordinaire des 

Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. , –; SHAT OM , declaration of the king, Jan. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War Guerres under the pretext of often legitimate worries about financial and monetary irregularities. So much did the Le Tellier see the Extraordinaire as their personal fiefdom that Barbezieux ordered it to lend money in the Low Countries to his friends and relatives serving in the armies – sums which he would ensure were repaid back in Paris. Barbezieux himself borrowed heavily and furtively from the Treasurers-General – for example, , livres from Arnauld to build his ‘maison de plaisance’ at L’Estang – and on his death he owed the Extraordinaire over , livres, for which he had given no receipts. In the end the Treasurers-General were the Secretary’s men, they were installed by the Secretary, and they could be forced from office by him if he so wished. The hierarchical structure of the Extraordinaire des Guerres changed over the course of Louis XIV’s reign to adapt to circumstances and malpractice, but the core agents – known as commis – continued to fulfil broadly the same roles: they were both disbursers of money and receivers, they were expected to produce clear, regular accounts, and from the late s they found themselves again under the jurisdiction of the intendants or commissaires. There was a network of these men – by the s in the region of sixty to seventy – scattered across France in both war and peacetime. Money parcelled out to them might be given under the official or private seal of the Treasurer-General: legally it did not matter which. All this notwithstanding, before  there was a plethora of venal treasurers and non-venal commis both inside the Extraordinaire and unofficially connected with it, whose roles and status often made very little sense when related to their activities. The system had evolved, but had not fundamentally altered since the s when it was last recast in very different and turbulent circumstances. The loss of the Chambre des comptes records means we will probably never know who exactly was a Treasurer-General at which particular time, certainly before , so no table of incumbents will be provided here. Similarly, the fire at the Chambre makes it difficult to estimate how much money was being spent on the French land forces during Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’, but we can lay down rough figures which at the very least indicate trends. Table . demonstrates clearly the increase in the total amount spent on the land forces during the Nine Years War in comparison to the years of peace in – and to the years of partial mobilisation in – and . This reflects the volume of money channelled through the Extraordinaire des Guerres, as well as the Ordinaire des Guerres; the direct spending in the provinces on winter quarters, the milice and route-march e´tapes; and the money sent by the 



Mention, L’arm´ee de l’ancien r´egime, p. ; Fr´emont, Les payeurs d’arm´ees, p. ; Dangeau, vol. VIII, pp. , –,  May,  June ; SHAT A : Barbezieux to Bagnols,  Feb. ; A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  May ; A , no. : La Touanne to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  Feb. ; AN G , no. : ‘debet’ of the Extraordinaire des Guerres []; no. : memorandum by Arnauld [–]; no. : note []. See below, pp. – for discussion of the Treasurers-General. See chapter , pp. –, for reforms to the structure resulting from fraud scandals.



Financing war Table . Total expenditure on land forces through the Extraordinaire des Guerres and other sources. Year

Millions of livres

             

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

No accurate figures can be presented for  at present, though the total was certainly less than that for . Sources: Clamageran, Histoire de l’impˆot, vol. III, p. ; J. Saint-Germain, Les financiers de Louis XIV (Paris, ), p. ; G. Symcox, The Crisis of French Seapower –. From the Guerre d’escadre to the Guerre de course (The Hague, ), p. .

Controller-General directly to the armies’ food suppliers. The early eighteenthcentury financial official Mallet estimated that of the  million livres of military expenditure in the peak year of ,  million was channelled directly through the Extraordinaire des Guerres. Actually, this is a somewhat low estimate, because a hefty proportion of the rest also went through the hands of the Extraordinaire somewhere down the line. The overall total of military spending includes a variety of different forms of expenditure, most notably the ‘prˆet’ paid out to captains every ten days for the wages of the men in their companies; the ‘appointements’ (salaries) of the officers; the off-reckonings on winter wages; the royal milice after December  when they were operating beyond their province of origin; and the expenses of the hospitals and beds for garrisons. The Extraordinaire des Guerres handled some of the paperwork for the e´tapes system of military staging-posts, but it was not responsible 

J.-R. Mallet, Comptes rendus de l’administration des finances du royaume de France (London, ), pp. –. Less than  per cent of that went through the Ordinaire des Guerres. Mallet was one of the staff working for Controller-General Desmaretz in the War of the Spanish Succession.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War for raising or paying out the sums necessary for its operation. During the s, and again after , the Le Tellier were able to shift the burden of paying for the e´tapes and of meeting the top-up costs of winter quarters away from the TreasurersGeneral at the centre and onto the provinces as advances on the taille. For winter quarters the Extraordinaire des Guerres would have to advance the funds locally for the units in each area, but they would then be given assignations on the taille and other taxes in the immediate vicinity, thereby giving them a stake in ensuring these imposts were collected. Ordinary pay for the officers and men was relatively straightforward, but the disbursement of off-reckonings from the ustencile – the winter quarters pay supplement – was complex and financially threatening. These off-reckonings on the officers’ ustencile were supposed to be paid back to the same officers for the upkeep of their units in monthly instalments during most of the campaign season. This involved large sums of money: in – the ustencile was worth . million livres, in – and – over  million. As a recognition of the minor role his agents played in handling the ustencile the Treasurer-General got a commission of  d, or . per cent, in –, but because of growing complications and the probable need for his agents to advance their own private resources to pay the ustencile this was raised the following year to   d, or . per cent. Before  the Extraordinaire des Guerres had to fulfil the role of a primary receiver and collect the ustencile from the local communities, but as the burden of the armies grew again, the job was parcelled out to the Receivers-General of Finances in each g´en´eralit´e. The Receivers-General signed contracts with the Extraordinaire des Guerres and made advances to its agents before the revenue had rolled in. In the final months of the Nine Years War the Treasurers-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, desperate to find revenue with which to pay troops, wanted instead to force the ReceiversGeneral to sign bearer bills, backed by the ustencile, instead of signing contracts with the Extraordinaire. These could then be handed to the officers by the Extraordinaire. But because of ever-lengthening time lags in collecting the ustencile, which had prevented the Extraordinaire des Guerres handing over cash sums to the military officers, this prospect filled the Receivers-General with alarm. The chances were very high that many such bills would be presented by military officers and merchant suppliers before the Receivers-General had amassed the money. The bills would therefore be protested, and the creditworthiness of the Receivers-General would be shattered. In fairness, this was a worryingly realistic scenario for the government, but within  

Colbert had managed to stymie this between  and . SHAT OM , r`eglement,  Nov. ; AN G , no. : La Touanne to Quenet,  June ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –; Belhomme, L’arm´ee francaise en , p. . This arrangement suited the king best because it provided another means by which the receivers of the tailles were kept on their toes, but Colbert disliked it because it allowed War Ministry clients to interfere in provincial revenue-raising methods and gave him less influence about the disbursement of money at the centre.



Financing war two months the king’s determination to subordinate all other priorities to that of ensuring a reliable cash flow to his soldiers led him to compel the Receivers-General to sign the bearer bills as guarantees of the payments they were already contracted to make to the Extraordinaire each month. In the drive to end the war the interests of Louis’s financial officials came a distant second to the imperative of putting sound forces into the field. If the threat of ruin acted as a spur to the Receivers-General to redouble their efforts to collect the ustencile, so much the better. Aside from regular and ustencile expenditure on the troops, the most important – and unwelcome – drain on the Treasurers-General of the Extraordinaire was the supply system known as the vivres. The two principal companies of bread suppliers – covering the armies of Italy and Catalonia, and Flanders and Germany respectively – accounted between them for somewhere in the region of  to  million livres per annum at the height of the Nine Years War. Technically, when it was possible the Controller-General released funds to the directors of the companies in Paris in the form of cash, or, far more usually, assignations on the Receivers-General in the provinces or on the Parties Casuelles or royal mints. The directors might then send these funds on to their own treasurers in the provinces, or to the local commis of the Extraordinaire des Guerres for him to pass on to local suppliers or agents of the company. But the incompetence of the companies put a crushing burden on the Extraordinaire and its commis, who were forced to loan them money. Furthermore, the growing difficulties in which some Receivers-General found themselves meant that they could not always have assignations drawn upon them. Instead, the ControllerGeneral distributed assignations to the Treasurers-General of the Extraordinaire in the full knowledge that these men could draw on a wider credit network and deeper credit resources than the vivres, and the Extraordinaire des Guerres was ordered to channel money to the bread companies wherever they needed it. These sums could run into millions of livres. The Extraordinaire des Guerres was thus shouldering a heavier burden of obligation to compensate for the failure of some revenues in some provinces and the weakness of the bread companies. As if that were not bad enough, at times they also found themselves forced to pay for the transport of bread, flour and wheat outright and were not reimbursed by the vivres companies. So far it might seem that the Le Telliers were eager to keep the burden on the Extraordinaire des Guerres at a reasonable level, seeking to offload responsibility for winter quarters, the e´tapes and the ustencile from the Treasurers-General whenever and wherever possible. If the Extraordinaire was forced to bail out the suppliers, at 



AN G , no. : Receivers-General to Pontchartrain,  Jan. ; nos. –, : e´tats of ustencile, –; SHAT A , no. : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  July ; Navereau, Le logement et les ustenciles des gens de guerre, p. . SHAT A , no. :  May ; A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Crozat,  Feb. ; AN G , no. : munitionnaires of Italy to Pontchartrain,  Apr. ; no. : Veizi`eres to Pontchartrain,  Apr. ; no. : e´tat of assignations,  Apr. ; SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Bouchu,  May ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Aug. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War least the Secretary of War could console himself that this was in the wider interests of the War Ministry and its administration of military campaigning. Yet what determined the pattern of Extraordinaire des Guerres activity and jurisdiction was high politics. In particular, Louvois’s eagerness to subject the artillery and fortification administrations to his own personal oversight meant the Extraordinaire des Guerres found itself lumbered with the guardianship of these two branches of the military, both of which still enjoyed considerable autonomy in the early s. Both arms operated separate accounts, but they were now effectively annexed to the Extraordinaire. The autonomy of the artillery will not be examined in this book, but it is worth making a few points here. After  power over the artillery funds was exercised by the Secretary of War, or in the field by the intendant d’arm´ee and the commander-in-chief jointly. Etienne Landais, the Treasurer-General of the Artillery from  to , found himself restricted to ordinary expenditure on his arm – such as the maintenance of existing guns, the payment of the  or so staff under the jurisdiction of the Grand Master of Artillery and the upkeep of the arsenals. The extraordinary expenditure – the manufacturing of new guns, gun carriages and munitions – was authorised either through him or through the Extraordinaire des Guerres, and for the purposes of active campaigning and the defence of increasingly sophisticated fortresses this amounted to the bulk of expenditure. The weakness of the Artillery Treasurer-General’s agent network also meant he sometimes had to use commis of the Extraordinaire as his usual channels of finance instead. Landais’s role may have been undermined because he was close to Colbert in the s and s, having begun as household treasurer of the duc de Mercoeur, Mazarin’s nephew by marriage, and going on to a stint as a tax Farmer-General in –. For whatever reason, Louvois clearly did not trust him. Louvois’s handling of the Treasurer of Fortifications, Terrat, was more brutal, in part because he mistrusted Terrat too. Moreover, a highly sophisticated fortification network was becoming the key-stone of Louvois’s prescription for the defence of the realm, and the most important land fortifications were under his direct control from  as he came to incorporate the key frontier provinces into his d´epartement. On the death of Colbert de Seignelay in November  Louvois was given responsibility for all maritime fortresses, but after his own death the entire fortifications concern passed into the hands of Michel Le Peletier de Souzy, one of his prot´eg´es, who was appointed Director-General of Fortifications. As commissaires g´en´eraux des fortifications, Clerville, then, from , Vauban, were mere technical experts wielding considerably less patronage power, for a start, than the Grand Master of Artillery.  

I intend to publish this material separately, probably in a volume of essays on aspects of war, state and society in early modern France. Dessert, Argent, p. ; Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, p. ; SHAT A , fols. v –v : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  Jan. ; A , no. : La Fonds to Barbezieux,  Mar. .



Financing war In  Louvois deprived Terrat of the exercise of his post, handing his tasks to Desnoz´es and Grandmaison, joint Treasurers-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres. In  they were replaced in this role by another Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire, Franc¸ois Lemaire de Villeromard (in office since ). However, these men took on this responsibility not because it was added to the post of Treasurer-General, but on the basis of simple ad hoc commissions. Terrat did not accept this lying down. He conducted a running legal battle with Villeromard in the s to get hold of receipts which he could present to the Chambre des comptes, thereby salvaging his honour and giving him a continued claim on the income from the post. At least by making a fuss he could ensure that the Chambre knew full well that he was not to blame for any irregularities. This continued until May , when Villeromard agreed to give Terrat three-fifths of the commission for handling fortification funds, to prevent him talking. Out in the provinces fortification funds were handled by the local commis of the Extraordinaire, whose salaries were accordingly raised to reflect the additional load. This was, though, scant reward for lumbering these men with further, ultimately unsustainable expenditure. On Louvois’s death, therefore, it was announced that the Treasurers of Fortifications and the Artillery (Landais was succeeded that year by his son, also called Etienne) would regain their independence from the Extraordinaire des Guerres. Le Peletier de Souzy set up a separate network of agents under a revivified TreasurerGeneral of Fortifications, and tried to be extremely strict about the preservation of separate accounts where he was employing commis of the Extraordinaire for his own arm. Barbezieux in turn was adamant that the funds of the Extraordinaire should not be used to pay for fortification work without his prior consent. But bad habits lived on. In a number of fortresses, agents of the fortifications were lending their money to desperate commis of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, no doubt for a profitable rate of interest which they would pocket. Souzy had to step in to forbid such practices unless, of course, the loans were approved by the local intendant, in which case he and Barbezieux would settle accounts in Paris. Overlapping relations remained problematic for decades and unfortunately the direct fall-out from Louvois’s manipulation of military finance continued well into the War of the Spanish Succession. In  the royal council decreed that the Treasurers-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, who from  had accepted that the fortifications came as part and parcel of the charge of the Extraordinaire, had a share in the liabilities of the artillery and fortifications for the period prior to . It then emerged that Villeromard had placed fortification expenditure in the accounts of the Extraordinaire, and not kept them separate as he should have done. Terrat seized upon this and other irregularities in the aftermath of Barbezieux’s death in  to claim that he had been unjustly deprived of his role and robbed of the other two-fifths of commission on the funds, part of which Villeromard, and then La Touanne, had passed on to their associate Jean de Sauvion as a stable source of return on his investment in 

The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War the two Treasurers-General. The case dragged on for years following La Touanne’s bankruptcy in the summer of , as Terrat claimed the whole two-fifths share from Sauvion as a known colleague of the men. In this instance Louvois’s desire to control with his own hands both the artillery and the fortifications, principally through patronage power and a firm grip on mechanisms authorising expenditure, had benefited Louis XIV little: Louvois had overloaded his immediate acolytes, pushing up the commitments of the Extraordinaire des Guerres; they in turn had confused the accounts, thus making fraud easier and Louvois had not stopped them; and there was a legacy of debt from this empire-building which hung over the Treasurers-General. It took the more realistic ambition and good sense of Barbezieux and Souzy to insist on greater procedural regularity and distinction of roles, so that accountability might improve and the burden of war finance be spread around a little more. But by then things had already gone beyond the stage of recovery.    

EXTRAORDINAIRE DES GUERRES

As a secondary receiver of revenue, the Extraordinaire des Guerres depended heavily upon other treasuries and upon the political influence of the Secretary of War to secure its funding to carry out its spending obligations. The annual budgets for the Extraordinaire des Guerres were set in the conseil royal des finances after a series of bilateral discussions and negotiations between the king, the Secretary of War and the Controller-General. By the time he entered into the exercise of his functions in the early days of January the Treasurer-General knew the rough total sum of expenditure he would be expected to disburse. In the meantime he had contracted enough loans and secured enough credit guarantees to ensure the king could, in wartime, launch the campaign season. Obviously, though, in some years funds were more abundant than in others, depending upon the Treasurer-General in question and the economic context. In the ideal scenario the Treasurer-General was then presented by the Controller-General with a series of assignations and, for a smaller quantity of money, with some liquid capital, on a monthly basis. In practice assignations were just as often fed across en bloc every one to two weeks. All the same, there was a certain amount of predictability, unless there were major changes of circumstance – catastrophic bankruptcies among tax-farmers and officials and 

AN G , no. : note on Sauvion [–]; no. : placet of Sauvion [–]; no. : memorandum on Sauvion v. Terrat [–]; Foissier, ‘Un commissaire des guerres de Louis XIV: Jean Chrisostome de Gresillemont –’, p. ; Dangeau, vol. III, pp. –,  July ; SHAT A , fol. r–v : Barbezieux to Trobat,  July ; A , no. : Souzy to La Grange,  May ; BNF NAF , fols. r –r : Souzy to Tess´e,  Sep. ,  Oct.,  Dec. ; NAF , fols. v , r : Souzy to Tess´e,  Oct.,  Dec. ; NAF , fols. r , r : Souzy to Tess´e,  Jan.,  Feb. ; AN G , no. : memorandum for Nicolas Le Clerc [post-]. This footnote refers to material deployed over the previous three paragraphs – it was the only way to make sense of the evidence for the reader.



Financing war revenue failures – or changes of plan. For example, in  the prospect of the death of Duke Victor Amadeus II of Savoy from smallpox meant that the army of Italy, placed on the defensive for that campaign, would have to gear up immediately for a full-scale invasion of Piedmont in support of the prince of Carignano, his nearest heir, should the duke die. In , at short notice, funds had to be sent to Piedmont when Louis and Victor Amadeus declared their peace agreement and joined forces to invade the Milanese and compel the other members of the Grand Alliance to accept the neutralisation of Italy. Assignations could be paid anywhere that was designated in the kingdom, and, in extremis, if lack of funds threatened to provoke military disorder, agents of the Extraordinaire were considered entitled to demand money from local fiscal receivers. Though a number of Receivers-General were backers of the Treasurers-General, there was not a perfect identity of interest between them, as the episode over the ustencile suggested. Upon presentation of an assignation drawn upon a ReceiverGeneral, the Treasurer-General preferred to get delayed credit notes from him in lieu of actual cash deliveries or bills of exchange for immediate liquidation. In this way, the Extraordinaire des Guerres could make a claim on the Tr´esor royal for the reimbursement of further interest payments! Needless to say, the Receivers-General tried to avoid this wherever possible. Nor were they pleased by the way collection of forage impositions and the ustencile on behalf of the Extraordinaire des Guerres were prioritised over collection of the taille. Given the wealth of most Receivers-General one might have scant sympathy for their personal predicaments, but from the point of view of the war efforts such inconveniences could cause serious problems, as many Receivers-General were also investors and participants in the supply companies. At difficult moments some Receivers-General who were active in military supply gave priority to the bread companies over paying money across into the Extraordinaire des Guerres. The currency also provided a source of revenue for the Extraordinaire des Guerres. In the s, when debasement of the coinage was used to support the war effort, the Treasurers-General were given assignations on the profits of the royal mints, which they then sent to the nearest of their commis. To supplement all this, wagons laden with cash would journey across the kingdom. In May  Treasurer-General La Touanne sent carts bearing , and , livres from Rouen and Chˆalons respectively to Namur in occupied Brabant. When such deliveries were impractical or considered inefficient, the Treasurer-General would send bills of exchange to his commis. For instance, in Lyon in the s commissaire du Bois, in addition to his other duties, was responsible for coordinating the acquittal of bills of exchange drawn upon local financiers and merchants by the Treasurers-General, the proceeds  

See above, pp. –. Saint-Maurice, vol. I, pp. –: Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Nov. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; AN G , no. : Receivers-General to Pontchartrain,  Jan. ; no. : Chambellain to Pontchartrain,  Nov. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War Table . Assignations handed to the Extraordinaire des Guerres for August  for ‘de¸ca les monts’ (incomplete accounts). Source

Livres

Mints of Paris, Rouen, Lyon, Tours, Toulouse, Dijon, Besanc¸on, Strasbourg, Lille, Metz, Riom, Bourges, Pau Estates of Languedoc Tr´esor royal Royal tax-farms Receivers-General (to be paid October) Loan floated privately by the secr´etaires du Roi Postal service revenues Contractors collecting payment for bonds and venal offices Contractors collecting impositions on presidial courts Brewers of Artois Parties Casuelles Bills of exchange Auditors of the corps of ‘arts et m´etiers’ Tr´esoriers de France in the provinces Innkeepers Cash

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 

of which were then delivered to the commis of the Extraordinaire across south-east France wherever money was required. This was not without its complications. These bills might be protested, or acquitted at a discount for which the unfortunate commis would have to bear, at least temporarily, the loss. To give a sense of perspective on all this, some of the accounts of August  for receipt of assignations miraculously survive, representing . million livres (see table .). In the previous month assignations we know of had also been issued on the town of Alenc¸on, on the collection of ‘franc-fief ’ duty (a levy on ‘noble’ land owned by commoners), on the venal revenue from offices in the Aix Parlement, and on ecclesiastical forest land. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a complete picture, but it does give a clear indication of the nationwide functioning of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, in spite of the division of its accounts into northern and southern France, and it provides a flavour of the variety of resources on which the Extraordinaire drew. 

AN G , no. : Receivers-General to Pontchartrain,  Jan. ; SHAT A , no. : De S`eve to Barbezieux,  May ; A , no. : Voysin to Barbezieux,  May ; A , no. : Barbezieux to du Bois,  Nov. ; A , nos. , : Du Bois to Barbezieux,  Mar.,  Mar. ; A , nos. , , : receipts of assignations for months of July  and August .



Financing war The Extraordinaire des Guerres might have been dependent upon the Tr´esor royal and Controller-General for the vast bulk of its revenues, but it was not wholly so. It also acted as a primary receiver for a small proportion of royal income, most notably contributions and confiscations. The Kontributionssytem emerged in Germany in the s as a large-scale and organised version of the ad hoc plunder and requisitions which armies had traditionally appropriated as they marched through areas. First employed systematically by Maximilian of Bavaria and Christian of Brunswick to support the forces of the Catholic League and the Protestant Union, this vicious method of financing armies was magnified in scope and brought to the peak of efficiency by Wallenstein in , by which time it was the principal basis of his war machine. The contributions took the form of enforced cash payments, or forage and foodstuffs, often assessed on the basis of taxable wealth, extorted from communities and even whole regions under threat of pillage and absolute destruction. Such a basis for financing war, as practised in Germany in the s and s, was unsustainable, as evidenced by a drop in the size of field armies in the s and the increasing use of regular taxes to pay for the Emperor’s war effort. During the first half of the seventeenth century France was not able to exploit contributions in the same way: the Low Countries frontier was dotted with protective up-to-date fortifications that militated against widescale extortion, and the areas under French occupation (with the exception of western Germany when Turenne operated east of the Rhine with a mobile army) were too small or had been ruined before France joined the European conflagration in . The failure of the tax system to compensate for the paucity of contributions brought misery to French subjects themselves, mainly in frontier regions, when the king’s troops frequently seized what they needed under the direction of their officers to make up for deficiencies of supply or pay. The government was appalled by this, but it could do little to prevent it when it could not even meet the needs of its men-in-arms. Throughout the period up to  fortress governors extracted contributions from their localities, French or otherwise, and took direct delivery of any resulting income, a practice given explicit sanction between  and . Most of the time contributions were ad hoc, informal and went into the pockets of the officers who demanded them, because discipline was poor, the threat of restitution was weak and the ministry’s agents were unable or unwilling to keep a check on the units. Without regulation this wrecked military discipline, beggared the king’s own subjects and created economic wastelands. From  the War Ministry sought to gain control over contributions, which became more systematic and orderly after the Franco-Spanish war had ended. Indeed, 

Tallett, War and Society in Early-Modern Europe, pp. –; R. Asch, The Thirty Years War. The Holy Roman Empire and Europe, – (London, ), pp. –, is the clearest account yet of state finance and warfare in the early seventeenth century; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. , –; Lynn, ‘How War Fed War’, pp. –; Lynn, Giant, pp. – reproduces his earlier article on contributions and provides a clear, if debatable, picture of the administration of contributions by the French and their importance in the seventeenth century.



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War there was now a broad consensus among generals and princes that widescale and rational extortion was far more productive than piecemeal pillage, and that the proceeds of this should be handled by the king’s nominees. Disciplinary improvements cut back sharply the incidence of pillage on French territory by the king’s troops, and contributions were levied, in wartime, in areas beyond the French borders but within reach of raiding parties or campaigning armies. In the early years of his ministry Louvois tried to collect contributions through special intendants des contributions whose jurisdictions were rigidly demarcated but whose authority could not be enforced. Instead, therefore, at the opening of the Dutch War there was a conscious move away from such specialised officials. Instead, for the rest of the reign contributions and confiscated revenues were organised by the provincial or army intendants in consultation with their commander-in-chief or a fortress governor. They employed receivers charged with collection, or gave commissaires des guerres quotas to meet. This way of proceeding, based on sending out written demands to communities and awaiting returns, was best suited to Flanders, which was densely populated and wealthy. In Germany, north-west Italy or Catalonia – on the whole poorer and/or less accessible areas – raiding parties had to be sent out much more frequently to impose demands and collect resources. Over the course of the second half of the seventeenth century, a series of conventions became the norm in western Europe, and it is true that contribution demands could hang over the heads of communities beyond any peace treaty. But one convention which applied in this case was the need for communities to receive their prince’s permission to pay contributions over to the enemy, because he could not adequately protect them. If such authorisation had not been given then any outstanding demands were null and void. The money from the contributions and confiscations went into the coffers of the local commis of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, and was entered in his accounts, to show up, often much later, in the overall accounts of the Treasurer-General. The Extraordinaire des Guerres could also draw upon other sources of income. Its coffers were inflated by the funds from tax-farms and the sale of offices and royal domains in the newly acquired provinces – the ‘pays conquis’ – under the control of the Secretary of War. In  Michel Le Tellier and Louvois personally assessed the taxability of the new provinces with the utmost secrecy. The task of the intendants des 



Ferguson, ‘Blood and Fire’, pp. , –, –, ; Baxter, Servants of the Sword, p. ; Foissier, ‘Un commissaire des guerres’, pp. –; SHAT A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  July ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Sep. ; A : Barbezieux to Bignon,  June ; A , no. : Tallard to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; Bib Maz , fol. r : Guiscard to Barbezieux,  July . SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Bonval,  Feb. . The failure to appreciate the need for the sovereign’s sanction to pay over contributions to the enemy, and to understand the accounting system and hierarchy of the Extraordinaire des Guerres are major errors on the part of John Lynn, which lead him to overlook evidence that does not tally with his exaggerated claim for the importance of contributions (see ‘How War Fed War’, p. ; Giant, pp. –).



Financing war contributions et fortifications on the northern frontier in the surrounding years was to use conquered territory, which would not be subsumed within the fiscal purview of the Controller-General, to pay for refortification in these territories. In other words, the Le Tellier were determined to hold in check Colbert’s financial domination and to secure for themselves an autonomous source – however shallow – for defence spending. Further study of this is required, but given the fact that the ‘pays conquis’ were part of prosperous international trading zones, the customs revenues alone were going to be fairly lucrative. While the Controller-General issued assignations on most French provinces, the Secretary of War issued them on the ‘pays conquis’, whether for the Receivers-General, tax farms or venal offices. The Extraordinaire des Guerres also creamed off some of the revenue from the Order of Saint-Lazare and Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel, integral parts of the pension scheme for military officers between the early s and the mid-s; it was responsible for collecting the Capitation tax from army officers in –; and goods confiscated from enemy aliens – such as the possessions of three Spanish wig merchants seized in Catalonia – were given over to the Extraordinaire. The real issue of contention is the proportion of finances pumped into the land forces which came from contributions and confiscations. John Lynn has made a number of claims which cannot be justified by the extant evidence, in particular a wholly unscientific guesstimate that about  per cent of Extraordinaire des Guerres revenues came from these sources at the height of a war effort. In fact, even in the best years it was only about half that figure, as appendix  will explain in detail.              -                        Attention must now be turned to the people who ran this highly complex and precarious system at its apex. Under Louis XIV financing the Extraordinaire des Guerres became an ever more collective affair, as the cost of war climbed. If there was ever a ‘golden age’ for the Treasurers-General it was the s and early s, but at this time the Extraordinaire was riddled with corruption. By comparison, the central problem faced beyond this period, especially from , was that the instruments of credit were under-developed for the demands placed upon the state, while the amount of specie in circulation was insufficient and even shrank as a result of counter-productive government monetary policy. Yet the interests and aspirations of the Treasurers-General and their associates did not fundamentally change. 

 

Smedley-Weill, Les Intendants de Louis XIV, pp. , ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. , ; AN G , no. : assignations list for ,  July . Because they concerned coinage, the mints in these areas were under the auspices of the Controller-General. Clamageran, Histoire de l’impˆot, vol. III, p. ; SHAT A , no. : extract from council of state registers,  Aug. ; A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Esgrigny,  Feb. .  See pp. –. Lynn, Giant, p. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War The office of Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire was created in , divided in two the following year, and in three in . By the s the third post had been bought out by the other two, who alternated one year on, one year off ‘in exercise’. The year out of exercise was not only vital to draw up accounts with only limited available staff, but it also gave a Treasurer-General’s credit the chance to recover and provided him with a much-needed period in which to assemble a fresh team of backers for his next year on duty. This was the theory, but in practice, as an edict of  explained, from  it became more and more obvious that the task was too big for two office-holders, even with rich associates, for they were financially overstretched and administratively overladen. They were unable to present their accounts within the legally specified period. The post therefore became triennial again in the autumn of . Yet throughout this period it was believed that the post was a stepping-stone to riches, which could be acquired legitimately. The Extraordinaire des Guerres handled over  million livres per annum in the s and around  to  million livres in the war years of the following decade. Given the commissions taken on such sums, and the opportunities presented for further favourable investments in the tax administration through intimate contacts and inside knowledge, it is not surprising that the sale value of a Treasurer-Generalship was . million livres in  and only marginally less by the late s. Over the course of Louis’s ‘personal rule’ a number of men held this post, some alone, others jointly, but all with the backing of official and secret associates. For example, Jean-Louis Arnauld and Romain Dru de Mongelas served as joint Treasurers-General in ,  and  until they were removed by Chamillart. Mongelas’s uncle Pierre Thom´e owned half of his share of the post. These arrangements were frequently dynastic and invariably involved some sort of familial relationship to other financiers otherwise unattached to the Extraordinaire des Guerres. The Jossier de La Jonch`ere family, Treasurers-General in the s and early s, were part of a wider clan of financial families including the Brebier, Aubert, Le Boistel and Poulletier. The Le Boistel were related to Louvois through his paternal grandmother, while the Jossier themselves married into the Colbert de Saint-Pouange who were so close to the Le Tellier. One member of the family even appears to have been Michel Le Tellier’s secretary in the s and s. The most successful of all Treasurers-General in the reign was Jean de Turmenyes de Nointel, a cautious, ambitious and exceptionally well-organised individual. Starting his career as a notary, in  he became Receiver-General of Finances of the Amiens g´en´eralit´e; in  he bought the post of secr´etaire du Roi which conferred     

Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. VIII, p. , notes of Boislisle. SHAT MR , no. : e´dit, Oct. . Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. VIII, pp. –, notes of Boislisle; AN G , no. : memorandum [June ]. Dessert, Argent, p. . Baxter, ‘The Commissaires des Guerres in the s’, ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. .



Financing war automatic hereditary nobility; and he was active in this period in both the Ferme G´en´erale (where one of his relatives was a leading director) and Colbert’s Northern Company, an unsuccessful trade monopoly to the Baltic. These Colbert connections notwithstanding, in January  Turmenyes purchased the post of TreasurerGeneral of the Extraordinaire des Guerres which he held until May , when he bought the more prestigious and more financially secure office of Guard of the Tr´esor royal, holding it until his death in . Concurrently with the TreasurerGeneralship, he had also been Grand Treasurer of the Order of Saint-Lazare, Louvois’s superannuation scheme for military officers between  and , and Receiver-General of Les Invalides. One son became a provincial intendant, then succeeded him in the Tr´esor royal; another served in the dragoons as an officer. For much of his tenure, up to , Jean was supported by his brother Franc¸ois. Franc¸ois succeeded him as Receiver-General of Finances of Amiens in , but Jean kept ownership of three-quarters of the charge, and the brothers used it to prop up their activities. When he sold the post of Treasurer-General in , he also maintained ownership of half of it. That way, he continued to own half, Arnauld owned one-quarter, Mongelas an eighth and Thom´e a final eighth. For most of Turmenyes’s tenure in office his colleague as the other TreasurerGeneral was Charles Renouard de La Touanne. The son of a receiver of the tailles from Montdidier, La Touanne in  became a secr´etaire du Roi and ReceiverGeneral of Finances of the Orl´eans g´en´eralit´e, remaining as such until September  when he bought one of the charges of Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire from Villeromard. As well as this post, La Touanne invested in corsairs, the excise farms and the farm of the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, as well as participating in three contracts in – for the recovery of crown revenue. In  his son married Mlle Dubois, niece of the king’s premier valet and most trusted servant, Bontemps. Louis XIV himself signed the marriage contract. By  La Touanne’s prestige was so great that his house was publicly visited by a number of princes of the royal family that summer. La Touanne’s affinity provides powerful evidence for the existence of the dynastic principle in war finance. His brother-in-law was Jean de Sauvion whose daughters all married financiers: Paul-Jacques Guymont, who became ReceiverGeneral of the rentes on the Paris Hˆotel de Ville in  and Receiver-General of Finances of the Limoges g´en´eralit´e four years later; Pierre-Vincent Bertin, who was Receiver-General of the Parties Casuelles from  to ; and Franc¸ois Paparel, the Treasurer-General of the Ordinaire des Guerres. Sauvion’s father-in-law was the Treasurer-General Villeromard who had sold La Touanne the post in . In fact,   

Dessert, Argent, p. ; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. IX, p. ; vol. XXXVII, p. , notes of Boislisle; Smedley-Weill, Les Intendants de Louis XIV, p. ; BNF FF , fol. r . Dessert, Argent, pp. , . Dessert, Argent, p. ; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. VIII, pp. –, , notes of Boislisle; Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  June .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War Villeromard kept a one-third stake in the post. By two official agreements of  and  Sauvion had been associated for one-quarter of the charge of TreasurerGeneral with Villeromard; in  he became the premier commis of the Extraordinaire des Guerres; and he was the universal heir of Villeromard. From  he was also privately and secretly associated with La Touanne. Beyond the family circles a wider group of investors had to be netted by the Treasurers-General. For  loans of over  million livres were raised by Arnauld and Mongelas, and this was by no means exceptional. The principal backers of the Treasurers-General appear to have been the provincial Receivers-General of Finances, upon whose tax revenues (and accumulated assets) the Extraordinaire depended to stand surety for loans it would contract in order to advance money for the king’s needs. In  Turmenyes was supported heavily by Receiver-General Crozat of Bordeaux, as was Arnauld in  and . The Farmers-General also played the same game. This was a precarious balancing act of different officials backing each other’s loans and if anything went wrong it would therefore go badly wrong. If revenues from the crown to the Treasurer-General started drying up, the Treasurer-General would be forced to draw upon the capital of the ReceiversGeneral to repay creditors, thus digging into the Receivers-Generals’ accumulated tax receipts, which they were supposed to hand over to the crown the next year. But this very state of affairs was likely to arise precisely because the Receivers-General were in receipt of insufficient taxation in their provinces and therefore could not give to the Extraordinaire tax revenues as directed by the king. The ReceiversGeneral would therefore find their own persons liable for the debts contracted by the Extraordinaire des Guerres! Because many Receivers-General also invested in the bread supply companies the danger of collapse was even greater, should the crown default on payment to these companies as well. Such catastrophic events came to pass on several occasions, with awful results for the war effort and the individuals concerned, in the War of the Spanish Succession. Fortunately this particular trick of smoke and mirrors was not exposed in the Nine Years War, though by  the state was entering the danger zone and there is a strong suspicion that Louis XIV was anxious to secure a peace precisely to avert a financial disaster along these lines. Finding people prepared to be openly and legally identified as associates was still a major problem throughout this period. In – Arnauld had only agreed to take on the position of Treasurer-General on condition that he could contract a 

 

Dessert, Argent, pp. , , ; AN G , no. : draft arrˆet [–]; no. : placet of Sauvion [–]; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. VIII, pp. , , notes of Boislisle; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Sep. –  Sep. . The Receivers-General did not need to hand over accounts or money to the crown until the following year after the tax had been collected. AN G , no. : Extraordinaire des Guerres,  [c. ]; G , no. : Receivers-General to Pontchartrain,  Jan. ; D. Ozanam, ‘Jean Orry: munitionnaire du Roi, –’, Histoire Economique et Financi`ere de France: Etudes et Documents  (), –; AN G , no. : memorandum on Extraordinaire des Guerres since  [].



Financing war society behind him, but in order to secure the open support of Crozat, Thom´e and Maynon he had to pay them a total of , livres up front. This was in large part because of fears of liability: if a Treasurer-General left office the investors were still all liable for the period of his tenure, for a very long time to come, and when there was confusion, and investigation, over the dealings associated with the artillery and fortifications for example, then they could find themselves in real trouble. Disaster finally struck in June , five months after the death of Barbezieux and well into the first campaign of the War of the Spanish Succession. The pressure that had built up over the previous thirteen years, and which had not been given a chance to subside during the brief interlude of peace from  to , finally became too much with the prospect of another long war, bringing down both TreasurersGeneral. First, La Touanne went bankrupt, possessing assets and credit to the value of  million livres, but with documented borrowings of over . million from private investors, and owing another , to the king’s forces. Louis now faced the prospect of an utter collapse in credit of seismic proportions, which would prevent the French state moving any money to its armies. The furious king had no choice but to cover all La Touanne’s debts, thereby losing  million livres and preventing the army in Italy from consolidating its hold on the Milanese and driving the Imperial forces back over the Venetian and Austrian frontiers. La Touanne, like Wolsey in , had the good sense to die just at this moment, leaving his brotherin-law Sauvion to face the music. In a rebarbative attempt to shore up the general public’s battered confidence in his fisco-financiers and in his willingness to guarantee sound credit, Louis decreed that henceforth the death penalty would be invoked for anybody handling royal funds who employed them for their own use or otherwise perverted them. This was, of course, a nonsensical pronouncement: the entire French financial system hinged around giant slush funds created by fiscal officeholders, who, until they needed to pass on money to the state under the terms of their office, would invest it in other tax-farmers and officials, or in such organisations as the Extraordinaire des Guerres, drawing (hopefully) handsome interest for themselves. It is difficult to work out exactly what message the king was trying to send, and to whom, by his knee-jerk reaction of affronted anger. To make matters worse, only two months later, Crozat, Thom´e and Maynon pulled the rug out from underneath Arnauld, now bereft of his protector Barbezieux: one of them made claims against Arnauld to Chamillart, who had him and Mongelas removed from office. It seems that the trio of backers feared that the liabilities were becoming too dangerous, though it would be unrealistic to imagine their decision to withdraw support from Arnauld was entirely unconnected with the downfall of  

AN G , no. : memorandum on Arnauld [c. ]; G , no. : memorandum for Nicolas Le Clerc [post-]. Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. VIII, p. ; Dangeau, vol. VIII, pp. –, – June ; Sourches, vol. VII, p. ,  June .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War La Touanne and the king’s death penalty decree. Indeed, this decree may well have eroded the financial system further, putting the fear of God into men who would otherwise have helped the king’s coffers tick along in return for a small amount of illicit profiteering. The fall-out from La Touanne’s bankruptcy only aggravated the situation, as Sauvion – La Touanne’s partner – found himself the scapegoat for all ills. When the Cour des aides examined the accounts of Villeromard, they found that although Sauvion’s association with him and with La Touanne after him had been private – and that neither creditors nor public counted on him – the association was nevertheless proved by entries in the account books. Sauvion was therefore liable for any retrospective claims made on the late Villeromard for his period in office, and Terrat, the aggrieved Treasurer-General of Fortifications, was pressing for restitution of the commission on fortification funds which he believed Louvois had unjustly prevented him from gathering. The implications of this ruling for the financial community were appalling: the very point of secret, informal investment in men such as the Treasurers-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres was that the investors could not be held liable for their obligations or actions. Now it seemed that the courts believed they should possess liability! The obvious conclusion to draw was that the king’s financial officers were now far less secure as objects of investment, indeed were bigger credit risks. A combination of extreme over-burdening in the Nine Years War, followed by the death of Barbezieux who could have protected his Treasurers-General, brought the system crashing down. The king had misjudged the capacity of his TreasurersGeneral to absorb the demands of international coalition conflict; he then misjudged the instincts of investors, piling a counter-productive decree which threatened easy credit flow to his officials on top of his acceptance of the liabilities of La Touanne which had already calmed public anxieties; and his courts now threatened the entire basis of private investment in officials of the crown. The whole episode was an abject lesson in how to mishandle the very private interests upon which the state depended for success. Other Treasurers-General went under at various points: La Jonch`ere’s position collapsed in –, and in the early years of the Nine Years War all Villeromard’s assets were sequestered at the request of La Touanne, his then senior partner, to whom Villeromard had obviously somehow defaulted on his obligations. What on 

 

AN G , no. : memorandum on Arnauld [c. –]; Sourches, vol. VII, p. ,  Aug. . Arnauld was undoubtedly in difficulties, in spite of his connections with Mme de Maintenon. He and Mongelas still owed over , livres to Turmenyes, out of the  million for which they had bought him out: Lavall´ee, vol. I, p. : note on Arnauld; AN G , no. : memorandum on Extraordinaire des Guerres [ June ]. AN G , no. : note [–]; no. : placet of Sauvion [–]. NLS , fol. r : journal of David Nairne; AN G , no. : memorandum on debts of a deceased commis from the s,  Jan. .



Financing war earth, then, was the incentive for becoming a Treasurer-General, or investing in one? The Treasurers-General, during their duty year, were entitled to a ‘taxation’, or official commission, on all revenues they handled. Typically in wartime for the bulk of expenditure this would be  deniers per livre, or . per cent of the total. Given that the Extraordinaire des Guerres was handling at least  to  million livres in the mid-s this meant a legitimate right to about . to  million livres per annum. With costs running at somewhere in the region of  million this still left a substantial paper profit, which, of course had to be distributed to investors before the Treasurer-General could claim any himself. Investors would typically have loaned to the Treasurer-General on the surety of his ‘taxation’. When all costs and creditors had been satisfied the Treasurer-General might find himself taking home about , livres net if he owned an entire office, or , per annum (because of the biennial alternation system). This was the equivalent of having about . million livres of capital wisely invested in government bonds or venal offices, making the Treasurers-General theoretically among the richest men in the kingdom (excluding any other incomes they may have had), though not necessarily among the hyper-rich such as princes and the Le Tellier. Though the posts were utterly dependent upon the Secretary of War and at the mercy of the flow of taxes to the government’s primary receivers, to the holders there were immense advantages in being a Treasurer-General, in theory. To begin with, it brought them into court circles, where illustrious marriages might be made and prestigious posts in the royal household, such as maˆıtre d’honneur held by the Thom´e family, acquired. It also gave them a staunch protector in the shape of the Secretary of State for War. Second, whatever happened to many other financiers, the king could not afford to disrupt or abase the credit rating of his Treasurers-General over the medium term. They should therefore always be reasonably well provided with cash or assignations, and the state could always back those debts they had incurred specifically on behalf of the Extraordinaire des Guerres (though not necessarily in other official or private capacities). Third, it might be a stepping-stone to higher posts which brought greater security, as when Turmenyes became Guard of the Tr´esor royal in . Fourth, the Treasurers-General had such good credit ratings on a huge scale that they could act as bankers for private individuals, and charge them fees for so doing. And, fifth, they could build up their capital by holding on to the proceeds of enforced contributions for a whole year, or at least several months, and either directly invest them in business of some sort, or instruct their commis to do so out in the provinces.    

Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. , ; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. XVI, p. , notes of Boislisle citing  e´tat of Extraordinaire des Guerres in AN G . Assuming about  per cent interest per annum. On the Thom´e, see Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  May . Vauban, vol. II, p. : Vauban to Louvois,  June ; : Vauban to Louvois,  May , which reveal that Turmenyes was Vauban’s banker; Desormeaux, Histoire de la maison de Montmorenci, vol. V, p. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War All the same, the scope for profits from fraud diminished after , and the costs grew after , eating into the ‘taxation’. In  the former TreasurerGeneral Arnauld complained bitterly that all his predecessors and colleagues had been ruined by holding the post. La Touanne, who died ruined and in disgrace, had nonetheless managed to set his son up with a prestigious marriage in , even though that very year his activities were already showing signs of creaking under the strain. Arnauld’s partner Mongelas recovered sufficiently – in time – to take up the post of Treasurer-General once again in  and , nominally on his own. But most Treasurers-General were far from adept in administration and contracted poor loan terms. Only Turmenyes, it seems, remained solvent because he was exceptionally well organised, and he quit the position at the end of  when he could see the way the French state was drifting closer to unsustainable deficit financing. Under Louvois he apparently always ensured he had access to around  million livres, but at his death in  he reportedly still owed the king huge sums. One suspects it was because other people were in fact defaulting in payments to him – Arnauld, for instance, had paid him only  per cent of what had been agreed for his post in . Certainly Turmenyes’s son was able to sustain himself as Guard of the Tr´esor royal after . But Turmenyes had been so anxious to rid himself of official responsibility for the wretched Extraordinaire des Guerres in  that he accepted a price from Arnauld several hundred thousand livres less than it was worth. It was his good fortune that the grim reaper created a vacancy in the Tr´esor royal at this time and provided the chance for him to escape. All in all, it was a highly exploitative system. The king exploited the TreasurersGeneral, the Treasurers-General exploited the Receivers-General and their own commis; and the Receivers-General, with their underlings, exploited the populace. But the financial disaster of  was a wake-up call to the king. He had overloaded his Treasurers-General of the Extraordinaire, and he now proposed to redistribute the burden more widely. He was also concerned enough about their weakness in negotiating good loan terms to install one of the Le Telliers’ most trusted premiers commis from the War Ministry, Toulmont, who for twenty or more years had been responsible for liaising with the Extraordinaire des Guerres, as the premier commis within this organisation charged with overseeing credit-raising. The TreasurersGeneral had to be protected from their own incompetence and from predatory creditors and associates. The welfare of the French dynastic state depended upon it.     

See chapter , pp. –. There were severe cash-flow problems in the spring of : SHAT A , no. : Le Camus to Louvois,  Mar. . AN G , no. : memorandum by Arnauld []; no. : memorandum on Arnauld [c. –]. Though it is worth noting that the December  reorganisation of the Treasurers-General was designed in part to generate cash to cover some of Louis’s losses for bailing out La Touanne’s creditors! Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. XVI, p. ; Sourches, vol. VII, p. ,  Aug. .





Corruption and the pursuit of self-interest in the Ministry of War With colossal sums related to military spending floating around France – topping  million livres in peacetime in  and over  million in the Nine Years War – the scope for fraud was a chronic headache for ministers. The scope for irregularity in French military administration was still, after , alarmingly high and accountability was chronically weak. The first line of defence against fraud and corruption was presented by the intendants, but they were so overburdened it was difficult for them to monitor the activities of paymasters. In  intendant Le Bret of Provence bewailed the fact that he could find only three to four hours each month to check the receipts and audit the accounts of the agents of the Extraordinaire des Guerres in Provence. The same pressure of time afflicted, on an even grander scale, the Secretary of State for War. The Chambre des comptes, supposedly the crown’s financial watchdog and one of the superior courts of the realm, was under-resourced, decrepit and hidebound. Already by the s it was grossly overloaded and the subsequent increases in its officers and magistrates failed to keep pace with further growth in government business all the way up to the Revolution. Needless to say, the staff of the Chambre, nearly all venal office-holders with plenty of investments in the fisco-financiers themselves, cannot be considered paragons of virtue either. Though the Extraordinaire des Guerres, and its small counterpart the Ordinaire des Guerres, remained technically responsible to the Conn´etablie, this body had even fewer resources and precious little expertise to combat fraud. Proving fraud nevertheless remains extremely problematic. To begin with, detecting fraud even at the time was hampered by the difficulty of getting to the bottom of accusations. The Secretary of War knew perfectly well that in such a society as seventeenth-century France, where people were hyper-sensitive, thin-skinned and proud, men and women could lie and distort matters in order to ruin somebody’s reputation simply out of revenge. The historian is also presented with a major lacuna in the official records due to the fire which swept through the Chambre des comptes in , destroying most of the financial archives of the Extraordinaire 



SHAT A , no. : Le Bret to Barbezieux,  June ; Doucet, Les institutions de la France au XVIe si`ecle, vol. I, pp –; Dent, Crisis in Finance, pp. , ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. , . Sourches described the post of president of the Chambre as worthless: vol. I, p. ,  June  et seq. Bib Maz , fols. v –r : Guiscard to Barbezieux (never sent),  July .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War des Guerres. The extant correspondence of treasurers, paymasters, commissaires des guerres and such like is thin, and by the very nature of the subject unlikely to discuss personal involvement in malpractice in an era when Louvois and Le Peletier were having the post clandestinely opened. The last word on such difficulties should in fact go to a former Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, who felt it was impossible to undertake a full audit of all the business of the men who held or had held his post, and who reminded the ministers that such a sisyphean labour had never been done because: ‘no Treasurer of the Extraordinaires des Guerres has yet been sufficiently orderly in his affairs to be able to reveal the work of all his years on duty in a single operation of arithmetic’. The failure of adequate accounting and auditing left the way open to widespread fraud, which was perpetrated in every branch of the War Ministry. This chapter will accordingly seek to describe the attempts to combat fraud committed within the Extraordinaire des Guerres and by other agents of the War Ministry, and to assess the damage malpractice may have done to Louis XIV’s interests.               

EXTRAORDINAIRE DES GUERRES

After the chaos of –, Louis XIV was determined to get a grip on the administration of all war funds, including contributions. From  military officers had to justify more and more the use to which they put money received. From  garrison commanders were forbidden to meddle with funding, responsibility for which was handed over to an intendant or commissaire des guerres, who merely required the officer’s signature alongside his own to release money. Though senior officers would recommend the release of funds, they could no longer authorise this themselves, but had to get the agreement of a War Ministry functionary. By the early s intendants watched over the paymasters, audited their accounts, ordered payments and signed alongside a general officer. In all this the intendant or commissaire liaised with the court, theoretically requiring permission from the Secretary of War for any extraordinary expenditure they wished to make except in emergencies, and from August  they were enjoined to tell the Secretary exactly what the commis were receiving from the Treasurers-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres by way of cash, assignations and bills of exchange. The intendant or a commissaire supervised the administration and pay-out to captains of off-reckonings on the men’s pay, and the intendant d’arm´ee sanctioned the release of pay for the generals. The intendant had control over fortification funds both before and after July  at a local level, and   

Doucet, Les institutions, vol. I, p. ; AN G , no. : memorandum by Arnauld []. Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –, –, ; Baxter, Servants of the Sword, pp. –. SHAT A , nos. , : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Mar.,  Aug. ; A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Dec. ; OM : ordonnance,  Aug. ; OM : ordonnance,  Nov. ; A , no. : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  July ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Apr. ; Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  Oct. .



Corruption in the Ministry of War in moments of crisis could advance funds from the Extraordinaire to the fortifications or artillery. As a sign of the intendant’s responsibility, an army’s treasury was heavily guarded and usually located near his quarters in the ‘quartier du Roi’. Michel Le Tellier, when Secretary of War, kept a hawk-like eye on the paymasters, insisting they follow increasingly sophisticated rules of book-keeping or he would not sign their accounts, in which case any monies they were still owed by the government or Treasurer-General would not be forthcoming. Le Tellier closely inspected their accounts, demanded explanations, suspended commis or removed their right to handle funds, and even ordered their arrest and imprisonment, though large fines were used only in cases of grave fault and mainly against the central treasurers. There was some investigation of their activities in the early s, but when the Chambre de justice came to an end in  a full pardon and amnesty was issued for all military treasurers, covering the period from March  to November . The government did not possess sufficient resources to investigate all the paymasters, and in any case Le Tellier may not have wanted to destroy his own financial clients at a time when Colbert’s were becoming dominant. The crown can only have hoped that misappropriation of royal funds and evasion of proper procedures had been deterred by the trials of the previous years. By the end of the Dutch War, however, it was clear that this was by no means the case. To spare their resources the Treasurers-General did not send carts of money to Flanders and Alsace as soon as they received the order, but instead sent bills of exchange payable many days later as part of the consignment, thus placing a burden of debt on their own commis. In August  the crown decreed they should thenceforth either despatch money immediately or bills of exchange payable within three days. The day afterwards the Treasurer-General should show the Secretary of War a breakdown of the coins and bills used to make up the delivery, present the records of the day on which the bills were payable and on whom and through whom they were drawn, and order their commis to inform the intendant d’arm´ee immediately upon arrival of the funds. Desperate commis would otherwise be trading bills to local fiscal officials and merchants at a discount and the armies would be short of the required money. This problem aside, commis were in any case falsifying the summaries of their muster payment papers in order to claim funds for more troops than were actually present. They were diverting and delaying funds, and they neglected to deliver ‘rolles’ and receipts which formed the basis for drawing up accounts. One could hardly blame them, given the liberties their superiors were taking with them. Nevertheless, this was patently unsatisfactory from the king’s perspective. So between  and  there was a significant attempt to clean up the Extraordinaire   

SHAT A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Apr. ; Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  July ; Gaya, L’art de la guerre, p. . Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. , ; Bib Ars : Bezons to du Peyrou,  Aug. ; SHAT OM : king’s declaration, Jan. ; OM : e´dit, July . SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Aug. ; OM : ordonnance,  Dec. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War des Guerres, which has never yet been explored by historians, and which broke the  amnesty. Louvois, in marked contrast to Colbert, was determined to clamp down upon corruption in the ranks of his own financial clients. In  Marcelin Arnauld, the Treasurer-Provincial for Picardy, Flanders, Artois and Hainault who had covered for the years ,  and , was investigated for fraud. Most notably he was accused of claiming funds for paying troops who had actually been paid by somebody else. This enquiry seems to have opened a whole can of worms. Between May that year and October  a number of people associated with the Extraordinaire des Guerres were arrested: Pierre Tallon, Treasurer-Provincial of the Extraordinaire for the same provinces between  and , his wife, his father- and brother-in-law, and several of his commis. On top of this, the government also arrested and tried people for fraud concerning the Sicily expedition of the s. Proving fraud, however, was a difficult business; in fact it was so complicated to unravel that in  the king thought it best to return most of the cases to the Treasurers-General and allow them to pursue their underlings through civil litigation if they so wished. The whole investigation had yielded little return and was a disappointment to those who sought more honesty in government. Some Treasurers-Provincial and commis were convicted, nonetheless, and in April  the current and previous TreasurersGeneral were permitted to recover specified outstanding sums from them. The investigations had made it abundantly clear that the entire Extraordinaire des Guerres was ripe for overhaul. At first the government preferred to support moves by the Treasurers-General to buy up many of the other venal offices, but this attempt failed because some holders refused to sell, others were obstructive and the Treasurers-General would have had to spend a lot in legal pursuit. In February  a royal edict therefore suppressed all offices of Treasurers-Provincial of the Extraordinaire and treasurers of various regiments, reuniting their responsibilities with the Treasurers-General who were now given carte blanche to install whomsoever they pleased as their agents. The venal offices were liquidated by the Ministry of Finance. It was also obvious that procedural regulations needed to be strengthened to diminish the scope for fraud. In April  a royal declaration ordered commis to do their books every day and forbade them from leaving any blank pages in their registers, or tearing any pages out, on pain of a , livres fine. The register and accounts were to go to the Treasurer-General at the end of the year, and they were to draw up two separate accounts each month of receipt and expenditure, which they were to certify as true before an intendant. In the accounts they were to break the figures down to the level of a military company (about fifty men strong). Within the first week of each month they were to send to the Secretary of War: () a statement of all 



AN G , no. : note on fraud in Dutch War [c. –]; Bib Ars ; Bib Ars : note,  Sep. , and another undated note. Arnauld was in fact the father of the future Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres! The surviving papers on the Tallon affair can be found in Bib Ars –.  SHAT X : e´dit, Feb. . AN G , no. : extract of council registers,  Apr. .



Corruption in the Ministry of War receipts and expenditure for the previous month without waiting for the intendant’s audit; () a separate statement about fortification finances; and () copies of the relevant justificatory documents. A financial inspector would be appointed to check the commis’s books every quarter, and if everything was in order he would give a promissory note that the Treasurer-General would make full acknowledgement of the value of their transactions in his own accounts. Every commis was to give a financial deposit as security for good behaviour and sound administration, unless the TreasurerGeneral was sufficiently confident about his conduct and solvency. Eight months later a royal ordinance ordered commissaires des guerres to sign at the bottom of every page of their summaries of troop musters. Previously commissaires had only been signing the back page of documents, thereby giving the commis of the Extraordinaire the opportunity to substitute some of the sheets of paper with others making false claims. Accordingly, from February  a streamlined Extraordinaire des Guerres – arguably too streamlined – was composed of the Treasurers-General and a handful of treasurers for the prestige units, and several score of commis who were non-venal and provided cautions to the Treasurer-General when they took up their appointments. The scope for fraud was certainly now reduced, and the king preferred that the same man should not serve as a commis in the Extraordinaire for more than two years in a row in the same place, because he would otherwise become too intertwined with local business interests. To coordinate activities the Treasurer-General might appoint a commis g´en´eral if a number of commis were operating in close proximity, and there was always a senior commis as treasurer for an army. These commis were all expected to advance money on their own credit when it was necessary, which, given the sluggishness of the fund transfers, was frequent. Many of them – as in the period before – – consequently got into major financial difficulties. By  there seem to have been a large number of commis ‘currently employed who have no cautions at all worth a solid , livres’, a sure sign that the Treasurers-General were recruiting anybody they could to take on such risky posts. In that year Benoit Chabrey still owed the Treasurers-General a great deal of money from the time that he was the Treasurer-Provincial for Champagne, Metz, Lorraine and Germany in the s; while in  several commis between them owed former Treasurer-General Arnauld , livres from the years  and . If some commis were exploited by the Treasurers-General, others had to be propped up for fear of their network crumbling in a region. Whether the subordinate agents should be revenalised was an issue that returned again and again during the ancien r´egime. If the commis system was upheld, then the Treasurers-General, since the lacklustre royal investigations in , were financially liable for any fraud committed by their   

 SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Dec. . SHAT OM : memorandum [end of ]. SHAT A , fol. v : Barbezieux to duc de Gramont,  Jan. . SHAT A , no. : second memorandum by Mairon, Aug. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War commis, and had to pay their wages, whereas if the posts were turned into venal offices then they would be spared all this. It is significant that the non-venal system was left largely intact, even in the darkest days of the War of the Spanish Succession. The evidence would indicate that few people would buy these offices if they were venal, owing to likely poor returns and long-term liability, and the Treasurers-General would have lost what little control over their underlings they possessed. Taking on the position of commis in the Extraordinaire des Guerres was a gamble with one’s future and fortune. Men would appear to have held the post for a few short years, especially in the frontier regions and in the armies, before either bailing out with some gains or being forced into withdrawal by losses. Large amounts of money could still be made after the early s by dishonest means, though opportunities were thinner than before. If a man had sufficient capital behind him he could try to increase it by advancing money at interest to his own superiors, the TreasurersGeneral, who always had to honour their debts. And the scope for fraud in collusion with other officials had by no means disappeared, especially as the venal posts of contrˆoleurs of the Extraordinaire des Guerres were mere sinecures whose holders were utterly ineffective and included serving military officers with no time to check the receipts of the Extraordinaire. Was the system therefore more effective as a result of the reforms of the early s? Though by no means perfect, the first couple of years after the outbreak of war in  saw reasonably smooth administration of the finances, but as early as  commis were already having difficulty paying cash to regiments, so they might give credit notes drawn on the Treasurer-General for two to three months hence. Officers then had to trade these notes at a loss to merchants and others if they needed cash immediately. This only got worse. As famine and coin-hoarding worsened from  the Extraordinaire des Guerres found itself under mounting strain, and by  the situation was dire. The Treasurers-General struggled to realise their remittances, there were delays of several weeks in the transport of money, and bills of exchange on the Extraordinaire were being protested in Lyon, Paris and even Genoa. La Touanne had received less than half of his allotted assignations for September by the end of the month, and in March  the Tr´esor royal still owed Turmenyes  million livres out of the  million deployed in December ! When La Touanne was given assignations on dried-up sources he sent them off to his provincial commis as soon as he could, with the effect of piling up useless bits of paper in the provinces which the commis or army officers had to trade locally for whatever they could get in the way of 





SHAT OM : memorandum [end of ]; A , no. : memorandum by Mairon, commis at Charleville, Aug.  (citation); AN G , no. : memorandum [June ]; no. : draft arrˆet [c. –]; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. XVI, p. , notes of Boislisle. Dessert, Argent, p. , for an example of a successful commis; SHAT MR , no. : e´dit, Oct. ; AN G , nos. , –: assorted documents concerning the liquidation of posts []; no. : placet of Jou¨y to Chamillart []. Another indicator of the size of monthly expenditure by the Extraordinaire.



Corruption in the Ministry of War cash. In October  Barbezieux even deliberately delayed ordering the transfer of funds by Turmenyes and his associates to the immobile army of Italy, because at that time the southern Alps were not a priority and he somehow had to ease the demands on Turmenyes’s coffers. Matters were not helped by the weak financial solidity of the Treasurers-Generals’ correspondents in the provinces, reflecting a liquidity problem across the whole of France. Intendants wearily made repeated requests to these agents that they discharge their obligations but often weeks passed before any money turned up, even though only short distances might be involved. The commis were repeatedly left with empty money chests and had their own bills of exchange drawn on Paris sent back protested. Several of them were ruined. At least one had also invested in one of the new venal offices of commissaire ordinaire des guerres, but he was unable to pay the full sum. La Touanne, no doubt anxious that this particular debt was impinging upon the man’s capacity to act for the Extraordinaire des Guerres, persuaded Barbezieux to have his post as commissaire des guerres withdrawn. In  Nicolas Bouret, sieur des Martrais, who had been a commis in the Saarland in , was still languishing in prison after ten years, and owed a staggering , livres to former Treasurer-General Mongelas. The original debt had been ,. Into the breach stepped the generals and the intendants. Under Richelieu the crown had expected intendants to use their own credit to make up for shortfalls and delays in funding, but according to Baxter this was no longer necessary after . He was wrong. On several occasions in – Bouchu, intendant of the Dauphin´e and the army of Italy, had to raise funds on his own personal guarantees both to pay the army and to stand surety for the credit notes issued by supply entrepreneurs. Le Mari´e in the Meuse–Moselle region personally borrowed between  and , livres in April . In case of financial breakdown it therefore remained imperative that the government employ wealthy men as its intendants. At such times it became doubly difficult for the intendants and the Secretary of War to prevent corruption in the Extraordinaire des Guerres, in part because they could not afford to persecute commis in case they drove them to the wall at a critical moment. It was vital to preserve the efficacy of the credit system, primitive though it was, at least in the short term, and Dessert has pointed out how the crown’s pursuit of 

  

Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise en , p. ; SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Du Bois,  Nov. ; A , no. : Trobat to Barbezieux,  May ; nos. , : La Fonds to Barbezieux,  Apr.,  Apr. ; no. : Jourdain to Barbezieux,  June ; A , no. : La Touanne to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , fol. r−v : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Oct. ; fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Crozat,  Oct. ; AN G , no. : memorandum of Turmenyes,  Mar. . SHAT A , fol. r−v : Noailles to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , no. : de S`eve to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; no. : Le Bret to Barbezieux,  June . SHAT A , no. : Bagnols to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; AN G , nos. –: various documents, Aug. . Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, p. ; Baxter, Servants of the Sword, p. ; SHAT A , fols. v –r : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , no. : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , no. : Le Mari´e to Barbezieux,  May .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War suspect financiers across government was much attenuated in the s and s. According to one worried commis, writing in , there had been a great deal of progress in preventing false and duplicate entries in account books since the end of the Dutch War, but these malpractices still existed because of the multitude of traditional and redundant practices which created enormous confusion. First, the muster rolls were written on parchment because the Chambre des comptes preferred to see it thus from force of habit, but it was easier to falsify writing on this than on paper. The parchment rolls should have been superfluous in any case, as the musters were reported in summary before both the royal council and the Chambre. Second, because the intendant’s simple summary report was not treated as sufficient discharge for a commis’s accounts the Treasurers-General were snowed under with paper which they and their central staff (seemingly only about twenty strong) could not possibly hope to scrutinise adequately. As Mairon remarked: ‘The way of withdrawing the receipts and letters of clearance . . . is so burdensome that it is well-nigh impossible that a Treasurer General after several years of exercise does not fall into a type of chaos.’ One reason the intendants’ summaries were not trusted was the very little time each could devote to checking the local Extraordinaire des Guerres accounts, and the fact that in places like Provence, where civilian personnel was short and the troops widely scattered, it could take two months to review them all, send the muster figures to the Extraordinaire commis, and complete the paperwork before the intendant could do even the cursory auditing. If the Treasurers-General were not themselves thieves, nevertheless the opportunities for fraud within the Extraordinaire were far from negligible, contrary to the impression that is given by the historiography. Occasionally, however, the crown did catch people. In May  the authorities at Namur discovered a major trafficking operation in Extraordinaire des Guerres bills, which the local commis, La Raudi`ere, was organising himself so as to make large profits at the expense of military officers. There was also strong evidence of collusion between him and the intendant’s subd´el´egu´e, Merveilhaud. The disappearances of all or parts of a consignment of funds en route to its destination on a number of occasions in various places similarly give a strong whiff of malpractice and suggest the diversion of royal finances to prop up the collapsing credit of the Treasurers-General or their commis. For example, Savigny was sacked as a commis by La Touanne on Barbezieux’s orders in April  for making use of the king’s funds for his private purposes. The worst case seems to be that of de Prailles, who had been commis of the Extraordinaire in  at Huy, France’s forward outpost in the Spanish Netherlands, from where he fled to Brussels    

Dessert, Argent, p. . SHAT A , no. : second memorandum by Mairon, Aug. ; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. XVI, p. , notes of Boislisle. SHAT A , no. : Le Bret to Barbezieux,  June . Bib Ars , fol. r−v : Guiscard to Barbezieux,  May []; SHAT A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Bagnols,  June .



Corruption in the Ministry of War with over , livres of royal money. He was tried in absentia by the Parlement of Tournai. Contemporaries were convinced, though, that such episodes were but the tip of a very large iceberg. Not least, this was because corruption – whether in the Extraordinaire des Guerres or by the military – might be encouraged or allowed by the very agents of the War Ministry: the central clerks, the commissaires des guerres and even the intendants, whose reputations have hitherto been largely unstained.                                    Fraud was deemed a necessity by many administrators and military officers (who will be dealt with in chapter ) because their anxiety about their personal financial circumstances drove them to it. The administrators not only needed to feed their ambition, which required money, they also had to find the wherewithal to withstand the growing financial and administrative pressures the state was putting them under after . Some, of course, were corrupt from sheer greed and were prepared to test the bounds of possibility: many new commissaires des guerres in  seem to have seized the first month’s salary of army officers who swore the oath of service and allegiance before them, causing outrage and provoking Barbezieux to insist that such predatory illegality cease. Others were genuinely beleaguered, but all the same the resurgence of administrative malpractice in the s, which became even more visible in the following decade, owed a lot to the crown’s own policies. In spite of the generous pay and rewards given to the commis of the War Ministry in the Secretary of State’s central bureaux, even here corruption was by no means unknown. At the very least commis used inside information to feather their own nests or those of their friends. Most of the time a blind ministerial eye was turned to the assistance commis gave to their cronies: indeed, despite the angry disapproval of the Le Tellier, colonels openly bought the best winter quarters in the bureaux of the ministry, and the commis were known to take small ‘pots de vin’ in return for their cooperation. Pinsonneau was lucky: in  he defrauded a captain in the r´egiment Royal-Italien of an inheritance, but when the regiment’s colonel and the mar´echal de Luxembourg drew this to the king’s attention Pinsonneau was excused after pleading ignorance as to the existence of a legitimate heir. But if commis were  

  

SHAT A : Barbezieux to La Touanne,  Apr. ; A , fol. : Barbezieux to Polinchoux,  Mar. . Intendants and, less successfully, commissaires, were keen to advance their own families in society. See chapter , pp. –; also Baxter, ‘The Commissaires des Guerres in the s’, –; SHAT A , fols. v –r : Crenan to Barbezieux,  Jan. . V. Belhomme, Histoire de l’infanterie en France,  vols. (Paris, –), vol. II, p. . Feuqui`eres’s nostalgia for his days of active service led him to date the rot from the early years of the Spanish Succession conflict (M´emoires, p. ). Desormeaux, Histoire de la maison de Montmorenci, vol. V, p. ; Saint-Maurice, vol. I, p. : SaintMaurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Nov. , SHAT A , fol. r : Magalotti to Barbezieux,  July ; fol. r : Luxembourg to Louis,  July .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War subverting the royal or ministerial interest in the pursuit of personal gain they could expect no mercy. In the spring of  there was a major scandal in the War Ministry involving the dismissal of several commis. A brothel madam named Radigues had captivated the heart of Verneuil and became his mistress, and then cultivated the impression that she could bring influence to bear on the War Ministry for a price. She and Verneuil shared the money she made from selling commissions which he expedited behind Louvois’s back, and when they were discovered Radigues was imprisoned and Verneuil sacked. It would be na¨ıve to imagine these were the only instances of malpractice, which could often go undetected for years and occurred in other central ministries. Moreover, the determination of Louvois to agglomerate responsibilities did nothing to ease his job of policing what was figuratively, if not literally, a highly venal administration. Fraudsters within the War Ministry could cover their tracks by a variety of means. If papers were left behind at the evacuation of conquered territory then there was little means of uncovering corruption that had occurred. Intendant La Goupilli`ere of the Sarre may have saved himself from disgrace in  by winning the hand in marriage of Mme de Maintenon’s niece, a pupil at Saint-Cyr. He was eventually withdrawn from service but was mysteriously never prosecuted for peculation. The Le Tellier knew about intendant Robert’s pocketing of huge sums from Dutch communities in the s, but turned a blind eye because he was otherwise so effective. Moreover, our idea of the scale of deception should be magnified because military officers who discovered they had been cheated were recommended to demand restitution from the villain, and only report the matter to the ministry if this move failed. To be fair, some malpractice on the part of civilian administrators was motivated by sympathy for the plight of others, or simple ignorance. One commissaire des guerres at Pinerolo was fined  livres, the exact sum which he had released from the regimental chest to a battalion commander despite the general prohibition on such hand-outs without superior authorisation. Commissaire Andrezel was carpeted for releasing royal grain to the desperate community of Diblon. Commissaire de Billy lost a month’s salary because he had failed to read an ordinance properly and so allowed two officers of the same company to go on leave at the same time. Usually, however, complaisance for soldiers and localities came with a price attached.  

    

Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  Apr. ; BNF FF , fols. r –r : Barbezieux to Gramont,  Aug. ; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Jan. . In  Jean-Baptiste Colbert had even covered up embezzlement on the part of Deschiens, one of his commis in the Finance Ministry, and was accused of actually having a part in it. Less fortunate was one of the former commis of the Surintendant des arts, who was put on trial for corruption in . Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  Apr. . Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. II, p. . He used his ill-gotten gains to help buy a presidency in the Chambre des comptes in ! See Corvisier, Louvois, p. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. . Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, p. . SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Andrezel,  Oct. ; no. : Barbezieux to Tess´e,  Nov. ; OM : Barbezieux to Billy,  Apr. .



Corruption in the Ministry of War The French armies of – were undoubtedly more up to strength than their precursors of the Thirty Years War, but there was without question some artificial inflation of troop numbers in the muster system. This inflation has been underplayed, and its cause was, by and large, extensive and untrumpeted collusion by commissaires des guerres and commis of the Extraordinaire des Guerres in officer fraud. In  commissaire Herv´e was discovered in musters to have recorded  men more than the inspector at Landrecies, including  non-existent soldiers in the r´egiment de Choisinet infantry and  in the r´egiment de Luxembourg infantry out of supposed total complements of  and  respectively. Barbezieux was well alert to the way ‘several’ commissaires recorded more men than were present at musters, either for a cut of the extra pay delivered or to help the officers. This applied to the infantry, cavalry and dragoons alike. The prevention of false mustering depended upon ordinary soldiers denouncing their officers at a parade to a commissaire des guerres in return for an honourable discharge and some money. But commissaires might pretend not to hear them, thus giving the officers a chance to get the false recruits out of the ranks. The foolish blabbermouth would get a thrashing later. In the summer of  blatant corruption by a commissaire des guerres at the northern Italian fort of Susa was reported to the king and the man imprisoned. Around the same time, in defiance of king’s regulations, a number of commissaires were placing cadets and officers who did not have commissions on the muster rolls of companies, thus securing more money for the captain. Six months later they were still doing it. In November  Barbezieux sacked Dampierre for including dead men on muster rolls, and commissaires would regularly connive at the practice of officers and suppliers providing false route-march papers as evidence for paying troops on the march. The commissaires also obstructed the contrˆoleurs des guerres (such as they were), refusing to allow them to be present at musters, thus removing another pair of eyes from any scenes of malpractice. The situation was no better than it had been in the s: that decade commissaires continued to defy ordinances by adding an extra man to each company’s revue in order to claim the pay for themselves, and for six years commissaire Aubert took bribes to warn officers of impending musters so that they could temporarily recruit a few more men. The same practices occasionally came to light in the Dutch War. 



 



A. Corvisier, ‘Louis XIV, la guerre et la naissance de l’arm´ee moderne’, in Contamine and Corvisier, Histoire militaire de la France, vol. I, p. , barely concedes this; Lynn, Giant, pp. –, tentatively acknowledges the problem. SHAT A : Barbezieux to Voysin,  May ; A , fols. v – r : Barbezieux circular letter to directors-general of cavalry,  Jan. ; MR , no. : order for revocation of a commissaire,  May . Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, pp. –. SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux circular letter to commissaires,  May ; no. : Barbezieux to de Vali`ere,  June ; A , no. : Barbezieux to de Vali`ere,  July ; no. : Barbezieux circular letter to commissaires,  Nov. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Nov. ; A , no. : second memorandum by Mairon, Aug. . SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Dec. ; Rousset, vol. I, pp. –; vol. II, p. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War Things appear to have become worse in the s. The demands on a commissaire’s purse were high enough at the best of times, but the increase in pressure on them brought about by the reconstitution of their venal offices in –, and subsequent ‘augmentations des gages’, left them particularly susceptible to the temptations of fraud and the bribes of military officers. At the same time, the withdrawal of the military inspectorate at the end of  provided a marvellous window of opportunity for unchecked corruption which might help commissaires and commis to keep their heads above water. The reintroduction of a beefed-up inspectorate at the beginning of  seems to have had a dramatic effect, initially at least. By the end of the year lieutenant-general Tess´e reported that the inspectors had instilled an extraordinary degree of fear among the commissaires, so much so that they did not dare to act in a crooked manner. This was an exaggeration, especially as some inspectors were sympathetic to the commissaires and officers, and commissaires caught out were taken out of service but still continued to own their posts and receive their gages. Nevertheless, the chances of corruption going undetected had once again been reduced. Unsurprisingly, the commissaires des guerres also perpetrated or connived at fraud associated with their other duties. In the hospitals they registered a larger number of beds and patients than existed, so the entrepreneurs gained more income, and they ignored scandalous under-spending on nourishment. According to Mairon – who as a commis of the Extraordinaire des Guerres was in a good position to know – commissaires regularly inflated the number of convalescents in hospitals and the number of men stopping at the e´tapes, causing colossal financial losses for the crown in the Nine Years War. In  serious fraud in the e´tapes of the Ile-de-France for ,  and – came to light, involving local councillors, contractors and even the subd´el´egu´es of the intendant to the tune of , livres. Eleven years later a commissaire in Languedoc took kickbacks for ignoring fraud in bed supply for the local e´tapes. All these men were prosecuted. Some of the greatest opportunities for fraud were presented in the offices of the intendants. Bouchu’s secretary was arrested for corruption in , and a number of subd´el´egu´es were caught with their fingers in the till. Nor were the intendants themselves all paragons of virtue. Louis Robert has already been discussed; so too has Raymond Trobat. La Goupilli`ere of the Sarre was particularly devious. He insisted that all contributions from surrounding German territories  

 

SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A : Barbezieux to Genlis,  Mar. . SHAT A , no. : second memorandum by Mairon, Aug. . On the hospitals see A : La Fonds to Louvois,  Sep. ; Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  June ; Bib Maz , fols. r –r : Guiscard to Barbezieux,  May ; on the e´tapes, see AN G , nos. –: two memoranda, Dec. ; no. : Le Clerc and Villeromard to Controller-General Le Peletier,  Dec. ; SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Bˆaville,  June . SHAT A , fol. r : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  Jan. . See above, p. , and chapter , pp. –.



Corruption in the Ministry of War were paid in cash so that he could rake off a portion, and he deliberately excluded lieutenant-general Tallard from negotiations on these sums. By  Louvois was extremely concerned about this and also about his handling of forage supply. But not all crooked intendants got away with it. Jean Tallon, brother of Pierre, may have been Michel Le Tellier’s sidekick in Italy in the s and then intendant on the Champagne frontier, but he was one of those arrested and tried for fraud in . Pierre Carlier was sacked as intendant d’arm´ee in  and the following year as provincial intendant of Roussillon. Two scalps, however, were even bigger. Jacques La Grange, a former commissaire des guerres whose career had been spent on the eastern frontier with Germany, was dismissed from the key intendance of Alsace in  after twenty-five years in post, for collusion in e´tapes corruption. An embarrassed Barbezieux denied all knowledge of the reasons when Vauban asked the cause of La Grange’s departure! In Burgundy only five years earlier intendant Argouges and his son had been investigated for fraud and irregularities in his adjudication of the e´tapes and roadworks contracts. The findings were sufficiently serious for him to be fired. These examples of corrupt practices are by no means exhaustive for this era, and represent only some of those episodes which came to a head or were common knowledge. There is plenty of evidence of ministerial frustration that many miscreants could not be brought to book through lack of proof, though their behaviour reeked of criminality. It is unrealistic to suppose that there were no further instances other than those lurking in the extant documents. Intendants and inspectors, even if virtuous themselves, were periodically warned not to turn a blind eye to malpractice, and some of them were roasted for their complaisance by the Secretary of War. Certainly men had moral choices, and the majority of civilian agents working for the War Ministry kept within the rules if they could and perhaps even if they could not. But a sizeable minority, enough to make a difference, circumvented or ignored the king’s regulations. The means at the government’s disposal to combat fraud were pitifully weak: many auditing posts were sinecures, the Paris Chambre des comptes was hopelessly inadequate and stunted, and the intendants, who were on the whole honest men, still could not be counted on to do audits properly, not least because of the other demands on their time. To a considerable extent the problem hinged around the inadequate number of men at the disposal of the Secretary of State for War. Similarly, it had much to do with the insufficiency of willing and suitable men coming forward to fill 



Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. II, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Tallard to Louvois,  May ; nos. , : Barbezieux to Tallard,  Aug.,  Nov. ; no. : Tallard to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; AN G , nos. –: three documents on La Goupilli`ere, –. Smedley-Weill, Les intendants de Louis XIV, p. ; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Jan. ; Vauban, vol. II, p. : Barbezieux to Vauban,  July ; ACC O, vol. , fols. r–v , r : Cond´e to bishop of Autun,  Nov. ,  Jan. .



The Le Tellier dynasty and the Ministry of War those places in the administration which were available. The Le Tellier therefore insisted on receiving papers and receipts which inundated the central bureaux of the War Ministry, and in fact generated the possibility of fraud going undetected amid a mind-boggling array of documents and figures. Moreover, clamping down on fraud when a war was underway only threatened to rip vital parts out of the administration. Some degree of fraud or unauthorised borrowing of crown money was inevitable because the fisco-financiers and their agents had to maintain their liquidity and credibility. And given the way the finances were structured, each different institution and employee of the Finance Ministry and the War Ministry had to bail out others with loans. This made the system of war finance prone to collapse every time one link in the chain of borrowing went bankrupt or was prosecuted by the crown for malpractice. The attempt to reform the Extraordinaire des Guerres in the early s stands out as a noble effort by a minister to rein in his own clients, but when the crown had to send the problem of fraud back to the Treasurers-General, encouraging them to pursue their own underlings, it was an admission of the pathological weakness of the state. Yet corruption and inefficiency also derived from the worsening ability of Louis XIV’s state to finance his needs in the face of increasingly well-organised international foes. The Extraordinaire des Guerres was faced with a growing pay-load, which was not helped by Louvois’s acquisitive tendency to control more and more of the levers of government, in this case the artillery and fortifications whose treasurers were marginalised. The scale of war from  had never been encountered before, and to pay for it, and to supply the Extraordinaire des Guerres with enough revenue for the armies, counter-productive measures were employed. One detects little sympathy in Barbezieux for such moves. The venal reformation of the commissaires des guerres was a disaster, as these men, under threat of dismissal for defaulting on payments, sought money wherever they could find it, often by fraud. To all this was added an economic catastrophe in – that depressed tax revenues and threatened the tax officials upon whom the state also depended for credit management and the supply of loans. The civilian infrastructure supporting the armies could only work effectively through the careful manipulation of enlightened self-interest. In the s, as Louis piled the pressure too high on his servants, this system of exploiting and manipulating private interests backfired, culminating most obviously in the d´ebˆacle of the Extraordinaire des Guerres in . The Le Tellier family cannot be considered wholly beyond reproach in this: Louvois had moulded a formidable team of agents by the standards of the time but he had not established any clear administrative hierarchy, and he had propelled France into diplomatic isolation and a war that became ever more costly. Barbezieux, who should not be blamed too much for the problems, was not senior enough to be able to prevent the exploitation of the 

As seen with the poor sales of the contrˆoleurs des guerres in –.



Corruption in the Ministry of War commissaires des guerres, and whatever charges of indolence may be laid against him, it appears from the surviving documentation that he was as sharp as his father and grandfather when examining the ever more voluminous accounts of the crown’s servants. But as France entered the War of the Spanish Succession while the Le Tellier passed from ministerial office it seemed as if all their work in building an effective War Ministry was fading away.



Part II

The forging of the French officer corps and the standing army under Louis XIV

Introduction

The French infantry used to be the worst in Europe, and has become the best mainly by the improvement in their officer material. ´nigo Fern´andez de Velasco y Tovar, Constable of Castile, Seventh Duke of (Don I˜ Fr´ıas, )

By  the French army was without question better organised, better disciplined and considerably larger than it had been during the reign of Louis XIII and the ministry of Cardinal Mazarin. French generals on attachment to foreign armies found them woefully deficient by comparison with their own. Nevertheless, this comparative advantage has tended to obscure the very real problems of military administration faced by Louis XIV and his ministers, not least in their attempts to organise and direct campaigning in more distant theatres of war. Furthermore, one must recognise that if the system of regimental administration was a distinct improvement upon the first half of the seventeenth century it came in for heavy criticism both from contemporaries and from reformers in the mideighteenth. The key to a larger and better army lies only in part in the improvement in civilian administration, as demonstrated in part I of this book. To present a full picture one must consider the quotation at the beginning of this introduction. If Fr´ıas was correct, and the improvement of the French army was indeed mainly due to the officers, how, then, was a better officer corps constructed? One policy which did nothing to help matters was Louis XIV’s decision to revoke the edict of Nantes in , driving at least , Huguenot officers out of the French army and precipitating the flight of most of their number into exile and either Dutch, British or Brandenburg service. Very few of them converted and returned. Moreover, as early as  the crown had given precedence to officers who were catholic over their protestant counterparts in the same rank, and with the zealous conversion of  

Archivo General de Simancas, Estado/,  Feb. , quoted in R. Stradling, Europe and the Decline of Spain, – (London, ), p. . G. Symcox, ‘Louis XIV and the War in Ireland, –. A Study of his Strategic Thinking and Decision-Making’ (Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, ), p. ; R. Place, ‘The Self-Deception of the Strong: France on the Eve of the War of the League of Augsburg’, French Historical Studies  (), , –, –.



The officer corps and the standing army Turenne to the Roman faith in  the Huguenots found their place in the army deteriorating even further. This damage aside, the crown was actually remarkably sensitive after  to the problems and the needs of the military officers – far more concerned to give them and their descendants the means to remain in service than were Richelieu and Mazarin’s governments. Arriving at such a superficial conclusion is not difficult, but actually showing in a meaningful way how the crown managed the officer corps before the War of the Spanish Succession has proved far from easy: the service records of officers were destroyed, probably in –, and in any case there is reason to doubt that they contained much detail or that the War Ministry kept them in any systematic way before the late s. What can be established is the approximate number of officers in service under Louis XIV at various moments in his ‘personal rule’, from which one can conclude that the demand for military employment was high in spite of the drawbacks: for example, in July , for an army of over , men, there were somewhere in the region of , officers. The demand for officerships was particularly high at the outbreak of any hostilities. Furthermore, prior to the War of the Spanish Succession the French army did not lose large numbers of officers in action (at least compared to the Wars of Religion in the previous century), except on a very few occasions such as the siege of Candia in Crete in . At least  per cent of the French army officers under Louis XIV were noble, and far more of them served in the royal armies at any one time during this reign than ever before: Andr´e Corvisier has argued convincingly that nearly one-half of all eligible, enlistable male nobles were in military service during the years of peak mobilisation in the s. The senior provincial nobility – the ‘noblesse seconde’ – had already made the transition from local military service to ‘national’, ubiquitous service under Louis XIII, and Louis XIV continued to channel their energies more 

 

BL Add. Mss. , fols. v –v ; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  June ; M. S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime – (London, ), p. ; W. Shaw, ‘The English Government and the Relief of Protestant Refugees’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London  (–), –, –; W. Shaw, ‘The Irish Pensioners of William III’s Huguenot Regiments, ’, ibid.  (–), ; C. Last, ‘The Huguenot Regiments’, ibid.  (–), , , ; W. Manch´ee, ‘The Huguenot Regiments’, ibid.  (–), –; ‘M´emoire in´edit d’Henri de Mirmand’, Bulletin de la Soci´et´e de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Fran¸cais  (), ; H. Bordier, ‘Bibliographie’, ibid.  (), ; ‘Requˆete adress´ee aux Etats G´en´eraux des Pays-Bas par Cent Soixante et Onze Officiers Franc¸ais ( juillet )’, ibid.  (), –; ‘R´esum´e’, ibid.  (), –; F. David, ‘Les colonies des r´efugi´es protestants franc¸ais en Brandenbourg-Prusse (–): institutions, g´eographie et e´ volution de leur peuplement’, ibid.  (), ; SHAT A , nos. , : Catinat to Louvois,  June,  June . Dangeau, vol. I, p. xxii; SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Coigny,  Oct. ; A , no. : to Capy,  Dec. ; BNF FF , fols. r –r . SHAT A , no. : estimates,  July ; A , no. : estimates of casualties from Staffarda [Oct. ]; Vauban, vol. II, p. : notes; vol. II, p. : Vauban to Le Peletier,  Oct. ; BNF FF , fol. r ; SHAT Xc: service records of Noailles cavalry,  Oct. ; Noailles, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –; Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  Jan. .



Introduction and more into the royal army. But from the s, and more particularly from the s, the lesser nobility came to form the backbone of the officer corps: perhaps about  per cent of the officers were moderately or extremely wealthy, if records from the s are anything to go by, but the rest were struggling or were poor. Bringing the lesser provincial nobility into service and keeping them there for as long as possible was therefore the main priority after . Even if he was not wholly successful in this regard, Louis XIV gradually succeeded in improving on the situation which he inherited from Mazarin. Furthermore, the pool of potential officers widened in other ways. For scions of robe noble houses, military positions became increasingly sought after as a way of acquiring acceptance in noble society and adding lustre to an otherwise undistinguished family, a development the crown only encouraged. In addition to the nobility, there was a noticeable (if unquantifiable) number of commoners among the officers. Usually they were frowned upon because they were not considered likely to be imbued with the sort of values requisite for holding the king’s commission, and some colonels refused to have them in their regiments, but the king by no means tried to prevent them from serving. Indeed, from the mid-s the crown sought to attract more commoners who ‘lived nobly’ into the officer ranks, in large part, one suspects, to fill the gap caused by the loss of the Huguenots. There were many ennoblements for military service in the late seventeenth century. Commoner officers were not ghettoised as ‘officiers de fortune’, with a handful of junior posts in each regiment earmarked for them and an exclusion order preventing them acquiring any others – this was a system established in the late eighteenth century. To an unprecedented degree, and to an extent never to be reached again under the ancien r´egime, the second half of Louis XIV’s reign saw a remarkable coalescence of rich commoners, robins and sword nobility around traditional martial values. However, historians still have to explain the motivation for such large numbers of nobles to perform military service, and how the French nobility was turned into a semi-professional officer corps by . For John Lynn, Louis XIV’s progress in reshaping the officers was achieved by two principal means: () severe government action against recalcitrant officers by Louvois; and () the fact that the officers greatly valued military service as it was the principal means by which they could    

Corvisier, La France de Louis XIV, pp. –; L. Bourquin, Noblesse seconde et pouvoir en Champagne aux XVIe et XVIIe si`ecles (Paris, ), pp. , , , –, –. SHAT Xc: e´tat of service records of officers of Noailles cavalry,  Oct. ; Xc: e´tat of service records of officers of Villeroi cavalry,  Oct. . On the robins, see Rowlands, ‘The Ethos of Blood and Changing Values?’; Quarr´e, M´emoires, pp. , ; Sarram´ea, Lettres, p. : notes; Herman, ‘Knights and Kings in Early Modern France’, pp. –. On commoner officers, see SHAT A , no. : ‘Discours’, ; A : Barbezieux to Beaulieu,  June ; Xb: e´tat of service records of officers of Vendˆome infantry [Oct.] ; BNF FF (i), fol. r ; Corvisier, La France de Louis XIV, p. ; A. Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe – (London, ), p. . On ‘officiers de fortune’, see C. Wrong, ‘The Officiers de Fortune in the French Infantry’, French Historical Studies  (), –.



The officer corps and the standing army acquire ‘gloire’ and achieve personal satisfaction. The nobility was: ‘selfless in this regard. The perception of having sacrificed its fortunes for the good of the monarchy gave the nobility a claim on preference and power, at least in its own eyes.’ Lynn’s officers were self-deluding idealists and their real power and authority fell victim to their own vanity and warrior code. This view will not be reflected in this book, though Lynn’s arguments are worth examining carefully. Most importantly, Lynn was anxious to prove that a materialist interpretation, stressing financial gain as a motive for service by French nobles, is wrong. Indeed, Fritz Redlich, in his great work on military enterprising, did place excessive emphasis on this as a factor in France, and Michel Le Tellier, repeatedly accusing officers of greed, failed to appreciate that most were merely trying to keep their heads above the rising waters of insolvency. Lynn has a strong case in arguing that the financial motive for service was a weak one, confined to officers running companies of raiders. Beyond this, however, Lynn’s interpretation lacks credibility. To begin with, he can justly be accused of taking at face value both the self-justifications of some noble writers and the elevating notions appearing in royal propaganda and legislation. More critically, his exposition of noble culture is deficient, and in particular his fixation with the concept of honour. This was most certainly a central part of the elite’s world but Lynn confuses it with ‘gloire’. ‘Gloire’ was fame, something earned by notable and extraordinary behaviour, and its pursuit could actually run counter to a rigid adherence to one’s duty and to obedience. Admittedly, the French were known for hot-headed and meritorious notions of ‘´eclat’. The Swiss commentator, B´eat-Louis de Muralt, who had served in the French army as a mercenary officer, believed French noblemen in competition one with another could take this business to extremes: ‘What does it matter if he goes into debt, if he ruins himself: he has placed himself above those who were his equals, he has sparkled in the world; what more can one do?’ But honour could be gained by many means less dangerous than reckless deeds, or less expensive than Muralt suggested: lowkey honourable actions and honourable behaviour were expected of an officer, and greater honour was acquired merely by doing one’s duty, by doing what was expected in a given situation. Louis XIV himself encouraged this idea.  



   

Lynn, Giant, pp.  (citation), , –. F. Redlich, The German Military Enterpriser and his Workforce. A Study in European Economic and Social History,  vols. (Wiesbaden, –), vol. II, p. ; Massiac, ‘Avis’ in M´emoires, n.p.; Montbas, Au service du roi, pp. –; Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, p. ; Bib Maz , fol. r–v : Guiscard to Barbezieux,  Oct. . E.g.s SHAT OM : king’s order,  June ; Lamont, ‘Officers of the Foot’, p. ; J. de SaulxTavanes, M´emoires (Paris, ), and comments on this work in Forster, The House of Saulx-Tavanes, p. . Lynn, Giant, pp. –. Sourches, vol. II, pp. –,  Oct. . One thinks also of the crossing of the Rhine in . B.-L. de Muralt, Lettres sur les Anglais et les Fran¸cais (Lausanne, ), pp. –. Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, p. .



Introduction According to the author of La conduite de Mars, those most avid for ‘gloire’ were the grands, but for the vast majority of French officers what drove them to serve was ambition and aspiration, and it was more than just ambition for ‘gloire’. Above all, like commoners and robins, they sought concrete social advancement. There was nothing bourgeois about this, and one does not have to see the question of advancement in exclusively materialist terms. Discussing the first half of the seventeenth century, Jonathan Dewald has pointed out that male nobles increasingly described their lives with reference to personal ambition, connecting their aspirations for both inner and outward improvement and change. Contemporaries frequently pointed to personal and family ambition as the key to understanding the French nobility. Vauban talked not just of honour but also of ambition and ‘interest’, and the desire to satisfy them as the prime motives for bravery and duty in fighting. The abb´e Faultrier wrote of ‘ambition which makes the real nobility’, and of officers seeking ‘the honour of elevation’. Officers quite explicitly expected that if they were honourable, behaved well and served dutifully they would receive rewards and secure their family’s advancement, while the duc de Navailles believed, ‘Only ambition to elevate oneself should make us act.’ A few very young officers, usually associated with the court, might run extreme risks in order to acquire a reputation, displaying an impetuousness and impatience bordering on lunacy. They, and the most ambitious of their social inferiors, embodied the very notion that ‘young men forget’, and they frequently forgot that they were mortal. But such braggarts and attentionseekers were the minority, and even they, as they matured, came to see the value of a reputation more coolly – it should not be sought just for its own sake, but so that it would also give them a stronger claim on advancement. In all this, noble women played a significant role in encouraging service, for it was widely believed, with good reason, that in matters matrimonial and sexual they favoured the charms of military men and prized heroic values above all others. But this still leaves unresolved one fundamental question: how could ambition be a serious motivation for service when in practice so few men really benefited in the long term? The answer lies in the quite extraordinary degree of hope which  







Sandras, La conduite de Mars, pp. –; La Colonie, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –. J. Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, – (Oxford, ), pp. , –. One should discount Jay Smith’s claim that nobles had contempt for the notion of ambition. Smith’s interpretation is based on limited primary research and relies too heavily on idealist writings: see The Culture of Merit, p. . Vauban, vol. I, pp. , , –: ‘R´eorganisation de l’arm´ee’ []; SHAT AA w: Faultrier to Louvois,  Dec. ; SHAT A A, fol. r : Considerations on the Swiss alliance, late ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, p. , quoting Navailles. La Colonie, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –, ; BNF FF , fols. v –v , is an autobiographical description of the ill-advised behaviour of one badly wounded officer who miraculously lived to become a lieutenant-general. Sandras, La conduite de Mars, p. ; Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, pp. –; Lavall´ee, vol. I, p. : Maintenon to Mme de Villette,  June ; vol. III, pp. –: to Mme de Veilhaut,  May .



The officer corps and the standing army beat in the breasts of the French nobility. Saint-Hilaire believed ‘hope’ was at the root of the Frenchman’s spirit, not least in the case of the young men who joined as cadets and subalterns, seduced by superficial glamour which they soon discovered was beyond their means. After  lesser nobles were more optimistic than ever before that through diligent service their name might one day come to the king’s attention, and the monarchy consciously exploited such a craving by spreading the notion of an ubiquitous ‘king’s gaze’ penetrating every corner of France and its institutions. However unrealistic it may seem, subalterns joined up hoping that one day they might be able to afford to become captains. Such lack of realism should be seen as part of the mental world of the French propertied elites, a society gripped with a fortune-obsessed mania for high-risk games of chance which viewed combat as gambling with death. Moreover, the French of this period, like their other European contemporaries, continued to believe powerfully in the capacity of Divine Providence to intervene in their lives. This, of course, could have a negative impact on their fortunes, but officers whose careers stalled, at whatever level, were fatalistic and stoical. Unlike the duc de Saint-Simon, who resigned his regiment early in the War of the Spanish Succession, most junior officers had little in life as an alternative, and the prospect of a retreat into rural living with its attendant boredom and loss of esteem was not one which necessarily appealed, no matter how large the problems encountered in royal service. Officers therefore stayed in service for as long as they could afford it. This is the essential cultural and mental context for an understanding of the management of the French regiments and the officer corps under Louis XIV, and there is every sign that after the treaty of the Pyrenees French ministers began looking at the concerns of the officers more sympathetically in this light. In large part, a willingness to accommodate noble ambition led Louis XIV and the Le Tellier to bring to an end the exploitative military system operating in the Franco-Spanish War. Henceforth, the core principles king and ministers worked around were the complementary beliefs that it was necessary () to give people the incentive to serve through the dispensation of honours and social advancement, and () to provide adequate means and efficacious regulations to permit sound service. By  king and ministers had put in place or sanctioned much of the new framework of rules and conventions which would, with periodic adjustments, last for good or ill until well into the eighteenth century. Andr´e Corvisier’s judicious 

  

Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. II, p. ; Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, p. ; Sandras, La conduite de Mars, p. ; Jouanna, Le devoir de r´evolte, pp. , ; Smith, The Culture of Merit, pp. –; SHAT MR : ‘Projet pour l’Infanterie franc¸aise’, fol. r [c. ]. It was a common, and deeply held, view, from the king downwards: Louis XIV, M´emoires, p. ; Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. I, p. ; vol. II, p. . Massiac, M´emoires, p. ; Dewald, Aristocratic Experience, pp. –, –. AA w, no. : memorandum attrib. Valli`ere, c. .



Introduction assessment of the process of reform outlined the basic policies which provided greater stability for the French officers: the limitation of officers’ expenses, the provision of more regular pay, and the more widespread use of pensions for good service or disability. This view will not be challenged here, but Corvisier also felt that the assuring of fair promotions in the context of contemporary social ideas played a significant part in giving nobles the incentive to serve, and this is more open to question. Furthermore, Corvisier’s ideas were outlined in a very brief way and the relative weight of different factors in contributing to the improvement in military administration was not assessed. More generally, while the Louisquatorzian system rescued the French army from self-defeating near chaos in its administration, the organisation which emerged also suffered in its turn from serious deficiencies. Attempts to tackle lingering problems in regimental administration from the War of Devolution onwards met with little success until Choiseul began a major overhaul in the s, and those problems were not trivial. In fact early on in the Nine Years War the officer corps was already running into severe difficulties owing to the sheer size of the war effort. Consequently, malpractice by the officers persisted and remained a source of lingering concern, but while John Lynn and others have assumed that residual abuses after  basically stemmed from a lack of self-discipline, greed and sloppiness – for Louvois had surely, in their analysis, gained a firm grip over administrative problems by now – this interpretation was not proffered by contemporaries. Intendants and commissaires des guerres, not to mention generals and Barbezieux himself, believed there was a direct link between chronic administrative defects and acute breakdowns within the War Ministry on the one hand, and officer ill-discipline and fraud, which reached high levels in the mid-s, on the other. This is not to proclaim that selfdiscipline was a concept French officers had otherwise fully absorbed by . Nor need one believe na¨ıvely that when things were running smoothly all French officers would behave scrupulously, for there is plenty of evidence that violence and general cupidity were widespread and simmering. But one should remember, as Lynn and others tend to forget, that the officers were not operating in anything like a system which was ideal, even for its time. The following three chapters will therefore try to make sense of the evidence still existing about the organisation of the French regiments, and will focus predominantly upon the officers. Chapter  will focus on the administrative structure imposed on the French regiments of infantry, cavalry and dragoons, on the patterns of ownership permitted by the king, and on the career system (such as it was) offered to the officers over the course of the years  to . Chapter  will then look at the way in which the regiments were funded, how the officers administered  

 Lynn, ‘How War Fed War’. Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –. SHAT A , fols. v –r : Noailles to Louis,  Sep. ; A , no. : Trobat to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; no. : La Goupilli`ere to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Sep. .



The officer corps and the standing army recruitment and spending, the means of additional support provided by the king, and the contrasting failure of the government to provide a sustaining framework for the subalterns. Chapter  will then examine the cultural and financial pressures on the regimental officers – particularly the captains – before outlining ways in which they could alleviate their situations or escape from them altogether.





In the name of sustainability: reforming the structure of the standing army and the officer corps From the mid-sixteenth century armies across Europe adapted their military organisation to revolve around the regiment, a unit commanded by a colonel and typically ranging in strength from around  to , men, subdivided into companies each between  and  strong under a captain. There were other regimental staff officers to assist the colonel, and captains were supported by subalterns. The process began in France in the s, and was taken up by the Dutch a little over twenty years later and in Germany, Britain and parts of northern Italy in the early seventeenth century, though the Spanish Monarchy continued to employ the tercios, larger bands of between , and , men, until the eighteenth century. As the seventeenth century unfolded, increasingly large numbers of these regiments were placed on a permanent or semi-permanent footing, and larger regiments might be divided into battalions  to  men strong for tactical purposes. But prior to the mideighteenth century no European state possessed the administrative infrastructure to organise all aspects of company and regimental business. Instead a great deal of room was left for entrepreneurial activity by the officers. Indeed almost no aspect of regimental and company administration was not connected in some way with financial management, and questions of credit were at the heart of this. Notaries even travelled with armies for the convenience of officers. Nonetheless, during the middle decades of the seventeenth century there had been a shift in almost all states towards stronger political control of the regiments by the sovereign power. In large part this was a reaction to the Thirty Years War and rampant, unruly entrepreneurialism. French monarchs, perpetually jealous of their monopoly of military authority within the kingdom, had become even more concerned to retain sufficient political control over the troops in their pay after the Wars of Religion of the late sixteenth century. They permitted a significant degree of private enterprise – indeed they had no choice – but they failed to provide sufficient incentives and advantages to their noble officers. In the Thirty Years War, even up to , this ‘semi-entrepreneurial’ system, described in illuminating detail by David Parrott, failed to unleash the vast material and manpower resources of France in  

Gaya, L’art de la guerre, p. . See G. Rowlands, ‘The Monopolisation of Military Power in France,  to ’ in R. Asch, W. E. Voß and M. Wrede, eds., Frieden und Krieg in der Fr¨uhen Neuzeit. Die europ¨aische Staatenordnung und die außereurop¨aische Welt (Munich, ), pp. –.



The officer corps and the standing army quantities sufficient to deal Spain a crushing blow, something recognised by the high command, by the ministers and by the young Louis XIV himself. French colonels were expected to invest heavily in their regiments but were not allowed to run them like private businesses, nor could the captains run their companies in like manner under the colonels. To a considerable extent regimental officers prior to the s were not actually enterprisers but investors with almost negligible rights of security and return, and in consequence they failed to maintain their units in good condition either by negligence or from poverty. The largest single problem, of course, was cash flow. Had the French state under Richelieu and Mazarin been able to maintain adequate liquidity the armies would certainly have performed better. But good pay flow alone could not have created a sound military edifice, for the organisational framework positively militated against responsible officership. For as long as the mechanisms for recruitment, promotion and pay distribution discriminated against virtue and honesty, and for as long as the procedures for expansion and contraction of the army wounded the interests of the nobility, France could not hope to achieve military security or an adequate projection of Bourbon power across Europe. It was the achievement of Louis XIV, together with the Le Tellier, Turenne and other members of the high command, to turn the administrative procedures in the army inside out and recast them in ways favourable to the creation of a massive force, all the while preventing royal authority from being weakened in any obvious and glaring way. How they created a viable administrative system for the regiments will be the principal subject of the next two chapters. To begin with, this chapter will explain the roles of the regimental officers, before examining the basic principles by which Louis XIV administered his standing army, the career structure created during his reign, and the development of the network of senior officers who oversaw the regiments. This will then feed into chapter , where the detail of regimental administration and the significance of Louis XIV’s reforms and policies in this field will be set out and explained.                                       To understand how the army of Louis XIV became so large and could sustain itself against large coalitions of enemies, some attention should be paid to the roles performed by officers within the regiments, whether they were members of the regimental e´tat-major – the colonel (or mestre de camp in the cavalry), lieutenantcolonel, major and (sometimes) aide-major – or whether they served as company officers – the captains, lieutenants, sous-lieutenants, ensigns, guidons and cornets. Because the colonel was seen as the ‘paterfamilias’ of his regiment and his subordinates looked to him to assist in their ambitions, it was considered in general highly 

For a full comparison of the French system of unit ownership with the Imperial, Spanish and Dutch entrepreneurial systems during the Thirty Years War, see Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, pp. –.



Reforming the structure of the standing army necessary that he should be well born and able to exert a natural social authority over his officers and men. The colonel was the vital agent in the enforcement of discipline within a regiment, and upon his lead might depend not only the quality of the personnel but also the maintenance of sufficient numbers of men. He was supposed to check on his captains and their activities, and until the Nine Years War to make a report to the Secretary of War every month during the winter season on the state of the companies. He might review and drill his regiment in preparation for the arrival of inspectors, and would invariably end up spending his own money – often too much because of a competitive spirit – upon the upkeep of his units. However, a colonel was often absent from his regiment, in peacetime for as much as eleven months of the year, and in wartime the king’s orders varied from year to year: sometimes colonels were expected to be on duty for up to three months of the winter season – a stipulation which caused resentment – but in other years they did not have to be present personally at any time during this period unless the regiment was in bad condition and needed close attention. Of course, the king preferred them to be with their unit, unless they had other duties in a civil capacity which needed performing. During wartime Louis XIV typically ordered them to their regiments between mid-February and mid-March to prepare for the campaign season, but colonels sometimes evaded service, arriving quite casually at their regiments in late June or mid-July, to the frustration of the generals. For as long as it was deemed vital to install men of good pedigree as colonels, the crown would have to accept that convention expected them to be granted long periods of leave to fulfil their social responsibilities. This did not necessarily mean that they were guilty of gross dereliction of duty. Colonels managed their regiments by correspondence from their estates, from Paris or from court. In the administration of the regiment, however, they depended greatly upon the lieutenant-colonel and the major. The lieutenant-colonel had originally been the representative in an infantry regiment of the Colonel-General, but after  he became the principal figure in charge of day-to-day discipline and order in the regiment, and was picked by the king from among the whole officer corps. Like the colonel and the captains he continued to own a company in the regiment. In a multi-battalion infantry regiment he was placed in charge of the second battalion, and the most senior captains in charge of any further battalions. In  lieutenant-colonels were introduced into the cavalry as well. Colonels were supposed to consult with them on all matters, and a good partnership often produced 



Lamont, ‘Officers of the Foot’, p. ; La Fontaine, Les devoirs militaires, p. ; SHAT A , fol. r : Crenan to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , no. : Larray to Barbezieux,  June ; OM : Louvois circular letter to all cavalry mestres de camp and dragoon colonels,  Jan. . Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  June ; Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  Mar. ; vol. VII, p. ,  Aug. ; SHAT A , fol. r : Louis to Luxembourg,  Oct. ; OM : ordonnance,  Oct. ; A , nos. –: Catinat to Louis,  June,  June ; nos. , : Catinat to Barbezieux,  and  July ; BNF FF , fol. r : Tess´e to Noailles,  Nov. .



The officer corps and the standing army the best regiments. Nevertheless, both Andr´e and Corvisier misjudged the extent to which the lieutenant-colonel took over responsibility for the regiment from the colonel, positing an exaggerated dichotomy of birth and merit, honorific and active in comparing the two positions. First, colonels remained jealous of their rank and often did not give lieutenant-colonels sufficient authority to act autonomously in their absence. Second, lieutenant-colonels frequently took the side of hard-pressed captains against the demands for higher standards being made on them by the colonel. Third, only in the War of the Spanish Succession, and again right at the end of the ancien r´egime, did lieutenant-colonels assume a greater burden, in the s because of the growing number of rich but under-age colonels who could subsidise the regiments but were too inexperienced to run them without significant assistance. After  the position of major was detached from the ownership of a company, and they and their subordinates, the aides-majors who were the rough equivalent of lieutenants (though better paid), were fully settled in infantry regiments. The major quickly became far more important for the business side of the regiment than the lieutenant-colonel. Like the lieutenant-colonel, he enjoyed powers of general surveillance and police over the regiment, though vexatious captains might dispute rank with him, and in a court martial the major would act as the prosecutor. But from about  his real task was as regimental accountant and auditor, maintaining the muster rolls and regularly drilling and parading the troops to keep an eye on manpower levels. Lamont saw them as the central figures in the fight against false mustering, ‘because only the Majors can know the effective Men, which the Commissaries can never discover, unless they had the Spirit of Prophecy.’ The Extraordinaire des Guerres passed the pay and money from off-reckonings for the officers and men over to the major, who provided receipts certified by the officer on the spot commanding the regiment. The major also gave receipts to bread suppliers for their deliveries, took promissory notes from them for anything which was owing, and also handled beef entrepreneurs on behalf of the captains. When a regiment moved on, the major was responsible for paying off any outstanding debts in a locality. On the death of an officer on active duty the major sold his baggage 





Gaya, L’art de la guerre, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Sep. ; A , no. : Larray to Barbezieux,  May ; A , no. : ‘Projet’, autumn ; OM : ordonnance,  Feb. ; J. Chagniot, ‘De Rocroi a` Rossbach’, in C. Croubois, ed., L’officier fran¸cais des origines a` nos jours (St-Jean-d’Ang´ely, ), p. . Corvisier, Louvois, ; Gaya, L’art de le guerre, pp. –, ; Lamont, ‘Officers of the Foot’, pp. ,  (citation), ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –; SHAT A , no. : memorandum, Nov. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to infantry Inspector-Generals,  Apr. ; OM : notice on cadets [eighteenth century]; OM : ordonnance,  May ; BNF FF , fols. r –r : Vendˆome to Coigny,  June . SHAT OM : memorandum on Extraordinaire des Guerres [end of ]; A , no. : Barbezieux to Pelport,  Dec. ; A , no. : Maisoncelle to Barbezieux,  Mar. ; BNF FF , fol. v : Extraordinaire des Guerres payments to regiments, May ; Bib Ars : ‘Descompte’ from Pezeu dragoons for bread []; Harnoncourt to Mainfroy,  Sep. .



Reforming the structure of the standing army and animals, kept the dead man’s sword for himself and remitted the rest of the proceeds to the family. Because majors occupied such a crucial position of trust they were appointed by the king in full consultation with the colonel in question; often, indeed, they were the colonel’s own choice and sometimes even one of his relatives. If the appointment did not work then colonels might request the major be replaced, though this was only done after investigation to examine the grounds for removal: sometimes colonels were anxious to be rid of majors who were just too scrupulous for comfort. The most important consideration in a promotion to major was, however, the candidate’s ability to handle money and his credit rating. Sometimes majors might be fabulously wealthy, but most of the time they were figures struggling to juggle the multifarious financial commitments of the regiment. Conscious of the need to keep them afloat, in the Nine Years War the crown paid majors in the cavalry  livres per month and granted them automatically a  livre annual pension. Infantry and dragoon majors also received the same pay as a captain in their arm (though without company responsibilities) and a pension of  livres. All the same, if a bad choice of major was made the results could be disastrous: in November  the r´egiment d’Albigeois found itself short of , livres which had never arrived, and junior officers were owed about , of this, all thanks to the incompetence of a young major; in June  the major of the Cl´erambault infantry possessed debts of between  and , livres. Because personal faith and credit were so central, the death of a major in harness could find a regiment owing large sums of money in several provinces. Inspectors would keep an eye on regimental accounts, and investigated complaints against majors by other officers, but they could not stamp out fraud and deception. In charge of the companies were the captains who owned them and who were also expected to sink their money into them. In the second half of the seventeenth century the French crown shifted some of the burden of administration and troop recruitment from the colonels to the captains, apparently for two main reasons: first, a realisation of the need to spread the financial risk more widely and to support the burdens on the captains more equitably by issuing funds to them directly; and, second, because the king was anxious to build up a closer relationship between the crown and the captains to weaken the political hold of the colonels on their  





Montbas, Au service du Roi, p. ; SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Coigny,  July . SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Bouchu,  Sep. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Poudens,  June ; Yb(i), fols. r –r : cavalry contrˆole, –; fols. r , r : dragoon contrˆole, –; BNF NAF , fol. r : Barbezieux to Tess´e,  Nov. ; Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, p. . BNF FF , fol. r ; BMG Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  Feb. ; SHAT A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Larray,  Sep. ; A , no. : Larray to Barbezieux,  Nov. , A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  June ; A , fols. v –r : to Genlis,  Apr. ; A (ii), fol. r : to Nanclas,  Dec. ; A : Bagnols to Barbezieux,  July ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Bagnols,  June ; A , no. : to Bouchu, June ; Bib Ars . See chapter , pp. –.



The officer corps and the standing army regiments. Captains were supposed to know something about mathematics, geometry and fortifications, blockade tactics, and how to conduct and protect convoys. They were also expected to manage aspects of pay and supply, to administer the handling of the sick, and to educate the troops in their duties and in obedience. Every two weeks the company was to do drill, and the captain was to inspect guard posts regularly every day. In most of his responsibilities the captain was assisted by one or more subaltern officers. Though paid considerably less, lieutenants and sous-lieutenants participated in the costs of maintaining the company and were particularly important in recruiting fresh troops, even if they were often unreliable. Rich subalterns were highly valued by captains, and while peacetime usually saw only a lieutenant to aid his captain, at mobilisation for war sous-lieutenants were always instituted. Day-to-day inspection of the men and their equipment (including horses), and supervision of the NCOs were the principal tasks of the subalterns.                           :                          One of the most significant factors in the improvement of the French army after  was the acceptance by the crown of military venality, or purchase of commission, and the creation of a sustainable regimental system. Under Louis XIV colonels and captains continued to be investors in their units, but they enjoyed greater security both of tenure and resources. It was a considerable contrast to the era of the Thirty Years War. The Code Michau of  forbade military venality, and throughout Richelieu’s ministry the re-sale of captaincies was not permitted, so that no incentive existed to maintain decent standards in companies. The actual sale of military office by the state, on the other hand, was largely covered up. In the s, however, officers seem to have become bolder, and sale of posts by an incumbent to a replacement had become quite normal by the end of the Frondes. Mazarin’s government consequently tried to arrest this development with an ordinance on  April  which forbade monetary transactions between outgoing and incoming captains, lieutenants and ensigns in the infantry. Instead, the crown promised to indemnify officers by other means, but the parlous state of royal finances precluded any serious efforts to meet this commitment, while Mazarin himself undermined   



Redlich sees this development but does not explain the reasons behind it: Redlich, The German Military Enterpriser and his Workforce, vol. II, pp. –. La Fontaine, Les devoirs militaires, pp. –; Gaya, L’art de la guerre, pp. , ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. ; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Oct. ; Birac, ‘Officers of Horse’, p. . J. Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine du Grand Si`ecle’, Revue Historique des Arm´ees – (), ; BNF FF , fols. r , r –v : proc`es verbaux of Tilladet and Castres infantry regiments, –; SHAT A , no. : Saint-Pouange to Louvois,  Nov. ; A , no. : Arnoul to Barbezieux,  Mar. . Gaya, L’art de la guerre, pp. –; BMG Saugeon , no. : instruction from Flanders DirectorGeneral of infantry,  June ; Sandras, La conduite de Mars, pp. , .



Reforming the structure of the standing army the law on venality in order to encourage support for a persistently weak crown. On top of this, remaining in service as a regimental officer under the cardinalministers was distinctly difficult, for these men were forced to invest in their companies by the threat of disbandment of their unit or a reduction in its size, without compensation. The crown sacked officers who allowed their companies to grow weak, even at the height of the campaign season, while the ministers authorised an annual recasting of regiments and amalgamation of companies at the onset of the winter season. If a captain died in harness the company might well be disbanded and the other officers sent home, while men and horses were redistributed either within the same regiment or even to other regiments. In essence, prior to  the government was more committed to supporting those officers remaining in service in other companies, by transferring men to them, than in the long-term support of that wide circle of noble families who supplied the officer corps. In the aftermath of the peace of the Pyrenees, Louis XIV’s government decided to adopt a radically different approach to both of these key matters. A premium was put upon encouraging nobles to remain in service, and the acceptance of military venality was a cornerstone of this policy. In practice, the crown had been forced to acquiesce on the sale of commissions within six months of the  ordinance, but after  it was regulated and restricted to the ranks of colonel and captain. The aim was to allow these officers (and supposedly no others, though the rank of major was still purchasable for between  and , livres up to ) to recoup some of the costs of establishing and maintaining the regiment or company. The need to purchase these particular posts certainly discouraged poorer nobles, or imposed sacrifices on them out of all proportion to their means, and prices did rise, in some cases to exhorbitant levels, in the first thirty to forty years of Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’, until capping was brought in on a systematic basis. But historians have failed to realise that the alternative in the late seventeenth century was even worse from the point of view of both the crown and the nobility. Generally, the acceptance of venality gave officers an incentive to invest some of their own money in the king’s army. Should a captain or colonel be wounded or wish to retire from service he would, after , be allowed to sell his post on to his successor for a reasonable price. New regiments and companies were given by the crown without sale; likewise those which were taken back without any compensation to  

  

Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, pp. , ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, p. . Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, pp. –, –; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –, –; BNF FF , fols. r –v , r –r , v , v , r passim: letters relating to disbandments, Dec. . BNF FF , fols. v –v : memorandum from Le Tellier to Turenne,  Aug. . BNF FF , fols. v –r . Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; Chagniot, ‘De Rocroi a` Rossbach’, p. . Neither sees venality as beneficial.



The officer corps and the standing army the previous owners were parcelled out again for free. From that point on, however, transfer of ownership involved payment of large sums of money to the previous owner. The only real difficulty remaining was the fate of an officer’s investment should he die in post. Some contemporaries and all major scholars maintain that the death of an officer resulted in the loss of his position and frequently the pauperisation of his family, owing principally to the forfeiture of the original purchase sum. Certainly Louis XIV would confiscate without compensation any units which fell vacant because the incumbent died from duelling. But there was nothing automatic about a loss of investment through death in service. On the contrary, the king often decided to assist a family struck by such tragedy, and there were several means to achieve this. One was to honour a brevet de retenue on the post: this certificate, issued by the king to an incumbent, guaranteed the right of his family to receive a specified price for any post he vacated as a result of death. It usually applied only to prestigious units associated with the court. Alternatively, a family would be given a pension or the royal treasury would pay them a lump sum for the value of the unit. Much more common was royal permission for a family to retain a company or regiment, or to permit them to sell the unit on to a replacement. Taking the  infantry regiments in existence at the end of , thirty-seven colonels died in service during the Nine Years War: in eleven instances they were replaced by a member of the same family. Alternatively families were rewarded and compensated in other ways for their loss, though some do seem to have received no recompense. Occasionally Louis robbed one family of such benefits in order to assist another: for example, on the death of Prince Paul de Lorraine in  his cavalry regiment had been given to the chevalier de Rosel for nothing, so to compensate Paul’s father, the prince de Lillebonne, Louis gave him the regiment of the late marquis de Gournai for him to sell on. All this was utterly dependent on Louis’s whim, but as a general principle he was happy to allow the relatives – sometimes even the under-age sons – of a deceased officer to inherit his post should he have performed his duty well. It would not be going too far to say that the king’s instinct was to preserve family ownership wherever possible and compatible with his interests. These principles,     



Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Mar. ; vol. V, p. ,  May . Corvisier, Louvois, p. ; Chagniot, ‘De Rocroi a` Rossbach’, p. ; M´emoires de Primi Visconti, p. . Dangeau, vol. V, p. ,  July . BNF FF , fol. v : for the Gendarmes Flamands, Mar. ; FF , fol. r ; SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Feb. . BNF FF (i), fols. v –v ; FF (i), fols. r –r , r –r ; FF (ii), fols. r –r ; FF , fols. v –r ; FF , fol. r ; FF , fols. v –r ; Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  Aug. ; vol. IV, p. ,  Jan. ; Dangeau, vol. II, p. ,  Oct. ; vol. III, p. ,  Aug. ; vol. IV, p. ,  Aug. ; vol. IV, p. ,  Dec. ; vol. IV, p. ,  Aug. . Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  Sep. ; vol. VII, p. ,  Feb. ; SHAT A : Louis to Luxembourg,  Aug. ; BNF FF , fols. v –r ; FF , fols. v , r .



Reforming the structure of the standing army of safeguarding the inheritance of useful families, were most obviously seen in connection with regiments, but when the king chose he could also apply them to single companies. Instead of seeking to suppress venality the crown tried to regulate the prices of units. The difficulty was in setting rates at the optimum level to ensure both that enough families could afford the positions, and that incumbent families were compensated for their investment. It was not an easy balance to maintain. At the lowest level were the infantry companies, worth c. , to , livres. In  the market rate for cavalry companies was , e´cus (c. , livres), but by  this had doubled. At the top of the price range were the ‘royal’ regiments, such as the r´egiment du Dauphin infantry, along with the eleven ‘Vieux’ and ‘Petits-Vieux’: the price of these regiments and the companies within them reflected the prestige attached to them. Naturally, any units which could be guaranteed to survive intact, or nearly so, the likely demobilisation at the end of a conflict (a ‘r´eforme’), were costly. In fact, the price of colonelcies and captaincies in all these units rocketed under Louis XIV, and such inflation did not reflect the actual investment of the officers. What drove prices even higher was the increasing demand for prestigious and secure military posts among the wealthy robe nobles who had begun to seek military office during the Thirty Years War but who turned more and more to the sword for opportunities for their younger sons from the s. Many old sword families had little choice but to bid up if they wished to secure the best regiments. The consequence of all this was massive inflation of officer prices in this and the following decade. For example, the r´egiment de La Marine infantry changed hands in  and  for around , livres, but in  for ,; Feuqui`eres infantry for , in  but for , in . These two were elite regiments, but inflationary pressures impacted equally upon any regiment which seemed likely to survive demobilisation. For those regiments which seemed less likely to survive, price rises were more modest and tended to reflect actual investment: Boufflers infantry was sold for , livres in , a reflection of the , livres provided by the crown for its levy in  plus Boufflers’ own investment over the following six years. If peace was considered imminent, though, it could prove difficult even to recoup the original investment. Similarly, grievous damage in combat would affect the price of a unit.       

SHAT A : Barbezieux to Cambout,  Sep. ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  Sep. . Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  Oct. ; BNF FF , fol. r–v . Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  May ; vol. VII, p. ,  Aug. ; Corvisier, Louvois, p. ; BNF FF , fol. r ; FF , fol. r . Rowlands, ‘The Ethos of Blood and Changing Values?’  BNF FF , fols. r , r . Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Mar. .  Ibid., fol. r . E.g. the r´egiment de Languedoc infantry: see BNF FF , fols. v –r . Dangeau, vol. V, p. ,  Apr. ; Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Jan. .



The officer corps and the standing army In March , in an attempt to control these problems, the king imposed a price ceiling on non-royal cavalry regiments of , louis d’or or pistoles, which at that time was the market rate – , livres. For some mestres de camp this meant a loss when they came to sell in the following years. Cavalry prices were generally consistent, but dragoon prices were not, some selling for as much as , livres. In part this reflected the lower level of support provided by the king which forced dragoon officers to invest more of their own money, but in April  Louis decided to bring in a ceiling for this arm as well, setting the maximum price for a regiment at , e´cus or roughly , livres. Furthermore, Louis exercised a continuous watching brief over infantry prices, intervening to set price tariffs where he thought fit. Yet the ceiling policy could not be sustained: it did not apply to royal cavalry regiments, where prices could be more than twice as high as the supposed maximum, and inflation can clearly be discerned. What is more, the king could not enforce the ceiling in the dragoons and had to resort to ad hoc judgements about the market value of regiments. With all this tinkering Louis was trying to ensure that his officers did not expend too much of their credit or capital on purchase, leaving little for subsequent investment. More importantly, he was concerned to maximise the amount of noble investment in the army and minimise financial withdrawals: in  Louis accordingly relaxed the ceiling on the sale price of cavalry companies so that all those remaining in service in another capacity were allowed to get what they could for those units they were relinquishing, but those retiring completely could ask for only , e´cus. This approach was repeated after  as well. This was all of a piece with the king’s determination to prevent venality spreading to the subaltern ranks. He knew full well that many, if not most, subalterns could ill afford large capital investments, and trafficking in these positions was expressly forbidden after . Only in the elite Gendarmerie de France, the Gardes Franc¸aises or the Maison militaire du Roi were subaltern posts sold. Similarly, the installation of the best tactical fighters as grenadier captains was considered vital for combat, so the grenadier companies were made non-venal. Finally, the king wanted the more senior post of major to be non-venal because this figure needed to invest as much of his money as necessary in maintaining the day-to-day credit of the whole regiment; 

 

 

BNF FF , fol. r ; FF , fol. r ; FF , fol. v ; Dangeau, vol. II, p. ,  Sep. ; vol. II, p. ,  Mar. ; vol. III, p. ,  Dec. ; vol. IV, p. ,  Apr. ; vol. VII, p. ,  Mar. ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Jan. ; vol. IV, p. ,  Feb. ; vol. VI, p. ,  June . BNF FF (i), fol. r ; Dangeau, vol. II, p. ,  Mar. . BNF FF , fol. v ; FF , fols. v , v ; FF , fol. r ; Dangeau, vol. III, pp. –,  Mar. ; vol. VI, p. ,  Jan. ; Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Feb. ; vol. V, pp. –,  Mar. . These were regiments belonging to the king personally or to members of the extended royal family, or were permanent and deemed ‘royal’. BNF FF , fols. v , r ; FF , fol. v ; Sourches, vol. VI, pp. –,  May . Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Nov. .



Reforming the structure of the standing army and the lieutenant-colonel was not subject to purchase of commission, though as he was simultaneously in charge of a company he would therefore have bought his company like any other captain. Allegations emerged in the Nine Years and Spanish Succession Wars that hard-up colonels were defying the rules and indeed selling posts they should not, but when they were caught they paid a high penalty – either a spell in the Bastille or even dismissal in disgrace with the total loss of their investment in their regiment. Nevertheless, a kind of informal venality existed for subaltern posts: lieutenants in particular could be bribed with hundreds or even thousands of livres to resign in somebody’s favour. One could hardly blame them for accepting such offers. Ultimately, even if the venal military system was seen as a curse by the time of the Seven Years War, and whatever the perceived drawbacks it presented, one should view it as one of the vital factors in the creation of a massive standing army and wartime force under Louis XIV.                                       After  the government was also far more sensitive to the interests of officers in the processes of expanding and demobilising the land forces, and this also contributed much to the achievement of colossal forces three times the size of those in the first half of the century. This actually came as something of a surprise to the king and his ministers – back in the late s it was a strongly held belief that there were only a finite number of troops and potential recruits, and the crown could not yet see ways of expanding the army beyond the official paper targets of the years –. During the early s – years of peace – the French army stood at approximately , men, but by early  – just before mobilisation and again during peace – it was supposed to total , men. Eight years later, at the height of the Nine Years War, it was theoretically ,. By this time actual strength, as revealed in musters rolls, was about  to  per cent of official strength, a dramatic improvement from sixty years earlier when Richelieu had been lucky if muster figures showed that  per cent of the anticipated men were present and available for duty. One must also acknowledge that in most years between  and  numbers were actually lower still because of falsification of the figures. But by the Nine Years War this accounted for only about another  to  per cent of troop strength. With the exception of the dire years –, this was also a dramatic improvement upon the estimated 

 

Rousset, vol. I, p. ; BNF FF , fols. v –r ; FF , fols. v , v , v ; SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  July ; L. Tuetey, Les officiers sous l’ancien r´egime: nobles et roturiers (Paris, ), pp. –; Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Dec. ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. –, .  Corvisier, Louvois, p. ; Rousset, vol. IV, p. . SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Mar. . J. Lynn, ‘Recalculating French Army Growth in the Grand Si`ecle, –’, French Historical Studies  (), –. Lynn’s evidence from musters in two provinces is accurate and corroborated by other data.



The officer corps and the standing army  per cent fraud rate in the s and s. Of course, there could be quite wild fluctuations in the strength of regiments at any time, and figures tended to drop in the second half of the campaign season. Furthermore, mere figures tell us little about the state of the men on duty, which could be pitiful. Despite improvements in the s and s, during the War of the Spanish Succession matters deteriorated again, with false mustering accounting for perhaps one-tenth of the army. Government circles became increasingly aware that the regimental structure, especially in the infantry, had an impact upon the strength of the king’s armies. Unfortunately, they were faced with a dilemma. Should regiments consist of several battalions so that there would be greater esprit de corps in actions? Not least this would mean fewer colonels and e´tats-majors, thereby cutting costs and reducing the chances of senior officers dying. Or should there be more single-battalion and two-battalion regiments, so that the crown could depend upon more colonels to subsidise the units and attract young nobles into service? Moreover, there was the related question of whether battalions specifically geared for garrison service should be enregimented, in which case they could then easily be transferred to campaign service in the event of hostilities. Different people advocated different schemes at different times, and the government’s approach changed over the course of the reign. At the end of the Dutch War Louis side-stepped this issue and instead reorganised his infantry forces in a dual fashion: a rapid reaction force, consisting of battalions ‘de campagne’ was set up, consisting of about one-quarter of the infantry, while the other threequarters were designated as companies ‘de garnison’ which usually had a battalion organisation. In  a reserve campaign force was created by enregimenting twentyseven garrison battalions, and then three years later Louis increased the number of designated campaign battalions from thirty-seven to seventy-five, so that garrison forces now amounted to just under half the total foot soldiers. This was a direct response to his growing concern about the formation of the League of Augsburg. When the Nine Years War broke out Louis maintained the split between campaign and garrison battalions, but expanded his forces in several ways: first by raising large numbers of fresh companies for garrison duty and setting up the auxiliary milice; and then by turning more seasoned garrison troops into campaign units as the war came to encompass several major fronts. In the course of the conflict he enregimented yet 





On under-strength units in the s, see SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Louvois,  Nov. ; A , no. : Catinat to Louvois,  Jan. ; A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  Oct. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Mar. ; A , no. : memorandum,  Oct. ; OM : ordonnance,  Nov. ; Bib Maz , fol. r : Guiscard to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; Corvisier, L’arm´ee fran¸caise de la fin du XVIIe si`ecle au minist`ere de Choiseul, p. . Louis XIV, M´emoires, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Catinat’s memorandum,  Dec. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to fifty new infantry colonels,  Jan. ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; MR : ‘Projet pour l’Infanterie’ [c. ]; Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, p. ; BNF FF , fols. r –r : ‘Reflexions’ [c. ]. SHAT OM : ordonnance, [ Feb. ]; Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise en , pp. –; V. Belhomme, Histoire de l’infanterie en France,  vols. (Paris, –), vol. II, pp. –.



Reforming the structure of the standing army further garrison companies or collected such companies together to form a battalion to join an existing regiment, as well as raising new regiments afresh. On top of this, the crown made periodic adjustments to the size of infantry companies throughout the reign. By  it had become apparent that companies consisting of seventy-five or even a hundred men (on paper at least) were too much of a burden for many captains to bear, especially given the poor cash flow of the time, so they were shrunk to between thirty-five and fifty men each. At such a level recruitment of men was easier. But it was only in the s that the government seemed to grasp definitively that companies in French regiments should be around fifty strong in wartime, and even less in peacetime, so that the officers could recover more easily and enough employment would be provided for them. All the same, when the campaign–garrison split was enshrined in  the companies were reorganised on an irrational basis: each was a hundred men strong, but it was divided into three unequal parts under three unequal captains. There were plenty of complaints by officers, fortress governors and commissaires des guerres, so between December  and December  this was scrapped and replaced by equal companies of thirtyfive to fifty men. With the approach of war again the companies were increased by increments to a peak of fifty-five men for both campaign and garrison troops in . All this notwithstanding, by mid- the number of solvent nobles with the potential to become infantry captains was reaching the limits of availability. The number of campaign battalions – the key tactical units – could therefore be increased only if each one lost several companies and new battalions were created from them. French military expansion was now at its elastic limit. In the horse it also took a good twenty-five years after the start of Louis’s ‘personal rule’ for a system to be sufficiently refined to produce sustainability and the massive expansion which was achieved after . It was not until the Dutch War that cavalry companies were brought down from a hundred troopers to about forty. Except in wartime prior to , the cavalry was not even organised on the basis of regiments but as loose companies, and for tactical purposes a regiment was divided throughout the wars of Louis XIV into between two and four squadrons of about a hundred troopers each. From  until spring  the cavalry and the dragoons, like the infantry, also had to put up with super-companies divided respectively into 





 

Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, pp. –, –, , –, –, , ; Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  Oct. ; BNF FF , fol. r ; FF , fol. r ; SHAT OM : ordonnances,  Feb.,  Dec. ,  Feb.,  Sep.,  Oct. ; OM : order,  Dec. . Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –; Bib Maz , fols. r –v : figures of company size for –  []; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  July ; OM : ordonnance,  June ; ordonnance,  Dec. ; OM : ordonnance,  Sep. ; Corvisier, Louvois, p. . SHAT OM : ordonnances [ Feb.],  Mar. ,  Dec. ; OM : ordonnances of  Sep.,  Nov. ; Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, pp. , , ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Sep.  et seq. E.g. Rousset, vol. IV, p. . BNF FF , fol. v details the dragoon expansion from fourteen regiments to the forty-three on a footing between  and .



The officer corps and the standing army three and four unequal sub-companies, until an equal structure was reimposed here too. With the onset of the Nine Years War about half of all cavalry companies were increased in size from thirty-five to forty men while the other half remained at the lower level, but in the winter of – sixty-six of the cavalry regiments and thirty of the dragoons saw their companies go up to fifty men each. Within two years it was apparent that this was unsustainable. While one suspects Richelieu would have maintained these levels and bullied the officers, Louis XIV decided to give them some space to breathe. In October  all cavalry and dragoon companies were set at forty men, and any troopers surplus to requirements were incorporated into understrength companies. There was a further reduction to thirty-five men in early . This is a clear demonstration of Louis XIV’s determination to maintain his land forces in a sustainable way which would encourage the officers to remain in Bourbon service over a number of years and from one generation to the next. In the process of demobilisation Louis tried to be equally accommodating. At all costs he wanted to avoid the sort of piecemeal disbandments of regiments and companies during wartime or in the middle of a peaceful era which had bedevilled France before . For the first time, in November , there was no explicit threat in an ordinance to disband companies if they were not complete by a given date. Instead, captains who defaulted on their obligations risked dismissal. However, this was used as a weapon of last resort against those whose companies were woefully under strength without good reason. Even then, it seems that only in the summer of  did the War Ministry order companies to be totally disbanded because of the feeble performance of their captains. When, in the War of the Spanish Succession, the crown started disbanding infantry regiments again in the middle of a war, only those which had received severe maulings in combat were a target, and, of the twenty-seven which were shut down in this conflict, only five were French, while the rest were mercenary regiments. At the close of a conflict there was naturally extensive demobilisation, but, again, Louis XIV tried to manage it in a reasonably sensitive way. On the principle of ‘last in, first out’, those infantry regiments created most recently were disbanded ahead of others enjoying longer pedigrees, while regiments remaining in existence found themselves losing second or third battalions. By contrast, in the cavalry, where royal financial support was greater and the officers richer, regiments were disbanded without automatic reference to their seniority or the rank of their mestre de camp. Beyond this, troop numbers were brought down by cutting the number of companies in a regiment, or by ‘salami-slicing’ in every company in all three arms, reducing 



Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise, p. ; SHAT X : ordonnance,  Apr. ; OM : [ordonnance],  Nov. ; ordonnances,  Feb.,  May ; OM : ordonnances,  Dec. ,  Mar.,  Nov. ; OM : ordonnance,  Oct. ; OM : ordonnance,  Oct. ; OM : ordonnance,  Jan. . SHAT OM : two ordonnances,  Nov. ; OM : Louvois to the nine commanders of the cadet companies,  May ; BNF FF , fols. r –r ; L. Susane, Histoire de l’infanterie fran¸caise,  vols. (Paris, –), vol. V, pp. –.



Reforming the structure of the standing army them from, say, fifty to thirty-five men each. In practice, recruitment always tailed off when officers sensed the end of a conflict and in the aftermath of peace breaking out, so only a proportion of companies found themselves with surplus men, who were then absorbed by other, weaker companies. The aim of this entire process was to spread the burden of demobilisation as widely and thinly as possible. If this might seem unfair on poorer officers, one should remember that Louis XIV did not have the bureaucratic resources to allow a more sophisticated approach where the strength of the blow would fall on each according to their ability to bear it. 

O F F I C I E R S R E´ F O R ME´ S:

                             

Though it took several decades of experimentation, by the s Louis XIV and his advisers succeeded in formulating a framework and a set of procedures for expanding and contracting the army which was far less damaging to the interests of the nobility than had previously been the case. Part and parcel of this was the development of a system to support those officers who lost their regiments, companies or other responsibilities at the time of a post-war demobilisation, or ‘r´eforme’. In the aftermath of the Franco-Spanish war Louis, the Le Tellier and the high command understood that if a viable standing army was to remain the cadre for future wartime expansion it needed reserves of officers on which to draw in the run-up to a fresh conflict. Before  there was no real support for ‘reformed’ officers: decent captains and lieutenants down on their luck might be maintained as volunteers in their regiments or receive half-pay in the Gardes Franc¸aises, but many who lost their positions fell out of service altogether. The first steps towards improvement were taken in December  when two royal companies were earmarked for such officers, and in , when the r´eforme kept most regiments but cut a good number of them down to just two companies, Le Tellier designated  captains of cavalry for pensions of , livres per annum. They were not subject to service or residence requirements and could accordingly rebuild their positions at home. It was not until  that the –strong company of Chevaux-l´egers Dauphins was created as part of the Gendarmerie Royale to honour the infant Louis de France and to provide a berth for reformed subalterns. By April  the crown had spelled out in no uncertain terms that officiers r´eform´es were subordinate to those officers possessing the same rank who were maintained on a full footing, and at that time the ‘reformed’ officers were ordered to perform six months’ service each year (for twelve months’ half-pay) to keep them on their toes. The basis for future r´eformes had now been laid, and in , in the aftermath of the War of  

Susane, Infanterie, vol. V, pp. –; Sourches, vol. VI, pp. , ,  Mar. ,  Dec. ; SHAT OM : two ordonnances,  Nov. ; ordonnance,  Dec. ; two ordonnances,  Dec. . Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –; BNF FF , fol. r ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. –, ; Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  Oct.  et seq.; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Apr. .



The officer corps and the standing army Devolution, a very similar pattern was followed, though in the cavalry reformed captains were maintained in super-companies in charge of fifty of the hundred men. They were to do six months’ duty, while infantry officers only had to do four. All the same, what these men actually did with themselves did not always help matters. In – around  officiers r´eform´es served in Louis’s expeditions to assist the Venetians in the last futile and bloody months of the defence of Candia on Crete against the Ottomans, and many of the best never came back. Moreover, in  four mestres de camp,  captains and  lieutenants were sacked for failing to serve in return for their reformed status. Penalties for dereliction of duty nevertheless had to go hand in hand with the crown maintaining officer confidence in r´eforme status. By and large, therefore, those who performed their limited duties to a respectable extent did obtain their promised rewards in the shape of new companies and regiments whenever the king remobilised for war, as in –, – or –, though as part of his policy in the s of strengthening the pull of the royal court Louis preferred to award new commissions at that time to those who were serving in the Chevaux-l´egers Dauphins. When vacancies arose casually during peacetime they too seemed to go to officiers r´eform´es. By such means Louis kept hope alive. At the end of the Dutch War Louvois organised the demobilisation in such a way as to ‘disband a lot in appearance and very little in reality, and to keep all the officers’, as the marquis de Sourches put it. Actually, not all officers were kept on in a reformed capacity, for sous-lieutenants and cornets were dismissed outright unless lucky, and a large number of ex-officers may have been killed fighting for the Ottoman Empire against the Holy League in the Balkans during the s. But there were far more reformed captains and lieutenants than ever before and they were now expected to serve for eight months of the year, between March and October, with some distributed evenly throughout continuing companies but others bunched in the colonel’s company of the regiment. In the cavalry several mestres de camp r´eform´es now retained their first squadron (two companies) and were incorporated fully into other regiments. The Chevaux-l´egers Dauphins had by now ceased to be a repository for the reformed. After the brief War of the R´eunions of – there was another demobilisation, imposing more or less the same obligations on the officers as that of . The most junior subalterns now had the dubious privilege of rejoining the new cadet companies, whence they had been drawn just a few short  



BNF FF , fol. r ; SHAT OM : ordonnances,  May,  July,  Oct. ,  Mar.,  Apr.,  July ; Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. I, p. . BNF FF , fol. r ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; Louis XIV, M´emoires, p. ; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Dec. ; OM : ordonnance,  Oct. ; Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  Dec. ; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  June ; vol. VIII, p. ,  Feb. . Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Sep.  (citation); BMG Saugeon , no. : ordonnances of  Apr. ; SHAT OM : ordonnances,  Jan.,  Sep. and  Dec. ; OM : ordonnances,  Feb., [ Feb.],  Mar. and  Nov. ; BNF FF , fol. r .



Reforming the structure of the standing army months earlier, but a large number of officers still seem to have either left service altogether or to have neglected their obligations. In late  some  to  officiers r´eform´es accompanied Louis’s new ambassador to Rome, the marquis de Lavardin, in a show of armed force designed to intimidate the pope in the dispute over diplomatic immunities in the Eternal City. During the Nine Years War, Louis’s principal adviser Chamlay had tried to draw some lessons from previous eras of peace when he began to sketch out ideas for implementing the next r´eforme. His diagnosis of the problems such as non-service which had arisen was highly perceptive, but his prescriptions for alternative paths to pursue got nowhere. In particular, his argument that part-time service brought little material alleviation and that it would be better to have one year on and one year off fell on deaf ears. The r´eforme which stretched from late  to early  might, on the surface, appear to be a kinder cut for the officers than previous demobilisations: first, mestres de camp in the cavalry only had to serve one month a year; second, all captains and lieutenants were initially kept on; and third, because the demobilisation was gradual and staggered. However, the process actually panned out in this way because the French government was extremely uneasy about the intentions of the Dutch and, more acutely, the Austrian Habsburgs. The first stage, lasting until mid-, was all about clearing out dead wood among the officers and men, and reordering the companies and regiments, and only later were really deep reductions in manpower made. Moreover, there was still no cushion provided for sous-lieutenants and cornets, and with the disbandment of the cadet companies a few years earlier most now faced a straight choice between withdrawal from service and ‘carrying the musket’ in the ranks. Furthermore, Barbezieux and the king actually seem to have bungled the demobilisation of the cavalry. They disbanded the regiments of the most senior mestres de camp, and in the regiments being conserved the veteran troopers bore the brunt of dismissals. In the aftermath of the first Partition treaty the king and his minister appear to have been over-confident that peace was here for a long time to come, so they decided to concentrate on training up the next generation of officers and men and to let the experienced men go into retirement. Events in the aftermath of Carlos II’s death and the outbreak of war in the spring of  gave them a rude shock. The system of officiers r´eform´es was not without its attendant problems. There were frequent disputes over the authority they could wield and their place in the military hierarchy. With a serious cut in salary, reformed captains, and lieutenants   

 

BNF FF , fol. r ; SHAT OM : two ordonnances,  Sep. ; Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  Oct.  et seq. SHAT A , no. : ‘Discours’, ; no. : memorandum,  Dec. . Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  Oct. ; p. ,  Jan. ; Sourches, vol. VI, pp. , ,  Feb.,  Aug. ; pp. , ,  Jan. and  Dec. ; p. ,  Feb. ; Vauban, vol. II, p. : Barbezieux to Vauban,  Oct. . SHAT OM : two ordonnances,  Nov. ; Sourches, vol. V, p. ,  Dec. . Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. III, p. ; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Dec. .



The officer corps and the standing army more so, found it very difficult to remain above the poverty line if they were to maintain their dignity as officers by owning horses and employing a valet. Many reformed officers simply failed to carry out their obligations and remained at home, so the king dissolved their commissions. In  Louis sacked nearly  such offenders. Others simply went into foreign service, particularly Portuguese after , Savoyard in the s, and Swedish after . However, none of this should obscure the point that the establishment of a proper r´eforme system was a dramatic improvement upon the situation prevailing in the first half of the seventeenth century when officers had enjoyed negligible security. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain reformed officers were stigmatised as failures, but this negative outlook was not nearly so prevalent in France before the mid-eighteenth century. In fact, officers threatened by redundancy lobbied intensely to get r´eforme status, with several hundred making the journey to Versailles to try to secure their future. If one could hold on as an officier r´eform´e for long enough one could be reasonably sure of recovering a full-time position. If many did give up the struggle, most officiers r´eform´es were successfully retained for military service to the benefit of the Bourbon dynasty.                         Retaining the services of officers was vital to maintaining a large standing army, but so too was the recruitment of fresh officers at a young age and Louis XIV intervened directly to bring the process of officer formation under closer royal control. Hand in glove with recruitment went the training and education of the officer corps to try to improve military administration and the general conduct of the officers. The results, it must be admitted, were somewhat mixed but there was some improvement, especially among the upper echelons of the nobility. In the first half of the seventeenth century noble attitudes towards education and learning underwent something of a transformation, as many families came to appreciate that military preparation was somewhat deficient, and that some inculcation of arithmetic and letters was necessary if their youth were to be employable and able to fend off 







SHAT A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Crenan,  Apr. ; A , fols. v –r : Crenan to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; A : Barbezieux to Villars,  Jan. ; Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, p. ; Sarram´ea, Lettres, p. : Franc¸ois to his father,  Apr. ; Dangeau, vol. VII, pp. –,  Feb. . Dangeau, vol. I, p. xxii; Sourches, vol. VII, p. ,  Jan. ; SHAT A  reveals how a large number of officers went to serve Victor Amadeus II of Savoy in the s but in  sought to return to France because, either from loyalty or more material motives, they did not wish to fight against Louis XIV. F. Gonzalez de L´eon, ‘La administraci´on del Conde-Duque de Olivares y la just´ıcia militar en el ej´ercito de Flandes, –’, Invest´ıgaciones Hist´oricas  (), p. . I am grateful to Alistair Malcolm for this reference. Sourches, vol. VI, pp. , ,  Jan.,  Feb. ; p. ,  May .



Reforming the structure of the standing army competition from robins and commoners for military commissions. By the s theorists felt that subalterns should understand mathematics up to the square root, and captains should know the rules of geometry and proportion. All junior officers should be well read, especially in history. Ideally, schooling in these subjects should be followed by some time in a military academy and then travel abroad, and officers would periodically return to their studies throughout their career. Those interested in the education of officers had placed academies at the centre of their prescriptions since such institutions appeared on a wide scale in sixteenthcentury Italy. Intrinsic to the proposals for Italian academies, and those established in emulation in France, were explicit hopes that they would contribute to the creation of a useful, loyal and law-abiding nobility. The first serious flotation of the idea in France came from Francis I, who failed in his ambition to create a noble college in Paris where young gentlemen would spend six years. In , with the approval of Richelieu, the duc de La Force presented plans for a college, but this too proved abortive. Instead of state academies, in the s and the first three decades of the seventeenth century there sprang up private riding academies teaching mental and physical self-discipline, refinement, equestrianism and martial skills. Some were established under the patronage of the king, local authorities and chivalric orders. Attendance averaged between one and two years, and it was hoped that in this time the rough, even brutal, edges of noble youth would be smoothed. With the practice of placing poorer nobles in grandee houses as pages waning in mid-century, these academies assumed a growing importance: in their heyday there were, according to Motley, just over half a dozen in Paris and about twenty in the provinces. In the early s these institutions enjoyed an Indian summer under the protection of the king’s Grand Ecuyer, the comte d’Armagnac. However, attendance at an academy cost a considerable amount of money, at the very least  livres a year despite the subsidies provided by the king and other bodies, and this was enough to exclude at least two-thirds of the officer corps from benefiting from such an education. At the very most, in  there were perhaps about , nobles alive – of all ages – who had passed through an academy. Furthermore, competition to attract the middling nobility came from the royal stables which took in youths as pages and could give them, in the opinion of a Savoyard ambassador, a superior formation. This alternative became ever more attractive in the last decades of the century and the early years of the next, producing a fall in enrolment in academies and the closure 





M. Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat: The Education of the Court Nobility, – (Oxford, ), p. ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, p. ; Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture, pp. –, ; Lamont, ‘Officers of the Foot’, pp. , , , . J. R. Hale, ‘The Military Education of the Officer Class in Early Modern Europe’, in Renaissance War Studies (London, ), pp. –, ; J.-M. Constant, La vie quotidienne de la noblesse fran¸caise aux XVIe et XVIIe si`ecles (Paris ), pp. –; Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat, p. . Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat, pp. , , , , –, , ; Dewald, Aristocratic Experience, pp. –; de La Roche, ‘Les acad´emies militaires sous l’ancien r´egime’, Revue des Etudes Historiques  (), –.



The officer corps and the standing army of many over the course of the s. The academies were by no means a wholehearted success, but they did improve the behaviour of the upper echelons of the French nobility who went on to hold the more senior positions in the army. In a society gripped by aspiration and emulation it is more than likely that the examples these men went on to provide, and the conduct they strove to encourage in others, had at least some impact on many of their subordinates. For the bulk of French officers, after a very rudimentary education at home their military induction began in the army itself as cadets. Traditionally they had started as mere volunteers in regiments, but, although they were supposed to pick up habits of obedience and discipline, in practice all too often this produced extreme competition for honour and glory, or autonomous bands of youths on the battlefield operating beyond control. In an attempt to institutionalise an apprenticeship, article  of the  Code Michau proposed that one-fifth of every infantry and cavalry company be comprised of noble cadets. In a very loose way, and to a smaller extent, this became the standard practice, though large numbers of cadets could be found in the r´egiment des Gardes Franc¸aises. But some time after the Frondes Louis XIV made a conscious decision to adapt the military organisation of the state to create highly prestigious opportunities for the scions of important noble dynasties, who would look principally to the king – not to any minister or even any leading grandee – for security, advancement and nurturing. What Louis was engaged upon was nothing less than the extension of the page system beyond the royal stables and into the Maison militaire du Roi for the sixteen to twenty-five years age group. From , when Maul´evrier, brother of Colbert, took over as captain-lieutenant of the second company, the Mousquetaires du Roi became an elite training formation into which the most promising and the best-connected of the king’s pages would graduate from the stables. There they would be joined by equally notable young men from leading court families. Though the two companies of Mousquetaires also contained a sizeable number of more mature gentlemen volunteers, most of the troopers were young men being groomed for higher things. Even the Grand Dauphin began his military education in this corps. Between  and  both companies stood at  men each. At their head stood the king as captain, who delegated the running of them to two captain-lieutenants of general field rank. The Mousquetaires not only enjoyed the prestige of immediate royal association, they also had a formidable reputation for battlefield performance and reckless bravery in the reigns of both Louis XIII and Louis XIV.   

Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat, pp. , , , –, –, –; Saint-Maurice, vol. I, p. : Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  June . Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat, p. , ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; SHAT Ya: list of new Chevaux-l´egers de la Garde du Roi,  Nov. . Rousset, vol. I, pp. –; Daniel, Histoire de la milice fran¸coise, vol. II, p. ; BNF FF , fol. r ; FF , fols. r−v , v ; FF , fol. r ; FF , fol. v ; La Chesnaye, vol. VII, p. .



Reforming the structure of the standing army Between  and ,  musketeers are known to have left the second company for a position elsewhere: seventy became cavalry captains, thirty-two became ensigns of the Gardes Franc¸aises, twenty-eight became lieutenants of the r´egiment du Roi infantry, nineteen became dragoon captains, fourteen became cavalry lieutenants, thirteen became infantry captains, seven became cavalry cornets, five became guidons of the Gendarmerie, and another five sous-lieutenants of the Gardes Franc¸aises, two became dragoon lieutenants, another two captains of the gates of Lille and Nice respectively, and a further two sous-lieutenants of the r´egiment du Roi. One went into the ‘other ranks’ of the Gardes Franc¸aises, one into the ‘other ranks’ of the Gendarmerie, and one into the ‘other ranks’ of the dragoons, while two disappeared somewhere into the ranks of the cavalry and four into the ranks of the r´egiment du Roi. Additionally, men went singly to become an exempt of the Gardes du corps, a lieutenant and mar´echal des logis of the Grenadiers a` cheval, an ensign of the Chevaux-l´egers de la Garde, a lieutenant in the Gardes Franc¸aises, a major of a regiment, a captain in the r´egiment du Roi cavalry, an aide-major of the fortress of Namur, a cornet of dragoons, a sous-lieutenant and an ensign of the galleys, a volunteer at sea, a maˆıtre d’hˆotel of the king, and an equerry of the duchess of Lorraine (the duc d’Orl´eans’ daughter). At least two others retired with military pensions, and many more could also have left the two companies, though we shall probably never know. A few of the older men might have moved straight to colonelcies or into middling ranks of the Maison du Roi, for example, while the younger men were more likely to become subalterns or perhaps captains, with prospects of accelerated promotion. As an instrument of Bourbon dynastic policy the Mousquetaires du Roi were an outstanding success. Yet, these two companies could provide only limited opportunities, and both foot and horse regiments continued to take in cadets beholden to their colonel. To extend the chance of military education and training the government set up a network of cadet companies in the summer of  to draw young nobles into military service. For Louis, the motivation was to give the nobility the means and the training to fulfil the duties associated with their social Order, and he was anxious that future officers were not learning bad habits in the ranks among the scum of society. The s had demonstrated quite starkly that young officers were profoundly ignorant. For the marquis de Louvois, who was the driving force behind the companies and who took the closest possible interest in them up to his death, the aim was most likely to rival the officers of the Mousquetaires du Roi and to diminish the authority of Armagnac, the Grand Ecuyer, who was then extending his control over the private academies. Louvois insisted that, with the exception of musketeers, all French  

BNF FF , fols. r –r . SHAT OM : king’s order,  June ; ordonnances,  Sep. ,  July ; MR : [Louvois] to Mesgrigny,  June ; Lavall´ee, vol. II, pp. –: Maintenon to Aubign´e,  Aug. ; SaintMaurice, vol. I, p. : Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Sep. ; Sandras, La conduite de Mars, pp. –.



The officer corps and the standing army officers should pass through the companies, even if they had enjoyed proper training abroad, a sure sign of his controlling obsession. He encouraged the king to take a close interest in the cadet companies, but perennially seems to have feared that Louis would turn against them. Far from this being the case, in the immediate aftermath of Louvois’s death Louis reiterated the policy that he would only accept officers who had been through the cadet companies or the Mousquetaires du Roi. By September  over , young men had been admitted to the nine companies based in the citadel of a fortress under the command of its governor, each with space for between  and  cadets (see map ). All nobles aged between fourteen and twenty-five were eligible for admission, and bourgeois whose families were living nobly were also admitted, though they remained a minority. At first demand for places outstripped availability by a factor of ten. Provincial intendants personally met candidates for the companies in their province, but by the Nine Years War Louvois was insisting that all aspirants visit him at court for an interview. Standard wages were  sous a day with another  going into an account as enforced savings for the cost of equipment and clothing. Non-commissioned officers were promoted from within the cadets themselves and received higher pay. By , when the companies had been cut to six and each had been reduced to  men, the total wage bill came to , livres, with the king contributing more towards equipment. However, the pay was insufficient for their needs and cadets required a private income or support from their families to remain in the companies. With the onset of the Nine Years War this was formalised into a requirement that every cadet had to be covenanted  livres per annum by his family. The emphasis of the cadet companies was on the inculcation of practical knowledge, especially military exercises, guard duty, shooting, fencing, riding, geography, drawing, useful mathematics, money management and the principles of fortification. Also offered was German and, for the near-illiterate, writing lessons. But the creation of a competent officer corps was not the only ambition of the king and Louvois – they also wished to reform the manners and practices of the nobility, and one way of attempting this was to make the cadet companies vehicles for moral regeneration. The diarist Sourches referred to the companies as ‘in reality seminaries’,  



Massiac, M´emoires, pp. –; La Colonie, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. , ; Lavall´ee, vol. II, p. , notes; SHAT A , no. : Louis to Catinat,  July . SHAT OM : Cang´e memorandum [eighteenth century]; notice on cadets [eighteenth century]; ordonnances,  June,  Sep. ; OM : list of companies and commanders,  Aug. ; MR : e´tat of cadet companies’ wage costs for , ; list of the companies and their captains,  June ; A , no. : Louvois to Lorge,  May ; Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  May ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, p. ; Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, p. ; Rousset, vol. III, p. . Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, pp. –; La Colonie, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –; SHAT OM : Cang´e memorandum [eighteenth century]; MR : [Louvois] to various cadet captains,  July .



Reforming the structure of the standing army

A. Tournai B. Valenciennes C. Cambrai D. Charlemont E. Longwy

A * B* C * E *

* D

*F * G H *

*I

F. Sarrelouis G. Strasbourg H. Belfort I. Besançon

Map  Cadet companies, .

and, in so far as it described the intentions of the authorities, there was a lot of truth in this. The officers of the companies were supposed to mount round-the-clock efforts to instil moral rectitude in the young men under their charge, encouraging them in the pursuit of honour, and imbuing them with a horror of all baseness and vice: inns, brothels and even the premises of military sutlers were out of bounds, 

The officer corps and the standing army while gambling, swearing, personal abuse, quarrelling and the use of nicknames were all forbidden. Whether the companies actually delivered all that was expected is another matter. On a superficial level they did produce plenty of recruits for the officer corps in the s and early s: for example, in May  , cadets were drawn out of the companies to become sous-lieutenants in the campaign battalions of the infantry and two years later more were presented with companies to raise from scratch. Quantity was not, however, matched by any real improvement in quality. The teaching on offer in the companies was of a reasonable standard, and some maths, at least, rubbed off on the cadets, yet only musketry was really compulsory. As with the artillery schools of the same era, trying to teach most cadets anything else was casting pearls before swine – they simply did not have the requisite mental attitudes for absorbing ideas and learning technicalities. Many of the cadets were highly disruptive, especially those who had been granted posts as sous-lieutenants in  and found themselves back in the companies at the demobilisation a few months later. In June  there was a major mutiny in the Charlemont company, when many deserted and twentyseven were hunted down by regular cavalry. The entire company was disbanded and the cadets were incorporated into the other eight companies, though two of the miscreants were ordered by the king to run the gauntlet ‘pour encourager les autres’, as Voltaire later put it in another context. Unfortunately the disaster which overtook this company did nothing to help moderate the behaviour of other cadets, though it did mean that their officers now clamped down at the first sign of trouble. Only two months later a public duel took place within the Besanc¸on company in which one of the participants was killed, following which fourteen cadets murdered a sentry and deserted from the army. When cadets arrived at their new regiments they often behaved little better. Some even sold their commissions without permission to other men and went home without leave. Lieutenant-general Feuqui`eres complained in February  that the growing licence among young officers in recent years originated with those who had come straight from cadet companies. Two years later Boufflers, also a lieutenantgeneral, remarked in frustration: ‘There is also a very large number of new officers who know almost none of the first elements of war and of the service, to whom it is necessary to speak and to make them understand what they must do.’  





Sourches, vol. I, p. , Sep. ; SHAT MR : [Louvois] to various cadet captains,  July ; OM : Cang´e memorandum [eighteenth century]; Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, p. . SHAT OM : Cang´e memorandum [eighteenth century]; OM : ordonnances,  May ; Louvois to the cadet company commanders,  May,  July,  Aug. ; Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  May . La Colonie, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –, –, ; Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, p. ; SHAT OM : notice on cadets [eighteenth century]; Sourches, vol. I, pp. , –,  June et seq.,  Aug. ; Dangeau, vol. I, pp. –,  June . Sourches, vol. V, p. ,  Nov. ; SHAT A , no. : Feuqui`eres to Louvois,  Feb. ; A , no. : Boufflers to Barbezieux,  Mar.  (citation).



Reforming the structure of the standing army Feuqui`eres, in a diagnosis which was reflected five years later by Chamlay, actually argued that the cadet companies had done serious damage to the cohesion of the regiments. Officers in a regiment had not received their formation together or under each other, with cadets posted randomly to units whenever subaltern vacancies arose. The result was diminished trust and confidence between officers in a regiment; captains were consequently most reluctant either to dole out money to a lieutenant for recruiting or to allow him to look after the company whilst he himself was away; nor did the men know a good proportion of their officers from one year to the next. Indeed, at the end of each winter sometimes up to half the officers in a regiment might be new and unknown. Even before Louvois’s death the War Ministry was having difficulty enforcing the monopoly on cadetships enjoyed by the designated companies. Captains were defying the king’s regulations and allowing relatives to serve in their companies as cadets under the guise of ‘volunteers’. At the siege of Namur in  Barbezieux himself had to weed out cadets from the ranks, but by now he and the king were losing the struggle. In July  all the candidates for officer vacancies in the r´egiment des Landes infantry were serving as volunteers in the unit. There was a steady drop in enrolment in the cadet companies: by May  the Besanc¸on company contained only fifty-five youths. Three months later the king gave up the tussle and closed seven of the nine companies, leaving only Strasbourg and Tournai open and functioning. In April  they too went the same way. Thenceforth, the Mousquetaires continued to take in neophytes, but the regiments went back to providing places for cadets within their ranks. Some of them were as young as ! The official line was that the cadet companies were scrapped because the king had provided all their members with commissions by , but this conceals the failure of these institutions in the face of ignorance, poor service and noble dynasticism, and glosses over the fact that Louis XIV did not try to replenish the companies as they gave up their cadets. Most tellingly, the king could not enforce his will upon dynastically minded families at every level of the nobility who preferred to have their offspring gain a military apprenticeship under the direction of a relative rather than in an impersonal company run by strangers. In failing to control the recruitment and training of young officers the ‘absolute’ state had met the limits of its reach. The Mousquetaires du Roi had been a success, but cadet companies would be tried again, and fail, in the s;  

 

SHAT A , no. : Feuqui`eres to Louvois,  Feb. . SHAT A , no. : Louvois to commissaires des guerres,  June ; A : Barbezieux to Louis,  May ; A , no. : to commissaires des guerres,  May ; A , no. : e´tat of r´egiment des Landes, July ; OM : to cavalry and dragoon colonels,  June ; BNF FF , fol. v ; Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Feb. ; Bib Ars , fol. r : Guiscard to Barbezieux,  Apr. . SHAT MR : La Fonds to Barbezieux,  May ; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Aug. ; OM : ordonnance,  Apr. . Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Dec. , explicitly cites the poor service given by officers who had been in the cadet companies as the reason for winding them down.



The officer corps and the standing army and it was not until the foundation of the Ecole Militaire in  and the subsequent establishment of provincial academies in the late s that the crown finally succeeded in gaining control over the formation of cadets.                                  If Louis XIV was to enjoy a standing army which could respond to his needs then it was not enough to provide a better career structure and greater security of interest for officers. The government also had to tackle the degree of ignorance and non-cooperation displayed by military officers. In the early s, when veteran officers were examined for their suitability to be chevaliers of the Order of SaintLazare, large numbers of them were found to be illiterate. Nearly twenty years later literacy may have improved somewhat but this did not necessarily mean the officers were professionally competent. As Feuqui`eres put it, ‘Among the officers there is an ignorance and a negligence so great that one has a great deal of difficulty in making them understand that in our profession the slightest faults have great consequences.’ With the majority of French officers at the start of the Nine Years War lacking experience of campaigning, the mar´echal de Duras could only vent his frustration to Louvois at the poor performance they were giving. Even when officers joined regiments containing veteran officers they might remain totally in the dark about major regulations. It took the young Franc¸ois de Sarram´ea eighteen months as a subaltern to find out that he could not have his valet passed as a soldier in musters! The fight against ignorance was conducted on a number of levels. In the first instance military administration was guided by royal laws and drill manuals, many of which were regularly reprinted. This reflected in part the War Ministry’s concern to recall officers to their duty and because printed papers would be lost from one year to the next, but it also indicates that officers continued to ignore or deliberately violate king’s regulations. Louis de Gaya, writing in , pinned much of the blame for disorder and disputes on the failure of officers even to read the ordinances. The price of a compilation volume containing all ordinances was expensive, at around  livres, but even many officers who could afford such a sum did not bother to make a purchase because the works were out of date.     

BNF FF , fol. r ; E.-G. L´eonard, L’arm´ee et ses probl`emes au XVIIIe si`ecle (Paris, ), p. . Montbas, Au service du Roi, p. . On the Order of Saint-Lazare, see chapter , pp. –. SHAT A , no. : Feuqui`eres to Louvois,  June . SHAT A : Duras to Louvois,  Aug. ; Sarram´ea, Lettres, p. : Franc¸ois to his father,  Feb. . SHAT OM : drill manual, Jan. ; A , no. : Gaya’s project []; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –. Andr´e became marginally more cynical as to why ordinances were reprinted between publishing his two great works.



Reforming the structure of the standing army Alongside ordinances one also needs to consider the didactic literature on military affairs in the shape of manuals, treatises, conduct guides and personal memoirs which became ever more prevalent and were all bestsellers by the standards of the day. Some were even translated into other languages. They are invaluable sources, but they must be treated with caution. These works certainly highlighted abuses and instances of poor officership, and they tried to open young men’s eyes to the reality of military service, warning them of its codes and the mockery which displays of cowardice brought. But they concentrated on setting out model patterns of activity and behaviour, and should be seen largely as educational instruction for young officers. Of all the manuals, Gatien des Courtilz de Sandras’s La conduite de Mars, republished for several decades after it first appeared in , was the most impressive and influential, and other authors borrowed heavily from its prescriptions for a long time to come. Other great works included Allain Manesson Mallet’s Les travaux de Mars and Surirey de Saint-Remy’s M´emoires d’artillerie. In spite of the efforts which went into printing regulations and other useful material, the government felt that the most effective way of combating ignorance and ensuring officers were performing their duty was to give them adequate supervision on the basis of uniform rules. Naturally this began with the colonel of the regiment watching over and directing his officers’ activities, and between  and  the crown imposed an increasingly authoritarian chain of command which made colonels and then also lieutenant-colonels directly responsible for the behaviour of the officers under their command. But somebody needed to exercise vigilance over the colonels and their officers, for each regiment had a whole series of codes, conventions and rules to preserve harmony and order within it which often bore scant relation to the king’s regulations. The intendants and commissaires des guerres had only limited authority to control and discipline officers, restricted to the commencement of legal proceedings, alerting the Secretary of War about problems, and enforcing those procedural rules governing basic administration over which they had direct responsibility. Though Lynn has claimed that a clampdown on abuses and pillage occurred because the civilian administration was seen as ‘unquestionably in charge’, this was not a view shared by contemporaries. As Louvois put it, ‘It is not the 



The most notable treatises published during Louis XIV’s reign (with first edition dates) are: de Birac, Les fonctions du capitaine de cavalerie (); [G. des Courtilz de Sandras], La conduite de Mars ou l’homme de la guerre (); L. de Gaya, L’art de la guerre et la mani`ere dont on la fait a` present (); L. de Gaya, Trait´e des armes, des machines de guerre, des feux d’artifice, des enseignes, et des instrumens militaires (); de La Fontaine, Les devoirs militaires des officiers de l’infanterie, contenant l’exercice des gens de guerre, selon la pratique de ce temps (); de Lamont, Les fonctions de tous les officiers de l’infanterie (); de Lamont, Les devoirs de l’homme de guerre (); F. de La Baume Le Blanc, chevalier de La Valli`ere, Pratique et maximes de la guerre (); A. Manesson Mallet, Les travaux de Mars ou l’art de la guerre (–); F. de Morains, Le major parfait qui enseigne avec facilit´e le maniment des armes (); P. Surirey de Saint-Remy, M´emoires d’artillerie recueillis par le Sr. Surirey de Saint Remy commissaire provincial de l’artillerie, & l’un des cent & un officiers privil´egiez de ce corps (). Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. –.



The officer corps and the standing army commissaires who keep the troops to their duty and in observation of the King’s ordonnances, but the firmness of those who command them.’ In policing the officers, it was their military superiors who were the key agents. During wartime and when corps were gathered during peace, the French general officers – commandersin-chief, lieutenant-generals and especially mar´echaux de camp and the infantry major-general – were expected to monitor the condition of the regiments in their force and assist officers in managing their charges. Whenever it was convenient – particularly on campaign – the king himself would inspect his troops, often spending an entire day on a large corps. Moreover, during the four years –, and again in –, Louvois went on annual tours of French fortresses as far afield as Roussillon to examine the condition of the regiments and companies based in them. Nevertheless, in spite of the vigilance of the king and his minister they knew that the task of monitoring the condition of the standing army during peacetime and in the winter months of a war had to be delegated to senior officers of probity.                      :                                       Since the mid-sixteenth century the units and officers of the French army had been policed by office-holders who enjoyed a permanent authority, in peace and war, as members of the high command. The abolition of the Constable in  left the Colonel-Generals of the infantry and cavalry as the most important of these offices which were endowed with significant prerogative powers in matters of patronage, rights of command and general administration. For most of their existence these two posts were occupied by men of the highest social status, and their existence could be highly discomfiting for ministers. But for the period after  historians have written off such positions as impotent vestiges of an earlier era. The abolition that year of the Colonel-General of the infantry on the death of its incumbent, Bernard de Nogaret de La Valette, duc d’Epernon, is hailed as a watershed in Louis XIV’s struggle to eradicate inconvenient prerogative offices or to bypass them using alternative power structures. Certainly at this moment Michel Le Tellier effectively took over principal responsibility for the policing of   





Lynn, ‘How War Fed War’, ; SHAT A , no. : Louvois to La Hoguette,  May . E.g. SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Louvois,  July ; A , no. : to Barbezieux [c.  Aug. ]. Louis XIV, M´emoires, pp. –; Saint-Maurice, vol. I, pp. , –: Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Apr. ,  Apr. ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  July ; vol. II, pp. , ,  May,  July ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –, –. I am currently preparing an article on the nature of the prerogative military offices in the cavalry and dragoons, which will stress heavily the personal and dynastic political considerations of the king and the holders of these posts. Readers can find some preliminary thoughts and conclusions in Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –. Rousset, vol. I, p. ; Lynn, Giant, pp. –.



Reforming the structure of the standing army the infantry and began acting as the channel between this arm and the king during peacetime. However, other political imperatives may have been at work besides Le Tellier’s ambition: the post had been suppressed before in –, and in  Epernon left no male heirs, so refilling the post would have meant nominating a new family, thereby sowing enmity amongst a large number of unsuccessful candidates. Furthermore, taking direct control of the infantry was probably symptomatic of Louis’s contempt for this arm and his feeling that it needed to be put under far tighter control than other branches of the army. This was a sentiment that never left the king. In the mounted arms matters were rather different. The post of Colonel-General of the cavalry continued to be filled by men of the highest status: in  it was bestowed on the mar´echal de Turenne; he was succeeded by his nephew Fr´ed´ericMaurice de La Tour d’Auvergne, comte d’Auvergne, in , and he in turn by his nephew the comte d’Evreux in . Under the Colonel-General stood two other military offices: the Mestre de camp g´en´eral and the Commissaire g´en´eral, the latter of which was created in  to keep an eye on the former. Prior to the mid-s the Colonel-General of cavalry had exercised a preponderant, though by no means monopolistic, influence upon patronage and appointments in his arm, in large part because he possessed the detailed knowledge of the cavalry and its personnel which other people lacked. But from  the king personally intervened in the appointment of officers to a degree lacking since Richelieu’s last years. All the same, the opinions and recommendations of Turenne and Auvergne after him continued to be taken seriously by Louis, though Louvois did his best to secure posts for his own candidates and those proposed by other members of the high command. Continuing with this post made some sense politically, but what is perhaps more surprising is that Louis XIV actually created afresh the Colonel-General of the dragoons in  and initially installed his favourite the marquis de P´eguilin (later duc de Lauzun). He was succeeded the following year by the marquis de Rannes, who was replaced on his death in  by Louis-Franc¸ois, marquis de Boufflers, whose importance and skills eventually brought him promotion to marshal of France and duke in the s. In  the post of Mestre de camp g´en´eral des dragons was created – at the instigation of Louvois – for Ren´e de Froullai, comte de Tess´e, who in turn succeeded Boufflers as Colonel-General in . Political relations between these men and the Le Tellier were very good for most of this period and the views of the dragoon office-holders were given high consideration at court, but in any case they too enjoyed the right to make recommendations for vacancies within 

J. Racine, Oeuvres,  vols. (Paris, –), vol. V, p. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; B´erenger, Turenne, p. ; Daniel, Milice fran¸coise, vol. II, p. : letters patent,  Sep. ; SHAT A , no. : Auvergne to Louvois,  Aug. ; A , no. : Auvergne to Louvois,  Oct. ; BNF FF , fol. r : memoirs of Muret (Auvergne’s ADC); Dangeau, vol. IV, p. :  Mar. , notes of Saint-Simon.



The officer corps and the standing army their arm. The patronage power of the Colonel-Generals during Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’ had none of the prescriptive characteristics of the Mazarin era, but the strength of their position in this regard by no means dwindled to insignificance. In –, – and – the Colonel-Generals’ influence over patronage fell because there was now a set of seniority rules governing officer advancement during peacetime, which were geared to maintaining officers in service and which blunted the effect of patronage recommendations from every quarter. But during the mobilisations of , – and –, and during wartime, the power of the Colonel-Generals made itself felt far more, and to a great extent their influence varied according to the degree of royal confidence they inspired at a particular time. The general staffs of each arm comprised the three office-holders of the cavalry and the two of the dragoons plus thirty-four lesser officers and pen-pushers in the former and seventeen in the latter. Contrary to historical perception they continued to fulfil an important role in servicing the needs of their arms independent of the ministerial bureaucracy. As well as recommending candidates for officerships, and issuing lettres d’attache and other forms of recognition to officers in their arms (which were a useful check on illegal and forged commissions), the ColonelGenerals also acted to protect the interests of officers under their jurisdiction against other arms of service, and they even provided the War Ministry with recommendations for settling disputes between officers within their own arm. In addition, they may have been acting as a financial prop for a good number of cavalry and dragoon officers. One of the most important roles of the Colonel-Generals, the Mestres de camp g´en´eraux and the Commissaire g´en´eral of the cavalry, and the one which was valued by the king and the Le Tellier above all others, was their role in inspecting their arms and drawing to royal attention any problems afflicting regiments and officers. In spite of the development of an inspectorate answering directly to the Secretary of War after , which is discussed below, the scrutinising of standards in the cavalry and dragoons depended a great deal upon the prerogative office-holders, at least up to . Even thereafter they continued to play an important role in policing their arms, and it may be no coincidence that Louis overhauled his inspectorate that year at about the time he had given up his attempts to install his bastard, the duc du Maine, as Colonel-General of the cavalry. Villars, looking back on his period as Commissaire g´en´eral between  and , certainly exaggerated when 



Daniel, Milice fran¸coise, vol. II, p. ; H. Choppin, Histoire g´en´erale des dragons (Paris, ), pp. – for details of the  edict creating a dragoon staff; BNF Clair. , fol. r ; NAF , fol. r : memorandum of the cur´e of Milly; fol. r : untitled memorandum on Boufflers; FF , fol. r ; ACC I, vol. , fol. r : Cond´e to Pomerol,  Mar. ; M´emoires de Primi Visconti, p. ; Sourches, vol. II, pp. –,  July ; p. ,  Aug. ; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Nov. ; vol. IV, p. , – Jan. ; SHAT A : Luxembourg to Louis,  Aug. . SHAT A , no. : Bousonval to Tess´e,  Nov. ; no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; Dangeau, vol. IX, p. ,  Feb. ; vol. X, p. ,  Feb. ; vol. XI, p. ,  Feb. .



Reforming the structure of the standing army he claimed that ministry-appointed inspectors were subordinate to him, but he was considered sufficiently sound to be charged with a huge amount of inspection by the king. He was not alone in shouldering a huge burden. Prior to the Dutch War combined musters and inspections had also been conducted by Villars’ predecessors, and though the Colonel-General of the cavalry was principally a point of contact and lobbying he too was expected to investigate matters from time to time: Auvergne was asked to look into the suspicious death of a cavalry captain in . When one of the office-holders of the cavalry was present in an army Louis usually abided by the convention that he was made commander of the regiments of his arm. As such he undertook inspection duties throughout the campaign season as well as in winter. The dragoon office-holders preserved their roles just as effectively. Boufflers as Colonel-General had been scrupulous in reviewing each dragoon regiment at least once a year, and as Mestre de camp g´en´eral Tess´e visited the dragoons stationed on the Netherlands frontier in the winters of the s and substituted for Boufflers in inspecting regiments whenever it was necessary. In  Barbezieux rejected the idea of setting up an inspectorate for the dragoons and hoped instead that a new Mestre de camp g´en´eral could be persuaded to play a greater role. As an illustration of how king and ministers sought to work within traditional frameworks, so long as they did not actively obstruct sound administration or their own personal interests, there could not be a clearer example. Unfortunately, the system was unsustainable because the office-holders had simply become overburdened by their myriad duties in the context of massively expanded royal armies. Given the growth of the cavalry after , the creation of the dragoons as a separate arm in , and Louis XIV’s longing to eradicate disorder and negligence in the regiments, the administrative duties of the Colonel-Generals and their deputies actually became more onerous during his ‘personal rule’. Yet it was not easy for them to carry out their tasks because they were, by and large, also active general officers with separate responsibilities as such in the field armies during wartime. For example, from  to  Tess´e had to combine his office of dragoon Colonel-General with the roles of second-in-command in the army of Italy, military governor of Pinerolo province, and plenipotentiary in the negotiations with Savoy. As both support and stimulus to the officers of the mounted arms, the Colonel-Generals and their deputies were worth preserving – and the calibre of the men who were installed and the confidence Louis XIV demonstrated in them 

  

Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –, ; SHAT A : Barbezieux to Auvergne,  June ; A , nos. , : Villars to Barbezieux,  May,  May ; A , fol. v : Villars to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Apr. . SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  May ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Tess´e,  May ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Mar. . ACC S, vol. , fol. r : Ph´elypeaux to Vendˆome,  June ; Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –. Other examples could be given: Montclar in  was Mestre de camp g´en´eral of the cavalry, a lieutenant-general and senior commander in Alsace; while Villars’ posting to Vienna as extraordinary envoy in  precluded any activities as Commissaire g´en´eral for three years.



The officer corps and the standing army show that he felt they were anything but irrelevant. Be that as it may, an inspection system needed to be put in place to complement their work on a far larger scale.                      :                   ’                Although Camille Rousset and Louis Andr´e gave almost unqualified praise to the inspection system set up by Louvois after , one should be wary of attributing any transformation of the French army to these men. Their establishment and activities were significant in instilling a stronger notion of central oversight in the officers, but, as will become clear, historians have exaggerated the limited practical impact the inspectors had in themselves. In October  Jean de Martinet, lieutenant-colonel of the r´egiment du Roi and recently promoted to brigadier, was given a commission to visit all the fortresses of the kingdom, inspect the infantry stationed within them and report on his findings to Louvois. He continued to perform this role until his death in battle four years later, when he was replaced by Ren´e de P´erouse Desbournays. Martinet and his successors as Inspector-Generals, and the junior inspectors operating under them, were to promise full crown support to senior officers in their efforts to improve infantry standards, and they were ordered to demand full compliance with royal orders and regulations. Martinet was responsible for setting up the grenadier companies of infantry regiments, but the staple concerns of the inspectors were preventing unnecessarily luxurious uniforms, discharging old or unfit soldiers, and agreeing or striking down the appointment of non-commissioned officers, subalterns and even captains proposed by colonels. At the outbreak of the Nine Years War, with weaponry changing, they were also ordered to teach the officers and men how to handle their firearms properly, and to check that troops had socket bayonets, steel scabbards and sufficient tin tubes for musket cartridges. They usually operated only during peacetime and in the winter months of a war, but Desbournays also visited under-employed garrisons during the campaign seasons of the Dutch War. The cavalry was more complicated, not least because of the continued presence of the office-holders described in the previous section. In  Louvois was keen to grant overarching powers to another Martinet-like figure, but the man to whom he turned was Fourilles, who actually became Mestre de camp g´en´eral of the cavalry the following year. He was succeeded in  by the sieur de Beauvez´e, but far from either man acting as a crowbar to lever Louvois’s authority into the cavalry Fourilles   

Rousset, vol. I, pp. –; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. . Vauban, vol. II, p. : notes; Rousset, vol. I, p. ; Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –. Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Jan.  et seq.; Corvisier, Louvois, p. ; L. Dussieux, L’arm´ee en France. Histoire et organisation depuis les temps anciens jusqu’`a nos jours,  vols. (Paris, ), vol. II, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Du Repaire to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; OM : ordonnance,  Apr. ; OM : ordonnances,  Jan. ,  Nov. ; Rousset, vol. I, p. ; vol. III, p. ; Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, pp. , –.



Reforming the structure of the standing army was a Cond´e client and both were on good terms with Turenne, possibly a prerequisite for their appointment. Moreover, their powers were far more circumscribed than those of Martinet and the infantry inspectors, and it was not until  that an Inspector-General of cavalry was created, significantly because La Cardonni`ere, a particularly obstinate and quarrelsome Commissaire g´en´eral, was refusing to account to the Colonel-General. In spite of this problem, those men employed in an inspecting capacity were chiefly holders of prerogative posts in the cavalry: in order to achieve a modicum of control the minister had to secure the position of mar´echal des logis de la cavalerie, a post in the cavalry general staff just below Commissaire g´en´eral, for his client lieutenant-colonel Du Bourg before issuing him with a commission of inspector. As Jean Chagniot has pointed out, the penetration of the cavalry by ministerial agents did not go nearly so far under Louvois as it did in the infantry, nor were the powers granted them anything like as extensive. Until the Nine Years War cavalry and dragoon colonels, not inspectors or generals, were responsible for producing assessments of their officers and the companies in their regiments. The efficacy of the inspection system, such as it was, was undermined by the relatively humble ranks held by most of the ministerial appointees. At first both Martinet and Desbournays were mere brigadiers-cum-lieutenant-colonels holding a special commission as Inspector-General. Martinet was promoted to mar´echal de camp – the most junior general – only a few weeks before he was killed, and Desbournays had to wait until . The marquis de Maumont, Inspector-General after , had to wait until August  before reaching this rank. These men were permitted to recruit junior inspectors of their own choice, nicknamed ‘apostles’ by the troops, and they invariably picked captains of the Gardes Franc¸aises, lieutenant-colonels and majors; not until October  were any colonels appointed as inspectors directly by the War Ministry, and they remained the minority. In the cavalry the pattern was similar, though there were more mestres de camp (colonels), and brigadiers after . Holding such ranks it was difficult, sometimes impossible, to get officers of other regiments, who claimed to be responsible only to their colonels and general officers, to accept their strictures and the royal orders they transmitted. But, in the conviction that some good was being done, the king persevered with the system. To call it a ‘system’ at this stage might, however, be something of an overstatement.  



SHAT A , fols. r –r : Louvois to Le Tellier,  May , cited in Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois; B´erenger, Turenne, p. . SHAT MR , fol. r : Abr´eg´e historique by Desbournays, ; OM : Louvois to cavalry and dragoon colonels,  Jan. ; OM : ordonnance,  Jan. ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Feb.  et seq., Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Mar. ; BNF FF , fol. r ; Chagniot, ‘La rationalisation de l’arm´ee franc¸aise’, –. Sourches, vol. I, pp. , –, , ,  Jan. et seq., – Oct.,  Dec.  et seq.,  July  et seq.; vol. II, pp. , , ,  May, Aug. ,  May  et seq.; Vauban, vol. II, p. , notes; BNF FF , fols. v , v ; SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Catinat,  Dec. ; A , no. : La Fare to Barbezieux,  July ; OM : ordonnance,  July ; OM : ordonnance,  May ; Dangeau, vol. I, pp. , –, ,  May ,  Jan.,  Jan.,  Oct. ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, p. .



The officer corps and the standing army There was no clear hierarchical structure or geographical delineation of responsibilities: inspectors were barely a presence in the south of France, and in the first few years the king simply picked a few good officers to go on ad hoc tours of Flanders. Furthermore, the inspectorate, at least until late , was predominantly staffed by Louvois’s acolytes, including the illegitimate half-brother of his wife, the chevalier de Souvr´e. The reluctance to use general officers as inspectors may stem from the fact that the minister regarded few as reliable enough or sufficiently favourable to his interests, whereas he was building up a considerable body of clients among lieutenant-colonels and colonels. The network of inspectors was, then, insufficient before the Nine Years War, and those who carried out such a role in any case found themselves overburdened by logistical and administrative tasks related to their other responsibilities as regimental officers. Moreover, there were no settled and uniformly understood standards. Martinet had been over-zealous, stamping his authority through fear, alienating good officers and even driving future brigadiers out of the r´egiment du Roi. Other inspectors, though, proved weak for fear of making enemies. If officers knew roughly the minimum standards that they could get away with, they were far from cooperative: officers refused to recognise the authority of inspectors; some battalion commanders in the Dutch War argued that, since their units were equally likely to go on campaign as remain in garrison, inspectors had no jurisdiction over them during the summer months; and in the mid-s there were still colonels who neglected their responsibilities and blamed the inspectors for any deficiencies in their regiments. Furthermore, general officers were always able to countermand and direct the inspectors. In the early stages of the Nine Years War there was a limited reform of the inspectorate. First, in December  in response to the escalating size of the army, Louis named six infantry inspectors and thirteen for the cavalry and dragoons. The following year four infantry Inspector-Generals were appointed, covering respectively the German frontier, the south-east, the south-west, and Flanders and Hainault. They were expected to review each battalion once a year, while the subordinate inspectors were to do so in November, January and March. But this adjustment went no further, for no extra powers were granted, the inspectors were still drawn only from the ranks of brigadiers, and scrutiny of the mounted arms remained weak. Instead, from late  the inspectorate actually collapsed as an effective mechanism. At first the king relaxed his grip on appointments, allowing the infantry Inspector-Generals once    

Saint-Maurice, vol. I, pp. –: Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Aug. ; BNF FF , fol. v ; Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  July ; p. ,  Oct. ; Desormeaux, Histoire de la maison de Montmorenci, vol. V, p. ; Quarr´e, M´emoires, p. ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Feb.  et seq. Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, p. ; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  July ; Sourches, vol. I, pp. –, Mar. . Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  Dec. ; Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –; Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, pp. –.



Reforming the structure of the standing army again to choose their subordinate inspectors, but during the next spring inspection seems to have been visited only upon foreign regiments in Louis’s service. Six months later, in October , the king scrapped the inspectorate entirely, deciding instead to employ general officers operating qua general officers with no special commission, backed up by brigadiers, to oversee the regiments within their remit of authority. Towards the end of the winter period, in spring , all colonels were ordered to visit their regiments and send the king memoranda on their condition, while all brigadiers were sent to tour round the regiments of their arm and report back to the king on what they found. Needless to say, the information reaching the king was inadequate and trickled in very slowly. In April , to try to instil a greater sense of professionalism into the colonels by filling them with awe through his personal involvement, Louis ordered them to bring their reports to court and to him directly, bypassing Barbezieux. The reason cited for reverting to the old, pre-inspectorate system was to spare great expense: inspectors had been receiving  livres a month while performing their duties and an extra  livres if they were brigadiers, but in  they had received extra monthly pay worth only the salary of a capitaine r´eform´e, a mere . livres. And if the king was hoping to save money then the move was a failure: first he had to pay expenses to the generals and brigadiers in the form of gratifications, and then he had to face the fact that the abolition of the inspectorate had directly precipitated a decline in the quantity and quality of troops and an increase in the level of fraud perpetrated by regimental officers. The only solution was a complete overhaul of the process, and Louis finally grasped this nettle in December , setting a new pattern for military inspection which would last in outline for the rest of the ancien r´egime. France was divided into sectors corresponding to the four main armies of Flanders, Germany, Italy and Catalonia, and the troops stationed in their vicinity. Each area was the responsibility of one Director-General for the cavalry and another for the infantry – drawn from the lieutenant-generals and mar´echaux de camp – under whom were between one and three Inspector-Generals of foot and horse chosen mainly from the brigadiers of the army concerned. The cavalry inspectors also had jurisdiction over the dragoons. Every regiment would be reviewed by a Director-General when it entered winter quarters, and orders would be given to the officers. The Inspector-Generals were then charged with overseeing the execution of these orders, and in each April the  



SHAT A , no. : Louis and Barbezieux to Chalmazel,  Sep. ; A , no. : e´tat [Feb. or Mar. ]. Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Jan. ; vol. IV, pp. , , ,  Oct.,  Nov.,  Dec. ; pp. , ,  Mar.,  Apr. ; SHAT A , no. : Usson to Barbezieux,  Feb. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to colonels,  May ; A , no. : Barbezieux to colonels,  Aug. ; Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Apr. . The end of the  campaign saw the same pattern of ad hoc scrutiny: SHAT A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Dec. . Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Oct. ; BNF FF (ii), fols. v –v , ; SHAT A , no. : La Goupilli`ere to Barbezieux,  Feb. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to infantry colonels,  Nov. .



The officer corps and the standing army Director-General would again review the troops and their mounts to assess the work done by the officers on their units. Surveillance would continue during the campaign season. Although the cavalry Director-Generals were still required to keep the Colonel-Generals fully appraised of the situation of the cavalry and dragoons, including sending them summaries of the revues, now, however, they were ordered to make their reports to the king face to face, in the presence of the Secretary of War. The areas which concerned the new inspectorate were multiple: they sorted out seniority disputes, investigated complaints made by officers against each other, observed the performance of chaplains, monitored regimental accounts and funds, instructed the officers where necessary, weeded out substandard men and noted the quality of the rest, oversaw the repair of companies, tried to detect officer fraud – and fraud committed by commissaires in league with officers – and prevent men being poaching from other units, helped to organise leave passes and semester rotas, lobbied for expenses on behalf of officers, wrote memoranda on major issues of military administration for the War Ministry, advised the king and minister on vacancies and appointments, and oversaw demobilisations. From the end of the Nine Years War, though perhaps earlier, they were sending in reports detailing the service records of a regiment’s officers, though this became really systematic only in the War of the Spanish Succession and most of the surviving documentation dates from about  onwards. Under the new dispensation they were noticeably better paid than before: , livres a month for a director and  a month for an inspector covering six months’ service over winter, and each received thirty-two and sixteen rations of forage and bread per day respectively. Barbezieux estimated the whole package was worth about , livres a year for a director (half that for an inspector), and in  their pay went up by another , livres for directors and , for inspectors. These were astronomical sums and came on top of the officer’s normal salary during the campaign season, but the crown thought that this was what it took to entice men to fill a hated post which entailed significant travelling during the worst months of the year, often in extreme weather conditions. Of course, the government could also 



SHAT OM : instruction to Huxelles,  Dec. ; instructions to the infantry Inspector-Generals, instructions to Bezons and Du Bourg, instructions to the cavalry Inspector-Generals,  Dec. ; A , no. : commission for Coigny,  Dec. ; A : Barbezieux to Genlis,  Aug.,  Aug. ; to Nanclas,  Feb. ; A , fol. v –r : to cavalry and infantry Director-Generals; fol. v : to infantry Director- and Inspector-Generals,  Sep. ; fols. v –r : to infantry InspectorGenerals and commissaires des guerres,  Sep. ; fols. v , v , v , v –v : to Larray,  Oct.,  Oct.,  Oct.,  Nov. ; A , fol. v : to Coigny,  July ; A , fols. v –r : to Genlis,  Apr. ; fol. r : to Coigny,  Oct. ; A (i), fol. r : Barbezieux to Bezons,  Nov. ; fol. r : to Larray,  Nov. ; A (ii), fol. r : to Nanclas,  Dec. ; A : to infantry and cavalry Director-Generals,  May ; BMG Saugeon , no. : instruction issued by Flanders infantry Director-General,  June ; no. : ordonnance,  Oct. ; Sourches, vol. IV, pp. –,  Nov. ; vol. VI, p. ,  Nov. ; pp. , ,  Jan.,  Dec. . SHAT A , fol. r−v : Barbezieux to Marsin,  Nov. ; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Aug. ; BNF FF , fols. r –v : accounts of Extraordinaire des Guerres,  Nov. .



Reforming the structure of the standing army appeal to the ambition of officers to inveigle them into the inspectorate, and many of them did indeed end up as generals. At the very least, they had the chance to exercise real power during the winter season in the usual absence of an army commander-inchief, and their duties involved visits to court where they would be in direct contact with the king and the Secretary of War. According to Sourches, Saint-Pouange persuaded Huxelles, colonel of the r´egiment du Dauphin infantry, to become an inspector: ‘In order to have the opportunity by this to render him good offices, and that his assiduousness in the service would be a way to his promotion.’ Personal ambition and family interests were clearly lurking at the heart of an inspector’s motives. How efficacious was the reformed inspectorate? After  it unquestionably forced officers to attend more keenly to their duties and produced higher standards than had existed in the early s. Colonels feared the arrival of an inspector and drilled their regiments for several days before a visit, while Vendˆome, commanding the army of Catalonia, believed the inspectors had made a noticeable difference to his forces. The role of the new inspectors in keeping regimental officers on their toes should not be underestimated, but a balanced assessment of their impact can only be achieved by acknowledging the many problems which persisted into the new system. For a start, many of them displayed remarkable ignorance about details of military administration, including the number of men making up a company and the rules on desertion. To Barbezieux’s frustration the memoranda and reports they sent in were – at least initially – poorly organised and set out, with one inspector simply relying on the muster reports given him by commissaires des guerres, thereby defeating the whole object of his appointment. The inspectors also had to contend with the limits on their power: during the campaign season they had other service commitments to fulfil as senior officers, which led them to neglect their monitoring of troop numbers (especially during sieges), and the army commanders-in-chief continued to control the activities of the inspectorate throughout the summer months. Plenty of lieutenant-generals and mar´echaux de camp were jealous of their authority and at all times of the year obstructed their work. Nor was the inspectorate itself a wholly cohesive and united    



SHAT A (i), fol. r : Barbezieux to Director- and Inspector-Generals,  Nov. ; Sourches, vol. I, pp. –, – Oct.  (citation); vol. VI, p. ,  Nov. . Sarram´ea, Lettres, p. : Franc¸ois to his father,  Feb. ; SHAT A , no. : Vendˆome to Louis,  July . SHAT A , no. : Larray to Barbezieux,  May ; A  Barbezieux to Nanclas,  Mar. ; A : to Coigny,  Oct. . SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Chartogne,  Mar. ; fol. v : to Chartogne, Chamilly and Larray,  Mar. ; fol. r : to Director- and Inspector-Generals,  May ; A , fol. r–v : to Genlis,  Jan. . SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Chartogne,  July ; fol. r : to Genlis,  Aug. ; fol. v : to Nanclas,  Aug. ; A , no. : Maisoncelle to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; BNF FF , fols. r –r : Vendˆome to Coigny,  June .



The officer corps and the standing army body – Genlis, Director-General of infantry for the notoriously factional army of Catalonia, referred to Coigny, his cavalry counterpart, as ‘an old dog from Boulogne more malicious than a sexagenarian monkey’! Handling the regimental officers proved no less difficult for many inspectors. Most were still only brigadiers, rather than mar´echaux de camp, and found that surliness bordering on defiance was an all too common reaction to their orders. They were handicapped by the need to refer instances of bad behaviour (and reasonable requests) by officers back to the minister, and could not actually discipline officers themselves. Feuqui`eres believed that, consequently, they could do little good but much harm. Dragoon officers certainly felt this. With the exception of the army of Italy, dragoon regiments were subjected to the whims of the cavalry inspectors because their own Colonel-General, Tess´e, and his deputy, Mestre de camp g´en´eral Mailly, were serving in the southern Alps and were unavailable to examine them. Tess´e was forced to complain directly to Barbezieux that these inspectors were trying to devalue the dragoons in relation to their own arm: There is hardly a cavalry director who does not find we err if we are altogether neither footsoldiers nor cavaliers . . . In a word the indulgence of some, who always find us almost too well mounted to be dragoons, ensures that most allow our officers to go slack on the size and condition of the horses, while others suppress the details of service which distinguish us from the infantry.

The biggest problem, however, was the sympathy, even of the Director-Generals, for the plight of ordinary officers, a product of fellow feeling which the crown could not persuade them to discard. With regard to financial and muster fraud, inspectors could certainly be duped by officers, but really the king and Barbezieux strongly suspected them of deliberately turning a blind eye to abuses and favouring particular regiments. One Director-General was allowing women and children attached to the Irish Jacobite regiments in Savoie to receive bread at the king’s expense until Barbezieux gave him a severe reprimand. The government found this sort of indulgence, and complaisance in fraud and in debt defaulting, deeply frustrating. They knew that the credit system, on which officers depended, could be very precarious, and they feared that permitting abuses would only store up problems over the medium term. It was not that the inspectors were crooked, but there still remained the problem of quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Only the king and the Secretary of War could do this, and they had limited room for manoeuvre when   

 Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, p. . SHAT A , no. : Genlis to Barbezieux,  Dec. . SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  May  (citation); A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Tess´e,  May . SHAT A , no. : Chamilly to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Larray,  May ; A , fol. r : to Genlis,  Feb. ; A , no. : Noailles to Louis,  June ; A : Barbezieux to Chazeron,  Apr. ; to Genlis,  May ; to Coigny,  Sep. ; A (i), fol. r : to Nanclas,  Nov. ; A , fols. v –r : to Nanclas  Nov. ; A : memorandum on infantry,  Sep. .



Reforming the structure of the standing army faced with such low-key defiance by their most trusted servants. In the end, all that they could appeal to was the ambition and self-interest of the inspectors themselves. Some of the reforms introduced by Louis XIV proved very far-reaching in their effects on the army. Between the s and s regiments might exist only for a single campaign, but during the ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV the number of regiments put onto a permanent footing grew during every war, and at successive demobilisations between  and  there were always more regiments retained than had been the case at the end of the previous war. This provided an expanding degree of administrative and tactical continuity which had hitherto been lacking in all but the dozen or so elite regiments, and as such it expanded the solid nucleus of the standing army. Complementing this, Louis XIV’s government gave up attempts to suppress military venality and instead sought to manage it and restrict it to colonels and captains. The aim of this fresh, and now clear, approach was to give the French officer corps a medium-term, even a long-term, stake in the condition of their regiments. This sense of attachment had been very limited during the FrancoSpanish war. The acceptance of purchase of commission was an intrinsic part of Louis’s wider concern to provide a reformed structure of officership, the better to accommodate the interests of the middling and lesser nobility. The systematisation of half-pay officiers r´eform´es, to take one profoundly important reform, was a great improvement on the wilful neglect of demobilised officers under Richelieu and Mazarin. Not all reforms were so fruitful. The cadet system – a far-sighted effort to use early training to bring the officer corps under closer control, to instil greater discipline in them, and, as far as Louvois was concerned, to bring them within his orbit – proved to be impractical in the face of cultural resistance. The inspectorate was longer lasting and more successful, in that it forced regimental officers to be that much more attentive to the maintenance of their units, especially from , than they would otherwise have been. But it too had its limitations: historians have exaggerated the effect it had. It took three decades to refine the system and meanwhile it went through some periods of very doubtful effectiveness. All these defects notwithstanding, the intentions of the king, which lurked behind every one of these changes of policy and approach, cannot be ignored. In essence, one should see Louis XIV as preoccupied less with disciplining and punishing, and instead as considerably more concerned to overcome the disease of French military administration in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: the inability to sustain a functioning war machine.





The business of a regiment The administration of the regiments and companies of the French army was a profoundly taxing business, both for the crown and for the officers concerned. It involved nobles trying to exercise entrepreneurial talents for which they had received little training, and a civilian administration which could provide only limited guidance on how they should run their units. Nevertheless, most regiments remained in reasonably good shape throughout all but the last of Louis XIV’s wars, even if king and ministers often wished they were better maintained. Much of the credit for this should be given to officers who managed to steer between the scylla of crown expectations and the charybdis of personal financial ruin. Regimental administration remained deficient from a Napoleonic perspective, but by contemporary standards the French did remarkably well after  to create and sustain a standing army, which reached about , men, lest one forget, just over thirty years later – a four-fold expansion from Mazarin’s day and the largest force in Europe by a factor of more than two. If Louis XIV had high expectations of his officers, he and his ministers also came to have a more sensitive and subtle appreciation of how to get the best out of them. This chapter will therefore seek to explain the way administrative procedures were altered, and how a more sophisticated system of financial support for the officers evolved during the forty-two years after the treaty of the Pyrenees. Problems and setbacks will be made apparent, for one cannot pretend that the Le Tellier developed a perfect system to be unquestioningly lauded, but none of this should detract from the underlying argument that the ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV saw immeasurable improvements in military organisation over the era of Richelieu and Mazarin.                Whatever the improvements to regimental structure, to career development for officers or to the system of regimental oversight by office-holders and inspectors, ultimately what mattered most was an adequate flow of money. As the scope for war profits from ransom and plunder fell over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, officer pay and allowances became increasingly important issues for government. Louis XIV accordingly sought to combine a sustained and sustaining regimental structure with a pay system he hoped would maximise the 

The business of a regiment length of service officers could give. Yet it was not until the end of the s that the crown took steps to enshrine this principle, and even then the system was not always effective in its aim of satisfying officer needs. The pay and allowances for officers can be separated out, in part, from those grants for the provision of clothing and equipment for their units. As to their own pay, their bonuses after  known as ‘paies de gratification’ for full or nearly full companies, and the money given to them for recruitment, the officers did not have to account directly to or with the military treasurers. The recruitment money and some of the paie de gratification was expected to go on the maintenance of a full complement of well-equipped and healthy men, but the king was not concerned exactly how captains spent these funds as long as the results achieved were the desired ones. This section will look at the pay and bonus system which evolved over the two decades after the Dutch War, and which was directly related to the structure of companies and regiments. There were a number of basic principles which governed pay during Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’. First, the intervals at which officer salaries were paid were shortened: in the s money was forthcoming in six ‘montres’ across the year, but after the treaty of the Pyrenees the French shifted to a monthly pay interval. Of course, the key thing was less the rate or the intervals of pay than the reliability of the crown in meeting the salary bill. Officer pay might appear, by some measures, to have ‘dropped’, as Lynn has claimed, but crucially it appeared with far greater regularity than in the past. The only sustained periods prior to the War of the Spanish Succession which appear to witness serious pay arrears on the European continent (as opposed to Ireland or Sicily) were the years –, and then it was, indeed, bad. Second, though officers of all arms prior to the s benefited from an improved royal cash flow (as explained in chapter ), in most respects cavalry officers always enjoyed far better treatment than their counterparts in the infantry and dragoons. Though cavalry mestres de camp did not receive more than a captain’s pay of , livres per annum in peacetime, during time of war their salary went up nominally by two-thirds again to , livres; after  lieutenant-colonels received , livres. This was roughly double the pay of the equivalent ranks in the infantry. Third, the pay scheme was divided in two: there was ‘campaign pay’, which went to companies operating in the field armies, and then there was ‘garrison pay’ which was considerably higher and was enjoyed by those who served in fortresses, who were en route to join an army, and by the campaign forces as well during the winter quarters period (November to March inclusive) and if they were stationed in fortresses during the campaign season. For the infantry officers, as for the men, the gap can be accounted for in part by the crown paying directly for the supply of bread and   

Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. ; Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise en , p. . Lynn, Giant, p. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –. SHAT OM : ordonnances,  Feb. ,  Feb. .



The officer corps and the standing army forage for units on campaign. One also suspects that pay was lower on campaign because the crown knew the officers and men would have little on which to spend it and many of the men might desert or die anyway, so it would be a waste. Louis and his advisers sought the best combination of penalties and incentives to secure full complements of decent troops in foot and horse companies but not until the late s did a more ideal mixture emerge. In particular the crown took an inordinately long time – four decades – to weigh up whether captains in all arms should be paid a flat-rate salary or whether their pay should be linked to the strength of their company, on a per capita basis. Before October  both campaign and garrison pay was flat-rate, but thereafter garrison pay was directly tied to company strength. In September  this was scrapped for the cavalry and dragoons, but it persisted in the infantry until April . It was finally abolished because infantry captains had been recruiting poor-quality men, with little regard for their fitness for service, merely to claim full companies. Although there were no explicit penalties laid down for having an under-strength company during the peace years of the s, in wartime the War Ministry found it could not trust the captains to achieve the desired results merely by relying on this incentive pay scheme. At all levels it failed to deliver, and it only remains a wonder that per capita pay for captains was not abolished sooner in all arms. What worked far better were paies de gratification. Between the s and the s the government failed to give any real positive incentives to captains to achieve a full complement of men but instead operated a counter-productive penalty programme which did nothing to reward good performance. Mindful of this, Louvois introduced a bonus scheme at the end of the Dutch War to give infantry captains added incentives to maintain their companies at least at  per cent of their theoretical maximum strength. This was designed primarily to assist those captains in designated campaign battalions: sliding-scale payments were made, and this applied in both winter months and during the summer, whatever the company’s activity at the time. Typically, for a full complement a captain could expect to receive on top of his normal pay a maximum of between three and five daily wages of a musketeer – either  sol per day on campaign or  sous for ‘garrison pay’. Further inducements were also offered. By  a captain would receive a lump sum gratification of  livres at the start of a campaign if he had a full company, a sum which was increased to  livres from spring . At the same time, an expansion in the size of campaign companies to fifty-five men meant an extension of the paie de gratification scheme to cover between forty-five and fifty-five men. But the financial downturn caused by 

 

SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Jan. ; A , no. : La Fonds to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. ; Iung, ‘Service des vivres et munitionnaires sous l’ancien r´egime’, vol. I, p. . SHAT OM : ordonnance,  July ; OM : ordonnance,  Oct. ; OM : ordonnances,  Mar.,  Sep. ; OM : ordonnance,  Apr. . Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. , –; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  July .



The business of a regiment Table . Combined basic pay and paies de gratification of infantry captains during the Nine Years War. Full complement of men Garrison captain Campaign captain (–) Campaign captain (–) Only  per cent of a full complement of men (reduced paies de gratification or none at all) Garrison captain (–) Garrison captain (–) Campaign captain (–) Campaign captain (–)

,  c.     

livres:  sous livres livres

livres livres livres livres

This takes the current consensus figure for actual company strength. Note well how the proportional gap between garrison and campaign captains’ income narrows between the ideal and the realistic level of company strength. Sources: Pay ordonnances from SHAT OM  to OM .

devastating harvest failure saw cutbacks in this area. In September  the sliding scale for paies de gratification was scrapped, and from spring  the lump sum was reduced to  livres for a full complement. As one might expect, this had a counterproductive effect on troop numbers, so in February  – as finances appeared to be in recovery – the crown restored the sliding scale of paies de gratification, only times were still tight so now a minimum of fifty men was required before a captain could qualify even for a single extra wage. Garrison companies also enjoyed similar treatment during the Nine Years War, but unlike their campaign counterparts who had to undergo musters every three months – so a lag would develop between paper numbers and actual numbers as desertion, illness and death took their toll – captains in garrison were disadvantaged because their units were counted every month (see table .). In the aftermath of the Nine Years War and the retrenchment of troops, the paie de gratification system was mothballed altogether in December , but within three months it had become so clear that officers needed this incentive to maintain their units that it was reintroduced. Louvois’s reputation is that of a cold, heartless figure, but his introduction of a helpful bonus scheme clearly had beneficial effects on the king’s officers and his armies. 



SHAT OM : ordonnance [ Feb. ]; A , no. : Louvois to Bouchu,  Feb. ; OM : ordonnance,  Dec. ; OM : ordonnances,  Sep. ,  Sep. ; BMG Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  Sep. ; Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  Feb. ; Belhomme, Histoire de l’infanterie en France, vol. II, pp. , , ; Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise, p. . SHAT OM : ordonnances,  Dec. ,  Mar. .



The officer corps and the standing army                                  To a great extent, then, the income of an infantry captain was clearly and directly linked to the number of men in his charge between  and . Further assistance to captains of both horse and foot for raising and maintaining their companies at full strength, or near enough, was provided by the crown in the shape of financial grants for the recruitment of men. Before  officers setting up new units were given negligible support by the crown – a notional  livres per man in the infantry which was frequently never paid, while the grant the crown made under Richelieu for raising a cavalry company barely covered one-third of the actual costs. Indeed, officers had to advance large amounts of their own money and demonstrate sufficient personal solvency before even a commission would be forthcoming. By contrast, after the treaty of the Pyrenees far greater assistance was proffered. The sums provided by the crown did not cover the entire actual cost of levying a man, and there was still a general shortfall in recruitment money even at the best of times – the king reimbursed an infantry captain only  livres in the s and  in the s for each man raised, though actual costs were far greater than this. When France was in the midst of fiscal crisis and a failure of cash flow then officers’ problems were greatly exacerbated and recruitment could grind to a near halt. Nevertheless, the gap between actual costs and reimbursement was far smaller than had been the case before , and recruitment money was generally paid rather than forgotten. Raising fresh units and replenishing existing ones was therefore much easier financially for the officers in the second half of the seventeenth century than it had been under the cardinal-ministers. However, a number of caveats must be entered, and this section will try to give a balanced picture of the problems posed by recruitment after . To begin with, it must be noted that royal aid was by no means distributed equitably. Leaving aside the grant for purchasing horses, cavalry captains were given between  and  per cent more funds to raise, clothe and equip an ordinary trooper than infantry captains, even if the time allowed for recruitment and the penalties for failing to reach a full complement of men were stiffer in the cavalry. The development of the French infantry was unquestionably damaged by such under-funding. Second, built into the recruitment monies were the bounties – the ‘primes’ – officers could offer to men for enlistment, but depending on the time of year, on the region and on the economic circumstances the size of bounty an officer might have to offer  



Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, pp. –, ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –. Montbas, Au service du Roi, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  July ; Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, ; SHAT A , no. : Artaignan to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , fol. r : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; A , no. : Le Bret to Barbezieux,  Jan. . Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, p. ; SHAT OM : ordonnances,  Sep.,  Dec. ; OM : ordonnances,  Sep. ,  Sep. ; BMG Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  Sep. ; Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  Oct. ; vol. VIII, p. ,  Feb. .



The business of a regiment a recruit could fluctuate wildly. In one Beauvaisis town the economic depression of  allowed officers to attract men for only about  livres, but two years later, with the local economy much recovered, they had to raise the rate to a ruinous  livres. Only in December  did an edict fix the maximum bounty which could be offered to urban recruits. Furthermore, the French state found it extremely difficult to match military expansion with acquiring good-quality recruits. Raising units afresh involved far larger administrative problems than levying extra recruits for existing units, and the crown continued to rely heavily on influential individuals and institutions for new regiments. Individuals continued to raise companies at their own expense: the comte de Saint-Pol of the house of Orl´eans-Longueville spent , livres setting up his cavalry company in , and such generosity to the king was not confined simply to grandee families. Governors of frontier provinces raised regiments, particularly dragoon and irregular foot units equipped with flintlock muskets, and army commanders might be ordered to entice deserters to return to the colours by setting up new regiments to receive them. Wealthier nobles continued to raise regiments in the interior provinces using their seigneurial authority in particular parishes. In some cases these people used local resources at their disposal or their own private funds, but as often as not during the ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV the crown would reimburse them for the full notional costs of the levy through the treasury of the Extraordinaire des Guerres. To complement this, local corporate institutions would take some of the strain off the central financial machinery and act as direct sponsors of regiments, paying over to the Extraordinaire des Guerres not only the costs of the initial levy of a regiment but also subsequent expenditure for recruitment and maintenance. In the Nine Years War, for example, the estates of Brittany, Languedoc and Artois and the urban corporations of Angoulˆeme and Limoges all contributed to the war effort in this way. The three infantry regiments raised by Brittany in  theoretically cost the province , livres each year while they were on a footing. The administrative channelling of financial assistance for recruitment varied from one arm to another and across the period –. For the campaign battalions after , recruitment money was disbursed to the captains in November each year, but between  and  the king gave no recruitment money for these units. Instead, officers were expected to employ their paies de gratification to cover recruitment, equipment and clothing costs, and it was not until late  that the wretched garrison captains received either paies de gratification or recruitment money.   

 

Corvisier, L’arm´ee fran¸caise de la fin du XVIIe si`ecle au minist`ere de Choiseul, pp. –; Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, p. . Bib Maz , fols. r –r ; BNF FF , fol. r . BNF FF , fol. v ; FF , fol. r−v ; FF (i), fol. r ; Dangeau, vol. II, pp. –,  Dec. ; SHAT A , no. : La Bretesche to La Goupilli`ere,  Sep. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Villeroi,  July ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Aug. . BNF FF , fols. r , r ; FF , fols. r , r , r ; M. Richard, ed., M´emoires d’Isaac Dumont de Bostaquet (Paris, ), p. ; SHAT A , no. : estimates [Feb. ]. Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, pp. , –, .



The officer corps and the standing army Incentives to reach a full complement of men in a company were provided by a mixture of further rewards and penalties. When officers were away from their units on recruitment drives they received no pay, which was only handed over on their return if their company was in a sufficiently good state or they had brought enough recruits with them. If all was indeed well, then, during the era of per capita-based pay, the captain would have his pay backdated to the start of the recruitment period on the basis of the number of men he now commanded. Similarly, the ustencile – the winter quarters pay supplement – would be backdated on the same generous basis, though it too would be clawed back if the officer concerned had failed in his duty to recruit enough decent men. Deadlines for returning with parties of recruits were set annually but could be extended owing to adverse economic circumstances, and the ustencile could be increased to help cover excessive but justifiable recruitment costs even though it was not supposed to be spent on such purposes. Until the s there was no orderly set of rules for officers to leave their units to go on recruitment drives, but from  the government operated a semester system for the winter months which allowed many officers to withdraw from their regiment for up to four months to recruit more men and to attend to their own private affairs. This applied in a similar fashion to both foot and horse in both war and peacetime, except in the years – when all officers were permitted six months leave. There were some problems in fine-tuning the semester procedures, and it took time to minimise the worst abuses: from March  the government had to take steps to ensure a minimum number of officers remained on station with their regiments during the winter months; it was important to ensure that subalterns did not make up too high a proportion of those remaining at the regiment; and the War Ministry was anxious that men were granted semester leaves not because they were favourites of their colonel but because they could be useful by being absent. In practice, subalterns might make up just under one-half of all the officers sent off to enlist fresh recruits. How the officers found the recruits is worth considering. Up to a point, seigneurial recruitment by captains around their own properties accounted for a sizeable 







SHAT A : Barbezieux to Artaignan,  June ; to des Bordes,  June ; A : Louvois to cavalry and dragoon inspectors,  Nov. ; OM : ordonnances,  Sep. ,  Sep. ; OM : ordonnance,  Nov. ; A , nos. , : Catinat to Barbezieux, plus extract from r`eglement,  May ; A , no. : Barbezieux to intendants,  Feb. ; A , no. : Louis to Catinat,  Jan. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Dec. ; A , fol. v : to Le Bret,  Jan. ; BMG Saugeon , nos. , : ordonnances,  Sep. ,  Sep. ; Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  Feb. ; Corvisier, L’arm´ee fran¸caise de la fin du XVIIe si`ecle, p. . Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. ; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Oct. ; OM : ordonnance,  July ; OM : ordonnances,  Aug.,  Nov. ,  Apr. ,  Aug. ; OM : ordonnance,  Feb. ; BMG Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  Mar. . BMG Saugeon , nos. , , : ordonnances,  Sep.,  Sep. ,  Sep. ; Saugeon , nos. , : ordonnances,  Oct.,  Oct. ; SHAT OM : two ordonnances,  Sep. ; A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  Sep. ; no. : to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to infantry directors and inspectors,  Sep. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to infantry directors and inspectors,  Sep. . BNF FF , fols. r , r –v .



The business of a regiment proportion of new soldiers, especially in the case of new captains raising new companies. Some regiments tried to retain geographical recruitment links, and many companies had a strong nucleus based on a seigneurial relationship between the officers and a minority of the men. Family members back home might actively seek out local men to recruit and send on to their sons’ or nephews’ companies. Knowledgeable contemporaries like Tess´e believed seigneurial recruitment was critically important in attracting more men to the colours. But, for all its advantages, from the s this dwindled in importance, partly because officers on leave tended to gravitate for reasons of business more to the large towns than to their own estates and they often recruited men while on their travels. Most obviously, regiments in garrison would do much of their recruiting in the nearby localities, despite royal disapproval, because it kept costs down. From the beginning of the Nine Years War until  captains were still seen by the state as the agent of recruitment but in practice the actual work was done more and more by contractors and other agents. Officers themselves argued that no one of them could be expected to recruit personally more than thirty men, so to fill companies forty or even up to fifty-five strong agents were required from whom bona fide recruits could be purchased. These agents could include innkeepers, shopkeepers, priests, military chaplains, staff officers of fortresses, even officers of other units with surplus men to trade. Many were deeply unscrupulous, but, as Girard demonstrated, by the s they had become indispensable and remained so until the ministry of Choiseul. The quality of recruits produced by such a system varied greatly. Most officers accepted anybody willing to serve because they had to contribute something from their own pockets towards recruitment costs and they could not afford to be too choosy. Consequently many recruits were unsuitable for the rigours of the army and were described as ‘miserables’ by one inspector. By  officers knew that most inspectors would not accept woefully substandard recruits, but they still succeeded in engaging poor-quality men for their units and senior officers had no choice but to acquiesce in such sharp practice – if the unfit were discharged at the captain’s expense an excessive burden of duties would be placed on those men remaining. Even Louvois urged inspectors to be lenient about this. Furthermore, mutual 





Sandras, La conduite de Mars, p. ; Corvisier, L’arm´ee fran¸caise de la fin du XVIIe si`ecle, pp. , ; SHAT A , fol. r : Crenan to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; J. Lemoine, ‘Madame de La Fayette et Louvois’, La Revue de Paris  (September ), p. . SHAT A , no. : Grammont to Barbezieux,  Feb. ; A , no. : list of recruits,  Apr. ; P. Lapalu, ‘Le Royal-Italien, –’, Revue Historique des Arm´ees  (), ; Corvisier, L’arm´ee fran¸caise de la fin du XVIIe si`ecle, pp. , ; Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  May ; SHAT OM : to Anfossy,  Dec. ; A , no. : Feuqui`eres to Louvois,  Dec. ; Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, p. ; G. Girard, Le service militaire en France a` la fin du r`egne de Louis XIV: racolage et milice, – (Paris, ). SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Mar. ; BNF FF , fols. r –v : review of campaign battalions in Savoy [early ]; Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, p. ; SHAT A , nos. , : Maisoncelle to Barbezieux,  Apr.,  Oct. ; A : Louvois to Chazeron,  Jan. .



The officer corps and the standing army help given by officers could easily break down, and captains particularly resented being forced to give up men for their battalion’s one or two grenadier companies, especially when grenadier captains – who got recruits for no price at all in – and at a subsidised rate at other times – completely neglected the men. In spite of the financial penalties and prison sentences handed out to officers who failed to fulfil their quotas or who recruited useless men, a certain level of neglect and abuse remained inevitable, particularly in the infantry, because the system of financial grants for recruitment was never quite generous enough. Vauban believed that the constant requirement of officers to seek recruits made it very difficult for them to subsist, a view endorsed by the author of a memorandum which spoke of the frequently high costs of enrolling men for which the crown did not make sufficient allowance. Chamlay was another who argued that France should turn more towards a systematic recruitment principle based upon parishes or hearths. Unfortunately this would not have prevented higher rates of desertion or physical degeneration among men who would have no ties with their officers and whose officers would have no interest in their welfare. The behaviour of some grenadier captains provides a clear indication of the neglect likely to be visited upon men who were not recruited from civilian life by their own immediate officers. Essentially, if the system which made captains responsible for their recruits was to work effectively then not only did they have to have a financial stake in their men – which was continued beyond  but on a more manageable scale – but there also had to be adequate seigneurial recruitment to ensure high-quality enlistment and maintenance. Essentially, however, the king’s need for a colossal army of over , men by the s precluded this on a sufficiently wide scale. In such circumstances the crown had to try to complement the more generous system of recruitment support provided to the captains with a workable regime against desertion which could also help them maintain their units on a respectable footing. Deterring desertion was best achieved through ensuring the men enjoyed reasonable pay and conditions. Richelieu had sought to give priority to the men’s pay over that of the officers, but this policy had been rendered nugatory by handing over the wages en bloc to the unit commander. The key thing was to ensure that the men were not only paid but that they were paid regularly, and this had to await the more 



 

SHAT A , no. : Louis to Catinat,  Mar. ; A , fol. r : Crenan to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; OM : ordonnance,  Nov. ; OM : ordonnance,  Aug. ; BMG Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  Oct. . E.g. SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Dec. ; A , no. : Du Repaire to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Chartogne,  Mar. ; A , no. : Maisoncelle to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to cavalry directors and inspectors,  Mar. ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  June . Vauban, vol. I, p. : ‘Reorganisation de l’arm´ee’ []; SHAT A , no. : ‘Projet’, autumn ; A , no. : memorandum,  Dec. ; no. : memorandum, n.d. Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, pp. , ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –.



The business of a regiment effective handling of state revenue and military cash flow after . From then on the men were paid in advance at the stipulated intervals, and in the years – officers were supposed to make no deductions on the pay of the men. By the War of Devolution Le Tellier had succeeded in removing control of the men’s wages from the officers and placed them in civilian hands under the guidance of the commissaires des guerres and intendants. Though far from perfect this was a dramatic improvement on the previous way of conducting business. At first the pay rates jumped about quite considerably and there was neither much uniformity nor systemic organisation of pay and conditions during the War of Devolution, but from  matters were settled for a musketeer at  sous per day for basic garrison/peacetime/winter pay or  sol on campaign, remaining roughly at these levels for the rest of the reign. Furthermore, at the end of the War of Devolution the crown decided that the men were better served by receiving their pay in smaller quantities but every ten days, instead of getting a larger sum once a month which they would quickly squander, so making them more difficult to control. Ensuring fair treatment for the men in the matter of pay, supplies and conditions was recognised by the government as central to the war against desertion, but the king and his ministers also felt that a heavy hand was needed to deter men from going absent without leave. From  until  the death penalty was prescribed for desertion, while for the following twenty years this was commuted to penal servitude on the galley fleet. Between  and  there was little desertion because the army was smaller and conditions were good, but the problem reappeared as Louis geared his forces up for war in . Accordingly, that year the king tightened up his policy: a -livre bounty was offered for the return of a deserter; individual deserters would be executed; and if three or more were caught, one would be executed on the spot and the other two sent to the galleys. Furthermore, soldiers were encouraged by financial incentives and (if sergeants or nobles) the prospect of promotion into the officer ranks to inform on officers who enlisted deserters from other units. This, of course, did nothing to halt desertions from the army altogether. Subsequent ordinances in  and  reiterated these provisions, but in  there was a slight relaxation of these draconian punishments – all captured deserters would have their noses and ears cut off, be branded with two fleurs-de-lys on the cheeks and be sent to the galleys. In June  the king restored the death penalty for two reasons: one, 



Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. , –, –, –, –; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –; SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Lorge,  Apr. ; OM : ordonnance,  Apr. . Lynn gives a sound description of the pay system and suggests that the income of an ordinary soldier under Louis XIV was similar to that of a country weaver (Giant, p. ). However, he is wrong to argue that a diminution in the real-term value of military wages allowed the growth of the army after : in fact, far more money was being spent than ever before under Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’, and it was now actually reaching the pockets of the men when this had not been the case prior to . Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. , –; Lynn, Giant, pp. –; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Mar. .



The officer corps and the standing army because of the extensive re-emergence of desertion since mobilisation had begun in the previous summer; and, two, because facial amputation caused infection and appalling smells which spread disease and demoralisation. However, in practice the death penalty was applied randomly, while men were returned to the ranks because the crown could not afford to forgo their services. Branding continued, but even this provided little deterrent because the burning was deliberately light, while only the very tip of a deserter’s nose was sliced off. By the start of the War of the Spanish Succession ministers privately admitted that a certain level of desertion could not be stemmed through threat of physical punishment. Indeed, tens of thousands of men deserted in Louis XIV’s last two wars. It must be said that in large part the officers themselves were responsible for the continuing phenomenon of desertion. Before  high levels of absenteeism among officers, combined with bad food, poor supplies and irregular pay, had facilitated extraordinary rates of flight. In the second half of the century insufficient numbers of officers present amongst the men continued to produce higher rates of desertion than usual, and whenever officers were suffering from particular financial hardship there was a general collective failure of leadership and discipline while the soldiery began to lose confidence in the ability of their officers to support them. This in turn stimulated licentiousness among the men leading to more desertion. From the s discipline improved markedly but the officers were still underpaid, so they continued to withhold pay from the men quite illegally which only encouraged the troops to maraud and to leave the colours. In  the French diplomat Estrades, reporting from Nijmegen where he was in conference with the Allies, spoke of around , French deserters in the area who had left Louis’s service because of severe fraud by their officers. Desertion was also more likely if a man had been recruited by force or excessive trickery, or if he was traded away by the recruiting officer to another company. According to Gaya, who wrote several works of military instruction,  per cent of deserters went absent without leave because they were homesick, a feeling likely to be exacerbated if they had no pre-existing ties to their officers. Mallet believed that most desertions from the cavalry were caused by lieutenants mistreating the men or beating them with a cane when they felt it was their privilege to be chastised only with a sword. Louvois himself blamed desertion on officers meting out injustices to the men, unfair pay deductions which persisted well into the Nine Years War, and ineffectual and corrupt military provosts.   

SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Dec. ; BMG Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  June ; SHAT A , no. : Pontchartrain to Chamillart,  July ; Lynn, Giant, p. . Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, p. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –; SHAT A , fol. r : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  May . Rousset, vol. II, p. ; SHAT A , no. : memorandum by Gaya []; A : Bagnols to Barbezieux,  July ; A , no. : Le Peletier de Souzy to La Grange,  May ; Mallet, Les travaux de Mars, vol. III, p. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –; SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Lorge,  Apr. .



The business of a regiment Nevertheless, the officers should not shoulder all the blame. An unacceptable level of desertion, perhaps up to  per cent of the army in some years during the s, was also facilitated by weak provisions for detecting and administering the problem and by government policies which in some cases proved not merely ineffective but actually counter-productive. In  the crown had ordered commissaires des guerres to keep registers of deserters which detailed their physical description and place of birth, with a copy to be sent to the War Ministry which would then update and circulate a list of deserters across France every month; and regiments had their own unique seal, which was changed every year, to certify bona fide discharge papers for the men. All this notwithstanding, provosts and other local officials failed to pay attention to the lists of deserters and made only cursory searches for them, and military officers who succeeded in capturing deserters would demand exorbitant sums for returning them: in  some refused to hand deserters over for less than  livres each. Moreover, until  guard posts were arranged in military camps in open country in such a way that the generals almost seemed to be inviting men to desert. It could be argued that the king himself did the struggle against desertion no good by his abuse of the enlistment and discharge procedures. Men signed on in the belief that they would be released after a specified number of years, perhaps two, but Louis disliked limited engagements because they cost him and his officers more money trying to replace a retiring soldier. Consequently, after the War of Devolution in both wartime and peacetime Louis forbade more than one or two discharges each year, so that men would find themselves trapped in service. In some years no discharges whatsoever were allowed. Soldiers naturally felt betrayed and cheated by their officers and by their king. Most damaging of all were the amnesties issued by the king which seem to have had a deplorable effect on military discipline. The motive, in all cases, was to attract deserters back to the colours at a time when the crown was desperate for recruits. The first came in  – a general amnesty covering all previous desertion – and this was followed by several more over the next fifty years: for example, in January  another full general amnesty covering all desertion up to the end of , followed by another amnesty in April that year, and yet another in August which allowed men to return to service up to  December. Officers unofficially continued the provisions of these and other amnesties beyond their legal terms. By late  the king had officially acknowledged that this had produced ‘libertinage’ and desertion on an even greater scale than before because the troops had ceased to fear punishment. 

 

Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –; SHAT OM : examples of seals,  July ; A , no. : memorandum by Gaya []; A , no. : Bouchu to Louvois,  Sep. ; Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise, p. . SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Aug. ; BMG Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  Oct. ; Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise, p. . Corvisier, L’arm´ee fran¸caise de la fin du XVIIe si`ecle, p. ; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Mar. ; OM : ordonnance,  Nov. ; A , fol. r−v : Barbezieux to governors and commanding officers,  June ; BMG Saugeon , nos. , : ordonnances,  Jan.,  Aug. .



The officer corps and the standing army Clearly, the fight against desertion made some progress during Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’, mainly through better pay and conditions and some improvement in officer conduct, while exemplary punishments must have dissuaded a good number of men from deserting. But the problem had by no means been solved, as Louis Andr´e claimed. Indeed, as Louis’s armies expanded in size desertion once again became a great problem in terms of absolute numbers of men taking to their heels, even if one can say with reasonable certainty that the ratio of desertion to army size did not reach the proportions it had under Richelieu and Mazarin. Louis XIV implemented and then persisted with policies of cheating men of their discharges and of issuing amnesties in the full knowledge of the disadvantages they would bring, but one suspects that he pursued this approach because he felt that the threat of being caught and of receiving draconian punishment, plus a more effective pay system, would act as sufficient disincentives to desert for all but the most disgruntled and unhappy men. If he believed this, the fact that he sustained an army of over , men during the s means that he was probably correct. The beneficiaries of this improvement in manpower retention were as much the officers as the king himself. By the Nine Years War, after fifty years of trial and error, the king and his ministers had constructed a system which by and large – except in the worst circumstances – encouraged and enabled officers to have acceptable complements of men in their companies, and did not drive them to abject ruin. All that remained was to equip them.                               The company officers were given specific grants to cover some of the costs of clothing, boots, arms and equipment for their men, but they were also expected to use their own basic pay and associated bonuses, as well as recruitment money – over which they had considerable discretion – to meet these expenses. They were expected to make their own arrangements for the provision of these material goods, and often whole regiments would act together to buy in bulk. To take clothing, large amounts of cloth might be purchased which trained tailors within the regiment, or in the region where the regiment was then based, might turn into uniforms; or merchants in Paris or other large towns might be contracted to achieve the same finished products. In the first half of Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’ officers often bought cloth from abroad because it was cheaper, but mercantilist dictates led the king in October  to insist that all purchases were made within France, a move which only put up prices. The king supplied about ten fresh pairs of boots free of charge to each campaign company every autumn, while the War Ministry even had its own entrepot in Paris which at a price could supply saddles, bandoliers, 

Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –.



The business of a regiment harnesses, medical remedies and other equipment. This did not mean that clothing and equipment were always up to scratch. In fact renewal of uniforms, boots and other items took place only on a limited basis because officers held back fresh, pristine clothing to be used only during musters, while troops were often poorly shod because officers seemed reluctant to spend too much on their footwear. Captains retained the clothing of any of their men who died in hospital, and even seized the clothing and equipment of any soldiers discharged by the inspectors or the colonel. This kit would all be recycled for further use. The king himself insisted only that soldiers’ possessions were in a good state of repair – on occasion Louis even ordered officers not to hand out new uniforms if the old ones were still wearable. Prudence, even meanness, had some justification. The average cost of clothing an infantryman rose steadily during the reign, from  livres in around , to  livres  sous by , to between  and  livres in –. In  an ordinary infantry company, comprised of forty-five men, cost each year about , livres to clothe and another  livres to equip. This was a substantial amount from a captain’s budget. Arms supply also cost officers money. During wartime the king provided weapons free of charge to infantry campaign battalions, to newly raised units and to garrison companies if they underwent a siege. Otherwise, until January  – when the crown took over weapons supply for the whole infantry – the officers themselves bought the guns directly from the suppliers. After , when the infantry was supposed to obtain its muskets through the supply monopoly controlled by Maximilien Titon, cavalry and dragoon officers remained at liberty to buy guns wherever they wished. This monopoly was difficult to enforce, for the artisans working under Titon’s direction sold guns surreptitiously, but at least it meant greater standardisation of weaponry. Recruitment money was expected to cover the supply of weapons to a newly enlisted man, and at most other times a captain could include the replacement costs of a musket, pike, sword or, increasingly, bayonet among general deductions made from a soldier’s wages. Prior to the War of the Spanish Succession infantry officers wishing to equip their men with flintlock, as opposed to the more primitive matchlock muskets were expected to make up the difference in costs from their own pockets. To give an idea of the sums involved, in November  a dragoon regiment paid , livres for  bayonets and the same number 





Redlich, The German Military Enterpriser and his Workforce, vol. II, pp. –; SHAT A , no. : Du Repaire to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , no. : Magnac d’Arnolfiny to Barbezieux,  Jan. ; A , fol. r−v : placet au Roi, Nov. ; Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  Sep. ; Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, pp. , –; Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise, p. . SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  Aug. ; A , fol. r : Trobat to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , no. : Vauban to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; OM : ordonnance,  July ; Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, pp. , ; Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  Mar. . Lynn, Giant, p. ; Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise, p. .



The officer corps and the standing army of flintlock muskets, at a rate of  livres for the two weapons together for each man. Finally, cavalry and dragoon officers also had to secure horses for their men. A decent war-horse cost about  livres, on top of which the officer then had to purchase saddles, harnesses and bridles for the mount, as well as jerkins, pistols, sometimes cuirasses, and the different sort of boots required by cavaliers and dragoons, which, though not the same as each other, were both more expensive than the low-cut footwear of the infantry. To pay for all this, and to recruit a new trooper, a cavalry captain was given  livres recruitment money. On top of this, every year a specific payment, known as the ‘remonte’, would be given to those captains whose companies required fresh horses and whom their mestre de camp deemed able to profit from such assistance. Ownership of the horses and equipment was split between the officer and the soldier: if horses were sold during wartime then the officer benefited, but at demobilisation the men being discharged were given the receipts or the horse itself, much to the captains’ distaste. In any case, after extensive service a horse might have depreciated in value a great deal: in  they were being sold off for only  livres. If officers were expected to contribute towards all this from their pay and bonuses, and from recruitment money, the crown tried to ensure that many of the costs were met from a complex system of off-reckonings, or deductions – ‘retenues’ – on the pay of officers and men, plus the winter quarters supplement – the ustencile – and off-reckonings on this source as well. By imposing off-reckonings, and using them extensively from the War of Devolution onwards, the French government was copying the practices evolved by the Dutch during their wars of independence in the early seventeenth century. Louis XIV was essentially trying to protect his officers against their own short-sighted inclinations to spend money on non-essentials, in the cause of military sustainability. Retenues should be seen as a form of enforced saving, and it was hoped that officers would realise that if they made their men take good care of their equipment and clothing then they would get back some of the deductions in the form of cash at some stage. The retenues were not supposed to be there to be spent just as the officers wished, and they did not belong to them unless they were particularly efficient and until they were demobilised, while demobbed men were entitled to a share of their ustencile deductions. Moreover, the proceeds 



Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise, p. ; SHAT A , fol. v : Louis to Vendˆome,  Aug. ; fol. r : Barbezieux to Esgrigny,  Sep. ; A : to Dandign´e,  Mar. ; to Genlis,  Nov. ; A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; Bib Ars : Pezeux’s agreement with Titon,  Nov. ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. ; P. Bonnefoy, ‘Maximilien Titon, et le d´eveloppement des armes portatives en France, sous Louis XIV’, Revue Historique des Arm´ees  (), , ; P. Bonnefoy, ‘Maximilien Titon, directeur g´en´eral des magasins d’armes de Louis XIV, et le d´eveloppement des armes portatives en France’, Histoire, Economie et Soci´et´e  (), . SHAT A , no. : La Goupilli`ere to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Crenan,  May ; OM : ordonnance,  Sep. ; OM : ordonnance,  Nov. ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. –; Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, p. .



The business of a regiment of retenues were emphatically not to be used in the recruitment process, but for the replenishment of clothing and equipment only. To create an element of transparency, accounting of the off-reckonings was supposed to take place every three months after  and every six months after . Until November  infantry officers had to bear the full cost of clothing, boots and equipment for the troops because no retenues on the troops’ pay were allowed. Not only was this a harsh burden on infantry officers because of their low pay, but it only encouraged the men to be feckless because they had no stake in keeping their possessions in good order. Therefore, from then on the crown authorised limited deductions of  sol per day from the men’s wages unless the unit was on campaign in the field. When that was the case the same sum would be credited from central crown funds to the company’s accounts. The idea was that a deduction of this size each day would, over the course of a year, pay for a fresh set of clothes, but this took no account of the escalating costs of uniforms over the course of the reign, so that fresh clothing was typically issued only every other year. The total accumulated by a company from the off-reckonings on the men’s pay was known as the ‘masse d’habillement’. Before November  the officers themselves had held onto the retenues and had been using them for their own profit. Thereafter,  deniers of the sol were kept as the masse in the regimental account held by the Extraordinaire des Guerres and overseen by the regimental major, and sums from this source were only disbursed on the orders of the battalion commander or an inspector. Typically bills presented by merchants and artisans for the supply of coats, hats and leather goods would be met from the masse and the sums passed over to the suppliers without going through regimental hands. In recognition of the fact that shirts, cravats, stockings and boots had to replaced regularly, the other  deniers were passed over to the captains immediately. Around the start of the Nine Years War the king gave infantry officers some additional assistance by retaining deductions at the same level but raising other grants so that the purchase of weaponry would no longer be made from the masse. By the s, an infantry captain could expect to rely on somewhere between  and , livres each year for the upkeep of his company from retenues on the pay of the men. In the cavalry there was no masse because troopers received higher wages than foot soldiers and were expected to look after themselves under the supervision of their captain who was also paid far more in salary and allowances, though the Extraordinaire des Guerres also credited every company with  sous each day per man. Unfortunately, the crown was too trusting of the officers: as early as  it   

SHAT OM : ordonnances,  Nov. ;  Oct. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Genlis,  Dec. ; BNF NAF , fol. r : to Tess´e,  Oct. ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. . Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. , –, ; Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise, p. . SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Nov. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Tess´e,  Nov. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Sauron,  Jan. ; Vauban, vol. I, p. : ‘Reorganisation de l’arm´ee’ []; Corvisier, Louvois, p. .



The officer corps and the standing army was clear that some captains were not bothering to force the men to do their own off-reckonings so they were badly clothed, mounted and equipped; while at the opposite extreme even in the elite Gendarmerie de France the troopers – many of them nobles – were being cheated by their officers who forced them to make excessive deductions from their wages. Surprisingly the crown took no remedial action other than to castigate particular officers. The king and his ministers persisted in seeing cavalry officers as more reliable and honest than their counterparts in the infantry, in large part because they were supplied with more funds. Why the crown did not force more restrictive procedures on the cavalry to improve standards remains something of a mystery, but the answer may lie in a cultural predisposition to esteem the horse more highly than the foot and to leave it more to its own devices without narrow supervision. Separate from the masse was the ustencile, but, although it was supposed to be spent on the same sort of things, unlike the masse captains were allowed far greater discretion to use it as they wished. The ustencile, which was levied during winter months only, can be separated into two component parts: ‘nature’ which covered the provision of a bed, sheets, candles and other items and entitlements in a billet, and which lasted up to ; and ‘esp`ece’ or ‘argent’ or ‘Grand Ustencile’ which was paid by all those eligible to pay the taille who did not personally endure the billeting of troops, and which operated from  until . It is the latter with which we are concerned here. This part of the ustencile was effectively a gratification to officers to help them re-establish their companies in winter and support them during the campaign season, and it could come to a colossal amount of money for an entire regiment: Pezeux dragoons were entitled to , livres in –. Typically, for the  designated days of winter quarters, an infantry captain of a campaign battalion could expect around  livres from the ustenciles of his subalterns and men, plus another  livres from his own personal entitlement. In the Dutch War it was all given in cash by the Extraordinaire des Guerres to the captain, who distributed it as he saw fit and pocketed the surplus. Up to  a cavalry captain on the frontier was allowed to keep for himself up to one-third of the men’s ustencile and in the interior up to one-half. The problem with this was that it provided no systematic framework for reliable income and only encouraged binge spending when large amounts of money flowed into the hands of both the officers and men. It was not a system which encouraged sustainability. Accordingly, during the winter of – the crown introduced a retenue on the ustencile, holding back a proportion of the  



Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise, pp. –; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Jan. ; A , no. : Bonval to Barbezieux,  Apr. . The willingness of Louis XIV himself to allow the cavalry greater autonomy in its affairs both large and small can be seen strongly in his behaviour towards the Colonel-General of cavalry and the other prerogative office-holders of this arm. See Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –. Navereau, Le logement et les ustenciles des gens de guerre, pp. –, , , ; Bib Ars : ustencile estimate for Pezeux dragoons, –; Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, .



The business of a regiment money released to the captain – including  livres from the captain’s own ustencile, and  and  livres respectively from the  and  livres belonging to his lieutenant and sous-lieutenant – so that it could instead be paid during the summer months in five separate instalments to the regimental major who would then pass on what he felt was required. By spreading payment across the year it gave officers a more reliable, regular income with which they could attract credit. From the same time the Extraordinaire des Guerres withheld and banked  sous per ustencile place for the cavalry, which was also distributed during the summer in five portions, except it was given directly to the men and not to their captain. The introduction of deductions on the ustencile was a sensible move, but by the middle of the s financial difficulties afflicting the crown meant that the summer instalments were being spread over six months, rather than five, and were often paid at erratic intervals. Even so, it was still a considerable improvement on the situation before . By developing a more stable framework for supplying the officers with sufficient funds, and spreading payments out more smoothly across the year, Louis XIV’s government was recognising the key role of credit at the heart of regimental military administration: the king’s officers had to be encouraged and even forcibly disciplined by payment mechanisms into preserving their own creditworthiness in good times and in bad. This does not mean that after  officers became paragons of financial virtue who always paid their bills on time. Indeed they did not: some lieutenant-colonels and colonels did acquire very poor credit ratings and merchants refused to do business with them, while, unsurprisingly, many regiments had sizeable debts at the end of major wars. Captains, majors and colonels placed orders for clothing and equipment, and then dragged out the process of payment for as long as possible, so merchants frequently demanded written guarantees of specific collateral for payment, such as a proportion of the remonte or the ustencile due to a unit, or even the royal pension expected by a colonel, lieutenant-colonel or major. Furthermore, officers and merchants alike encountered periodic problems with the non-payment, or delayed payment, of, for example, the ustencile. In these circumstances the inadequate flow of funds to officers forced them to trade promissory notes on the value of the expected sums at a discount, sometimes an unavoidable but potentially dangerous step which might only postpone the unpleasant day of reckoning with creditors. The importance of a masse or some other reliable and 



 

Corvisier, Louvois, p. ; Navereau, Le logement, pp. –; SHAT A , no. : certificate,  Jan. ; A , no. : Maisoncelle to Barbezieux,  Mar. ; OM : ordonnances,  Oct. ,  Apr. ,  Nov. . SHAT A , no. : Huxelles to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to de Meaux,  Dec. ; BNF FF , fols. r , r , r , r : Barbezieux to La Fonds,  Oct.,  Oct.,  Aug. (× ) . Bib Ars : receipt from Delaballe,  Jan. ; IOU note to Aribert from the chevalier de Pezeux,  Jan. ; BNF NAF , fols. r−v , r : Barbezieux to Tess´e,  Mar.,  May . SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Crozat,  Sep. ; A , no. : Huxelles to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; Bib Ars : Bagard to Mainfroy,  Mar. .



The officer corps and the standing army managed bloc of regimental funds to provide collateral for credit and large expenditures can be seen by a cursory glance at the wretched situation of unregimented garrison companies. In spite of the difficulties that were encountered across the army, the situation was generally tolerable for merchants and officers most of the time, at least before the mid-s – if the case had been otherwise the army would have deteriorated to a massive extent long before the darkest years of the War of the Spanish Succession.                                 Louis XIV and the Le Tellier understood very well that no system they could devise, and over which the War Ministry could maintain control, could be flexible enough to provide incentives to perform good service beyond the limits of what was expected. To secure performance from officers which went beyond the immediate call of duty the king needed to dispense special favours to those worthy of extra reward, and during the ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV the government showed itself to be far more inclined to give additional assistance on a wider scale than ever before. After  there was a general and gradual improvement in the range of incentives which the crown could offer, and Louis ensured that his subjects realised that extra rewards were wholly dependent on the royal whim. Of course, the king relied upon ministers, generals and courtiers to draw his attention to meritorious individuals, but it was Louvois who exercised preponderant control over compensation and reward mechanisms for regimental officers from the s. This was almost certainly the key to forcing officers to knuckle under to the War Ministry. Regimental officers in the French army had high hopes of advancement whether it came with tangible, material benefits or not. Promotion to the titular rank of captain or colonel, even if it brought a lieutenant or a lieutenant-colonel the possession of no company or regiment, was sought for the greater prestige it brought. Real promotion, to be colonel with a regiment or to be a brigadier, was more complicated. Converted Huguenots – the so-called ‘nouveaux convertis’ – wishing to acquire such positions might be catapulted over the heads of other, more senior officers causing no little resentment, though it should be said that Louis had earlier blocked the promotion of Huguenots from the end of the Dutch War, so some of these men were merely catching up in their careers. Whoever obtained a regiment, a significant amount of money was required to buy it and most lieutenant-colonels did not have the wherewithal. It has been argued that Louis XIV instead evolved a career structure which allowed talented, but impoverished individuals to rise through non-venal  

SHAT A , no. : Vrevin to Barbezieux,  July . SHAT A , no. : Noailles to Barbezieux,  June ; A , no. : Imecourt to Barbezieux,  Feb. ; Dangeau, vol. II, p. ,  June ; vol. III, p. ,  Dec. ; vol. V, p. ,  Apr. ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  June  et seq.; p. ,  Feb.  et seq.; Lavall´ee, vol. II, pp. –: Maintenon to Mme de Villette,  Dec. .



The business of a regiment routes into the higher ranks of the army. Certainly some lieutenant-colonels were promoted directly to brigadier in the s and s, but, pace Corvisier, they were a small minority, even in the infantry: less than a handful took this route in the cavalry, and most brigadiers were also colonels. Only four out of thirty-three new brigadiers in June  were lieutenant-colonels, and only nine out of ninetythree in the January  promotion. Realistically speaking – despite the hopes nurtured by young officers – for most captains, majors and lieutenant-colonels even the acquisition of brigadier rank was a very remote possibility. Actual military promotion was only likely to take an ambitious officer so far up the social ladder in seventeenth-century France. Instead, ordinary officers were more likely to get assistance from the crown in a variety of other forms. At any one time most officers owed somebody money, but for much of the seventeenth century those whose indebtedness had reached extreme proportions received no help from the crown, even though ministers were aware of their parlous situation. From the Dutch War, however, the king tried to alleviate officers’ private financial problems. In – Louis imposed a moratorium on pursuing commoner officers for outstanding franc-fief payments, and many lettres d’´etat were issued during his wars suspending the actions of creditors against individual officers both noble and otherwise. But by the end of the Nine Years War Louis and his ministers realised that the entire officer corps needed some degree of protection from creditors, so he issued an unprecedented declaration: from February , for three years, all who had served from October  until October  as officers in the armed forces, or as troopers in the Arri`ere-Ban or in the Maison du Roi, plus surviving children of the same who had died in service in the same period, plus all those officers wounded since , would enjoy full royal legal protection against judicial sequestration and involuntary sale of their assets, and immovable property which had already been seized was to be restored to its owner. This was a great relief to many officers and their families, though even at the time the declaration was issued contemporaries expected vast amounts of litigation to arise from its provisions and some feared that it would both destabilise the credit market inside France and lead to creditors piling all their pressure on those who did not enjoy immunity from pursuit. The king, if he had any such qualms, had clearly decided to give priority to the interests of his nobility and officer corps over the financial and mercantile sector. Even if officers did not have their debts quoshed or suspended by the government, Louis and his advisers still understood that they had to help them maintain their creditworthiness. With this imperative in mind, assistance was certainly forthcoming in the Nine   

Corvisier, Louvois, pp. , –, ; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Mar. ; Sourches, vol. IV, pp. –,  June ; vol. V, pp. –, –,  Jan.,  Jan. . SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Dec. . The franc-fief was a feudal due payable by commoners on land they purchased which was designated as ‘noble’. SHAT A , no. : ‘Discours’, ; OM : king’s declaration,  Feb. ; Sourches, vol. VI, pp. –,  Feb. .



The officer corps and the standing army Years War: in September  , e´cus were sent to Dinant to discharge debts incurred in that city by French units who had been based at Namur; later that year winter quarters treatment was extended by a whole month to all units which had been involved in the siege of Namur. Other instances of the crown suspending normal rules and bending pay regulations abound. Direct financial assistance outside the normal pay and allowance system was often forthcoming. Officers might find themselves in an anomalous but legal situation which threatened to deprive them of some of their legitimate pay entitlement, especially when absent from their units, in which case the Secretary of War would issue a ‘relief ’ – an authorisation for the Extraordinaire des Guerres to pay an officer a specific sum – though Louis preferred that this was only done when a large number of officers possessed outstanding claims and he often made them wait for favourable financial circumstances. More common was the issuing of gratifications with various justifications: as rewards for outstanding service, to compensate officers for catastrophic losses in, for example, a fire, or to cover specific and unusual expenses in the line of duty. One list of  gratifications to military officers for  totals , livres, of which fifty-eight grants worth , livres went to French regimental officers (as opposed to foreign units, general officers, the artillery or the Maison du Roi). The sums varied between  and , livres. One colonel was given , livres specifically to distribute among his officers as he saw fit. Two further lists for the last six months of  and for the whole of  point to grants of between  and , livres to regimental officers. None of these lists are definitive but they provide a good indication of what was going on. Gratifications would also be paid out to wounded officers, for they could often find themselves in dire financial trouble if they became incapacitated. The total of such assistance to officers wounded at the battle of Staffarda in  came to , livres, and all those injured at the siege of Montm´elian in  were given  livres each to help pay for their recuperation and treatment. Those particularly badly wounded might get considerably more. This was all quite generous by the standards of the time, but the king wanted to avoid abuses and the creation of an entitlement culture. Though he wanted the generals to give the appearance that they decided on all such grants, unfortunately officers refused to accept money from them unless they knew it was coming from the king. This was, of course, an admirable sentiment, but Louis was accordingly forced to acknowledge wound grants as a crown policy. Moreover, the  





Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  Sep. ; SHAT A , fol. r : to Bagnols,  Dec. . SHAT A , fol. r−v : Barbezieux to Coigny,  Sep. ; A : to Nanclas,  Dec. ; A , no. : Noailles to Barbezieux,  June ; A , no. : Chalay to Barbezieux,  Sep. . Typical examples can be found in the following: SHAT A , no. : Louis to Catinat,  June ; A , fol. v : Louis to Catinat,  Sep. ; A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  May ; A , no. : Des Clos to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, p. . BNF FF (i), fols. r –r ; FF (ii), fols. v –r , v –v , v –r .



The business of a regiment potential for gain meant that officers would cynically exaggerate the extent of their injuries in the aftermath of an action. More stable rewards came in the form of pensions. The pension budget for the military was always retrospective because the king added people to his list whenever he wished, and entirely at his own whim. Most predictable were the annual, renewed gratifications which were disbursed by the king in recognition of the burdensome tasks undertaken by the most senior officers in each regiment and which contemporaries thought of as pensions. In the French infantry in  fifteen lieutenantcolonels received  livres per annum, two received , nineteen received , seventy-two received , and the lieutenant-colonel of the r´egiment du Roi got ,. The basic rate for an ordinary regiment’s lieutenant-colonel was  livres; that for a major was  livres; and that for a grenadier captain was  livres. Typical of Louis’s generosity towards the horse, cavalry majors received a  livres per annum pension from that year. Most colonels did not enjoy pensions linked to their rank, for a colonelcy was usually awarded only to somebody with an already sizeable private income, but dragoon colonels, in recognition of the high costs they incurred but the lower salary they received than their cavalry counterparts, received , livres by . On top of this, a few nobles from prestigious dynasties but who exercised lesser military rank as captains also enjoyed royal pensions, as did subalterns – especially in grenadier companies – who had performed especially valiant deeds. More senior officiers r´eform´es might also get a pension. Essentially, among serving officers there were a low number of colonels, lieutenant-colonels and majors who enjoyed pensions over and above the standard annual gratification due to their rank, but those colonels and lieutenant-colonels who were also brigadiers did receive further support; by contrast, captains and subalterns accounted between them for just one-tenth of total pension expenditure in –. To a great extent this pattern of distribution could be justified by the higher level of personal expenditure made by regimental staff officers, as opposed to captains. But other aspects of the pension system were more problematic. Huguenot officers who converted to catholicism and remained in service after  received pensions of several hundred or even several thousand livres merely on account of transferring their religious loyalties. Pensions were sometimes transferable as an officer moved 



SHAT A , no. : Lorge to Louvois,  Oct. ; A , no. : Catinat to Louvois,  July ; A , no. : Louvois to Catinat,  July ; A , no. : Bouchu to Louvois,  Sep. ; no. : Catinat to Louvois,  Sep. ; A , no. : La Hoguette to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A : Barbezieux to Bagnols,  Aug. ; A : Bagnols to Barbezieux,  Aug.,  Aug. ; A , no. : Luxembourg to Louis,  Aug. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Sep. ; A , no. : Louvois to Cr´equi,  June , in Hardr´e, p. ; BNF FF (i), fol. r . BNF FF (i), fols. r –r ; FF (ii), fols. r –v ; FF , fols. v –r , r ; BMG Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  Feb. ; SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  May ; A , fols. v –r : Louis to Vendˆome,  July ; AN G : e´tat of pensions for  [–]; Massiac, M´emoires, p. ; Sourches, vol. VI, pp. , ,  Dec. ,  Mar. .



The officer corps and the standing army around, so a pension might be reduced or denied altogether to an officer if the man he was replacing in a post had his pension continued. Furthermore, the actual payment of military pensions did not have the highest priority for the Extraordinaire des Guerres and officers could find themselves owed a great deal of money. To improve the chances of military officers getting the help they needed, in  Chamlay proposed that the king reduce the salaries and pensions of civilian recipients at court and operating in other arenas. Little came of this, no doubt because it was politically unacceptable. The most honourable and prized pensions were those which were linked to wounds, long service and membership of French chivalric orders, in particular the Order of Saint-Lazare and the Order of Saint-Louis. The traditional method of helping veteran officers retiring from service, which prevailed right through the s, was to give them lump sums of around  livres, or, if they were in favour at court, pensions on religious houses or a place in such an establishment as an oblate. Nevertheless, from  it was clear that the king had his eye on the combined Order of Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel and Saint-Lazare as a source of support for poor nobles disabled in state service. The Order had declined in prestige and wealth during the seventeenth-century, but from  it began to acquire large amounts of property and endowments, with the example set by the duc d’Orl´eans who returned all property and benefices related to it contained within his apanage. In  the incumbent Grand Master, N´erestang, was given massive financial inducements to resign his post, which sent the Order into serious debt and forced the crown to issue an ordinance that December to recover properties alienated and usurped from it over previous generations. At the same time a system of commanderies and pensions was established for officers no longer fit for military service, with the explicit hope that this would encourage good service. In February  Louvois assumed the post of Grand Vicar and turned the Order into his personal fiefdom, administered by his clients Camus de Beaulieu (artillery Controller-General), Jean de Turmenyes (Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres from ), counsellor M´erault of the Paris Parlement (until ), and a number of financiers. The Chambre royale set up to adjudicate on all matters relating to the Saint-Lazare was packed with Le Tellier supporters. For the rest of his life Louvois pursued highly authoritarian attempts to build up the Order’s endowments which were met, in turn, with a barrage of lawsuits. Of particular controversy was his milking of the well-endowed but poorly administered Order of the Saint-Esprit de Montpellier, whose Vicar-General and members were repeatedly threatened when they protested or tried to assemble.   

AN G : [ placet?] re Boulou []; BNF FF , fol. v ; Sourches, vol. V, pp. –,  Feb. ; La Fayette, M´emoires, p. . SHAT A , no. : proposals for army reduction,  July . Saint-Maurice, vol. I, p. : Saint-Maurice to San Tommaso,  Apr. ; BNF FF , fols. r –r : e´dit, Dec. ; fols. v –r : commission for council of Saint-Lazare,  Feb.,  Mar. ;



The business of a regiment During its period of existence as a military corporation, between  and , the crown appointed a total of between  and  ex-officers as knights and commanders of the Order of Saint-Lazare – about half of them had been captains, with another quarter either colonels or subalterns. In addition, a few disabled exofficers not provided with membership of the Order might still benefit from pensions generated by its resources. However, in spite of all the activity by Louvois to construct a sustainable Order to support retired officers, the attempts to build up endowments and to generate significant income met with only limited success. In part this was because, first, Louvois was piously tying the practical question of financial assistance to a religious vision of a godly officer corps: he wanted commanders of the Order to exercise rights of patronage and control over the chapels and churches belonging to it, and to use some of the revenue to maintain them. Second, the property of the Order was widely scattered, often in small parcels of land, and in spite of the involvement of major financiers in the Order, commanders were supposed to organise the farming out of revenue collection themselves. These factors were a recipe for low yields which afflicted commanders and ordinary knights alike. The reorganisation of the commanderies in  does not seem to have improved matters significantly. Furthermore, the disputes about property were involving beneficiary officers, as well as the crown, in expensive legal costs. A month after Louvois’s death, in August , Pomponne was informed by one officer that the Saint-Lazare was simply not yielding the resources that had been hoped for. With the controversies over the dubious sequestration of assets coming to a head at this time, the growing qualms about despoiling the church of its wealth, a desire to improve relations with the papacy and the basic practical failure of the Saint-Lazare scheme all encouraged the king to appoint a set of commissioners to examine the problem. In March  Louis decoupled the Order from military service and restored the status quo ante-. Later that year a new institution was established, the Order of Saint-Louis. The new Order was not designed simply to replace the Saint-Lazare, for retirement was not the necessary criterion for admission, and senior as well as junior officers filled many of the vacancies. Moreover, the king envisaged that, for the purpose of the Order, commoner and noble officers would be placed on an equal footing, and membership of the Saint-Louis would bring ennoblement if an officer were a





fols. v –r : commission for Chambre royale,  Feb. ; fols. r –r : petition to king and commissioners, ; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Dec. ; Herman, ‘Knights and Kings in Early Modern France’, pp. , –, –, –, –, –, –, –. Herman, ‘Knights and Kings’, pp. , –; Corvisier, Louvois, p. ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. , ; SHAT OM : e´dit, Mar. ; Bib Ars , fol. v : chevalier de Corbet to Pomponne,  Aug. . Herman, ‘Knights and Kings’, pp. –, , ; Dangeau, vol. I, p. , notes; p. ,  Oct. . Back in  Louis had ceased to give church benefices to serving knights of Malta, even if they were in the French forces. He had, though, siphoned revenues from vacant episcopal sees during the R´egale dispute with Rome and channelled them to help military officers – this came to an end with the settlement with the pope in  (marquis de Forbin, ‘Le cardinal de Forbin-Janson a` Rome. L’affaire des bulles (–)’, Revue d’Histoire Diplomatique  (), ).



The officer corps and the standing army member of the Third Estate. To be eligible for one of the  endowed places, an officer must have served for ten years, performed distinguished actions and received some wound or other. Most of the knights of the Saint-Lazare were transferred to the Saint-Louis. There was also an internal hierarchy within the Saint-Louis, reflected in the size of pensions, and men could be promoted from chevalier to commander to ‘grand cross’. Two-thirds of the funds came from sources belonging to the Hˆotel Royal des Invalides, and the rest from royal subsidies which were essentially nonreligious and certainly not linked to devotional worship. One hundred and twentyeight knights received between  and , livres each, twenty-four commanders , or , livres, and eight ‘grand crosses’ , each. Demand for a place was insatiable, not least because the king himself was the Grand Master of the Order, and he personally invested all new knights, with Barbezieux handing him the decorations to bestow on the recipients. Unlike the Saint-Lazare it did widen the range of opportunities available for the lesser nobility and for commoner officers. Nevertheless, not everybody could benefit financially. The edict establishing the Order had provided only for  pensions, though the king could appoint as many non-stipendiary knights as he wished. By spring  the total had climbed to  members, all of whom were considered highly deserving, and when vacancies for an endowed pension arose they tended to be filled from the surplus knights. But after  the Order was debased, as the crown ran ever more short of money to reward and bribe officers and had to turn to honorific inducements. By  there were , members of the Saint-Louis and by  a ridiculous ,. Other rewards and forms of compensation for military officers are worth highlighting. Some captains and colonels could hope for appointment to a post in a fortress or citadel of some sort, but although there was ample scope for profiteering at the start of Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’ Louvois later came down very heavily upon it. Instead, officers could expect a few perks plus the extra salary which appointment as a governor, major or lieutenant de Roi of a fortress might bring. Barbezieux disliked the fact that officers would draw salaries for doing nothing simply to support their activities with their regiment, but given the fact that the local urban communities themselves provided many of the emoluments for these posts, it made some sense from the central government’s perspective. A decent retirement could also be secured by appointment to a post in a fortress, though there were other ways of providing for the future: the king was particularly concerned that good 





Herman, ‘Knights and Kings’, pp. , , , –; M. d’Aspect, Histoire de l’ordre royal et militaire de Saint-Louis,  vols. (Paris, ), vol. I, pp. , ; Dangeau, vol. VII, p. ,  Jan. . Aspect, Histoire de l’ordre royal, vol. I, p. xxxv; Quarr´e, M´emoires, p. ; Herman, ‘Knights and Kings’, pp. –, –; Dangeau, vol. IV, pp. , ,  Feb.,  Mar. ; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Feb. ; SHAT Ya: memorandum on the Order of Saint-Louis, July ; second memorandum,  Oct. . Quarr´e, M´emoires, pp. –; Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  Jan. ; Vauban, vol. II, p. : Barbezieux to Vauban,  Nov. .



The business of a regiment lieutenant-colonels should retire on royal pensions, and officers of other ranks also received such largesse. Subaltern officers and captains who had withdrawn from regiments might join one of the units of the Maison du Roi as a trooper because they could no longer support their activities as officers. There was always room here for a sound ex-officer. A few junior officers with powerful connections might be fortunate enough to acquire minor court office which brought further emolument: Villeras, a captain in the Pi´emont infantry, was a gentilhomme servant de Sa Majest´e, and, thanks to the duc du Maine, became Secr´etaire ordinaire de la chambre du Roi a` la conduite des ambassadeurs. Colonels and lieutenant-colonels were given fiefs for the duration of their military service, or even companies or whole regiments to sell on for their own profit. Finally, the king twice protected his officers from investigation at the time of ‘recherches de noblesse’ which were aimed at rooting out those falsely claiming nobility. Even for long-established noble dynasties with plenty of proofs this could be a vexatious process, and for those whose family documents were in poor order it could be a nightmare. The last thing Louis wanted was his military officers distracted by such things in the middle of wars, and if the commissioners were to rule against a family the financial consequences could be severe.                            Of course, thus far the system outlined here has been largely presented in a way that showed how it operated with more or less success most of the time for most of the army, and only a few allusions have yet been made to drawbacks and problems. But military life was full of unexpected exigencies and contingencies, and even the more senior officers experienced difficulties: dragoon regiments whose colonels had insufficient private income seem to have been particularly susceptible to degeneration, but so too could any regiment owned by a general whose attentions were concentrated on the broader direction of military operations. Unexpectedly high demands could be placed on all colonels and captains in the shape of additional burdens of service which could turn a viable financial system into a crushing one. Clearly, officers might find the fate of their unit dictated, at least in part, by circumstances beyond their control. Pay sources dried up periodically, especially for garrisons beyond France’s borders throughout the reign and for the whole army on frequent occasions during the years –. In these circumstances officers were     

Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise, p. ; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Sep. ; BNF FF , fols. r , v ; FF (i), fol. r ; Sandras, La conduite de Mars, p. . Dangeau, vol. VII, p. ,  Nov. . SHAT A , no. : Harcourt to Barbezieux,  July ; Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Jan. ; vol. V, p. ,  Dec. . SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Apr. ; OM : declaration,  Sep. . SHAT A , no. : La Bourdonnaye to Barbezieux,  Jan. ; A , fol. r : Louis to Villeroi,  June ; BNF NAF , fol. v : Barbezieux to Tess´e,  Mar. .



The officer corps and the standing army forced to skimp on replacing clothing and equipment for the men in order to divert money to their own pocket to maintain themselves in service, or they permitted the men to maraud with impunity. Furthermore, at any time units operating beyond the French frontiers might be forced to accept disadvantageous currency exchange rates, and officers were even forced to pledge their own credit to back government bills of exchange to secure the pay of their units. They also had to contend with perennial delays in communications and the inevitable difficulties of long distances, problems which could be worsened when units were operating beyond the king’s frontiers. Administrative sclerosis did not help in this regard either. Inspectors, who became increasingly important in the lives of regimental officers during the s and began to act as filters between them and the Secretary of War, often could not be reached as they travelled around the country, and so inordinate amounts of time might pass between a colonel writing to an inspector explaining his needs, the inspector receiving the letter and then contacting the War Ministry at Versailles, and the War Ministry finally replying to either the inspector or the colonel. The scale of military activity in general was becoming a problem. As the army became bigger the pay bill facing the crown increased in size, and the pool of money for extra financial assistance from the government shrank. Furthermore, commodity prices rose, first because this was an era of relatively stagnant supply, and second because growing demand could be felt at specific pressure points within the country and the military system. This was only exacerbated by poor short-term economic conditions, most notably the catastrophic harvests of –. In such circumstances the bread supply could, and frequently did, break down, leaving captains forced to equip their companies with hand mills to grind wheat themselves. Sometimes captains lost soldiers altogether through no fault of their own. Officers often reluctantly had to give up men temporarily for other tasks, such as constructing fortifications or servicing the artillery – what they feared was losing them permanently through accidents or consequent desertion. Most resented of all was the forcible transfer of men into the ranks of elite grenadier (infantry) and carabinier (cavalry) companies. Whole regiments could fall into poor condition, especially as a result of a major battle: when the king proposed Vandeuil take over the r´egiment de Gournai after the savage battle of Neerwinden he refused to pay for it because it had been ruined in the action. Long marches, especially in winter, could wreck the health of man and 

   

SHAT A , no. : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , no. : Baudouin to Barbezieux,  Mar. ; A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  May ; A , fol. v : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; A , no. : La Goupilli`ere to Barbezieux,  Nov. . SHAT A , no. : Segent to Barbezieux,  Jan. ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  May . SHAT A , no. : Wartigny to Chamillart,  Aug. . SHAT A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to all cavalry and dragoon colonels,  Apr. . Mallet, Les travaux de Mars, vol. III, p. ; SHAT A : Barbezieux to Genlis,  Apr. ; A , no. : memorandum [c. ]; Lemoine, ‘Madame de La Fayette et Louvois’, pp. –.



The business of a regiment beast. Furthermore, the relative lack of field hospitals in some theatres brought about more deaths than would otherwise have occurred. Newly appointed captains who took over dilapidated companies received no extra money to restore them to good condition unless somebody lobbied the War Ministry on their behalf. One captain spent , livres of his own money upon assuming command of a dragoon company, and then had to fight off an attempt by the ministry to deduct , livres from his funds because of horses which had been missing under his predecessor. Justice might eventually have been done – often by pursuing the previous incumbent for restitution of money – but it took time, and the anxiety felt by officers in such situations is still palpable in the surviving documentation. After Neerwinden in , a combination of battle losses and several months of non-payment led dozens of officers in the army of Flanders to desert their posts and return to their homes.                 :          ’  The conditions of the mid-s were extreme and put the French officer corps and Louis XIV’s regimental administration to the greatest test it had yet faced. But on a lesser scale such trials and tribulations were not an unanticipated aspect of military service, even if officers of the dragoons and of infantry campaign battalions knew they were more likely to face them than their counterparts in the cavalry or in garrisons. Captains and colonels periodically got into difficulties or took on more than they could handle. But the situation of the subaltern officers – the lieutenants, sous-lieutenants, ensigns, guidons and cornets – was far worse than that of their superiors. Not only were they paid considerably less than a captain, but they still might have to provide him with financial contributions and they certainly assisted heavily with the management of regimental business. Their treatment was the real cloud on what was otherwise, by the standards of the time, a fairly clear horizon of military administration. If some subalterns were middle-aged veterans whose careers had been thwarted by poverty, most were young men with great hopes for the future. Subaltern posts were seen as a purgatorial, apprentice phase in an officer’s life, and the most ambitious holders of such ranks tried to give the appearance that they were richer than was truly the case in order to stand a better chance of acquiring a captaincy and a company. More senior officers even descended to demanding bribes to secure promotion for subalterns, many of whom paid up. Veritably, some subalterns steered a perilous course: they spent lavishly to inspire confidence that they could take on a captaincy,  

Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Jan. ; BNF FF , fol. v . Vauban, vol. II, p. : Vauban to Louvois,  Apr. ; SHAT A : Louvois to Trobat,  July ; A , no. : Trobat to Barbezieux,  May ; no. : captain de Campredon to Barbezieux,  May ; A , no. : Luxembourg to Louis,  Aug. ; no. : Artaignan to Barbezieux,  Aug. .



The officer corps and the standing army but they might so deplete their capital and credit in the process that they ran the risk of having no money actually to purchase a company. Many of them got heavily into debt to acquire fancy periwigs, waistcoats and coats with huge sleeves. To put on a good show for their fellows and attract a reputation as a good man they also indulged in excessive eating and drinking. Such a lifestyle was unsustainable as a subaltern unless officers had a private income or mortgaged ever greater amounts of their patrimony, something which was not practical for the majority of them from rustic backgrounds. Subaltern pay was on the level of a good valet to a courtier. Between  and  infantry lieutenants received  livres a year, but thereafter this dropped to  for those in garrison companies, though in September  these unfortunates saw their pay go up to  livres. Dragoon lieutenants also suffered an absolute pay cut between  and . From April , with the onset of major war, infantry lieutenants on campaign found their pay dropping to a miserly rate of approximately  livres over the year, while sous-lieutenants in the same position received only  livres. The young Franc¸ois de Sarram´ea, struggling in  as a sous-lieutenant of a campaign company, with a single valet to support and requiring a dressing gown, bed, tent, chests, dishes, linen and coats, told his father that he really needed an annual income of around  livres. This was no special pleading. Senior officers regularly reported on the misery and pitiful condition in which they found subalterns, many of whom did without horses altogether. Captains were supposed to give their lieutenant a share in the king’s benefits and in any profits that were made and to help them in case of unforeseen catastrophe, but in reality they gave them little support. In part this was because many had been foisted on captains by their superiors. The mar´echal de Catinat pointed out to Barbezieux that it was only because so many subalterns had poor, rural upbringings that they were naturally able to put up with extreme poverty in the army. Demobilisations at the end of the Dutch War, War of the R´eunions and the Nine Years War all saw the suppression of sous-lieutenants and cornets (though the very best might acquire ‘reformed’ positions), in truth a merciful cull of young men who were struggling terribly to sustain themselves. But when international relations 

 

  

SHAT MR : ‘Projet pour l’Infanterie’ [c. ]; Quarr´e, M´emoires, p. ; Sarram´ea, Lettres, pp. –: Franc¸ois to his father,  Apr. ; Vauban, vol. I, pp. –: ‘Reorganisation de l’arm´ee’ []. SHAT OM : ordonnances,  Feb.,  Mar. ; OM : ordonnance,  Apr. ; Sarram´ea, Lettres, pp. , –: Franc¸ois to his father,  Feb.,  Feb. . SHAT A , no. : Maisoncelle to Barbezieux,  June ; A , no. : Noailles to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; Sarram´ea, Lettres, p. : Franc¸ois to his father,  Apr. ; Vauban, vol. II, pp. –: Vauban to Chamillart,  July . Sandras, La conduite de Mars, p. ; Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, p. ; SHAT A , no. : ‘Discours’, ; A , no. : Feuqui`eres to Louvois,  Feb. . SHAT A , no. bis: Catinat to Barbezieux,  Mar. . For –, see SHAT OM : ordonnances,  Jan.,  Sep.,  Dec. (× ) .



The business of a regiment began to deteriorate and war seemed likely the government would restore these posts in existing regiments, and at the start of every conflict there was a clamour for subaltern positions. For just thirty-four vacancies of lieutenant and cornet in the new r´egiment des dragons de Languedoc, composed of seventeen companies, over sixty nobles presented themselves in . As the Nine Years War dragged on, however, such enthusiasm fell away. By the time of Louvois’s death in July  there was already a shortage of subalterns throughout the army, and this became a chronic problem in the following three years. It was an issue the king was prepared to acknowledge quite openly, and he tried to prevent nobles from serving as volunteers in the ranks when subaltern vacancies existed in the same regiment. Where available, capitaines r´eform´es were forced to undertake the duties of lieutenants, and souslieutenants became almost non-existent in many infantry regiments. Apart from the extra burden this put on captains, who would have to spend far more time on drilling and disciplining the men, numerous other difficulties were caused by the shortfall in subalterns: fewer officers meant units could not be relied upon for action, either in pitched battles or sieges, in case the men panicked or fled; fortress commanders were reluctant to send out patrols without enough subalterns to control the men’s propensity to pillage; and sometimes it was difficult to find enough officers to remain with a regiment during the winter months while others were sent on semester to recruit fresh troops and to see to business affairs. Pace Tuetey, this deficiency predated the War of the Spanish Succession. The gaps were caused in part by desertion, but principally because it was increasingly hard even to recruit subalterns or to get them to join their regiment once they had received their commissions. Both Louvois and Barbezieux exacerbated the crisis by insisting that aspirants for subaltern posts – and even for places in the cadet companies – had to come to court for an interview with them. All this involved time and expense, and even though the king paid them six weeks’ salary and all forage expenses for the journey the costs still acted as a major deterrent to entering service. The mar´echal de Noailles estimated that a man going from Roussillon to Versailles and back, and equipping and attiring himself suitably to make a favourable impression  

 

Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, p. ; Noailles, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –. SHAT A , no. : Herleville to Louvois,  July ; A , no. : commission for Coigny,  Dec. ; A , no. : Luxembourg to Louis,  Sep. ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A , fol. r : Crenan to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A , fol. r : Noailles to Louis,  Aug. ; A , no. : Noailles to Barbezieux,  July ; A , no. : Maisoncelle to Barbezieux,  May ; no. : Larray to Barbezieux,  Mar. ; A , no. : memorandum, Aug. ; A : Barbezieux to Nanclas,  Feb. ; Vauban, vol. II, p. : Vauban to Le Peletier,  Oct. .  Noailles, M´emoires, vol. I, . Tuetey, Les officiers sous l’ancien r´egime, p. . SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Lorge,  May ; OM : Barbezieux to cavalry and dragoon colonels,  June ; A , no. : Courtebonne to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Nov. ; A , fols. v –r , v –r : Barbezieux to Larray,  Apr.,  May ; A , no. : Larray to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; A , fol. r−v : Barbezieux to Genlis,  Jan. .



The officer corps and the standing army on the Secretary of War, would have to spend around  livres, more than twice the annual pay of a sous-lieutenant in garrison! His fellow commander, Catinat, firmly stated that a visit to court would cost a candidate more than he would be likely to spend in the course of an entire campaign. One reason for insisting on a visit to court was a desire to uphold the importance of the two companies of Mousquetaires du Roi, and central organisations in general, in the selection and preparation of the junior officers. In fact, for political reasons the government seemed to be so worried about who became an officer in the king’s army that it was prepared to handicap the operations of its regiments. As Barbezieux admitted: ‘I have spoken several times about this to the King and His Majesty has expressed to me that He would prefer there were fewer subalterns in his troops, than to suffer them there without being provided by Himself, and that He does not wish to appoint them unless they present themselves here beforehand.’ It was true that colonels wanted to select subalterns themselves, not have them imposed on their regiment by the War Ministry. But, in the context of a major war effort, insistence on seeing every candidate seems a luxury the crown should have forgone. In the middle of a campaign it was even more illogical that noble volunteers and cadets in the ranks, wishing to become subalterns, should have to leave the army in which they were campaigning, travel to court, and then return to the army, perhaps with the minister’s rejection ringing in their ears. But by mid- the king and Barbezieux were retreating a little on the principle of an interview. The Secretary allowed his effective deputy, Colbert de Saint-Pouange, to interview subaltern candidates on the spot in the army of Flanders, and followed this by granting the same authorisation to one of his most trusted inspectors, Genlis, with the army of Catalonia. The king gave permission to Noailles, the actual commander-in-chief of that particular army, to do the same, which doubtless irritated Barbezieux, the marshal’s enemy. After his appointment to replace Noailles in June , the duc de Vendˆome, who was particularly close to the king, was also given the same privilege. All the same, this relaxation was not accorded anywhere else, and consequently recruitment to the most junior of ranks in the officer corps remained sluggish at best. The more than likely upshot was that the pool of experienced talent among the subalterns shrank in the Nine Years War, handicapping France when Louis XIV later faced subsequent and greater conflict over the Spanish Succession.    

SHAT A , fol. r−v : Noailles to Louis,  Aug. ; A , no. bis: Catinat to Barbezieux,  Mar. . SHAT A  , fol. r : Barbezieux to Genlis,  Feb. ; A , no. : to Catinat,  May  (citation). SHAT A , no. : Larray to Barbezieux,  Mar. . SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Saint-Pouange,  June ; A , no. : Le Mari´e to Barbezieux,  June ; A , no. : Noailles to Barbezieux,  July ; A , fol. r−v : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  June ; fol. v : to Genlis,  Aug. ; A : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  July .



The business of a regiment Even if it took several decades of experimentation and observation, the efforts expended by Louis XIV and his advisers to improve the administration and financial support for the native French regiments provided the officers with an institutional framework and degree of funding of which their grandfathers and greatgrandfathers could only have dreamt. A typical captain of a campaign company during the early part of the Nine Years War could expect funds from the crown – in the shape of salary, bonuses, allowances and grants – to the tune of approximately , livres, while he was expected by the government to be likely to spend perhaps , of that (either himself or through the Extraordinaire des Guerres) on the upkeep of his unit. This seemed to the king a not unreasonable burden considering most captains could derive some support from other sources. This is not to say that captains, especially in garrison, did not struggle a great deal, and some of them ended up ruining their families, while many others were reduced – at least temporarily – to pretty sorry straits. The reasons for the difficulties facing captains will be explained in the next chapter, but they have as much to do with the cultural pressures they were under as any shortfalls in revenue supplied by the crown. For subaltern officers, as discussed immediately above, the picture was much bleaker, principally because the crown did not seem able or willing either to improve their conditions or appreciate the problems potential officers faced in entering the king’s service. This was in marked contrast to the relative sympathy the central government extended to captains, majors, lieutenant-colonels and colonels. But in spite of all the difficulties they faced, the frequent destitution visited on the officer corps during the Thirty Years War (and which provoked the rapid turnover of short-lived regiments and companies discussed in chapter ) was far less prevalent after , thanks in large part to the king and the Le Tellier gradually ameliorating the pay, conditions and administrative procedures for officers of the rank of captain and above. By the s the improvements in administration meant that while captains were in post they were able to do a far better job of maintaining their companies than had been the case prior to . Equal credit for the development of a sustainable and credible military colossus must be given to Louis XIV’s preference for preserving regiments and companies while bringing in new colonels and captains as and where necessary. This was fundamentally to prevent disruption, and was a recognition of the likelihood that officer turnover would still be a bit too rapid for comfort. The serious problems which persisted in the officer corps will therefore form the subject of the final chapter in part II.





The pressures and temptations of service It has already been argued that the regimental officers were provided by the king with an administrative system which, despite mistakes in policy, improved considerably in the years around the War of Devolution, in the aftermath of the Dutch War, and again in the first years of the Nine Years War, but that did not mean life was easy. In fact to a young man who had never experienced the military misery of Mazarin’s years, service to the king in the Dutch War and Nine Years War could seem very arduous. The difficulties of service were only compounded by the persistence of a self-regulating noble and officer culture which the crown found particularly hard to control. King and ministers knew full well that disciplinary problems persisted, and the degree of licence was linked both to standards of social behaviour accepted and internalised by the officers, and to financial problems – indeed the two might be linked, for social codes and expectations often brought about financial difficulties for officers which had little to do with specifically military considerations. All the same, membership of the nobility and of a brotherhood of officers could bring its own compensations: to cope with the strain of military life and to sustain their wider family interests, officers developed a complex variety of self-help and mutual assistance mechanisms, which were but half-constrained by changing notions of gentlemanly conduct encouraged by the crown. H O N N Eˆ T E

        ,                                  

Foreign and French contemporaries alike believed the problems of self-discipline and self-control which stalked many French officers were a direct reflection of their spoiled and indulgent upbringing by parents who placed a strong emphasis on allowing natural and spontaneous behaviour, especially in those sons destined for the military. Youth was seen as synonymous with poor discipline, and veteran commanders remarked with disdain on the pampered puppies among the very junior officers who expected others to forage for their units on arrival in camp. Moreover, officers 

Muralt, Lettres sur les Anglais et les Fran¸cais, pp. –; Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture, p. ; SHAT A : Duras to Louvois,  Aug. ; Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Mar. .



The pressures and temptations of service might have some very unendearing traits. As Louis XIV put it himself in , ‘I am always vexed at seeing the little good faith in the officers when one asks them something.’ Many, in the king’s view, were habitual liars, and, in the words of his ‘M´emoires’, ‘usually attracted to the military profession by a spirit of libertinage’. These were harsh words and one should recognise that excesses were generally practised by the young and those who had recently joined the army, while the older regiments apparently enforced discipline more rigorously than those recently established. But contemporaries were split as to whether such behaviour could really be exorcised from officers’ souls and whether military service was inherently sinful and debauched. Moral reformers in the middle decades of the seventeenth century looked askance at the army as ‘a School of Lewdness, Immorality and Prophaneness’ ripe for moral reformation. Officers were criticised for idleness and spending their winter months ‘in the most Pernicious Exercises’ – dancing, gambling, swearing, courting mistresses, drinking and so on. At the forefront of the campaign to create a spartan officer corps, morally virtuous and religiously devout, was Louvois, who encouraged others to produce conduct advice for officers and who seems to have sought a fusion of lay piety and military service. The message reformers pushed was that an officer had to be both religious and demonstrative about it, attending Mass before a court martial for example, so he would be brave, have a clear conscience, control the immoral depredations of his men, and never be thought likely to betray his king. Of course, the persistent need for officers to inflict violence on their men – thrashing them with a cane, even running them through or shooting them to prevent pillage or for mutinous behaviour – was always going to undermine attempts to ‘civilise’ the officer corps. They were as yet unprepared to leave this sort of thing to the NCOs, though it was recommended that such brutality be applied sparingly and with justice, not least because an officer might otherwise end up murdered. Leaving this aside, there were, though, signs of improvement in behaviour: from their thoughts which appeared in print one can sense that some officers who served in the s, s and s appear to have shifted their ideas, explicitly linking issues of military professionalism to the deportment and conduct of an ‘honnˆete homme’, who should not only be brave and possess ‘heart’, but also be reticent and modest, resistant to the lures of sexual booty and actively hostile to the tolerance of rape and marauding. Saint-Hilaire put his finger on the central characteristic      

SHAT A : Louis to Luxembourg,  Oct. ; Louis XIV, M´emoires, p. . Chagniot, ‘Ethique et pratique de la “profession des armes”’, pp. , –. Lamont, ‘Officers of the Foot’, pp. , ; Birac, ‘Officers of Horse’, p. ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, p. xxvi. Montbas, Au service du Roi, p. ; Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, pp. –, ; Gaya, L’art de la guerre, p. ; Sandras, La conduite de Mars, p. . Massiac, M´emoires, pp. –; Quarr´e, M´emoires, p. ; Gaya, L’art de la guerre, p. ; SHAT A , no. : La Fare to Barbezieux,  June . One can track the evolution of one officer and his ideas, serving between  and , the key transition era, in Montbas, Au service du Roi, esp. pp. , –.



The officer corps and the standing army reformers were seeking to encourage: ‘The most particular interest that an honnˆete homme can have is his honour and his duty’ (my italics). And what that duty was, the king increasingly sought to define and reshape. Moreover, changing notions of what was acceptable officer behaviour in a general sense came from above and penetrated the regiments by osmosis. The open-door policy at the French court, with its standards of politesse, had some impact in encouraging correct behaviour among officers, as most would have visited Saint-Germain or Versailles at least once in their lives. Contemporaries believed that contact with generals and courtiers, whether at court, in the field or even in the provinces, rubbed off on those nobles who aspired to be like their superiors. Army commanders were determined to enforce decorum when officers were enjoying their hospitality, whether gambling or merely having a drink in the general quarters. To reinforce the message of how officers should be conducting themselves, manuals spelled out what was, by contrast, ungentlemanly: for example, officers should not bear their buttocks at the enemy because ‘it looks too mean’. All this notwithstanding, there were still too many displays of poor self-control and disorder despite an improved career structure, stronger policing and inspecting mechanisms, and better financial support. The basic causes were ignorance, financial problems (examined in the second half of this chapter), and the residual aspects of a fiercely independent noble mentalit´e which prized heroic virtue and personal moral integrity above obedience to the sovereign and his representatives. To counteract this, from the late s Louis XIV attempted to create a contagion of obedience and slavish devotion to the monarchy by a combination of exhortation, rewards and punishment. Conduct literature could stress the need for obedience as much as ‘politesse’, and some books, such as that of Massiac, were encouraged by the crown in order to persuade stubborn noble officers that it was not dishonourable or derogatory to do anything in the king’s service that was required of them. At all times officers should stick to the king’s regulations, obey the orders of superiors and sublimate their personal rivalries and disputes in royal service. Above all, the government needed to instil in officers a willingness to accept reprimands and reproaches without considering them violations of their honour, to be avenged by harsh words, resignation in a fit of pique and violent deeds. Louis XIV may have recognised that the lack of hierarchical ground-rules in the army could be disastrous for its administration and effectiveness, but the    



Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. II, p. . Massiac, M´emoires, pp. –; Sarram´ea, Lettres, p. ; Saint-Maurice, vol. I, pp. , : Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Sep.,  Oct. ; Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, pp. –, , . See pp. –. Sandras, La conduite de Mars, pp. , –; Massiac, M´emoires, ‘Avis’, n.p.; Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, p. ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. –, ; BNF FF , fol. v : Catinat to Croisille,  Sep. . Louis XIV, M´emoires, p. .



The pressures and temptations of service struggle to infuse notions of subordination was not decisively won in his reign, for two principal reasons. The first and most important is that very strong overtones of noble social equality persisted, as can be seen in the orders from generals to subalterns which still preserved all the formal politeness of social correspondence, and in the method of saluting which still involved the junior officer taking off his hat. In  the infantry rank hierarchy of colonel, lieutenant-colonel, captain, and subalterns had been clarified, and the major was later definitively made the third-ranking officer. In wartime it was also accepted that a cavalry mestre de camp was superior to the other captains and, from , to the lieutenant-colonel and the major. Nevertheless, this did not prevent resentment and disputes from existing. Simple personality problems could cause strains: lieutenant-colonels were unable to preserve sufficient psychological distance between themselves and the captains because they all had to live together in inns, leading one officer in the s to call for a salary increase to allow lieutenant-colonels to live alone; a lieutenantcolonel might, in turn resent a colonel who had not served the king as long as he; and officers for whatever reason might become objects of mirth, in turn wrecking their authority with the men.Even the authoritarian La Cardonni`ere, Commissaire g´en´eral of the cavalry, could not rein in his wayward brother who was lieutenant of his own company. Problems manifested themselves in several ways, ranging from simple dereliction of duty and a failure to follow orders, through gross disrespect and outright disobedience, to assault by one officer upon another or even murder. It was not unknown for colonels to be grossly insubordinate to an army commander-in-chief, while open mutiny occasionally broke out, though it was rare and savage reprisals were later inflicted. In most cases of insubordination the crown was happy for satisfaction to be rendered with a full apology by the offending party. More common, and more difficult to detect, was general disobedience to the king’s regulations. Some officers at moments of stress exhibited open contempt for the king, and particularly for royal justice. Louis particularly resented officers threatening to resign their posts if they failed to be promoted – confronted with such ultimata he often sacked the blackmailer. On a more prosaic level, incoming colonels    

 

Massiac, M´emoires, pp. –; Sandras, La conduite de Mars, p. . SHAT OM : ordonnance,  July ; OM : ordonnance,  Feb. . BNF FF , fol. r : ‘Reflexions’ [c. ]; Sourches, vol. IV, pp. –,  May ; La Colonie, M´emoires, vol. I, p. ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. –. Some of the best examples can be found in: SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Catinat,  July ; fol. v : to duc de Montmorency,  Sep. ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , fols. r –r : Crenan to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; S´evign´e, vol. III, p. : S´evign´e to Coulanges,  Apr. ; Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  Sep. ; Dangeau, vol. II, p. ,  Sep. ; SHAT A , no. : Luxembourg to Louis,  Aug. ; MR : anon. to Barbezieux,  May . SHAT A : Luxembourg to Louis,  July ; A : Louis to Luxembourg,  July ; OM : Louis to Rochefort,  Sep. ; Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –. SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Louvois,  Oct. .



The officer corps and the standing army might ignore royal orders and take whichever company they fancied for their own instead of the most junior in the regiment. If points of honour were involved then disobedience to the crown and to senior officers happened regularly, in spite of the drive mounted since Richelieu’s day to associate courtesy and noble codes intrinsically with obedience to the will of political and social superiors. Personal attachments to a prince or other grand might act as a stronger pull than obedience to the king. Several of the regimental officers of the princes de Conti and de La Roche-sur-Yon followed them in their dash from the kingdom in  to serve in Hungary, but this episode may have been something of a watershed: Louis sacked and disgraced them all, disbanding one regiment entirely and appropriating the other for his infant grandson, the duc de Bourgogne. There were no comparable episodes of officers misplacing their loyalty in such an open way for many years thereafter. Disobedience was more likely to take the form of refusing to wear cuirasses because officers did not want to be thought of as cowards – Louis, backed by conduct manuals, repeatedly tried to force them upon foolhardy cavalry officers. The desire to prove one’s bravery and worth also led officers, even colonels and generals, to join detachments secretly, and in defiance of orders, to get some action, especially in battles and sieges when they should have been staying at their posts or awaiting further commands. Day-to-day flouting of regulations was more likely in garrison than campaign forces. What gave the crown a real headache was the continued propensity of officers to fight and duel. Spontaneous fights were always breaking out, but many clashes were suspected by those at court several hundred miles away to have been deliberately engineered and planned: what were described by correspondents as ‘murders’ might all too often have been duels. Having reached its peak in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, duelling was in decline during the s and s until the Frondes encouraged more episodes. But this was more of a hiccup than the reversal 

 

  

Saint-Maurice, vol. I, pp. –: Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Apr. ; Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Dec. ; SHAT A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Aug. ; fol. r−v : to Nanclas,  July . On this, see O. Ranum, ‘Courtesy, Absolutism and the Rise of the French State, -’, Journal of Modern History  (), –, –. Belhomme, Histoire de l’infanterie, vol. II, p. ; BNF FF (ii), fol. v ; La Chesnaye, vol. IV, p. ; J. Roujon, Conti: l’ennemi de Louis XIV (Paris, ), p. ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Apr.  et seq.; p. , June ; p. ,  July ; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  June ; p. ,  June ; p. , July–Aug. ; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  June . Sandras, La conduite de Mars, pp. –; Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, p. ; Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Feb. ; SHAT A , fols. v –r : Louis to Luxembourg,  July . BL Add. Mss. , fol. v : Rutherford to Browne,  Sep. ; SHAT A , no. : Huxelles to Barbezieux,  Nov. . SHAT A , no. : Saint-Pouange to Louvois,  Sep. ; A , no. : Bouchu to Louvois,  June ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Nov. ; Dangeau, vol. V, pp. –, ,  Nov.,  Dec. .



The pressures and temptations of service of the prevailing trend, for propagandist literature decried the practice, and there was a strong voluntary movement against it among nobles at court and in some major pays d’´etats based on swearing oaths not to fight duels. The influence of religious d´evˆot thinking in all this should not be underestimated. All the same, the crown continued officially to disapprove and condemn. In , worried that duelling was on the increase again in the army, Louis XIV tried to rein it in by ordering senior officers to investigate any suspected incidents and report back to him or face dismissal themselves, following this with an ordinance the next year proclaiming that any officer who drew his sword or pistol against another would be treated as a duellist and sacked. Two years after that another edict made it a duty of governors and procureurs to send the king regular reports on quarrels in their jurisdictions. The official line was clear – duelling was unacceptable. But ambivalent attitudes reigned at all levels in the army and wider society. The significant fall in convictions for duelling in the s did not necessarily represent a drop in contests, reflecting rather more the connivance of the judiciary, ministerial distraction and the king’s own confusion on the matter. Sometimes Louis turned a blind eye to people’s whereabouts, though he had had them condemned in the courts, and he also arranged matters so that relatives could inherit a duellist’s property instead of the crown confiscating it. Louis was particularly ambivalent about duelling if it was somehow related to the honour of his own flesh and blood, and he seems to have felt a sneaking respect for nobles who were prepared to defend their honour with their life. What he did not want was large numbers of them killing each other, as happened in his grandfather’s reign. In an effort to stem the need to duel, in  Louis had allowed the marshals of France to establish one or two representatives in every bailliage and s´en´echauss´ee from whom nobles with a grievance could seek redress. They might refer cases on to the tribunal du point d’honneur run by the marshals or pronounce verdicts themselves. In  these posts were erected into full offices of ‘lieutenant des mar´echaux de France’. Unfortunately, the lenient approach, when coupled with the entry into service of thousands of fresh officers, produced a significant rise in duelling during the Nine Years War. Even colonels joined in. Prosecutions continued but the king, in the view of his Grand Pr´evˆot Sourches, whose oversight was the policing of the court, only ‘affected’ to clamp down. In any case, the tide could only be stemmed with difficulty, as the government was faced with a wall of silence on the matter. When two ensigns duelled before over  officers on the main square in Pinerolo at  p.m. one afternoon in mid-, with one of them dying as a result, there was only a single deposition informing on them – from a cadet. There were 

F. Billac¸ois, Le duel dans la soci´et´e fran¸caise des XVIe–XVIIe si`ecles: essai de psychosociologie historique (Paris, ), pp. –, ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. , ; SHAT OM : ordonnances,  Dec. ,  Jan. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to La Porte,  Dec. ; Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Nov. .



The officer corps and the standing army other instances of major cover-ups, even within the r´egiment du Roi. The only saving grace was that by  noble passions had cooled slightly, so that a duel was seen less as a means of extracting vengeance through killing, and more as a way of clearing the air. Even then fatalities were far from rare. The second and less significant reason why obedience was slow to take firm root was that the government enforced an illogical and corporatist subordination system based on regimental seniority which continued to cause precedence and command disputes between officers of the same military rank in different regiments. Since  all cavalry regiments had been ranked on the basis of their mestre de camp’s commission, but after  all infantry regiments were ranked according to the date of their foundation. In  Louis made this the basis of cavalry seniority too. Giving a colonel command over several regiments could be fairly easily done, by promoting him to brigadier, but more junior officers were expected to defer to a man with the same military rank on the basis of the age of his regiment. This was extremely irritating for captains, lieutenant-colonels and even simple colonels who might, in detachments, find themselves trumped by the less experienced or even youths who held the same rank as them. Linked to this difficulty was the prevailing notion peddled in government circles that authority did not come by virtue of one’s rank in a clear way, but from the detail of the king’s regulations – which were rarely remembered properly. Clearly some of the principles Louis practised did nothing to encourage ideas of military subordination, and it does not seem to have even occurred to the government that they were retarding the very subordination they were trying to stimulate. Despite these problems officers did have a stronger sense of order and hierarchy by  than their predecessors had possessed thirty years earlier. By the s the not uncritical B´eat-Louis de Muralt felt that the French officer corps contained many men more decent than one could have hoped to encounter in their Order: they were more realistic and less showy than non-military nobles, their politeness was more refined and their conversation less flowery, and there was a generally lower degree of humbug and falsity in the army – at least between officers – than in civilian life.Vauban broadly concurred. Self-discipline and obedience had definitely been strengthened, though far more by example and changing mores than by prescription from on high. 

 



Billac¸ois, Le duel, pp. –; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  July  et seq.; ,  Jan.  et seq.; vol. II, pp. –,  Apr. ; vol. V, p. ,  Nov. ; SHAT OM : e´dit, Mar. ; A : Luxembourg to Louis,  Aug. ; BNF NAF , fols. r−v , r : Barbezieux to Tess´e,  June ,  June . Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. –. Sandras, La conduite de Mars, pp. –; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –, , ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. , –; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  July ; A , no. : Usson to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; Dangeau, vol. VII, pp. –, r`eglement,  May ; BNF FF , fol. r−v ; Gaya, L’art de la guerre, p. . Muralt, Lettres, pp. –; Vauban, vol. I, pp. –: ‘Reorganisation de l’arm´ee’ [].



The pressures and temptations of service                                      For the likes of Louvois, though, a general improvement in personal conduct was not enough. Officers had to seek pleasure and satisfaction only in the serious business of serving the king, and should do so in an austere and devoted manner. The ‘R´eponse au livre intitul´e: la conduite de France’, inspired by the minister to hit back at critics of the army, argued that a military unit had to be husbanded like an estate: ‘It is desired in France that a captain makes a small farm, if I dare speak thus, out of his company, but he should also cultivate it at the same time; in this way he will get his enjoyment solely from the fruit of his work.’ Money and time was not to be wasted on ephemeral pleasures, on attendance at court, on luxury, even on the development of private estates, a view shared by Mme de Maintenon who warned her brother to avoid too much show and too little substance when running his company. The problem was that, pushed to the extremes Louvois wanted, this puritanical approach was liable to collide with noble interests and traditional features of noble culture. Though Louvois wanted officers to maintain their units at a high standard, he was nevertheless concerned to prevent officers spending too much. Up to a point emulating the standards of good companies and regiments was to be lauded, but the competitive nature of ambitious officers might cause them serious financial problems. In  the comte de Saint-Pol spent , livres on standards, kettle drums and trumpets, as well as other finery, for his cavalry company. He could afford such extravagance, though most captains could not, yet the spirit of emulation and a need to keep up with the highest standards drove them on. Cavalry officers in particular might buy horses which were too large for the needs of service and which cost more to feed – in spite of ordinances setting maximum heights – or splash out on excessively luxurious saddles, bridles, horse cloths and plumes for their horses and waistcoats for their men. The widespread use of elaborate musical instruments, particularly drums, trumpets and oboes, was directly attributed to competition between units. In the early s, as part of his austerity campaign, Louvois tried to clamp down on luxury in uniforms, by prohibiting the use of gold and silver braid on the uniforms of junior officers and the other ranks, and setting a price ceiling on the cost of the waistcoats officers could impose on sergeants. It proved very difficult to enforce such measures.   



Cited in Corvisier, Louvois, pp. –. I have been unable to trace an original copy of this pamphlet. S´evign´e, vol. III, p. : S´evign´e to Mme de Grignan,  Feb. ; Lavall´ee, vol. I, pp. –: Maintenon to Aubign´e,  Dec. . Saint-Maurice, vol. I, p. : Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Apr. ; Bib Maz , fols. r –v : Longueville accounts,  (my thanks to Philip Grover for this reference); SHAT Ya: ordonnance,  Nov. ; MR : Villars to Chamillart,  Oct. ; OM : ordonnances,  Sep.  (two),  Jan. . Rousset, vol. III, pp. –; Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, pp. , ; Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  Mar. .



The officer corps and the standing army Nor did officers neglect their personal conditions and possessions. Naturally they liked to carry their civilian amusements and standard of living with them into the army. Even on campaign they habitually took along a couple of dogs for shooting and hunting, and if convenient went regularly to the opera or the theatre. Their own weapons could be very elaborate – one infantry officer’s sword, cast in  and now in the possession of the duke of Buccleuch, was engraved and painted with gold on its blade to show not only its date of manufacture, several coats-of-arms and a bundle of weapons, but also the siege of the fortress of Lille that year. To carry their weapons, tents and chests full of clothing, crockery and other items the baggage train of a single infantry battalion might stretch to  horses or mules, driving the price of forage up; this worked out at about three beasts per officer. At the very least capitaines r´eform´es were thought to need  livres to get together an equipage and prepare themselves for campaigning in , and full captains required more. Officers also felt the need to support valets. There were attempts after  to restrict their number to two per company, following the War of Devolution when as much as  per cent of an infantry regiment had been made up of these men, and bread and pay for the valets were built into officers’ personal entitlements. In spite of this, valets continued to serve in large numbers, and to support them in sufficient numbers to maintain their dignity some captains continued to pass them off as ordinary soldiers throughout this period. Provided a valet did guard duty occasionally and was put into the line in combat they could get away with this. Once on campaign the problem of excessive luxury at table reared its head – in  the king stepped in to regulate the number of courses and dishes which could be served at officers’ meals because conspicuous consumption (literally) had got out of hand. The problem of extravagance was only compounded if the king himself were present. Officers feared that other units would outshine their own, damaging them in Louis’s eyes, and captains might spend around  livres polishing up their companies in preparation for a mere review conducted by a royal or a minister. This concern reached an extreme level in the expenditure by some for the  Compi`egne camp and manoeuvres, though this was hardly surprising as the king wanted to put on a display of magnificence which would impress foreign observers. 

    

´ Briain, ed. and trans.],‘The Chevalier Gaydon’s Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. –, ; [L. O Memoir of the Regiment of Dillon, ’, The Irish Sword  (–), ; Sarram´ea, Lettres, p. : Franc¸ois to his father,  Aug. . The sword can be seen at Boughton House, Northamptonshire, and was captured at the battle of Oudenarde. SHAT A , no. : Le Bret to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Crenan,  Apr. . SHAT OM : ordonnances,  Oct.,  Nov. ; OM : ordonnance,  Feb. ; Lynn, Giant, p. ; Massiac, M´emoires, p. ; Sarram´ea, Lettres, p. xviii. SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Mar. ; Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  Mar. . Bib Maz , fol. v : notes on camps [c. s]; Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. III, p. ; Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, ; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Sep. .



The pressures and temptations of service Conduct manuals exhorted officers, especially subalterns, to be frugal in clothing and eating, and not to be ashamed of their poverty. Unfortunately the message from the very top was rather different. The king himself set very high standards and indulged in a great deal of luxury, in furniture, coaches, horses, buildings, gardens and in the Maison militaire du Roi, a level of ostentation too many of his subjects in the s and s tried to emulate, to their financial cost. The thirst for display among the nobility stemmed from a deep-rooted sense of insecurity and a need to maintain the confidence of others – be they financiers, merchants, military superiors or the crown – in oneself and one’s fortune. As Muralt somewhat crudely put it, ‘[The French] prefer to show themselves well-clothed rather than well-fed, to spend and to pass for rich men, at the hazard even of dissipating their wealth, or risking it, than to conserve it and enjoy it with moderation, without appearing rich.’ It is true that most of the more prosperous provincial nobility of the late seventeenth century were still remarkably untouched by cosmopolitanism and luxury, but if their scions came into contact with this world in the army and in Paris then they might embrace it with gusto. By , Vauban noted, there was still unjustifiably large spending on personal luxury and finery for units, while excessive eating and drinking was producing far too many overweight and prematurely aged young officers. Luxury was draining, but the mania for gambling and placing crude wagers on anything and everything could bring instantaneous ruin. Gambling had always been popular with the soldiery – natural risk-takers – for centuries past, but in the seventeenth century it became deeply embedded in French culture more than anywhere else. As Jonathan Dewald has explained, it offered a chance to demonstrate that you were above crude mercantile and financial calculations, it was impersonal, relatively equal and based upon skill and fortune. As such it also offered a safety valve to a society where order and hierarchy were becoming ever more important. The crown made only limited and confused attempts to prevent it, designating games of ‘hasard’ – pure chance – illegal, but permitting and trying to regulate games of ‘commerce’ where intelligence and knowledge were at an equal premium. The most popular examples of each under Louis XIV were bassette and lansquenet, and culbas and reversi. For Jansenists and even mainstream devout catholics even allowing ‘jeux de commerce’ was too much, not least because gambling was an emotive business which challenged the Great Chain of Being. It bore a heavy responsibility for suicide, murder, duelling deaths and physical degeneration, and even the super-rich were inclined to put their souls in jeopardy by cheating. As if this were not bad enough, it could ruin not just losers but winners as well and threatened to undermine both royal justice and the codes of honour, for gambling debts could not be pursued through   

Lamont, ‘Officers of the Foot’, pp. . –, . Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. II, p. ; Muralt, Lettres, p. ; Dewald, Pont-St-Pierre –, p. . Vauban, vol. I, p. : ‘Reorganisation de l’arm´ee’ []. Matters did not improve much after that: see Forster, The House of Saulx-Tavanes, pp. –.



The officer corps and the standing army courts of law. Gambling was endemic at court, and some games could involve such huge sums that even the king and royal family had to associate themselves with other courtiers to produce the necessary advances to play. In spite of royal strictures even illegal games were played by courtiers. Furthermore, card games were also played in the War Ministry itself: in the course of my research I found a wine-stained eighteenth-century playing card in a volume of letters at the French war archive – it seems to have been placed there by clerks, or even a minister, to mark a particular piece of correspondence. The bad example set by the court was followed by the army officers, many of whom in the higher ranks were of course courtiers themselves. Memoirs and correspondence are littered with references to officers gambling, often in an illegal manner such as playing bassette, reflecting an inability to bring it under control. At the very least innumerable disputes flared up in the course of games, even when they did not lead on to actual violence. More worrying were the financial and psychological consequences of the pursuit. Mme de S´evign´e in July  was furious that her son Charles, sous-lieutenant of the Gendarmes Dauphins, had just lost over , livres at reversi, although the family could afford it. More insidious was the way officers gambled not only with their own pay, but also pledged that of their men as well as promissory notes on the company masse and ustencile entitlement. Hard experience and fear of this happening on a regimental scale led Louis after  to install as majors only men not inclined to gambling. One can hardly blame him, for there were plenty of examples of ruination due to gambling, and financiers’ sons in elite units were amongst those forced to sell their posts to pay off debts, so large could they become. Desperate officers short on funds could all too easily turn to gambling as a short-term fix for their cash-flow problems, blotting from their minds the likelihood that it would merely make matters worse and hasten their undoing. Most tragic of all, gambling debts could destroy a man’s life and lead him to suicide. At 



 

  

Dewald, Aristocratic Experience, pp. –; O. Grussi, La vie quotidienne des joueurs sous l’ancien r´egime a` Paris et a` la cour (Paris, ), pp. , –, –, , –, –, –, , –; M. Reulos, ‘Jeux interdits et r´eglement´es’, in P. Ari`es and J.-C. Margolin, eds., Les jeux a` la Renaissance (Paris, ), p. ; R. Sauzet, ‘Aux origines du refus des jeux et divertissements dans la pastorale catholique moderne’, in ibid., p. ; Muralt, Lettres, pp. –. Sourches, vol. I, pp. –, Nov. ; vol. II, p. ,  Feb.  et seq.; Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  Mar. ; M. Chardon, ‘Le jeu a` la cour de Louis XIV’, Revue de Paris ( July ), –; Grussi, La vie quotidienne des joueurs, pp. –. It was found in SHAT A  at piece  – a six of clubs, now in the office of an archivist. E.g. La Colonie, M´emoires, vol. I, p. ; Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. –; SHAT A , no. : Le Camus to Barbezieux,  May ; A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Bonval,  Jan. ; fol. v : to intendants in his d´epartement,  Dec. . E.g. SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Laubanie,  Dec. . S´evign´e, vol. II, p. : S´evign´e to Mme de Grignan,  July ; SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Bachivillers,  Jan. ; A (i), fol. r : to Artaignan,  Nov. . BNF FF , fols. v –r ; Sourches, vol. VI, pp. , ,  May,  Nov. ; SHAT A , no. : Villepion to Barbezieux,  May .



The pressures and temptations of service its most extreme competition amongst officers and nobles was clearly even capable of driving them to break one of the ultimate taboos of the age.                              A cultural predisposition to pride, ambition and personal vanity persisted uneasily beyond  alongside more austere moral demands based around notions of ‘honnˆetet´e’, and this tension shaped both the standing army and the reactive behaviour of officers to its development. The second half of this chapter will now turn to the financial pressures placed on the officer corps and the responses – both legal and illegal – these in turn provoked. The level of financial support provided by the government during the ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV may have been much greater than in the first half of the century, but that did not mean officers could comfortably go without a private income of some sort or another. Out of the , livres which typically reached a captain in a campaign battalion early in the Nine Years War through official sources, at least , of this was likely to be spent on the unit. Vauban estimated that about half of a captain’s personal salary – around  livres in this case – went on incidental expenses for his company, leaving him perhaps only  livres at best for his own upkeep. For that reason captains sought to secure rich subalterns for their company who could shoulder some of the burden of subsidising the royal war effort. In most cases, of course, such walking pots of gold did not materialise, and realistic contemporaries thought that instead somewhere around  livres of extra income a year was vital for a captain to serve successfully and uphold the dignity of his rank. Colonels required even more extra resources, especially when royal pensions were falling into arrears – one major reason why some people criticised Louis’s policy of giving cavalry regiments to lieutenant-colonels who were insufficiently wealthy. The obvious first recourse of an officer in need of subsidy was to his family, many of whom provided extensive assistance. The actual purchase of a company or regiment was usually a process involving an entire family, and a new captain rarely had a store of cash behind him, so his parents or siblings had to pay up front for the recruitment of men, with sums running into the thousands. Fathers or older brothers might make over a proportion of the family property to a son to establish him as a colonel or captain, or covenant a certain sum each year to the young man for the running of his unit. The chevalier de Corbet’s brother paid him an annual 

 

Vauban, vol. I, p. : ‘Reorganisation de l’arm´ee’ []; SHAT A , no. : Arnoul to Barbezieux,  Mar. ; Massiac, M´emoires, p. : Chamarande to Barbezieux,  July . Chamarande thought  livres too little. SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Feb. . Bib Ars , fol. r : Guiscard to Barbezieux,  Jan. ; Sourches, vol. I, pp. –,  Mar. ; Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, pp. –.



The officer corps and the standing army pension of  livres in the first three years of the Nine Years War, thus helping him meet his additional expenditure needs as a lieutenant-colonel. Hautefeuille, colonel of a dragoon regiment in , provides a good example of the resources a man of this rank felt he needed for military service and for the upkeep of his wife and patrimony: from his own possessions he drew an annual income of , livres, while his uncle, a commandeur of the Order of Malta, provided the same amount again and lodged and fed both him and his new bride, who herself was worth , livres a year. In spite of such planning, however, officers repeatedly had to be bailed out by their relatives at moments of difficulty. One young Auvergnat bourgeois, Joseph Thorillhon, sieur de Prades, spent over , livres of his family’s money as a cadet and then an infantry captain between  and . Getting money to sons, brothers and nephews at the other end of France could be achieved by working through merchants and their network of exchange facilities, but what is striking is the existence by  of complex networks of kin and friends across the country and throughout the army on whom young officers could call for assistance wherever they might be. Franc¸ois de Sarram´ea, though only a humble subaltern, could rely on a web of Gascon and Pyrenean connections both in the military, stretching far beyond his own regiment, and at court. To a considerable extent the officers of Louis XIV’s last wars were benefiting from the connections made by their fathers and other relatives earlier in the seventeenth century – contacts might be former comradesin-arms, or merchant families with whom business had once been done in a faraway place. As well as long-established contacts there might be superior officers willing to assist a subordinate in need. In the infantry colonels often gave subventions to their own officers, especially if there were geographical and clientage connections predating one’s entry into a regiment. If a colonel was too generous he might end up with serious problems of his own. A few lucky captains might be appointed to positions within the household of a grand, receiving a pension, and it was not unknown for grands to defray the military expenses of junior officers whom they knew but who were not in their immediate service. Captains serving in a regiment owned by a grand, especially so if he were a prince, were particularly fortunate in these regards. Indeed, any closely knit regiment would see officers willingly share their resources or lend (sometimes hundreds of livres) to each other on favourable 



 

Dewald, Pont-St-Pierre, p. ; Bib Ars , fols. r –v : Corbet to Pomponne,  Aug. ; fol. r–v : chevalier de Pomponne to Pomponne,  Aug. ; Dangeau, vol. VII, p. ,  Feb. ; Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, p. . Montbas, Au service du Roi, p. ; Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, p. ; Sarram´ea, Lettres, pp. –, , , : Franc¸ois to his father,  Jan. ,  July ,  Oct. ,  Aug. ; p. : Franc¸ois to Louis de Lagrange,  June . Belhomme, L’arm´ee fran¸caise en , p. ; Sarram´ea, Lettres, pp. , –: Franc¸ois to his father,  Feb.,  May ; SHAT A , no. : Mauroy to Barbezieux,  Oct. . Sarram´ea, Lettres, pp. , –: Franc¸ois to his father,  May ,  Jan.,  Mar. .



The pressures and temptations of service terms, with the major acting as the banker and accountant for such transactions. Chamlay, the king’s military adviser, forcefully claimed: ‘One cannot kennel the units enough. Only this can make them good . . . One cannot believe how much kinship, familiarity and friendship between the officers of a unit contribute to kenneling it and to make it good . . . In the king’s service people take care of each other and help each other.’ This was no hyperbole – possessions brought on campaign were frequently bequeathed to brother officers. The Grand Cond´e felt that, by contrast, when officers did not know each other well, this could cause real problems as the army relied so heavily on reciprocity to keep the regiments afloat. For this reason Louis and his generals preferred officers to be promoted, where possible, within their existing regiment (even if from a different battalion), at least in wartime. Further aid might be provided in the cavalry and dragoons by the general staffs of those arms under schemes which operated for years without the War Ministry having the slightest inkling: Hessein, secretary of the dragoons, managed the personal and military affairs of captains in this arm, soliciting payment of expenses, allowances and salaries, obtaining letters to hold off creditors, and dealing with the smallest purchases for their equipages, all so that the officers would be saved the cost and trouble of going to Paris. This cost a captain a mere  livres a year from his company funds, and the practice lasted from the Dutch War until at least the end of Louis XIV’s reign. A whole range of mutual and voluntary aid practices developed organically and without any input from the government. Nevertheless, it was both accepted and inevitable that officers – whether rich or poor – would still have to contract debts. With assets tied up in property a loan was often the only way to get hold of cash quickly to fit out a unit for a campaign. When sums were borrowed officers might use personal collateral or anticipate regimental funds to back the debt. Either way, if a captain contracted debts for the upkeep of his company in the locality where the regiment was based, such debts would be paid off by the major when the regiment moved on in order to maintain the liquidity of merchants and others who would be vital for other units in the area. The captain would then end up in debt to the regiment as a whole. This was not necessarily a serious problem, for the major might gradually recoup the money through deductions from a captain’s pay and allowances, but it all depended on the     

Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. –; Lamont, ‘Officers of the Foot’, p. ; BNF NAF , fol. v : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; SHAT A , no. : Lorge to Louvois,  Oct. . SHAT A , no. : ‘Discours’, . Chamlay was obviously comparing a regiment to a pack of hunting hounds, an analogy Barbezieux would have appreciated! La Colonie, M´emoires, vol. I, p. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. . SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , fol. r–v : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Sep. ; A : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  June . SHAT A : Boufflers to Louvois,  Aug. ; Bib Ars : Hessein to chevalier d’Aunay,  Jan. .



The officer corps and the standing army leniency or otherwise of the major. And officers could not use their regiments – or were not supposed to – as clearing houses for loans which were taken out purely for their own benefit. Not only could debts last for years, but they could also be on a vast scale. The initial purchase of a unit almost always required a loan because the realisation of sufficient liquid capital was not easy. Sometimes, because the crown wished to present a particular individual with a regiment, the Le Tellier would either lend the money themselves or help to find suitable creditors. To purchase the r´egiment de Picardie infantry the young prince d’Epinoy borrowed the whole , livres required from Jean Balagny, a Parisian bourgeois, in three instalments, giving Balagny the right to cash bills of exchange on Epinoy’s lands in Artois and French Flanders. The debts acquired through purchasing a regiment could last for years, and the sums might be paid over to the previous owner in instalments. A wise family therefore had to think extremely carefully about its strategy for purchasing companies and regiments, for there was no guarantee that the king would either allow the same family to maintain ownership of a regiment after the death of its colonel, or that a regiment would survive a r´eforme at the end of a war. As outlined in chapter , Louis XIV was perfectly prepared to compensate families if a decent colonel died in the saddle, but rather than losing a regiment altogether, some families asked the king to replace a deceased colonel with another of their scions, something which Louis repeatedly agreed to do. On retirement in  Montbas passed his regiment into the hands, successively, of two nephews, but within ten months both had died and there was no suitable male relative to take over so the regiment passed out of the family. Families were also keen to pass on regiments before the incumbent colonel died: of the eighty-nine cavalry regiments belonging to French nobles – known as ‘r´egiments de gentilhommes’ to distinguish them from the more illustrious royal and permanent regiments – sixty-nine changed hands in the Nine Years War, but seventeen of these had more than one mestre de camp from the same family during this period. The real problem for the royal war effort was when officers and their families began to sense the impending end of hostilities, which threatened the disbanding of their regiments before the investment could be amortised. At such a time the 

    

Forster, The House of Saulx-Tavanes, p. ; Bib Ars : Harnoncourt to Mainfroy,  Sep. ; SHAT A : memorandum on infantry,  Sep. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Larray,  Oct. ; fol. r–v : to Le Bret, Bouchu and Bonval,  Oct. . Lamont, ‘Officers of the Foot’, p. ; Sourches, vol. V, p. ,  Apr. . AN  AP: contracts of acquisition of r´egiment de Picardie infantry, May , Feb., Apr. ; BNF FF , fol. r ; Forster, The House of Saulx-Tavanes, p. .  Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. , –. See pp. –. BNF FF , fols. v –r ; FF , fols. r –v , r –v . Redlich, The German Military Enterpriser and his Workforce, vol. II, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Mauroy to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; Sourches, vol. V, p. ,  Feb. .



The pressures and temptations of service crown did not find it easy to keep officers of any rank up to the mark if they were convinced their posts would disappear at the coming r´eforme. Captains and subalterns in infantry regiments likely to face the axe, and who wanted to remain in service, cast around desperately for opportunities in the cavalry, in more senior infantry regiments and even in the navy, so they would not lose their investments or seniority altogether. Unfortunately in the run-up to peace it was a buyer’s market, for many families did not want to purchase a company that was probably going to disappear within a few months. Officers in regiments which were likely to survive a r´eforme tried to get kith and kin into the regiment just before the end of a conflict as full lieutenants so that they would immediately have a haven for the next period of peace. It would not be stretching credulity to imagine all sorts of sharp practices going on to ensure that satisfactory outcomes were accomplished. Ideally families and individuals hoped that when the music of war stopped they would no longer be holding an unwelcome parcel in the shape of a condemned unit. How families tried to avoid this can be clearly demonstrated by the following case. When the second r´egiment de Languedoc dragoons became vacant in April , the comte de Tess´e, as Colonel-General of that arm, decided not to put forward the name of his cousin the chevalier de Froullai, even though he had been seeking a colonelcy for him over the previous year. The regiment was based at the beleaguered fortress of Casale in Monferrato, and knowing the likelihood that the city would come under siege that year, and the regiment would consequently be expected to sustain severe damage, Tess´e must have seen it as an unsound investment. The fact that it was only the second r´egiment de Languedoc dragoons, not the first, also made it a more likely candidate for disbandment at the end of the war, another reason for not investing family capital in it. Similarly, when Tess´e was setting up a frontier infantry regiment of fusiliers in the autumn of , he considered reserving the colonelcy for his son, also called Ren´e after him, who was only thirteen years old at the time. Barbezieux counselled against it, but not on the grounds that an under-age colonel was against the king’s interest. He reasoned instead on the basis of family interest: It is up to you to see if you do not wish to keep this new Regiment for Monsieur your son, and as the other [r´egiment de Tess´e infantry] is much more senior, I believe you would do better still to destine him for it than for that which you are currently levying, which you could sell in a little while.



 

SHAT A : Barbezieux to cavalry and dragoon colonels,  Dec. ; Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  Mar. ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. ; Sarram´ea, Lettres, pp. –, –: Franc¸ois to his father,  Apr.,  Aug. ; BNF FF , fol. r . SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Apr. . SHAT A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Tess´e,  Oct. .



The officer corps and the standing army The r´egiment de Tess´e infantry, established in , was far less likely to be disbanded at the end of the war than the new r´egiment de fusiliers de Tess´e. The count was even being advised to get the fusilier regiment off his hands as quickly as possible so he would not be stuck with a financial loss at the end of the war when he would be unable to sell it.Family advancement and strategy in the French armies involved more than a simple willingness to serve the king, obey his orders and stump up extra cash to subsidise an officer’s unit and lifestyle. It encompassed the conscious manipulation of the regimental and company ownership system in order to achieve the maximum possible benefits for a family in terms of finance and prestige. If they misjudged matters the consequences could be serious.                                             As it was, most families producing captains and colonels were struggling enough anyway. Many more noble families went into military service under the cardinalministers and then Louis XIV, but, at least in relative terms, these newcomers typically enjoyed less wealth from the land than those who had been active in the hundred years prior to . Though agricultural rents in most parts of France continued to rise beyond , by the end of the Dutch War economic stagnation had set in almost everywhere, putting landed revenues under great pressure. The extent to which the nobility and landed bourgeois coped with the fall in prices and leases varied a great deal depending on the nature of the agriculture, and also on how well their locality had fared during the earlier Franco-Spanish war. Champagne, for example, had been particularly badly hit by troop depredations, and landed debt in the province was high. Depopulation was serious and there was a shortage of men whose skills and financial resources made them suitable to take on agriculture leases. In most provinces, weaker revenues and an almost exclusive concentration of landed capital in a single seigneurie meant that the lesser nobility were far less capable of weathering the late seventeenth-century stagnation than the wealthier noblesse seconde. On top of this, short-term agricultural disaster struck at various moments, but never more severely than in the so-called ‘ann´ees de mis`ere’, –. To compensate for these woes, seigneurs demanded feudal dues more and more in cash rather than in kind, families increasingly preferred to manage directly their own domain lands or grant them on short-term leases, and where they could nobles shifted investments into rentes, mercantile enterprises, and even tax-farming. Even so, sometimes the receipts just did not materialise. In most cases, however, the 

R. B. Bingham, ‘Louis XIV and the War for Peace: The Genesis of a Peace Offensive’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, ), p. ; Forster, The House of Saulx-Tavanes, p. ; Dewald, Pont-St-Pierre, pp. , –; Dewald, Aristocratic Experience, pp. , –; Constant, La vie quotidienne de la noblesse fran¸caise, pp. , ; Bourquin, Noblesse seconde et pouvoir en Champagne, pp. –, –, -.



The pressures and temptations of service administrative machinery of landed revenue was not even organised to maximise economic return, and the fruits of domains were being spent away from the localities for social, political and military ends on a scale and in a way which simply did not happen, for example, in England. This was only compounded by the actual absence of nobles in the armies, and it was scarcely surprising that Barbezieux was loathed by officers for an aloof indifference towards their demands for leave to manage their private affairs. Pinning down the pattern of wealth among the French nobility under Louis XIV is an impossible task, but some indications can be gleaned from recent research by French and American historians. Jim Wood has estimated the mean income for the  noble families of the Bayeux e´lection in  as , livres per annum, but  had less than  livres a year. Leading noble families in the more prosperous provinces might enjoy about , livres a year. Jean-Pierre Labatut believed the average noble fortune at the moment of marriage increased by only  per cent between  and , from , livres to ,. In , then, a good income for a noble family of this wealth might be around , livres. But, given the extreme wealth possessed by some of the grands and ministers, one should remember that there were many more whose incomes were less than this figure than there were families who enjoyed greater revenues. One way of boosting capital and income was to marry well. The endogamous marriage strategies of noble families so characteristic of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries gave way to much greater diversification in the choice of marriage partners, especially among military-oriented families. Obviously colonels could offer a tempting target for socially ambitious ‘nouveaux’ families, and some secured dowries running into several hundred thousand livres from their brides’ families, but such strategies were also followed by humbler dynasties out in the sticks, who needed to boost their assets to support their military activities. Marriage strategies aside, noble families might be able to subsidise their military activities from ecclesiastical revenues. More senior nobles could divert funds from abbeys, while lesser families might use some of the income from parish livings and prebendaries. The Order of Malta possessed commanderies across France which, for some of the French knights, could help to prop up their military careers in Louis XIV’s service, though they really had to have commanded a galley operating out of Malta for some time before they could expect such a benefice. Furthermore, nobles sitting in   

Parker, Class and State in Ancien R´egime France, esp. pp. –, –; Redlich, Enterpriser, vol. II, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Wartigny to Chamillart,  Aug. . Wood,The Nobility of the Election of Bayeux, p. ; Dewald, Aristocratic Experience, p. ; Labatut, Les duces et pairs de France, pp. –. Constant, La vie quotidienne de la noblesse, p. ; Bourquin, Noblesse seconde, pp. –; Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, p. ; Sourches, vol. VI, pp. , ,  Sep.,  Dec. ; BNF FF , fol. r (the marriage of the lucky marquis de Ba¨ıers, colonel of Oleron infantry, to the daughter of Turmenyes, Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres).



The officer corps and the standing army provincial estates might get rake-offs from tax revenues and contracts which could be used to cover military expenses. So, were officers and their families ruined, as Mention claimed, in their hundreds? On numerous occasions they certainly found themselves very short of money, especially if they were serving in campaign battalions where the reduced pay scale made it difficult to maintain their personal equipages. The years – were notably difficult, for the spasmodic flow of pay to the men forced the officers repeatedly to advance them money, and by spring  many could get no more credit. By  Chamlay felt that the lesser nobility had indeed been ruined: The lesser nobility of this Kingdom . . . is almost all injured and ruined. And as it is they who supply the better part of the King’s officers (which gives him much superiority over his neighbours, who have not the same advantage) it would be in His Majesty’s interests to prevent that nobility being chased from its lands after the Peace.

Up to a point he may have been correct, though his judgement was by no means infallible on many matters thanks largely to ignorance. Corroborating evidence suggests that an unusually large number of ordinary noble troopers in the king’s Gardes du corps companies needed leave to sort out their private affairs in spring , and many of them may have previously served as regimental officers. Worryingly for the king, by the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession in spring  there was no sign that the French nobility – even many colonels – had recovered a sufficient degree of solvency to provide Louis XIV and Philip V with the service they required. This was in spite of the  edict suspending all debt proceedings against serving officers, and which generously recognised the legitimate costs of non-military activity by the nobility in a way the less-indulgent Louvois had been keen to downplay. However, historians have in the past been too quick to write off ‘falling gentries’ and aristocracies in ‘crisis’ throughout Europe, most notably for the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. More recent research has convincingly endowed the traditional landed elites with a resilience and ability to recover which should lead us to be wary of making similar sweeping claims about the nobles of Louis XIV’s  

 

Constant, La vie quotidienne de la noblesse, p. ; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  June ; Sarram´ea, Lettres, p. : Franc¸ois to his father,  Jan. . Mention, L’arm´ee de l’ancien r´egime de Louis XIV a` la R´evolution, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Louvois,  July ; A , no. : Louis to Catinat,  Sep. ; A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  Aug. ; A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  May ; A , fols. r –r , v –r : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  May,  Dec. ; A : to Genlis,  May ; A , fol. r : Langallerie to Barbezieux,  June ; M´emoires de Catinat, vol. II, p. : Louis to Catinat,  May . SHAT A , fol. v : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; A , no. : estimates of troop retrenchments,  July ; Ferguson, ‘Blood and Fire’, p. . SHAT A , no. : ‘Discours’, ; A : Barbezieux to Du Doyer, Marais, Favre,  Apr. ; A , no. : memorandum on Carabinier surgeons [May ]; no. : Saint-Laurens to Chamillart,  July ; OM : declaration,  Feb. .



The pressures and temptations of service France. After all, they continued to serve in their thousands during the War of the Spanish Succession. Certainly officers sold parts of their patrimony to cover their expenses, and even pawned personal possessions such as watches, but in part the poverty of the officer corps was a poverty of access to liquid capital at a time when the money supply was shrinking due to successive revaluations and devaluations of the coinage and the resultant hoarding of coins. If one looks at the non-military activity of the nobility in the s and s, there is evidence of grave difficulties but not of absolute ruin. Improvements and enlargement of chˆateaux, which had occurred in the first half of Louis’s ‘personal rule’, do not seem to have been carried over into the second half and only really started up again in the countryside after . Given, as Constant says, that a noble’s home was the centre of his existence and the seat of his immediate family, reflecting its status and pride, the stagnation in architectural activity – even basic modernisation of run-down property by lesser nobles – would indicate an elite which was having to draw in its horns. Not that this would have worried the Le Tellier, who continued to spend vast sums on properties such as Meudon and Chaville (never mind their more outlying possessions), for an ordinary noble family embellishing its seat was not going to reflect the glory of the Bourbon dynasty, even if a chˆateau did sport the fleur-de-lys. The resumption of spending in the first decade of Louis XV’s reign indicates a return to relative prosperity, which the eighteenth-century financial historian Forbonnais attributed to the inflation of land values and the Law experiment allowing the liquidation of many noble debts. In the short term, of course, families struggled to support themselves in royal service. Most noble families seem to have been capable of bearing the burden of service for a number of years, but ultimately they needed periods of recuperation. Officers still did not remain in service for as long as Louis XIV would have liked, and were often obliged to quit after a few short years to avoid ruin. In the meantime their sense of 

 



On these controversies, the most useful discussions in English can be found in R. J. Knecht, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France (London, ), pp. –; J. Russell Major, ‘Noble Income, Inflation and the Wars of Religion in France’, American Historical Review  (), –; J. Russell Major, From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy. French Kings, Nobles and Estates (London, ), pp. –, –. For a grotesque caricature of the traditional view of noble decline, see J. Lough, An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century France (London, ), pp. –; a more sophisticated argument is supplied by D. Bitton, The French Nobility in Crisis, – (Stanford, ). All this bears a strong resemblance to the controversy over the early modern English gentry in the s: for typically controversial guidance on this, see J. H. Hexter, ‘Storm over the Gentry’, in Reappraisals in History (London, ). Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, p. ; Quarr´e, M´emoires, p. ; Chagniot, ‘Ethique et pratique de la “profession des armes”’, p. ; Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et soci´et´e au Grand Si`ecle, pp. –, –. At present there is almost nothing available on the social patterns of architectural improvement and spending in the late seventeenth century, so the views expressed here can only claim to be provisional. Meanwhile, see J.-M. P´erouse de Montclos, Histoire de l’architecture fran¸caise de la Renaissance a` la R´evolution (Paris, ), pp. , , ; Constant, La vie quotidienne de la noblesse, pp. –. F. V´eron de La Forbonnais, Recherches et consid´erations sur les finances de France: depuis  jusqu’en ,  vols. (Li`ege, ), vol. VI, p. .



The officer corps and the standing army Table . Average length of time between a change of officer in the native French regiments of cavalry and dragoons – years –. Rank

Cavalry

Dragoons

Colonel Lieutenant-Colonel Major Aide-Major Captain Lieutenant Cornet

 years  months  years  months  years  months  years  months  years  months  years  months  years  weeks

 years  months  years  months  years  month  years  months  years  months  years  months  year . months

Subaltern turnover was distinctly higher: . per cent of cavalry companies went through four or more lieutenants and . per cent went through four or more cornets in this period; in the dragoons the corresponding figures are . per cent and . per cent. Sources: SHAT Yb : cavalry and dragoon contrˆoles, –.

hope and ambition, however misplaced, drove many to devote precious resources to their units in an attempt to attract royal or ministerial favour. Measuring the pressure on ordinary officers is highly problematic, but it is possible to garner some statistical clues about length of service, though the picture is neither wholly clear nor accurate. We can establish – to within  per cent accuracy – the typical length of service in the horse thanks to a few documents outstanding from the s. Taking all French cavalry regiments on  December , we can gauge the tenure of captains: only  to  per cent had commissions in this rank which predated the Nine Years War, and only  per cent had been captains since the Dutch War; for the dragoons, in July  only  to  per cent had commissions dating from before the current war – probably just over half the rate of the cavalry at the same time – and only . per cent dated from the Dutch War. In the case of the dragoons the smaller number of veteran captains can be accounted for by the particularly drastic r´eforme of this arm in . One must also remember that many captains in both arms would have had several more years service behind them as a subaltern. All the same, in  a full  to  per cent of cavalry captains and in  about  per cent of dragoon captains had reached that rank only at some stage since August . On the basis of some contrˆoles for –, table . records the average length of time between a change of officer in every regimental rank. For the infantry it is not possible to paint nearly so complete a picture, and only rough figures can be given for the ranks of colonel, lieutenant-colonel, major and 

SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Aug. ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Sep. .



The pressures and temptations of service Table . Average number of rank-holders during the Nine Years War (–) in French infantry regiments existing on  January . Rank

Number of holders per post in the Nine Years War . . . .

Colonel Lieutenant-Colonel Major Grenadier Captain

Sources: BNF FF (i), fols. v –v ; FF , fols. v –r ; FF (i), fols. r –r ; FF (ii), fols. r –r . All lists made by the abb´e de Dangeau.

grenadier captain for the entirety of the Nine Years War; but what emerges suggests a certain resilience, even among the grenadier captains who were notoriously poor, in what was the most expensive and demanding war fought up to that time (see table .). Taking all four ranks together – and knowing the fates of  per cent of these officers – we can establish that about  per cent died in service, about  per cent retired from service altogether, about . per cent were sacked by the king, and about  per cent were transferred elsewhere within the military with or without promotion; just under  per cent remained in a post once they had reached it until at least the end of the war. The evidence from the cavalry and dragoons therefore points to a regular turnover of captains, as well as subalterns, during the Nine Years War, and it would be surprising to find stronger stamina within the infantry given the record of grenadier captains. On average, captains clearly could only sustain themselves in this rank for three to five years during open war, and though some did engage themselves again after a period of retirement Louis did not like this because it disrupted their skills and gave his service too casual an air. Those who held full commissions during peacetime tended to remain for longer but once war arrived they did not seem to fare any better, nor last any longer, than their newly commissioned brethren. Given that the average ages of the officers in the r´egiment de Vendˆome infantry in  were as follows – captain thirty-three years, lieutenant twenty-seven years, sous-lieutenant twenty-five years – one can suppose that a captain might have spent about five years as a subaltern before purchasing a company in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. If officers’ ‘careers’, such as they were, lasted more than ten   

There is no evidence that their mortality rates were any higher than those of the other three infantry ranks in table .. Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Sep. . SHAT Xb: e´tat of services of officers of Vendˆome infantry [Oct.] . There is no evidence that these ages are out of kilter with anecdotal evidence from the previous two decades.



The officer corps and the standing army years they were either lucky or reasonably prosperous. To quit at about the ten-year mark may have been frustrating for a man who had been motivated, as Sourches put it, by vanity and by fear of ‘starvation’ and boredom in the countryside, but military service performed without stain, whether it immediately led on to higher things or not, enhanced any family’s status in the eyes of their peers. And if exit from the army was a product and a stimulator of disappointment it did not seem to prevent families from pushing the next generation, in time, into the profession of the sword. Hope sprung eternal that Divine Providence might one day shine upon their house as it had done on others of equal obscurity.                       Until God smiled upon him, however, the French officer had to survive in service for as long as he could and as best he could, and that did not always permit him to stick to the king’s regulations. The assumption underlying John Lynn’s article on the ‘tax of violence’ was that the persistence of disorder in the army after the treaty of the Pyrenees was fundamentally a problem of discipline, not related in essence to finance; but a multitude of evidence makes this premise unsafe to hold. Financial problems continued to loom heavily over instances of disorder. Besides, it is unwise to present too strong a dichotomy. Certainly, two areas of disorder – the employment of violence against French civilians, and desertion or absenteeism by officers – could be products of both ill discipline and material desperation. Violence, whether against civilians or brother officers, was frequently related to alcohol, which has never been renowned for its restraining qualities. During campaigning, there was indeed a far lower incidence of officer disorder than during the winter season or when units were in garrison – there was simply less time and opportunity for drinking. Officers, of course, did not need alcohol to display a touchiness about their status in society, and if a civilian, even a judicial official, crossed them he or she might suffer harassment at the least, and if unlucky might fall victim to a serious assault or even murder. However, in numerous cases it is clear or very likely that violence was engendered by material considerations associated with recruitment and the logistical support of units, especially but not necessarily just during years of hardship such as .   



Lynn, ‘How War Fed War’. Sourches, vol. III, p. , – Mar. ; Sandras, La conduite de Mars, p. . SHAT MR : La Porte to Barbezieux,  Mar. ; Bouchu to Barbezieux,  July ; A , no. : Barbezieux to maire and jur´es of Chaulnay,  Dec. ; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Mar. . E.g. SHAT A , no. : Bouchu to Louvois,  June ; MR : Barbezieux to Herleville,  Sep. ; Le Bret to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , fol. r–v : Barbezieux to Quinson,  Apr. ; BNF Clair. , fol. r : Pontchartrain to La Bretesche,  Dec. .



The pressures and temptations of service The problem of gross dereliction of duty, notably in the shape of going absent without leave or deserting the colours altogether, related equally to material difficulties and cultural impedimenta. Absenteeism and desertion under Louis XIV was far less prevalent than it had been before , but that did not mean the crown could be relaxed about it. If officers left their units this in turn facilitated very high rates of desertion among their men, as Richelieu had discovered to his frustration. In the s a harsher line was taken against absent officers, with punishment extending even to the removal of an offender’s nobility, but Le Tellier realised that a better way to avoid high rates of desertion was to develop a regular and ordered system of leave. Officers wishing to be absent had to seek a pass from a general, and in the mids the War Ministry itself took over the task of granting leave. Louis himself was particularly concerned that officers seeking promotion or administrative assistance from the government should not come to court but remain with their units and either correspond with the War Ministry or channel their requests through their superior officers. Throughout the reign, colonels continued to give leave to their officers without reference to the Secretary of War, and during wartime at the end of each winter Louis was always faced with colonels pleading that they be allowed to remain at court for longer. The problem of absence became less chronic, mainly, it should be said, thanks to better pay and conditions, but in spite of stronger support from the crown and the introduction of the semester system for leave during the s, officers continued to go absent without permission, especially in the winter months. The problem was worse with garrison forces than campaign battalions – for example, most of the officers of Fort Barraux in the Alps lived in Grenoble  kilometres away and only went to their post for musters and reviews – but even so, units in an army on the march were often temporarily abandoned by officers going off to hunt or carouse in an inn en route. In August , inquisitive officers in the army of Italy could not resist the chance to slip away and visit Turin when peace was signed with the duke of Savoy. Furthermore, getting officers to their posts in the first place was not achieved without a struggle. At the end of winter officers frequently reported 



Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, p. ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. , –; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Oct. ; OM : ordonnance,  Apr. ; A : Louis to Luxembourg,  Sep. ; A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to [Mailly – transcriber mislabelled it as addressed to Noailles],  Aug. ; Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  Jan. ; vol. IV, p. ,  Feb. . Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Montal,  Jan. , in Hardr´e, p. ; BMG Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  Sep. ; SHAT A : Guiscard to Boufflers,  Dec. ; A , no. : Huxelles to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to infantry Director- and Inspector-Generals,  Nov. ; fol. r : to intendants,  Dec. ; A , fol. v : to Genlis,  Nov. ; A , no. : to Catinat,  June ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Genlis,  May ; OM : ordonnances,  Sep. ,  Sep. ; BNF FF , fols. v –v ; Sandras, La conduite de Mars, p. .



The officer corps and the standing army for duty at their regiments beyond the set deadline: in the army of Italy only twelve colonels out of a total of around fifty arrived at their regiments before  July . The essence of the problem was that officers disliked residing in the vicinity of their men. Far more serious was leaving the service altogether without permission – desertion pure and simple. This was far less a product of ill discipline than extremely low morale engendered primarily by financial struggle, and it seems to have taken a lot of pressure to induce officers to desert their unit. Regiments bottled up for four years between  and  in the fortress of Casale in Monferrato, blockaded or besieged by the Allies, lost an unusually high proportion of their officers who simply gave up and tried to sneak back to France through enemy territory. Poor pay and the battering their units had received in the bloody battle of Neerwinden similarly provoked officers to desert their posts in the army of Flanders and set off for home in August . On a smaller scale desertion could happen for the same reasons at any time when the pressure became just too much for an officer. Captains who fled service frequently left large company debts, running into hundreds of livres, and when the War Ministry caught up with them the unfortunate men were forced to pay up so their replacements would not be burdened. Other manifestations of disorder by officers can be even more directly and clearly linked to financial motives. Marauding by troops composing a mobile force was held to be a direct result of officers failing in their duty to protect the weak because they placed their own personal interests above Christian moral dictates. The crown was determined to limit pillage as much as possible, and in the pursuit of this goal it ordered the execution of men caught in flagrante delicto and imposed heavy fines on their officers. Naturally the crown loathed marauding on French territory, but it also tried to prevent it abroad because of the detrimental effect it almost invariably had on discipline and logistics, with whole regiments becoming unfit for duty. Louis XIV was roused to special fury when churches were pillaged, ordering offenders if 



 



SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Apr. ; A , no. : Villars to Barbezieux,  May ; A , nos. –: Catinat to Louis,  June,  June ; nos. , : to Barbezieux,  July,  July ; BNF FF , fol. r . Vauban, vol. II, p. : Vauban to Robinet de Pontagny,  Nov. ; SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Crenan,  Jan. ; A , fols. r –r , v : Crenan to Barbezieux,  Jan.,  Jan.,  Feb. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Crenan,  Apr. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Crenan,  Dec. ; A , fol. v : Crenan to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; fol. r : Crenan to Barbezieux,  June . SHAT A , no. : Luxembourg to Louis,  Aug. ; no. : Artaignan to Barbezieux,  Aug. . SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Louvois,  June ; A , no. : Huxelles to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Larray,  July ; A , fol. v : to Bezons,  Jan. ; A : to Bezons,  June ; A , no. : to Bezons,  Nov. ; MR : Le Bret to Barbezieux,  Aug. . Some officers from border regions, especially those from Lorraine, may have been prone to desert for reasons of dynastic loyalty: MR : La Fonds to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  July . Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, p. ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. .



The pressures and temptations of service caught to be burnt at the stake. The success of the policy of repression naturally depended upon the attitude of senior officers in an army, but it was obstructed not only by sympathetic generals but by regimental officers themselves who covered up the depredations of their men and allowed them to pillage in order to stem desertion. Colonels in particular were guilty of protecting their captains from the weight of royal wrath. Unsurprisingly, sometimes generals felt the need to permit plunder, either to prevent their troops melting away, or as a deliberate instrument of policy to seize particular commodities or punish a region. Officers deserting and allowing pillage were grave matters, but these paled beside the fraud and deception practised in the army. In the process of recruiting men officers might undermine each other’s companies (if in different regiments) or abuse the rights of civilians, all because they needed to save money and fill their companies in the cheapest manner possible. Louis Andr´e believed that abuses in recruitment were becoming ‘rarer and rarer’, but many did not go away and some actually became worse. Captains continued to ‘debauch’ men on a wide scale from other companies for the cost merely of a small recruitment bounty, in spite of royal ordinances forbidding it. Men recuperating in hospitals were a particularly tempting target for an unscrupulous officer. In the same way, small inducements to return to French colours with no questions asked were illegally offered to those of Louis XIV’s subjects who had already deserted and were serving the enemy. Moreover, from the late s forcible impressment of civilians by officers grew to worrying proportions. The government preferred there to be no violence or force in recruitment, for an unwilling soldier was likely to be troublesome and probably desert, but though edicts were issued banning such practices Louvois and Barbezieux were prepared to turn a blind eye at times of serious troop shortages. Officers themselves forcibly enrolled and kidnapped men and even boys, including monks, notaries, geriatrics, and shopkeepers whose relative prosperity would have 



  



Ferguson, ‘Blood and Fire’, p. ; SHAT A : Duras to Louvois,  Aug. ; A , fol. v : Louis to Noailles,  Sep. ; A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; Bib Ars , fol. r : La Feuill´ee to Pomponne,  Sep. . SHAT A : La Fonds to Louvois,  Aug.,  Aug.,  Aug. ; A , nos. , : SaintPouange to Louvois,  June,  June ; A , no. : memorandum on desertion [post-]; A , no. : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , fols. v –r : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , no. : Boufflers to Louis,  May ; A , no. : Villars to Barbezieux,  May ; A , no. : La Goupilli`ere to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; Ferguson, ‘Blood and Fire’, p. ; Desormeaux, Histoire de la maison de Montmorenci, vol. V, pp. –. Noailles, M´emoires, vol. I, p. .SHAT A , no. : Vendˆome to Louis,  July . Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. . D. Gillet, ‘Etude de la d´esertion dans les arm´ees royales a` l’´epoque de Louis XIV’ (m´emoire de maˆıtrise, Universit´e de Paris I, ), pp. –; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Oct. ; OM : ordonnances,  Jan.,  Feb. ; A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to infantry Inspector-Generals and commissaires des guerres,  Sep. ; A , fol. r–v : to governors and commanders,  June . Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Feb. ; Ya: Louvois to Les Mulot,  Mar. .



The officer corps and the standing army given them little incentive to take the king’s silver. One cobbler, Franc¸ois Huot of rue de la Savatterie in Paris, signed a receipt in November  for providing thirty pairs of boots to Lingendes, a cavalry captain, but the officer used his signature as a justification for impressment and threatened to kill Huot if he would not leave to join the regiment. When the lieutenant-general of Paris police, La Reynie, forced the captain to relinquish a claim on Huot, Lingendes had the nerve to whine that it would be unfair to lose the recruitment money he had ‘spent’ on him! The job of recruiting could also be left to others – in fact, had to be to a significant extent – who were often even less scrupulous. At least a decade before the eighteenth century ‘racoleurs’ – or enrollers – were operating across France, most notably in the rabbit warrens that were Paris and Lyon. In so far as they could they signed up willing recruits and then sold them on to officers, but they were far from averse to using extreme forms of compulsion to harvest a crop of likely lads, and typically whores would be used as bait, or they would cart drunken men out of taverns. Whether they were genuine volunteers or not they were held in cellars and locked rooms – ‘fours’ – until they passed into the hands of an officer. The monarch, his ministers and La Reynie all found such activities highly distasteful but they knew that a major clampdown would only drive racolage underground and make it all the more difficult to monitor. Periodically things got out of hand, in which case offenders might be sent to the galleys, though one racoleur, a law student, received his comeuppance at the hands of a captain who doublecrossed and kidnapped him as a recruit. Officers went to such extremes because they either wanted recruits without the bother of wooing them, or they wanted to extort money from their hapless victims as the price of their release. Either way the aim was to save money and widen the pool of resources on which a company could draw. So much of the business of running a company or regiment revolved around the number of men on its books that it is scarcely surprising to find that muster fraud continued to cause deep anxiety in the War Ministry throughout the ‘personal rule’ of Louis XIV. The growth in the size of armies, and the number of units detached from the main force in some theatres, made it more and more difficult for the limited number of commissaires des guerres to conduct accurate musters, forcing the government to rely heavily upon the honesty and hard work of regimental majors 

 



BNF NAF , fols. r , r : Barbezieux to Tess´e,  Aug.,  Sep. ; FF , fol. r : placet of Hugues Anges Masson, July ; SHAT A , no. bis: Bouchu to Louvois,  June ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Chazeron,  Apr. ; A , no. : memorandum [either  or ]. Countless other examples abound. BNF FF , fol. r–v : placet of Franc¸ois Huot, Nov. ; fol. r : Lingendes to La Reynie,  Nov. . SHAT A : Barbezieux to Argenson,  Feb. ; Dangeau, vol. V, p. ,  Mar. ; BNF FF , fol. v : La Reynie to Harlay,  June ; FF , fol. r : placet of Marin Buquet, Nov. ; fol. r : Buquet to La Marre,  May . SHAT A , no. : memorandum,  Dec. ; BNF FF , fols. r –r : placet of Christophle Richer, Nov. ; fols. r –v , r−v : Le Camus to La Reynie,  Nov.,  Nov. .



The pressures and temptations of service and the infantry major-general of an army. All the rhetoric indicates that the government was determined to smash muster fraud, and it must be acknowledged that there was a marked decline in the rate from the s, but might the government have been inclined to allow a small amount to go on? One is certainly still left pondering just how serious the king and his ministers were about eradicating it altogether. First, the commissaires were given no particular incentives to root out fraud. Second, musters for campaign troops occurred but twice during the summer, allowing captains three months of resources on the basis of so many men – men who in reality quickly declined in number while the Extraordinaire des Guerres continued to pay out on the basis of the official figure. Some officers dispensed with the services of a proportion of their men in the immediate aftermath of a muster, so that they could pocket the surplus pay and allowances. This could be detected, but only if the commissaires des guerres, the inspectorate and the general officers were vigilant. Unfortunately for the king, as has been spelled out earlier, many of them were complaisant or corrupt. If officers could bribe them or win them over to their point of view there was almost nothing the War Ministry could do about it. The variety of fraud was wide and the methods used to perpetrate it could be surprisingly sophisticated. Camille Rousset credited Louvois with ending the use of ‘passevolants’ – men who were not part of a company but who would be put on parade just for a muster – by applying a series of draconian punishments which varied over the reign, and which equated passevolants with deserters. From  officers were fined or imprisoned for employing them, with the penalty going up to  livres in , and men were rewarded with the money and a discharge for denouncing their officers. This lessened the problem, but in the early s, when the government withdrew paies de gratification, the officers resorted once more to passevolants – often using their own valets – in greater numbers. They persisted in this fraud, despite the reintroduction of paies de gratification, throughout the Nine Years War. Officers could trick the government in another related way: by allowing their men to work for private individuals during the winter months and then sharing the extra income with them. In a futile effort to prevent officers dispersing their men straight after a muster, in April  the crown tried but failed to get majors 





SHAT A : Bagnols to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , no. : Luxembourg to Louis,  Aug. ; A , no. : Maisoncelle to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; OM : ordonnance,  May ; A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  June . Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, p. ; SHAT A , fols. v –r : Louis to Luxembourg,  Aug. ; A , no. : Bagnols to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to cavalry [and infantry] Director-Generals,  May . Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, pp. –; Lamont, ‘Officers of the Foot’, p. ; SHAT A : Louvois to Noailles,  Oct. ; to Geoffroy,  Oct. ; A , no. : Bouchu to Louvois,  July ; A , no. : commission for Coigny,  Dec. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to commissaires des guerres,  May ; A , fols. v –r : to cavalry and infantry Director-Generals,  Jan. ; A : to Genlis,  Mar.,  May ; A : to Voysin,  May ; A , fols. v –r : to Nanclas,  Nov. . On the commissaires, see pp. –.



The officer corps and the standing army to report troop strengths to inspectors every two weeks. Some officers were even audacious enough to play the Extraordinaire des Guerres for fools: they tried to secure payments twice by relying on the confusion in the Treasurer-General’s affairs and networks. The best opportunity for fraud and recouping money was in the aftermath of a battle or siege by exaggerating troop losses. Captains naturally dreaded the musters which followed a major action in which they had been involved, for it could mean a sizeable cut in income, but they could turn them to their advantage to cover up the effects of earlier desertion, disease and death. Captains may also have given illicit discharges to men in the aftermath of battles because they could then pretend their troops had been killed and the king would look favourably on the officer’s financial plight. To be really successful in fraud required the cooperation of regimental majors who were supposed to be honest, but actually were no such thing because it was in the interests of the regiment – and of themselves who often had to raise credit on their own collateral – to suck as much money in from the crown as possible. They were regularly accused of falsifying regimental enlistment rolls, and in the aftermath of battles they collaborated with captains in producing claims of artificially high casualty figures. Artaignan, major-general of the infantry in the army of Flanders, advised Barbezieux that casualty figures were being inflated by between one-third and one-half after Neerwinden in . As the mar´echal de Luxembourg ruefully informed Louis, ‘It is the custom in France when there has been a combat to include among the dead all the deserters and all the soldiers who have been missing since the start of the campaign.’ It made the king, the ministers and even the generals very angry, but without the cooperation of the majors they could do almost nothing about it. 

 



 

Rousset, vol. II, p. ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –, –; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; SHAT OM : ordonnances,  Oct. ,  Oct.,  Oct. ; OM : ordonnance,  June ; OM : ordonnance,  Feb. ; A , no. : Renaud to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , no. : Maisoncelle to Barbezieux,  June ; A , no. : Barbezieux to infantry Inspector-Generals,  Apr. ; BMG Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  Feb. ; Belhomme, Infanterie, vol. II, p. ; Corvisier, L’arm´ee fran¸caise de la fin du XVIIe si`ecle, pp. –; Foissier, ‘Un commissaire des guerres de Louis XIV’, p. ; Thorillhon, ‘Un petit capitaine’, p. . SHAT A , no. : Villars to Barbezieux,  May ; A , no. : memorandum [Aug. ]. SHAT A : Bagnols to Barbezieux,  July ; A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  July ; A , fols. v –r : Louis to Luxembourg,  Aug. ; A , no. : Luxembourg to Louis,  Aug. . Lamont, ‘Officers of the Foot’, p. ; M´emoires de Catinat, vol. I, pp. –: Vauban to Louvois,  Nov. ; SHAT A : Bagnols to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A : Louis to Luxembourg,  Aug.,  Oct. ; Barbezieux to Artaignan,  Aug. ; A , no. : Artaignan to Barbezieux,  Aug. . SHAT A : Luxembourg to Louis,  Aug. . Colonels and lieutenant-colonels also helped out their captains by artificially inflating the number of men in a company during winter quarters between musters: Sarram´ea, Lettres, p. : Franc¸ois to his father,  Apr. .



The pressures and temptations of service In the course of the s officers lost the capacity to defraud their men of their pay on anything other than a small scale, when control of distribution was removed from them. But because so much money was devolved to them for expenses they could still short-change their troops with the off-reckonings, hospital treatment, equipment and clothing. In the cavalry and dragoons officers commandeered the mounts of their men to carry their excessive amounts of baggage, and sold off part of the oats and wheat rations for their horses, not to mention drafting in four-legged passevolants for the horse musters. Officers withheld pay destined for sick men, speculated with proceeds from the off-reckonings, sold new boots on to other people for a profit, and many other things besides. Colonels forced majors to make illegal use of regimental funds, and if they refused tried to drive them from the regiment. Most disgracefully in the eyes of their peers, it was not unknown for subalterns and captains actually to defraud their regiment by disappearing with recruitment money or making off with hundreds of livres from the regimental masse at their departure from service. The physical infrastructure supporting troop movements and billeting also brought opportunities for illicit gain both during winter quarters and in the campaign season. Officers were forbidden to take bribes from communities in return either for moving on or for good behaviour during winter quarters after , but the wish to bribe is unsurprising because abuses continued for decades, perpetrated even by elite units such as the Gendarmerie, and it was difficult to make charges stick. The e´tapes system – supply and refreshment depots and stopping places for troops on the march, linked by specially designated routes – was particularly difficult to control because of the sheer number of locations involved, the volume of troops on the march in wartime, and the scarcity of officials who could monitor it all in a disinterested way. To begin with, units deliberately strayed from the route plans they had been given and ordered to follow, and on arrival officers took  



 

Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –, –. SHAT OM : ordonnance,  May ; OM : ordonnance,  Sep. ; OM : ordonnance,  Jan. ; A : Barbezieux to intendants,  Jan. ; A , no. : to cavalry and dragoon colonels,  May ; A , no. : Villepion to Barbezieux,  May ; A , no. : Trobat to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  May . Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Lorge,  Apr. ; A , no. : to Saint-Pouange,  Aug. ; A , no. : to Bouchu,  Sep. ; A , no. : Usson to Barbezieux,  Feb. ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Artaignan,  Nov. ; no. : to Marsin,  Dec. ; BMG Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  July ; Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  Oct. ; Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, p. . SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Bezons,  Nov. ; nos. –, , : to various, all dated  Nov. . Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. ; Lamont, ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, p. ; SHAT A : Barbezieux to intendants,  Aug. ; A , no. : Bonval to Barbezieux,  Jan. ; A , no. : memorandum, circa Dec. ; A , no. : La Houssaye to Barbezieux,  June ; A , no. : La Goupilli`ere to Barbezieux,  Nov. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Mar. ; MR : to Herleville,  Mar. ; proc`es verbal,  Nov. ; Navereau, Le logement et les ustenciles des gens de guerre, pp. –.



The officer corps and the standing army bribes to keep marching on to the next suitable stopping point. Towards the end of the century recruitment for the infantry was often done in the name of cavalry or dragoon regiments so that more generous e´tape provisions would be made for infantry officers and their parties of newly enlisted men marching to their regiment. Officers trafficked in route passes for family and friends, forging and selling illegal routes within their regiments which would ‘entitle’ them to trick frightened peasants into providing them with free board and lodging, and perhaps a little extra for the road. They also sold off spare route passes, and when in an e´tape would obtain more lodging places than their unit needed before selling exemptions to the highest bidders. But for fraud to be really effective, and for it to go unpunished, the collaboration of different interests was necessary. Community leaders were supposed to sign documents giving a company a clean report at the end of their stay, but they were suspected with good reason of selling out either the king or the people under their protection for a cut in the proceeds of fraudulent claims and a mouth-stopping bribe to ignore pillage undertaken by the soldiery. If a captain wanted illegally to improve his financial situation then he could be most sure of going unpunished if he enlisted someone higher up the chain of authority in his conspiracy. As this chapter and chapter  have revealed, ministers were right to fear that commissaires des guerres, commis of the War Ministry, majors, colonels, generals and even inspectors could be suborned or be inclined, out of sympathy, to look the other way. No wonder the comte de Tess´e, one of the most agile minds in the high command, felt moved in  to vent his frustration at the huge amount of fraud that went undetected: Never does one see things clearly, because each [officer] depicts his circumstances differently, not to say falsely, and that when the King from his side and M. the Duke of Savoy from his have punished some officer convicted of this trick [recruitment fraud], thirty others take it up again, in the same place and with the same circumstances.

Taken in all its manifestations the fraud which the Ministry uncovered, the evidence for which has survived these  years, was but the tip of a very large iceberg. It was not stamped out by the Le Tellier. Ironically, it probably boosted Bourbon prestige because, provided it did not involve drastically weakened complements of men in regiments, it kept members of the French officer corps in Louis XIV’s service for longer than would otherwise have been possible.  

 

SHAT OM : ordonnance,  May ; OM : ordonnance,  Nov. ; A , no. : La Fonds to Barbezieux,  Jan. ; no. : S`eve to Barbezieux,  Feb. ; Louis XIV, M´emoires, p. . Sarram´ea, Lettres, p. : Franc¸ois to Louis de Lagrange,  June ; SHAT A , no. : memorandum [ or c. ]; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Quinson,  Apr. ; fols. r – r : to Vendˆome,  Sep. ; Navereau, Le logement, pp. , –. SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Catinat,  June ; A , no. : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  June ; no. : Gaigne to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; no. : anon. to Barbezieux, Aug. . SHAT A , fol. r : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Mar. .



The pressures and temptations of service The French officer corps subscribed not only to the idea of self-help, it also believed in helping itself to parts of the king’s budget to which it was not entitled. It is impossible to get a reliable estimate, in monetary terms, of the amount of fraud perpetrated by the officers, but one can say that illicit siphoning of royal money was not achieved by vast amounts of false mustering, as happened in the first half of the seventeenth century. Of that, the high command were certain.There was some fiddling of muster figures, and this was at its boldest in the aftermath of battles and sieges when officers would habitually lie, with the connivance of many of their superiors, about the losses their units had sustained. When these combat actions coincided with periods of economic depression the mendacity could be extreme, though we have no firm estimates of what that might actually mean in numbers of men. We do know, however, that it was rare for generals to claim that their forces were disappearing in a truly disastrous way, which they repeatedly did during the ministries of Richelieu and Mazarin. Indeed, lieutenant-general the comte de Tess´e, a senior, well-educated, exceptionally intelligent and highly realistic member of the high command, remarked: When one says now and then to the King that in other times the armies subsisted well without pay and without meat, it was because the armies of twenty thousand men on paper were really only five thousand effectives, and , brigands can live where  thousand ordered and disciplined troops cannot subsist.

Tess´e was clearly saying that the armies of the Nine Years War, even in the difficult year of , were considerably more up to strength than had been the case in the first half of the century. The threat of punishment for fraud and other disorder, instead of stamping it out, may have just pushed officers into perpetrating more subtle forms of it. Part and parcel of the government’s drive to enforce hierarchy was to create a chain of responsibility among officers for their actions, making colonels responsible for the errors and misdeeds of their underlings. But again, how far this merely quoshed more blatant forms of fraud at the expense of more devious activity is a matter of unresolvable debate. Louvois was certainly determined to punish malpractice wherever he found it, but he was, to put it bluntly, an extremist whose own sons, Courtanvaux and Souvr´e, felt his draconian will at first hand and were given exemplary and exaggerrated punishments for their misdemeanours. Vauban warned him about going too far when Louvois imprisoned officers who had committed no actual offences under the king’s ordinances, and Lorge appealed against the punishments Louvois  



SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  June . SHAT OM : ordonnances,  Jan. ,  Dec. ; OM : ordonnances,  Apr. ,  Apr. ,  May ,  May ,  Apr. ; Dangeau, vol. III, pp. –; Lemoine, ‘Madame de La Fayette et Louvois’, pp. –. SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Chamlay,  June ; Dangeau, vol. II, p. ,  July ; vol. III, p. ,  Mar. ; Sourches, vol. III, p. , – Mar. .



The officer corps and the standing army was inflicting on officers whose units had panicked before an enemy onslaught for the first time ever. The inadequate enforcement mechanisms of the inspectorate and senior officers, and the need to resort to encouraging denunciations of officers by their men, meant that in Louvois’s Weltanschauung a high level of order could only have been maintained – as in civilian life in this period throughout Europe – by implementing the theory of maximum deterrence. This approach to the officer corps was not adopted by Louis XIV, whose reluctance to be brutal towards his own nobility – in some contrast to the unsentimental approach taken by Richelieu – was directly reflected in the discrepancy in punishments handed down to officers and ordinary soldiers for the same offences. Louis XIV himself was much more inclined to be lenient and overruled Louvois on occasions. As matters deteriorated in the Dutch War and again in the Nine Years War the king – and Barbezieux after  – displayed much more tolerance for the officers’ failings. They were not soft, but unlike Louvois their first instinct was not nearly so much to lash out at an offender. There were profound problems with the crown’s punishment policy, if it can really be called a policy at all. First, there was clearly a difference of attitude between Louvois and the king, indeed between Louvois and most other people, which might be reflected in the imposition and then withdrawal of hasty sentences for offenders. Second, there was limited transparent consistency in the handing down of punishments. Some officers were merely fined for one offence, but others might be imprisoned for the same transgression; or one might be imprisoned and the other dismissed from the service in disgrace. The same punishment might be used for different offences in different places on different occasions, though there was always some particular (if often obtuse) rationale for variations in outcome, especially in length of prison sentences. It is difficult to gauge how many officers underwent formal punishment for their sins, but it seems that about  per cent were sacked from the army altogether by the king in the years  – . Certainly most officers would have lost money on some occasion through having a substandard unit, but explicit fining, imprisonment, dismissal (and even an occasional execution) of officers cannot have been inflicted by the War Ministry on anything more than  to  per cent of the officer corps. A combination of opaque disciplinary conventions, ignorance of those rules which were clearly set down, and the inadequacy of enforcement mechanisms meant that many French officers by  still did not really know where they stood. This   



Vauban, vol. II, p. : Vauban to Louvois,  Aug. ; SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Lorge,  July ; no. : Lorge to Louvois,  Aug. . SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Lorge,  Aug. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Genlis,  Nov. ; A : to Coigny,  July ; A , fols. v –r : to Vendˆome,  Sep. . E.g. Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  Sep. ; Dangeau, vol. II, p. ,  Sep. ; SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Nov. ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to duc de Montmorency,  Sep. ; fol. r : to Poinsegur,  Sep. ; MR : La Grange to Barbezieux,  May . Lynn, Giant, p. .



The pressures and temptations of service was probably inevitable given the standards of education at the time – the level of ignorance could be alleviated more than before but adolescents and nobles in their early twenties continued to grope their way through the haze of social, military and economic hierarchies, often learning the pecking order the hard way with insult and injury. Furthermore, Louis XIV’s need in the years – and again after  was to use his resources to produce quantity rather than to refine quality. At the risk of sounding hagiographic, Louis himself seems to have understood just how far he could realistically expect to impose rigorous discipline on his army. In the eighteenth century, as early as the s, officers were already beginning to react with hostility to any idea that the army should be subjected to ‘Prussianisation’. The idea of a servile service nobility was not one which appealed to French officers, and given the prevailing social system and the king’s need and wish to uphold it, there was no way that Louis XIV or Louis XV could have insisted, as Peter the Great did, upon twenty-five years’ state service. At best, in the last third of the seventeenth century, Louis XIV got about half that from most of his army officers. Louis XIV and his ministers reacted to the chaos and injustice inflicted on the officer corps prior to  by reforming matters in such a way that they could sustain officers in service for longer than before, and could give them far stronger support during the period they held a royal commission. The days when hundreds of officers would serve for only a single campaign, typical of the Thirty Years War, were over. The duke of Fr´ıas, quoted in the introduction to part II, knew what he was talking about when he marvelled at the improvement the French officer corps had undergone since the s. But what emerged was still something less than a professional body of men, in large part because they were possessors of a royal franchise, managing the income and expenditure of their units, just as much as they were holders of a commission. Cultural factors too militated against the enforcement of rigorous professionalism which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reformers tried so hard to instil and enforce. So how far did the nobility share in the cost of war with the king? John Lynn believes that officers may have contributed as much as  to  per cent of true military expenditure. If true this would mean that in  about , officers were spending about  million livres, an average of , livres each. Even taking into account the fact that about , or so colonels, officers in elite units and general officers would be spending considerably more than this, the overall figure quoted appears extremely doubtful. Lynn’s estimate does not even seem realistic if we include the amount spent by ordinary regimental officers upon their own upkeep, over and above any subsidisation of the war effort from their own pockets. The Sarram´ea family, who were neither rich nor poor, provided for their son Franc¸ois as  

BNF FF , fols. r , r –r , r –r : ‘Reflexions’ [c. ]. Lynn, ‘How War Fed War’, .



The officer corps and the standing army a sous-lieutenant, who needed about another  livres of income a year to support himself. Vauban and others thought captains typically needed between  and  livres extra income. If these figures are remotely accurate, and the evidence suggests that they are within reasonable bounds, then the officer corps as a whole may have been pumping around  to  million livres per annum either into direct military activity or into maintaining their lifestyle while they were in the army. That was about  to  per cent of total expenditure associated with the army. For most lesser noble families even this was a struggle, especially to find liquid capital, and one did not need to go bankrupt to be forced into retirement after five to ten years. To conclude, one can say with a fair degree of certainty that Louis XIV’s determination to accommodate the interests of his noble subjects was responsible for the great growth in the standing army, its expansion in wartime and the retention of officers for several years longer, on average, than had been the case under Richelieu and Mazarin. Many of the supposedly authoritarian reforms – such as inspectors and tighter control of pay and expenditure mechanisms – were inspired as much by a desire to save officers from short-sightedness, as to clamp down on abuse. As such they went hand in glove with the new-found tolerance and regulation of venality, and the preservation of regiments on a footing for decades at a time. Louis struggled to understand how much pressure his officers were really under, not least because their sense of honour and ambition led them to pull out all the stops whenever the king was likely to be present near their unit. Moreover, his officers were supposed to be gentlemen, and gentlemen had personal standards of smartness and social expectation to maintain which cost a certain amount of money – they were not merely administrators and combat leaders. But by the mid-s Louis had a fairly good idea of their stamina. Both the Dutch War and the Nine Years War ended before large portions of the officer corps started to buckle while in service, but in the War of the Spanish Succession it is perhaps no coincidence that major deterioration set in after about six years. Mostly when officers got into difficulty in the earlier wars it was because of short-term crown financial problems, through promotion above their means or through misallocation of priorities in spending by themselves. In the War of the Spanish Succession these perennial problems were all compounded by the growing fiscal exhaustion of France, but that is another story. 

Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Sep. .



Part III

The high command of the French armies

Introduction

The aggressive foreign policy pursued by Louis XIV in the first half of his ‘personal rule’, and the ensuing suspicion this engendered, which in turn provoked the two greatest conflicts of his reign – the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession – required the French king to maintain a large standing army during peacetime and to put even larger forces into the field on what appeared to be an everincreasing number of geographical fronts during open hostilities. The over-arching presence of war throughout Louis’s reign had significant effects upon the French army and its relationship with the wider society, especially the social elites. Part I of this book has considered the changes which affected the Le Tellier dynasty and the civilian administration of the army, while part II examined the regimental officer corps to explain the way Louis XIV and his advisers reshaped the standing army to make it a more reliable and responsive force for the waging of war and the deterrence of foreign threats. Because the deployment of forces in the field was such a central part of military activity it is now necessary to turn, in the third part of this book, to the high command: to investigate the nature and extent of the powers wielded by the generals, to examine the criteria by which appointments to command were made, and to explore the means used by Louis XIV to try to bring the most exalted – and potentially most dangerous – of his subjects firmly under his control. All this involved a host of delicate political and social matters, which have been considerably under-researched because their connection with the army as an institution was not clearly obvious to generations of historians imbued with nineteenth-century notions of military administration. Indeed, by borrowing the very term ‘high command’ we are using something of an anachronism. In the seventeenth century the high command can barely be seen as a collective entity in the way it became by , consisting as it did of princes, peers, marshals of France and other less exalted nobles, all of whom had their own political and social interests which transgressed any neat civil–military boundary. Moreover, what gave a strong sense of impermanence was the way authority was delegated in Louis XIV’s lifetime: all generals were issued with the king’s commission only for a limited period, usually a campaign season, and power could only be exercised outside the army to which they were attached with further royal permission. A full theatre commander – known variously as a ‘g´en´eral en chef ’, ‘g´en´eral de l’arm´ee’ or ‘lieutenant g´en´eral pour le Roi’, and who will usually be referred to here as a 

The high command of the French armies ‘commander-in-chief ’ – might have his commission renewed several years in a row, but even so command over an army during the winter months, with the forces strung out over a wide area in quarters, might be given to another general. The subordinate generals too were appointed for a limited period, but many more of them remained on station during the winter months at the king’s command, not always to the delight of the campaign commander-in-chief. All this notwithstanding, the commander-in-chief of a field army continued to receive a massive delegation of authority under Louis XIV, with overall control of the force in battle or a siege actually one of the rarer duties they had to perform. These men were charged with overseeing all campaign operations in a theatre which could stretch, in some cases, over thousands of square kilometres. In the Dutch War or Nine Years War a general might find himself in charge of the armies of Flanders, Meuse-Moselle, Germany (the upper and middle Rhine region), Franche-Comt´e, Italy (the southern Alps and the Po valley), Catalonia or Ireland. They were expected to supervise the work of the other generals appointed beneath them, watch over the state of the battalions and regiments composing their force, advise the king and Secretary of War on patronage matters, ensure the army had enough money, oversee the bread supply and other logistical support provided by private contractors, and generally direct a whole range of administrative activity. The vast distances between some field armies and the court only reinforced the commander-in-chief ’s authority over his subordinates and over military operations. The burden of responsibility resting upon a g´en´eral en chef was consequently immense; for some commanders a campaign proved a race between time and total exhaustion. In  Catinat, commanding the army of Italy, was sleeping little more than three hours a night: by July he was so tired that he could barely eat, instead resorting to the consumption of vast quantities of milk. He also took opium to relieve the pressures of command. The strain the generals were under reflects the very real degree of autonomy they continued to enjoy under Louis XIV. To assist the g´en´eraux en chef in the administration of the French armies there were whole teams of subordinate lieutenant-generals and mar´echaux de camp who made up the e´tat-major g´en´eral – or general staff – of each army. After  the most senior of the lieutenant-generals would assume command in the event of the g´en´eral en chef being incapacitated or killed, but the normal significance of lieutenant-generals lay in the devolution of authority to them by the commander-in-chief. They would act as separate corps commanders if required, but in battle they came into their own as experienced field officers, when the g´en´eral en chef would rely heavily on their judgement and leadership skills. The choice of these officers for an army was  

On appointments to winter command, and the problems this could pose for other generals, see Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –. BNF FF , fols. r−v , r , r−v : Catinat to Croisille,  Apr.,  Apr.,  July .



Introduction therefore a matter for serious reflection by the king. Below them were the mar´echaux de camp, who in battles were usually paired with a lieutenant-general. They were the real workhorses of the army general staffs. Until the end of the ancien r´egime administrative authority in an army was rotated in the form of a system which put a particular lieutenant-general and a mar´echal de camp on duty for twenty-four hours at a time. These men were known as the general officers ‘du jour’, and each general filled these posts by turn, with the most senior of each rank going first. The lieutenant-general du jour received the daily orders and password from the commander-in-chief, visited the sentry posts and saw the guard changed. He put the army into line of battle when necessary and was its commander until all the units were in position. If a large corps moved ahead of the rest of the army in line of battle he took command and led it into combat. The notion of the lieutenant-generals as essentially combat commanders is reinforced by an examination of the role of the mar´echal de camp du jour, on whom the administration of an army really depended. He received the daily orders and password through the lieutenant-general du jour, and in turn transmitted them to the senior officers of the various arms composing the army. He supervised the guards and sentries directly and took charge of the foraging. On march days he marked out in advance the location of the new camp, distributed space within it and oversaw its guard. In line of battle he executed the orders of the lieutenant-general du jour. During sieges the lieutenant-general du jour commanded the main assault and the mar´echal de camp du jour any second line of attack. The basic role of the two duty generals each day was to achieve a high degree of administrative coordination under the commander-in-chief, which was not deemed possible if there were split jurisdiction over different subsections of the army. The task was so onerous, and the number of general officers was increasing so much, that it had to be rotated on a daily basis. Such was the theory, but the growing size of armies in the s overburdened the mar´echaux de camp. To relieve the pressure Luxembourg recommended that the lieutenant-general du jour be made to oversee the detail of the army more directly, as already happened in the army of Flanders. To aid them in their military management, g´en´eraux en chef also relied on the heads of the infantry, cavalry, dragoons and artillery in each army. The infantry had no commandant answerable to a Colonel-General, so its immediate chief was the major-general of the army. He received orders for the infantry from the mar´echal de camp du jour and transmitted them to the majors of each brigade; gave orders to all infantry sent out as a detachment from the army; checked on all infantry units during marches and in camp, giving a written account to the commander-in-chief and the generals du jour; and lined the infantry up for combat. He was as far as possible  

 Ibid., pp. –. Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, p. . SHAT A : Louis to Luxembourg,  July ; A : Luxembourg to Louis,  July .



The high command of the French armies in direct attendance on the commander-in-chief and was described by Catinat as his ‘porte-voix’, distributing orders to all the foot, especially in battle. He kept the commander-in-chief in constant touch about the strength and quality of the infantry and informed him about the state of their weaponry, all so that orders for improvements could be issued with the g´en´eral en chef ’s authority. However, although he was usually junior to the general officers, the major-general was possessed of immense power if he enjoyed his commander’s confidence, and in those circumstances he could get away with issuing orders on his own authority. In the cavalry and dragoons it was more complicated. The persistence in these arms of the prerogative charge-holders set up an institutional barrier in the shape of the cavalry and dragoon commandants whose authority was interposed between the g´en´eral en chef and the regiments. Their existence provoked an enduring tension which periodically soured relations in a general staff and at times even threatened the operational capability of an army, as in the army of Flanders in . These two commandants were served by men performing a similar set of tasks to the majorgeneral of the infantry. The post of major-general of dragoons did not reach a mature stage of evolution until the War of the Spanish Succession (though the term was used casually), and before that time its role, as an administrative counterpart to the infantry major-general, was fulfilled by the major of the most senior dragoon regiment. In practice this figure often deferred to his cavalry counterpart, the mar´echal des logis de la cavalerie, who was almost always a mestre de camp. In April  the king even promoted Du Bourg, the mar´echal des logis of the cavalry in Flanders, to the rank of mar´echal de camp. Although the mar´echaux des logis of the cavalry often held field ranks identical to the infantry major-generals, nevertheless they were denied the equivalent authority by the insistence of the cavalry and dragoon commandants on exercising their rights. In fact, latent tension existed between these men since the king removed the right to appoint the mar´echaux des logis from the hands of the Colonel-General of the cavalry, and devolved the choice of this officer onto the army commander-in-chief. Even so, the mar´echaux des logis de la cavalerie lacked a direct line to the commander-in-chief and, unlike the infantry major-general, were less likely to become his immediate clients. A number of other posts in the general staff tied their holders firmly to the commander-in-chief. The mar´echal des logis des camps et arm´ees du roi had no authority over the troops but he worked closely with the commander-in-chief to coordinate 

  

Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, p. ; M´emoires de Catinat, vol. I, pp. –: Victor Amadeus II to Catinat,  Nov. , ‘R´eponse de Catinat’; SHAT A : Luxembourg to Louis,  Aug. ; A , no. : Noailles to Louis,  June ; no. : Vendˆome to Louis,  June . A more detailed discussion of this post can be found in Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –. See Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –. SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Louvois,  July ; Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, p. ; Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  Apr. . SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Catinat,  June .



Introduction and organise marches and camps, and he transmitted the commander’s orders to the general officers on these matters. He was constantly in attendance on the commander-in-chief and received orders only from him. One of the holders of this post was the marquis de Puys´egur, the closest confidant on his staff of the mar´echal de Villeroi, access to whom he carefully guarded in the s. Leaving this figure aside, the closest members of a general’s entourage were his aides-de-camp, chosen almost exclusively by himself. Although a g´en´eral en chef usually had four, all lieutenant-generals had at least two and all mar´echaux de camp one. Their role was to carry their general’s orders within the theatre of war and especially during battles. It was common practice for aspiring young seigneurs to serve a military apprenticeship as an aide, and Feuqui`eres criticised them for their youth, inexperience, over-enthusiasm and lack of judgement. All the same, many generals were happy to train them up as part of a wider desire to enhance their own position and protect their affinities. General officers of all ranks used these positions as personal sources of patronage, and when they went on campaign the king and the Grand Dauphin themselves chose young members of favoured or prestigious grandes maisons for their ADCs. In  the preponderance of young men aligned to Madame de Maintenon among the Dauphin’s ADCs is striking. An army general staff in this period was a patchwork quilt of jurisdictions which sometimes caused serious administrative disorder. With multiple poles of authority there was always the risk of political splits opening up within a force. The infantry major-general, the mar´echal des logis des camps et arm´ees du roi and his own guard officers and ADCs had a strong direct dependence on the commander-in-chief, but this sense of attachment was far weaker among the cavalry and dragoon officers in a general staff. All officers and aides were under the nominal command of the g´en´eral en chef of course, but in practice the commandants of the cavalry and dragoons had an oversight which could not be ignored, and the commander-in-chief also had to make allowances for the private and professional interests and sensitivities of an increasingly large number of general officers. A commander-in-chief could not always do very much to defuse tensions between his generals, but he could certainly make matters worse if he indulged in favouritism and encouraged the development  





Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, p. . Lavall´ee, vol. I, p. : Maintenon to La Villette, Jan. ; SHAT A : Louis to Villeroi,  June , illustrates a rare occasion when a general was forced to accept an ADC, in this case Louis pushing on Villeroi a young Swedish noble in order to further French interests in Stockholm. SHAT A , fol. r : Catinat to Louis,  Oct. ; BNF FF (ii), fol. v ; FF , fol. r ; FF , fol. r ; FF , fol. v ; FF , fol. r−v ; fol. r ; Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, pp. , ; F. Ziegler, Villars: Le centurion de Louis XIV (Paris, ), pp. –; S´evign´e, Lettres, vol. I, p. : S´evign´e to Mme de Grignan,  Apr. ; La Chesnaye, vol. XIV, p. ; Lavall´ee, vol. III, p. : notes. On the guard companies of generals, which followed them on campaign and actively protected and assisted them, see Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –. See also, Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, p. ; SHAT A : Boufflers to Louis,  July .



The high command of the French armies of factions. Reining this in was usually in the crown’s interest, but, as chapter  will suggest, the crown might exploit personal differences between generals in order to restrain those whose talents were great but whose compliance was suspect. Louis XIV faced several problems related directly to the high command in the early years of his ‘personal rule’: () he had to establish a stronger sense of hierarchy among the generals; () he had to restore the royal prerogative to appoint anybody he wished to the command of armies; () he had to eradicate from the minds of his generals their firmly held view that the performance of their duties automatically entitled them to royal largesse, the most difficult goal to achieve. To a limited extent, as will become obvious in this final part of the book, Louis succeeded in imposing his will in these matters, though it was no easy task and took fifteen to twenty years before compliance had reached tolerable levels. Other difficulties, though, continued beyond that magic year of  to which historians have traditionally dated the creation of an obedient and malleable high command. Not the least of Louis XIV’s worries throughout his reign was the selection of army and corps commanders, and related to that the question of how they could best be controlled – an understandable anxiety given the way generals in the period of his minority had turned the forces in their charge against the regent and Mazarin. The following three chapters will consequently seek to establish, first, how much authority Louis XIV allowed the commanders-inchief to wield in the years between  and ; second, what criteria he used in selecting generals for command; and, third, how he maintained their goodwill and cooperation. More authoritarian and more hierarchical the French army may have become, but its smooth administration continued to rely upon a realistic sense of the possible and good personal relations between king and senior officers. 



This theme will be explored in a subsequent article, ‘French Armies as Court Societies under Louis XIV’. Meanwhile, readers are directed to Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –. Le Tellier compared the army at this time to a cantonal republic: see BNF FF , fol. r : Michel Le Tellier to Mazarin,  Oct. .





The commanders-in-chief and the delegation of royal authority Contrary to popular ideas, army commanders-in-chief and more junior corps commanders enjoyed considerable autonomy in the day-to-day management of the forces under their command throughout the reign of Louis XIV. There is certainly some truth in the traditional argument that Louvois sought to gain prescriptive control over all aspects of campaigning, either through the intendants d’arm´ee and commissaires des guerres or through overbearing pressure on the generals. But, as part I of this book made clear, the attempt to use the intendants to control the generals had only a very limited effect, while Louvois himself – never mind Michel Le Tellier or Barbezieux – was anxious to build up a network of supporters within the high command on whom he could rely and who would not, therefore, have to be bullied. Moreover, it is far from clear that the king shared the extreme need felt by Louvois to micro-manage the French war effort. Indeed, Louis XIV was all too aware that he was not omniscient – the royal gaze might be seen throughout the kingdom by his subjects but that did not mean he could see very much himself. In the case of the army, Louis found – and here his generals agreed with him – that military affairs could be best coordinated when the king was at court rather than in the field in person. This meant, of course, that reports of events on the ground might take, at the very least, twenty-four hours to reach him from Flanders, four days from Alsace, five days from the southern Alps, and ten days from Catalonia; replies and orders from court would take at best the same amount of time to reach the armies in the field. Geographical reality was, perforce, a major constraint on royal and ministerial control over several major theatres of war. To a large extent, the leeway allowed a general in interpreting the king’s orders also reflected the relationship he had with Louis. This applied as much to matters financial, judicial and political as it did to the formulation of strategies.                                             In the fields of justice and discipline commanders retained considerable scope for using their initiative. Apart from the king it seems only the Dauphin could issue 

I am using the term ‘corps commanders’ to mean those general officers to whom authority over a body of troops, separated from the main armies, had been devolved either by the commander-in-chief or by the crown.



The high command of the French armies fresh regulations in the field. However, all generals bore responsibility for maintaining order and containing the troops, and they could issue bans, carrying the same weight as royal ordinances and prescribing capital punishment, as long as they were within the broad framework of royal military or civil law. All commanders could exercise important discretionary power, apparently extending even to the granting of pardons or the commuting of capital sentences handed down by courts martial. The disciplining of officers also demanded some latitude. In August  Catinat imprisoned two colonels for arriving late at their regiments after winter quarters, while in June  Luxembourg went so far as to block a ministerial order to dismiss a captain from the Italian r´egiment de Peri infantry on the grounds that the man was a good officer. He awaited a new order from the king personally. The power to order the monthly musters of the troops, known as revues, lay solely with the commander, and not with the intendant d’arm´ee, who could only act on his instructions. This was a matter of constant worry to Louvois, knowing the complaisance many general officers exercised towards their juniors. By delaying musters for as long as possible, a commander could ensure that companies were paid on the basis of outdated figures which had been registered before death, desertion and hospitalisation took their toll on the men. The cost of holding off musters could be extremely high: Bagnols, in July , believed that a muster in Flanders at the start of August would save the king nearly  million livres in money, bread and meat. In practice, regular revues remained a partially satisfied aspiration rather than an actual experience. In  Louvois was so horrified at the apparent diminution in troops in the army of Catalonia that he ordered the duc de Noailles to send him detailed figures, company by company, as he did not believe that the earlier figures had been accurate. In September Louvois was furious when he heard that Noailles had passed as present in the revues the troops who had been killed at the siege of Campredon, and scolded the duke for his action. However much Louvois might try to bully the generals, it clearly remained extremely difficult to exact compliance from them, for the intendants d’arm´ee and commissaires des guerres were not prepared to confront them on this and other matters. Bagnols told Barbezieux in July  he would not ask Luxembourg to conduct musters unless he knew that the king had explicitly requested it. Barbezieux’s  

 

SHAT OM : ‘Reglement fait par Monseigneur le Dauphin Concernant le Partage du Butin dans les Partys d’Infanterie’,  June . Sandras, La conduite de Mars, pp. –; SHAT A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; no. : marquis de Saint-Pater to chevalier de La Fare,  Sep. ; no. : La Fare to SaintPater,  Sep. ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Louis,  May ; A , fol. r–v : Barbezieux to Chazeron,  Feb. . SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , no. : Luxembourg to Louis,  June . SHAT A : Bagnols to Barbezieux,  July . See also A : Louvois to Catinat,  July ; A : Louvois to Noailles,  June,  October ; BNF FF , fol. r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  June .



The commanders-in-chief and royal authority remarkable reply three days later suggests that neither he nor the king had enough authority to force Luxembourg to hold musters or to distribute bread and wine rations on the basis of the official number of effectives. Subordinate generals too could hold up musters: on  April  the comte de Tess´e defiantly told Barbezieux that he would not allow the commissaires to conduct musters in the Pinerolo area for the end of winter quarters until after  April, far later than the date specified by the royal edict. This was because the lack of pay and poor provision for enlistment bounties meant the recruiting officers had only just left Italy for France! Although the commissions of g´en´eraux en chef did not usually extend into winter quarters, as they usually retired to court or their estates, the commanders nevertheless influenced winter administration. In October  Catinat allowed both the comte de Chemerault and the duc de La Fert´e (both colonels) to leave the army of Italy early to attend to their private affairs. Officers not only lobbied the War Ministry to get favourable winter quarters treatment for their units but also besieged their commander-in-chief with requests in the hope that he might influence the decisions of the court. G´en´eraux en chef could also vary the timing of the end of the campaign beyond  November, and they could grant leave and adjust the semester system for officers to go recruiting, sometimes to the crown’s displeasure. In spite of the greater attention intendants d’arm´ee could give to logistics from the s, general officers continued to play an active role in organising the supply of wheat, flour, oats, beef and forage, and were often given considerable freedom in this realm. The Grand Dauphin even moved artillery supplies across the whole of northern France’s frontier regions without reference to the War Ministry, though his authority was indeed exceptional. Luxembourg in  was allowed to deal independently with the intendants of frontier provinces to ensure his needs for the siege of Charleroi were met, though, as ever, the crown could in theory countermand an order. At times of crisis commanders were given total control over the vivres for their army, as happened in  when Catinat, facing the siege of Pinerolo, could be found ordering the distribution of supplies across the south-east of France and the southern Alps without prior reference to the government. Again in the winter of , when the atmosphere was a little calmer, Barbezieux handed him control of logistics in preparation for an invasion of Piedmont the following summer. In all of   

  

SHAT A : Bagnols to Barbezieux,  July ; A : Barbezieux to Bagnols,  July ; A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; OM : ordonnance,  Sep. . SHAT A , nos. , : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Oct.,  Oct. . BNF FF , fol.r : comte d’Ayen to Noailles,  Aug. ; SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  Sep. ; no. : to Barbezieux,  Sep. . A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Oct. . SHAT A , no. : De S`eve to Barbezieux,  June . SHAT A , fol. r : Louis to Luxembourg,  September . SHAT A , no.: Louis to Catinat,  Sep. ; A , fol. r : Louis to Catinat,  Aug. ; A , fol. r–v : g´en´eral des vivres Orry to Barbezieux,  June ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Nov. .



The high command of the French armies this the intendants worked at the generals’ sides, auditing the deliveries and giving Barbezieux a precise report each week. If necessary, important decisions about contracting could be taken in the field without advance approval from Versailles, especially with beef supply which was not organised out of Paris. Flanders being nearer to Versailles, it was far easier for the War Ministry to control logistics there than in the Mediterranean. In July  Barbezieux tried to ensure that supply movements by intendants, commissaires and commis were carried out not only with Luxembourg’s orders but with ministerial authorisation too. This infuriated the marshal. The Le Tellier were reasonably successful in maintaining a firm grip through the intendance upon the supply of food and munitions to the armies, and it was important they did so: the vivres contractors were Paris-based, and it was thus the responsibility of the minister to put pressure on them to ensure enough funds were sent to their commis out in the provinces. Nobody else could keep the compagnies des vivres in order, certainly not the generals in the field. Louvois and Barbezieux were therefore profoundly irritated by unilateral action in matters of supply on the part of generals if it was not, in their view, absolutely necessary. Sometimes, though, they had no choice but to acquiesce in decisions taken hundreds of miles away which they deeply resented. From early in his tenure Barbezieux attempted to re-establish the War Ministry’s grip: in November  he erroneously tried to insist that Catinat ‘has no oversight concerning the expenditure undertaken for the subsistance of the troops’. Generals, however, did not fear reprimands for interfering in matters of supply if they deemed it vital to keeping the army together as an effective fighting force. The same sort of difficulties surrounded the management of army finances, which were theoretically in the hands of the intendants and the personnel of the Extraordinaire des Guerres under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of War. However, in practice all g´en´eraux en chef controlled the use of an army’s funds as much on the basis of what they saw fit to do as according to the king’s orders. If the king, Dauphin or other senior royal were themselves the commander-in-chief of an army then they did entirely as they pleased, sometimes dispensing colossal rewards to officers and regiments: in September  the Dauphin gave out gratifications worth 



   

SHAT A , fol. r–v : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Jan. ; fol. r : Louis to Catinat,  Jan. . Partnership in such tasks, which were vital, can be found in the other armies too. As an example see, for Catalonia in , A , fols. v –r , r . SHAT A , no. : Bouchu to Louvois,  Sep. ; A , no. : Louvois to Catinat,  July ; no. : to Bouchu,  Aug. ; A , no. : to Catinat,  Jan. ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Sep. . SHAT A , no. : Luxembourg to Louis,  July . SHAT A : Barbezieux to Bagnols,  July ; A , fols. v –r : to Tess´e,  June . SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Nov. . See chapter  for a full discussion of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, and the fierce way the Le Tellier protected their financial network.



The commanders-in-chief and royal authority about , livres to the officers serving in the army of Flanders; in Brittany and Normandy during  the king’s brother, the duc d’Orl´eans, concerned himself with military finance, including raising revenue locally. Nonetheless, most generals had to contend with an intendant as a rival source of financial authority. The intendant on his own had little strength to resist the orders of generals, but if supported by the War Ministry he could prevent or at least delay decisions they took on the use of money, certainly irritating the general in the process. In his first couple of years in office Barbezieux sought to rein in such financial autonomy as the generals enjoyed. Louvois had demanded that intendant Bouchu resist any attempt by Catinat to release money from the Extraordinaire des Guerres to the bread suppliers of the army of Italy, but Bouchu proved powerless against his chief. Barbezieux, at the end of his patience, told Bouchu he would not sanction in the accounts any payments from the Extraordinaire that he had not personally authorised. He followed this up by castigating Catinat for giving extra payment without crown authorisation to milice units he had sent into the mountains. An equally exasperated Catinat pointed out that these constrictions would create insurmountable obstacles to effective management of the army. He demanded, at the very least, that a discretionary fund be made available to him for urgent or small expenses. Barbezieux seems to have got a firmer grip on money sloshing around in the armies than had Louvois, and his clamp-downs had some justification. In July  the War Ministry began sending express orders for the army of Flanders’ treasurer to disburse money to officers, thereby totally cutting out the commander-in-chief. Luxembourg protested vehemently to Louis that this was a scandalous innovation by Barbezieux which had never been practised even by Louvois. As in Italy in , what Barbezieux seems to have been doing was cracking down on the extraordinary payments, ‘which concern in no way the king’s service, but merely the satisfaction of numerous officers, who are always grasping for money’. Barbezieux was happy to leave ordinary expenditure, essentially the payment of troops, in the hands of the intendant, but for extraordinary expenses he insisted intendants always seek an order from the court. Either there was corruption at the highest level, or, at the very least, senior officers were demanding what they felt they were rightfully owed without concern for the wider needs of the armies. The intendants, far from controlling army funds, were simply not strong enough on their own to resist such demands. Barbezieux’s ability to get his way on this matter, or his willingness to enforce it, seems to have depended on his political position and his relationship     

Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Sep. ; SHAT A , no. : Saint-Pouange to Louvois,  Sep. ; A , no. : Matignon to Barbezieux,  July . AN  AP, no. : Luxembourg to Harcourt,  Sep. . SHAT A , no. : Bouchu to Barbezieux,  July ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Nov. ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Dec. . SHAT A , no. : Luxembourg to Louis,  July . SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Bouchu,  Mar. .



The high command of the French armies with the army commander in question. This may well account for the fact that his directives to Bouchu and Catinat in the Alps came nearly two years earlier than his attempt to enforce the same policy in his enemy Luxembourg’s army. In spite of Barbezieux’s efforts, generals continued to intervene in financial administration and channelled funds to purposes other than those for which they had been intended. In  Catinat diverted , livres from the Extraordinaire des Guerres, destined for paying the troops, to Orry, the g´en´eral des vivres, for the purchase of beef. Barbezieux told him politely not to repeat this. In August  Vendˆome ordered, on his own authority, the commis of the Extraordinaire to pay the suppliers for bread and flour delivered to the army of Catalonia. This was a practice Barbezieux usually condemned if it was done without a royal order, but no reproach was forthcoming on this occasion, probably because he habitually deferred to his friend and social superior Vendˆome. Nevertheless, good relations with Barbezieux did not stop Tess´e and the minister from having a major clash over spending and appropriation in Pinerolo in . The scarcity of money in the coffers of the Extraordinaire des Guerres in April forced Tess´e to raid the separate fortification funds to pay the troops their wages. That spring he also disobeyed Barbezieux’s orders: instead of saving the proceeds of the sale of offices in the Conseil sup´erieur of Pinerolo, as governor and commanding officer he had started to spend them immediately in repaying to local inhabitants the loans he had contracted with them during the siege of the town the previous year. A very annoyed minister informed him that the king forbade any further expenditure of this money. Tess´e, having to deal with an acute financial shortfall, fired back a letter of blistering ferocity and sarcasm to justify his actions, lecturing Barbezieux on the need to maintain good faith in Pinerolo in order to maintain the flow of credit: another siege of the town was a distinct possibility and in such circumstances the goodwill of the propertied citizens would be vital to ensure the defending garrison was regularly paid and supplied. Barbezieux made a partial climb-down. Generals not only involved themselves with the financial administration of the armies, but also made significant contributions from their own pockets to maintaining their forces in the field. For ambitious and conscientious officers financial investment in their commands was important because their honour and future prospects were bound up with successful discharge of their responsibilities. The need for generals to be possessed of some wealth and good credit can be illustrated by the army 

 

During the  crisis generals were even given freedom to confiscate, seize and divert any royal or private funds they could lay their hands on. See Berwick, M´emoires, vol. I, p. xxvii; C. Sturgill, Marshal Villars and the War of the Spanish Succession (Lexington, ), p. . SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Catinat,  July ; A , no. : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  Aug. . SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Apr. ; A , nos. , : Barbezieux to Tess´e,  May,  June ; A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  June .



The commanders-in-chief and royal authority of Italy in . In January Tess´e was having to provide his own money to regimental officers to pay their units spread around the valleys neighbouring Pinerolo. He had to borrow , livres in the Dauphin´e on his own collateral and that of some friends, who by June had risked their own credit further by taking out more loans to fill the gaps in royal expenditure. In September Vendˆome, in charge on the Cˆote d’Azur, borrowed on his own account to pay the troops of his corps, and in October Catinat and Tess´e had to advance their own funds for the refortification of Pinerolo and surrounding outposts. Tess´e told Bouchu he did not expect early repayment by the crown. Flanders saw similar problems. In April that year Boufflers advanced money to pay the garrisons of Huy and Charleroi from the sale of his regiment. Although the exceptionally bad fiscal and economic circumstances of – were probably responsible for the massive scale of such advances as were made in , this year was not wholly atypical. In December , only six months after the war against Victor Amadeus II broke out and when Savoie had been virtually overrun, the army of Italy already faced shortfalls: Feuqui`eres found himself obliged to advance his own money to pay for guides and artillery horses. A local provincial governor employed as an army commander-in-chief came into his own when the state coffers ran dry. In early  Boufflers raised , livres in cash from Flanders and Brabant to pay for refortifying Namur, drawing on his own credit and using the tribute he had been paid on his appointment as governor-general of French Flanders. The previous year Noailles, interim governor of Languedoc, had to borrow on his own credit in Toulouse in order to fill the chest of the army of Catalonia. Even without such advances the financial burdens of service on general officers could easily bring them to the verge of bankruptcy. Feuqui`eres is a classic example of this. In August  he told G´erard, his business manager in his governorship at Verdun, that his money had run out and asked him to cash two promissory notes and give the money to his brother the abb´e de Feuqui`eres who would get it to him at the army of Flanders. A little under a year later, though, Feuqui`eres was in desperate straits: the lettres de surs´eance he had obtained from the king, to prevent his creditors closing on outstanding debts, were about to be revoked and he appealed to Pomponne, once again a member of the conseil d’en haut after July , to prevent this catastrophe. Whether the letters were renewed is unclear, but shortly afterwards Feuqui`eres ordered G´erard to pay off his creditors from any 

  

SHAT A , nos. , : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Jan.,  Mar. ; A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  June ; A , no. : La Fare to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; no. : Tess´e to Bouchu,  Oct. . SHAT A , fol. r−v : Barbezieux to Boufflers,  Apr. ; Bib Maz , fol. v : Guiscard to Barbezieux,  Apr. . SHAT A : Louvois to Feuqui`eres,  Dec. . Bib Maz : Fumeron to Barbezieux,  June ; Noailles, M´emoires, vol. I, p. : Noailles to Louis,  May .



The high command of the French armies source of revenue available. Similar problems were faced in  by Quinson, a lieutenant-general and Director-General of the cavalry in Catalonia. Straightforward financial reimbursement for the advances that generals had made took place whenever possible. As with regimental officers, gratifications and pensions were paid by the crown to supplement officers’ normal pay, and essentially to reimburse them for expenses already incurred in the king’s service rather than as bribes for good behaviour. The crown additionally made grants at the outset of each campaign to g´en´eraux en chef, ostensibly for the assembling and upkeep of their equipage, typically a sum of c.  to , livres. Nevertheless, the financial health of an officer could be destroyed not only through debt run up in the king’s service but also through unexpected disaster striking elsewhere. During mid- the Receivers-General of the taille in the Dauphin´e went into insolvency. Their bankruptcy also ruined the marquis d’Herleville, governor of Pinerolo, who had invested , livres in their activities, all of which was now lost. On top of this he already owed his creditors , livres and also had to pay a Capitation tax of  e´cus (c. , livres) to the crown. Given the vital role of generals in managing the armies and helping to finance them, as well as the huge distances from the court at which some armies operated, it was necessary for the crown to preserve a great deal of the traditional autonomy of commanders in the field. For practical reasons, but also because of the social and political positions of the g´en´eraux en chef who were trusted agents of the king, their powers did not merely encompass troop administration, logistics and finances. They also extended into a field which enhanced their dignity and prestige and further strengthened their political position: the distribution of patronage.               ‘       ’      -- All army commanders were significant as patronage ‘brokers’ but to a certain extent the power and influence of a g´en´eral en chef in this field rested upon that commander’s political position at court and his proximity to the king. Commanders-in-chief sent lists of candidates for officerships to the court if openings occurred during the   



Etienne-Gallois, Lettres des Feuqui`eres, vol. V, pp. , –: Feuqui`eres to G´erard,  Aug. ,  July ; Bib Ars , fol. r : Feuqui`eres to Pomponne,  July . SHAT A , no. : Quinson to Barbezieux,  Aug. . See also the plight of an artillery lieutenant, Camus d’Ivours, in : AN G : placet of Nov. . Dangeau, vol. III, p. ,  May ; vol. IV, p. ,  Mar. ; BNF FF , fol. r ; for examples of gratification payments to general officers, see SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; BNF FF (ii), fols. v –r : gratifications ‘P´eie´es par Ordonances’, July–Dec. . See chapter  for a full discussion of rewards. SHAT A , no. : Herleville to Barbezieux,  June . It would appear that a large number of senior officers, as well as courtiers, had extensive interests in the tax-farming networks: see also Lavall´ee, vol. II, pp. –, : Maintenon to Aubign´e,  Sep.,  Sep. .



The commanders-in-chief and royal authority campaign season, and in the aftermath of horrific engagements such as the battle of Neerwinden in  and the siege of Barcelona in  the number of vacancies was far from negligible. Few such lists survive, but comments in letters reveal that they were frequently sent to the king or the Secretary of War. One such list which has been preserved was sent by Vendˆome from Barcelona on  August . It recommended men to pass from brigadier to mar´echal de camp and colonel to brigadier; it suggested that some dragoon lieutenant-colonels be given brevets of colonel; it proposed twenty-two grenadier captains and four engineers be awarded the Order of Saint-Louis; and it recommended an engineer for a brevet of mestre de camp. The beneficiaries of a commander’s recommendations were often members of his family or entourage. When the duc de Vendˆome sent his close friend and associate the comte de Chemerault to Versailles with news of the capture of Barcelona in August  he did so knowing that Louis always rewarded the bringer of glad tidings: Louis made him a mar´echal de camp at Vendˆome’s behest. If such blatant cronyism was particularly visible it was merely the tip of a commander’s patronage iceberg. If a vacancy occurred at the head of a regiment the g´en´eral en chef usually proposed a replacement and often his suggestion was accepted. Catinat successfully put forward Chauvigny, nephew of the bishop of Troyes, to be colonel of Quercy infantry in August , while in May  he thanked Barbezieux for ensuring that the son of Couteuge was given his father’s old regiment. Although regiments remained proprietary, when vacancies arose in them below the level of colonel they were not filled automatically with the proprietor’s choice (though this happened in practice most of the time if the colonel was an important figure). In the cavalry and dragoons the Colonels-General persisted in offering candidates to the crown, but in both these arms and in the infantry the recommendations of army commanders-in-chief were given full weight and were even more difficult for the minister to sweep aside. In May and June  Barbezieux promised Vendˆome he would see to the commissions for all the officers Vendˆome had proposed for the vacancies in the r´egiments de Vosges, de Cavenac and du Breuil. How far generals’ recommendations were made in full consultation with colonels is unclear, but the views of the colonels took second place. In , in the aftermath of the battle of Staffarda in Piedmont, Catinat, commanding the army of Italy, was not only given full authority to install new officers on his own initiative, but Louvois actually decided  

  

SHAT A , no. : e´tat of officers proposed for promotion, etc.,  Aug. . Ibid., no. : Vendˆome to Louis,  Aug. ; BNF FF , fol. r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Aug. . For other examples, see A , fol. r–v : Louis to Monseigneur,  June ; A , fol. r : Louis to Catinat,  Oct. ; A , nos. , : Vendˆome to Louis,  June,  July ; Dangeau, vol. V, p. ,  Apr. . SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  Aug. ; A , no. : Louis to Catinat,  Aug. ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  May . See Conclusion, pp. –. SHAT A : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  May,  June . For another example, see A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Crenan,  May .



The high command of the French armies against expediting commissions for new officers who had been proposed by colonels in order to check first that Catinat approved the choices the colonels had made. If a commander was particularly trusted or of exalted status his powers could extend to the direct nomination of officers to regimental posts. Both Louvois and, even more, Barbezieux insisted on seeing all aspirants to subaltern positions who had never previously held a commission, but in  Louis gave Noailles permission to choose subalterns provided they were seen by Noailles himself in Catalonia, and the next year the king allowed Vendˆome too the same privilege. In July  Barbezieux was even agreeing to Vendˆome’s nominations without yet knowing who the appointees to captaincies were, though he did wish to know the names before sending the commissions. Catinat too was well enough regarded to be told in September  that he could choose a new lieutenant-colonel for the r´egiment de Labour from outside the regiment and among any of the officers of his army. G´en´eraux en chef were also influential in the installation of garrison staff officers in fortresses. In June  Noailles fought to have a disgraced officer made commander of Campredon in northern Catalonia and his will prevailed over Louvois’s resistance. A commander, on the capture of a town, might establish trusted officers to act as the staff officers of the fortress and then recommend to the king that he confirm them as governor, major or lieutenant de Roi permanently. G´en´eraux en chef not only wielded patronage power by recommending men for promotions in the military chain of command, but they also pushed for the distribution of financial benefits and honours, and provided general protection of officers in their army. The institution of the Order of Saint-Louis in  for valour and distinguished service gave generals a chance to recommend worthy officers to be knights of this order. At the end of August  Vendˆome presented the crosses to some officers he had proposed for the Order in a special ceremony in the field, which can only have enhanced the duke’s own dignity as the sovereign’s representative. As far as ‘protecting’ regimental officers was concerned, generals would commonly seek financial relief for them, by solliciting for unpaid salaries, gratifications, or even garrison pay for campaign troops. Senior officers could also protect their juniors  





 

SHAT A : Louvois to Catinat,  Oct. ; A , no. : Catinat to Louvois,  Oct. . SHAT A , no. : Noailles to Barbezieux,  July ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  June ; A , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  July ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Sep. . Noailles, M´emoires, vol. I, p. –; SHAT A , nos. , : Louis to Catinat,  Feb.,  Mar. ; A , fols. r , r : Louis to Noailles,  June,  July ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Aug. ; A , nos. , : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Sep.,  Oct. . Unlike the era after the War of the Spanish Succession, generals at this time knew that only distinguished officers would be considered seriously by the crown, so any cronyism must be seen in this light. SHAT A , fols. r , r : Louis to Vendˆome,  July,  July ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Louis,  July ; no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  Aug. . E.g. SHAT A , fol. r : Louis to Lorge,  July .



The commanders-in-chief and royal authority from the threat of disgrace, which sometimes came about through wild (or true) rumours circulating at court and reaching the king’s ear. There were, however, limits to the amount of ‘protection’ a commander-in-chief could provide and to his ability to gain approval for his patronage recommendations. While the king was generally happy to consent to the vast majority of requests from men to whom he was close, such as Noailles, Vendˆome and later Villars, or Catinat, who was less of a high political player, he was much less enthusiastic when dealing with Luxembourg. His acceptance of Luxembourg’s requests was not so much a product of genuine goodwill as a necessity forced on him by the requirement of ensuring the marshal’s cooperation. There is much less extant evidence of Luxembourg’s patronage requests being easily accepted by the court, and those which were granted have the air of royal resignation and reluctance hanging about them. Of course, sometimes the king or the Secretary of War had their own candidates for vacancies, and at times all g´en´eraux en chef met with royal refusals. In January  Louis ignored the supplications of both Tess´e and Catinat to make Herleville a mar´echal de camp, to the latter’s chagrin, and Barbezieux was unable to help. It is also worth noting how a g´en´eral en chef could undermine his own power and lose some royal confidence were he to make recommendations which subsequently proved to be ill judged. Securing patronage for dependants and clients was above all a competitive game and was played by many generals who did not hold the rank of commander-in-chief of an army. For example, after the battle of La Marsaglia in October , where lieutenant-general La Hoguette was killed, the king was faced with three different recommendations to succeed him as governor of Mezi`eres, all written on the same day: Catinat suggested lieutenant-general Bachivillers, Vendˆome his acolyte Usson, and Tess´e his own brother, the chevalier de Tess´e. Potentially this posed serious problems for a g´en´eral en chef, because the establishment of alternative poles of power and influence, to whom regimental officers could look, might provoke disunity in an army and, even worse, corruption. This could be even more problematic if there were several grands seigneurs of general rank serving in the same army. The very unity of the high command was in a perennially fragile state, and after  the return of young and vigorous royal princes to the field only compounded the difficulty.      

SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  Nov. .  See chapter , pp. – for reasons. On Villars, see Villars, M´emoires, vol. II, p. . As with the long delay of almost a year before Albergotti was promoted mar´echal de camp. SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Tess´e,  Jan. . Herleville’s lack of advancement may owe something to his parlous financial circumstances. SHAT A , fols. r –r : Louis to Noailles,  Sep. . SHAT A , fol. v : Catinat to Louis; fol. v : Vendˆome to Barbezieux; fol. r : Tess´e to Barbezieux, all dated  Oct. .



The high command of the French armies      ,                            :            ‘               ’ Thus far it should be clear that the commanders-in-chief enjoyed a great deal of power in their army which was not easily controlled from Versailles. But historians persist in exaggerating Louis XIV’s ability to restrict not only the administrative but also the strategic autonomy of the generals in the field. A long-standing notion in French history is that Louis XIV imposed a ‘strat´egie de cabinet’ upon his generals out in the field in the years after . Advised by Louvois, Chamlay and later Barbezieux, Louis apparently bombarded his commanders from the court with prescriptive, detailed instructions about how to conduct particular campaigns, sending missives from the Paris region on an almost daily basis. This argument has been repeated and given enhanced credibility by John Lynn: leading French commanders had traditionally enjoyed considerable independence in the field, but apparently after  there was an important change in the level and style of command Louis and the conseil d’en haut exercised over operations and strategy. Lynn’s picture is of a king who would brook no interference in strategic policy, who ‘exercised complete authority for the formulation of foreign policy and in the drafting of strategy’, sharing that responsibility ‘only with those rare trusted advisers on whom he called for support’. These advisers apparently consisted only of the ministers, Chamlay and lesser officials, and they merely consulted the military commanders, whose input, one might get the impression, was strictly limited to informed comment. Lynn concedes that Louis also discussed foreign policy, strategy and operations privately with ‘other experts’, yet he does not elaborate on the identity or roles of these faceless individuals. This is the classical formulation of the ‘strat´egie de cabinet’. There are several problems with this interpretation of the direction of France’s war effort between  and : in the most general way its exaggeration of Louis XIV’s own power and willingness to use it. It cannot be denied that Louis was the sole legal and recognised repository of sovereignty over his armies, thus uniquely authorising him to formulate foreign and strategic policies. But he did not take decisions and work out plans on the basis of advice from the administrative personnel alone. To begin with, the influence of royal princes has been underestimated. Louis regularly consulted his brother, the duc d’Orl´eans, for advice on diplomacy, strategy and campaigning. He was not the only member of the house of France to be so honoured. For example, on  August , at the height of the siege of Namur which was going badly for the French, Louis spent much of the evening at court poring over maps and discussing strategy for Flanders with both the Dauphin and  

This half of this chapter has been published in a different form and in French: ‘Louis XIV et la strat´egie de cabinet, mythe et r´ealit´e’, Revue Historique des Arm´ees  (), –. Lynn, ‘A Quest for Glory’, pp. –. See also Lynn, Giant, pp. –.



The commanders-in-chief and royal authority the prince de Cond´e. When it came to the direction of military and naval policy for the British Isles, Louis consulted and agreed matters, if reluctantly, with a fellow sovereign, James II. Louis also found himself having to consult with Victor Amadeus II, duke of Savoy, in Italy in  and in – when the duke was generalissimo in the peninsula as an equal ally; and in the s when he had to agree policy with the elector of Bavaria and, from about , with his own grandson Philip V of Spain. The current orthodoxy exaggerates Louis’s control in a number of other ways. It is little appreciated that generals could push Louis into decisions he did not favour; operational policy and theatre strategy, as opposed to grand strategy, still rested in large part in the generals’ hands; the direction of strategy was not so much ‘centralised’ as properly coordinated for perhaps the first time since the s; and there was none of the stark contrast which has been painted between the eras either side of . Increasingly pervasive instructions and pressure from the court had in fact been a hallmark of the last five years of Richelieu’s ministry and was not a new phenomenon under Louvois. Louis XIV’s actual control of grand strategy, and even theatre strategy, rested primarily upon the power he alone possessed to assign troops to different armies and to allocate priorities in the funding and supply of these forces. It should be emphasised that it was Louis himself, holding the ring between the ControllerGeneral of Finances and the War Ministry, who took the decisions concerning the destination of funds, both during the winters and the campaign seasons. In the course of a campaign it was particularly important that he should have full control over the movement of troops. Preventing commanders from bilaterally deciding on the transfer of troops from one army to another during a campaign season was particularly vital, for in some circumstances it could jeopardise diplomatic relations with other states. All the same, royal authority over the movement of troops was by no means invariably exercised without regard to the wishes of the generals. In June  fear of Allied descents on western France led Louis to consider sending eight cavalry squadrons to the coast. He asked Catinat, in surprisingly   



SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Villeroi,  June ; Oresko, ‘The Diplomatic Background to the Glorioso Rimpatrio’, pp. –, ; Sourches, vol. V, pp. , ,  Aug. ,  Feb. . Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, pp. –. SHAT A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Aug. . John Wolf (Louis XIV (New York, ), p. ) was correct in identifying this as the key means by which the crown circumscribed the grands’ freedom of action, but he wrongly believed that, first, this had allowed Louvois an ascendancy by ; and, second, this allocation of funds was controlled by the War Ministry. It is also worth noting that such power had been wielded much earlier under Richelieu, to the chagrin of troop- and cash-starved commanders in Italy. See Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, pp. , , –. SHAT A , fol. r : Louis to Catinat,  July ; fols. r , r−v : Barbezieux to Grand Prieur,  Aug.,  Sep. ; A , fols. r –r : Catinat to Louis,  July ; A , no. : Grand Prieur to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , fols. v –r : Louis to Vendˆome,  Aug. .



The high command of the French armies understanding tones, if he could spare this number of horse, and when it became clear that Catinat could not risk weakening his own forces Louis withdrew the request. Moreover, within the broad strategic parameters approved or set by the court, a g´en´eral en chef was able to distribute his troops much as he wished. Once troops had been allocated by the crown to a particular theatre, authority over their employment passed from the court to the commander-in-chief. He could decide which battalions or regiments to use for garrisoning smaller forts and outposts, to send on patrol, to move within the theatre to counter immediate threats, or to send on expeditions. This was always subject to at least retrospective royal approval and Louis felt more personally involved in such decisions for Flanders and Germany than for the Mediterranean fronts. Sometimes a commander would, in the king’s view, exceed the bounds of wisdom in moving troops, perhaps because he was unaware of broader strategic concerns: in July  Luxembourg stripped the coastal ports around the Pas de Calais of three infantry battalions to reinforce his army inland, but Louis was astonished to learn of this and, because of the persistent danger of Anglo-Dutch amphibious activity, he countermanded the order. When a general was ordered by Louis to detach or send troops to another commander he could blunt the effect of the decision by sending the worst units and retaining the best for his own use, something Luxembourg repeatedly did to the king’s irritation. Similarly, corps commanders were allowed to distribute troops as they wished, subject of course to retrospective approval by a g´en´eral en chef who could reverse such decisions. In extremis, a general could even bolt together two run-down battalions from different regiments to make a militarily effective unit. But he could not issue marching routes to forces leaving a theatre to march across France – that was the responsibility of the War Ministry. Grand strategy may have been set and controlled largely from Versailles by Louis, advised by ministers, courtiers, princes and generals, but it cannot be easily divorced from theatre strategy, which was more difficult to manage from court. Catinat rightly pointed out that the king’s overall grand strategy heavily influenced the possibilities  

  



SHAT A , nos. , : Louis to Catinat,  June,  July . See, e.g., SHAT A : Luxembourg to Louis,  Aug. ; Guiscard to Luxembourg,  Aug. . In April  it was Catinat not the king who decided the field force of the army of Italy would contain forty-nine battalions out of the hundred at his disposal: see A , no. : Louis to Catinat,  Apr. ; A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  Apr. . SHAT A : Louis to Luxembourg,  July . SHAT A , fol. r–v : Barbezieux to Bagnols,  July ; fol. r : Louis to Luxembourg,  Sep. . For an earlier example of such behaviour in  see Rousset, vol. II, pp. –. For the corps operating in Provence under Vendˆome and then the Grand Prieur, see SHAT A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  July ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Grand Prieur,  June . SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Louis,  Oct. ; Bib Maz : Barbezieux to Fumeron,  July .



The commanders-in-chief and royal authority for action in the different theatres of war, but, equally, the successful pursuit of a grand strategy ultimately depended upon the feasibility of local strategies in those same theatres, and these were heavily influenced by the generals. Though all Louis’s wars began in a single theatre, for the main part they could not be neatly contained: in the Dutch War, the Nine Years War and the Spanish Succession conflict he was confronted within a year by a mushrooming of French commitments. The demands of keeping abreast of developments on several fronts, in many of which Louis had never personally served, therefore became extreme. Also worth noting is Louvois’s acknowledgement that ‘ordres positifs’ might quite often be totally unsuitable because the mental picture formulated at court of a campaign theatre might not accurately resemble the reality confronting generals on the ground. This realisation of the limited range of his knowledge coloured Louis’s own attitude throughout the wars of his reign. To arrive at a decision Louis therefore put much faith in the virtues of robust discussion. In December  he told Catinat: ‘I prefer to say something inappropriate, than to fail to inform you of what I think.’ On the whole, only concern for the bigger picture of grand strategy and for financial and logistical stamina led the king to order specific courses of action when a campaign was in full swing. For most of the time Louis depended upon the advice and initiative of his commanders to ensure sound strategies were followed. However, in the early stages of the Nine Years War, both when Louvois dominated military policy in – and even when he had lost some of his power in –, there were attempts to constrict the commanders’ freedom of action more than in the Dutch War or in the period following his death in July . To a large extent this was a product of gross complacency and self-delusion associated with Louvois’s policy of refortifying France’s borders, and it is worth discussing in some detail to illustrate the folly and impracticality of attempts to control the direction of the war effort excessively closely. In November  Chamlay had made a hollow boast that Louis’s conquests and an improved military administration allowed mediocre but politically safe commanders to be placed at the head of armies: The difference there is between the present state of the king’s affairs, and that of the other war [–], is that in that time His Majesty’s entire fortune, and that of his kingdom, was in the hands of a man who, either through being killed, or making a poor decision, could lose it in one battle, and it would have been difficult to recover. Whereas now, through the great conquests that have been made, and through the advantageous situations of the places that  



SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Louvois,  Jan. . SHAT A  and : Louvois to Turenne,  Sep. , quoted in Rousset, vol. I, pp. –; SHAT A , no. : Louis to Catinat,  Aug. . This principle could apply equally to setting the rate of financial contributions by occupied territories, as the War Ministry was not always in possession of good intelligence about local economic circumstances: A , no. : Catinat to Louvois,  June . SHAT A , no. :  Dec. .



The high command of the French armies have been fortified, the king finds himself in a position of having his army commanded by whomsoever he wishes, without having anything to fear from the mediocre capacity of the person to whom it has been confided.

The ‘mediocrity’ entrusted with the army of Germany was the mar´echal de Duras, and he could be placed in charge because the War Ministry believed that, with the fortress of Philippsburg now back under French control, the Rhine could act as a seventeenth-century Maginot Line, while small corps of cavalry manoeuvred on its right bank to keep the Imperial forces in a maximum state of confusion. Meanwhile, garrisons of French infantry and auxiliary forces manned cities like Mannheim, Bonn and Cologne. Such a strategic position was ideal for tight royal control and it suited Louvois because it allowed him to check the independence of the generals. But this approach rapidly proved unworkable and did not last the year: in September , after a bitter tussle between Duras and Louvois over corps movements, the key cities of Bonn and Mainz fell to the Allies and the French were pushed out of the Palatinate. The policy of prescriptive orders and fortressbased, defensive operations lay in ruins. The loss of Mainz was a great shock to France, dented Louvois’s credibility and strengthened the hand of the generals, who needed greater autonomy in the conduct of operations if the war effort were to have any chance of success. Briefly in – the court tried to tie the hands of the commanders and this had resulted in catastrophe when the crown refused to accept Duras’s assessment of his own situation. For the remainder of his life Louvois still sought to direct operations from court but the king was once again more willing to heed the views of the men on the spot. The result was simmering tension between the War Ministry and the generals. During  the clash between Louvois and the mar´echal de Lorge, Duras’s brother and his successor as commander in the Rhineland, illustrated the difficulties faced in trying to balance the domineering and increasingly paranoid attitude of the minister with the general principle of not tying the hands of the commanders. In May Lorge was told by Louvois that Louis was allowing him the liberty of deciding what operations to conduct, provided he maintain a corps of infantry to construct fortifications around Landau. But a breakdown in communications, principally because Lorge failed to explain adequately to Versailles the reasons for changing the operational plans, caused anguished criticism from Louvois. Lorge in turn interpreted this as an attempt to direct his movements from a position of ignorance. He lashed out with furious sarcasm at ministerial control, and his outburst produced the response he wanted, for Louvois told him that prescriptive orders ‘do not suit’ the king’s service. The king wanted only: ‘to propose his thoughts, that He will always permit you to follow, or not, according to whether the movements   

SHAT A , no. : Chamlay to Louvois,  Nov.. Bingham, ‘Louis XIV and the War for Peace’, pp. –, –, –. Ibid., pp. –; Noailles, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –.





Ibid., p. .

The commanders-in-chief and royal authority of the enemies make you judge it appropriate’. When Lorge did not follow Louis’s wishes, the king did, however, expect him to give clear reasons. This was all perfectly reasonable but it was clear that in practice Louvois and the generals were having difficulty in making the system work. Nevertheless, if it came to departing from the overall campaign plan and switching from an offensive to a defensive posture, or vice versa, generals found that the king did not restrict himself to disapproval but might reject their suggestions outright if they were obviously dangerous. Even before Louvois’s death, the balance of power lay with the generals in the field and by mid- even Louvois’s closest allies in the high command were prepared to face him down on strategic matters. For the rest of the Nine Years War Louis XIV allowed his generals greater (though varying degrees of) discretion over strategic and operational policy in their theatres, but he insisted that they keep him fully briefed on all developments, especially those concerning their strategic thinking. The degree to which Louis interfered in the formation of strategy and the conduct of operations in particular theatres reflected two variables: () how well he knew the area and, related to it, his distance from that front; and () how much he trusted his commander-in-chief on that front, both politically and militarily. The commanders on the Mediterranean fronts of Italy and Catalonia were particularly powerful in this regard. For the whole of the – war against the duke of Savoy, the French army was commanded by Nicolas Catinat, who got his own way on strategy in that theatre almost without constraint. To meet the invasion of the Dauphin´e in August  Louis gave Catinat full authority to direct operations, specifying only that Pinerolo had to be held. Throughout the crisis Louis approved all Catinat’s measures, even though he was frustrated by Catinat’s inability to halt Victor Amadeus’s advancing army. He promised Catinat there would be no recrimination if he were unable to take action against the Allies by striking at their communications with Piedmont. Louis knew there was no point in trying to direct operations from such a vast distance when the state of affairs was changing almost daily. In September he told Catinat: I do not prescribe to you anything certain on your conduct, knowing well that you will neglect nothing at all which concerns the good of my service, and that it is not possible to give you positive orders from so far, particularly as you have to act in country as difficult as that where you are.

In October  (and again in October ) Catinat was able to talk Louis out of ordering a reckless incursion into southern Piedmont which would seek the capture 

  

SHAT A , nos. , : Louvois to Chamlay,  May,  May ; nos. , : Louvois to Lorge,  May,  May ; no. : Lorge to Louvois,  May ; no. : Louvois to Lorge,  June  (citation); no. : Louvois to Lorge,  June ; no. : Lorge to Louvois,  June . Rousset, vol. IV, pp. –; SHAT A , nos. , , , : Louvois to Catinat,  Apr.,  May,  May,  May . SHAT A , nos. , , , , , , , , : Louis to Catinat,  July,  July,  Aug.,  Aug.,  Aug.,  Aug.,  Sep.,  Sep.,  Sep. . Ibid., no. : Louis to Catinat,  September .



The high command of the French armies of Cuneo but would also destroy what was left of the French supply infrastructure and military cohesion in the process. In  this required a great deal of pressure, piled on by both Catinat and then Chamlay, to dissuade Louis from such a catastrophic move. Louis occasionally insisted on specific moves, as in May  when he ordered the seizure of the Barcelonnette valley, but on the rare occasions when this occurred it was generally as part of a grand strategic concern: in this case, the valley’s seizure would threaten southern Piedmont and Cuneo, drawing more German cavalry into Italy who would live off the land. The disgust of the Italian princes for the Imperial forces would thereby increase. Victor Amadeus of Savoy would then be even more inclined to continue his peace negotiations with France. However, at times of crisis, the king could hand over all responsibility to a commander-in-chief. Louis did this in  in the Alps when Victor Amadeus invaded the Dauphin´e. Less than a year later, when the Allies launched a series of attacks against Pinerolo itself, throwing the French onto the defensive, Louis once again gave up control over the army of Italy’s operations to Catinat with the sole order to save Pinerolo at all costs. It was consequently a source of great consternation at court that Catinat had to abandon the fortress to its own defence and retreat into the mountains in late July because the Allies were threatening to cut his communications with Brianc¸on. On  August the marshal had the courage to criticise a panicking Louis for ordering him to march the army into Piedmont without adequate cavalry cover. He wrote to his sovereign: I dare tell you that an order so absolute, and so dangerous for the good of your service, is issued because of the lack of an exact knowledge of the country . . . Your Majesty can guarantee that, not being in a state to remain in the plain, all the efforts that one would nevertheless make would be a sacrifice to obedience without hope of success.

Catinat was refusing to comply. Louis did not press the point and when the marshal finally entered the Piedmontese plain through Avigliana in late September, reinforced with a significant contingent of horse, Louis merely expressed his hope that Catinat could both relieve Pinerolo and deliver the Allies a heavy blow in battle: What I write is not a precise order that I give you to charge head down and attack them, if the matter appears to you either impossible or too dangerous. I am not accustomed to behaving 

 

Ibid., no. : memorandum by Catinat,  Oct. ; nos. , : Catinat to Louis, plus accompanying memorandum,  Oct. ; A , fols. v –v , r –r : Louis to Catinat,  Oct.,  Nov. ; A , fols. r –r , v , v –r , v , r –r , r : Catinat to Louis,  Oct.,  Oct.,  Oct.,  Oct.,  Nov.,  Nov. ; fols. r –r , r –r : Chamlay to Louis,  Oct.,  Oct. . For a full description of the political tussle, see Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –. SHAT A , fols. r –r : Louis to Catinat,  May . Ibid., fol. v : Louis to Catinat,  July ; A , fol. r : Catinat to Louis,  July ; SHAT A , fols. v –r : Louis to Catinat,  Aug.  (citation).



The commanders-in-chief and royal authority like this, particularly with those for whom I have as much esteem as I have for you, but it is to urge you to do all that can humanly depend on you to give the enemies a considerable check (my italics).

Louis’s delegation of entire authority to the man on the spot paid dividends and he was naturally delighted that the Allies broke off the bombardment of Pinerolo and were then crushed in battle by Catinat at La Marsaglia in October. Further detailed descriptions of French operations in the southern Alps during the Nine Years War would add little to this analysis, though it is worth stressing that on occasions, as in June , Louis could be paralysed by indecision. He was at a loss to know how to proceed should the Allies attack Nice by land and by sea. He therefore outlined various options, all of which had severe drawbacks or were strategically dangerous, and then handed decision-making over to Catinat, who was expected somehow to defend Pinerolo, Susa, the Alpine valleys, Nice and Villefranche all at the same time with insufficient forces. It would not be an exaggeration to say that on this occasion, as on others, Louis XIV was very far from attempting to control his generals through a ‘strat´egie de cabinet’. On the contrary, he was simply evading responsibility. The evidence from Italy in – illuminates and exemplifies the formation of strategic policy in most years of the Dutch War and the Nine Years War, and even during the – War of the R´eunions which involved Louis himself so closely. In the Spanish Succession conflict devolution reached new heights. In the s, with French forces operating under dual control in the Iberian peninsula as far as the south-western Hispano-Lusitanian border, Versailles’s control over its forces in the Mediterranean was even weaker, as the duke of Berwick’s memoirs reveal. By  the collapse of the French state machinery devolved all authority on the generals. The situation had returned full circle to , when only the armies of Flanders and Burgundy had received full instructions and those of Catalonia, Italy and Germany were left largely to their own devices. Louis’s control over the Catalan and Italian fronts was looser because he acknowledged the extent of his own ignorance of Alpine and Mediterranean warfare compared to the expertise of others such as Catinat, Noailles, Vendˆome, Tess´e and Berwick. He also had far greater faith in these men than in those generals he placed in charge of the armies of Flanders and Germany. Indeed, the limitations of his own experience and the vast distances from the court forced Louis to place as commanders-in-chief in the Mediterranean only those men whose judgement and   



SHAT A , fols. v –r : Louis to Catinat,  Sep. . SHAT A , no. : Louis to Catinat,  June . Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. I, p. ; SHAT A , nos. , : Louvois to Cr´equi,  Dec.,  Dec. , in Hardr´e, pp. –, ; A , no. : to Chamlay,  June , in ibid., p. ; A , no. : to Cr´equi,  Jan. , in ibid., pp. –. Berwick, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –, –; vol. II, pp. –; Villars, M´emoires, vol. II, pp. –; Sturgill, Marshal Villars, pp. –; SHAT A , no. : memorandum given to Le Tellier, .



The high command of the French armies motives he trusted. By contrast, the mar´echal-duc de Luxembourg, commanding the army of Flanders between  and , was deemed politically unreliable. Here, royal interference in the conduct of operations was also a product of the king’s own extensive experience of campaigning in the Low Countries and the relative proximity to Versailles of this front. Hence, while the siege of Pinerolo and the prospect of an attack on Nice led Louis to devolve all decision-making to Catinat, the possibility of an Allied attempt to recapture the newly taken and as yet unrepaired fortress of Namur in August  was so discomforting that the king felt he had to dictate orders to Luxembourg. Luxembourg’s control over strategy in the Low Countries was negligible compared to that enjoyed by commanders-in-chief in southern France. While besieging Charleroi in August  Luxembourg even sought Louis’s advice about the lines of circumvallation, because Louis had a good local knowledge and he was equipped at court with extensive memoranda and plans to which Luxembourg out in the field did not have access. At times, then, royal prescription of operations in Flanders made sense in operational and strategic terms. At other times, though, it did not. In July , as William assaulted Namur, Louis insisted Villeroi try to take Nieuport. Maine rather disloyally told his father-in-law, the prince de Cond´e, that the generals all knew that the attempt would fail but the king, his father, was adamant. Sure enough the fortress was not captured. While Louis could always have the last word it should nevertheless be obvious that g´en´eraux en chef tried to bend the king to their wishes. Usually Louis was amenable provided the policy made immediate sense, and in the cases of several generals Louis acquiesced in all their decisions. On occasions, however, he could cling stubbornly to a particular view and it was a brave general who openly defied him. It was more advisable to apply gentle, persuasive pressure, for it was unquestionably difficult to persuade a sovereign he was wrong and even the most anxious of generals had to tread warily to avoid offending the royal dignity. In efforts to bring Louis round to their point of view commanders followed a typical pattern of behaviour: they would initially point out the impossibility of a course of action and if the king persisted they would agree to follow royal orders. At the same time they would accompany insincere declarations of enthusiasm for the declared policy with detailed expositions of what was really required for success to be achieved, a subtle tactic but one that proved highly corrosive of Louis’s id´ees fixes. They would also seek to enlist Chamlay, Louvois or Barbezieux in their cause. If the king was proving especially obdurate, a trusted and articulate subordinate could be despatched to court in an effort to alter Louis’s view in a private audience, though this did not always work, either because the king overawed the man or he was waylaid en route by    

SHAT A : Louis to Luxembourg,  Aug. ; A , fols. v , r , r –r : Louis to Luxembourg,  June,  July,  July . SHAT A , nos. , : Luxembourg to Louis,  Aug.,  Aug. . SHAT A s, no. : Maine to Cond´e,  July . SHAT A , fols. v –r : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Sep. .



The commanders-in-chief and royal authority the Secretary of State for War and persuaded to change his message. Eventually, and it often took months, Louis’s own common-sense would prevail in the face of the overwhelming objections which had been allowed to speak for themselves. If a g´en´eral en chef still found the king unwilling to budge he could always avert disaster by taking the ultimate gamble and defying the crown. In the way he handled Louis the mar´echal de Catinat could easily have been a model for the duc du Maine’s  recommendation to his son on how to win an argument with the king. One should: ‘not dispute too much at any particular moment in favour of one’s own opinion against his (even if one is certain one is right) and put back these arguments to another time to expose them on a new day’. This advice applied as much to generals involved in disputes with Versailles over strategy and operations as to anything else. Ultimately the king’s mind could be changed if the arguments made sense, the king was fully informed of them, and Louis was handled in the proper way. The will of the general could win out. If the ‘strat´egie de cabinet’ really existed, it involved only a loose grip on each theatre of war and centred on controlling grand strategy and the general allocation of troops to each front. The degree of direct crown intervention in particular theatres was variable and could be successfully resisted. In the end, in spite of Louvois’s ambitions, the ‘strat´egie de cabinet’ was far more a system of coordination than of domination, and as such it was appreciated by generals. As Villars pointed out, when the coordination weakened too much under Chamillart from , the results were decidedly unhappy.  



SHAT A , fol. v : Catinat to Louis,  Nov. . SHAT A A., fol. r : ‘Memoire instructif que j’ay fait pour mon fils le Prince de Dombes en novembre mil sept cent dix, pour luy donner les notions qui sont necessaire au Colonel General des Suisses’. Villars, M´emoires, vol. II, p. .





The appointment of general officers It is not enough to have large armies on a footing, if they are not well led and well commanded, and . . . the consideration of good generals hardly contributes less to the strength of a State.

For any ambitious military noble serving the king the ultimate prize was to be appointed commander-in-chief of one of the royal armies. It was a highly demanding job, but the potential rewards it could generate for an individual and his family were great indeed. Very few generals were as self-effacing as Nicolas Catinat, and as deeply reluctant as he to exploit their position and good credit with the king to advance their relatives. For all that, there were around , nobles in military or naval service at the peak of mobilisation during the s, yet only a handful of armies and fleets to command. Even for those who made it to the rank of general few could seriously expect to reach the very top of the ladder. Many were called, but few were chosen. This chapter will accordingly seek to explain the criteria by which Louis XIV made some of his appointments to command and his promotions to general rank, while the final chapter of this book will examine the means he deployed to encourage good service among his most senior officers. The selection of commanders-in-chief for his field armies and the policies pursued to get the best out of these men were among the most difficult responsibilities borne by Louis XIV. If the king made a serious error of judgement then at best his reputation would suffer, but at worst his state might collapse. Amongst a range of considerations Louis had to weigh up, the essential was this: was the candidate for command acceptable both to himself and to the subordinate officers of the army in question? Related to this issue were several others which concerned military competence: was the candidate sufficiently experienced either as a commanderin-chief or as a subordinate general running operations in the field? And did he inspire confidence in the king? Most pointedly, however, the king had to consider how a candidate for command figured on the domestic and international political chequerboard. In other words, what were his personal and family interests? Could the commander work smoothly with the Secretary of State for War, or could the king at least keep the peace between the two men? Did he have local links that 

E. Spanheim, Relation de la cour de France en , ed. E. Bourgeois (Paris, ), p. .



The appointment of general officers could be exploited in furtherance of the war effort in that particular theatre? With whom did his family have good and bad relations? Such issues could not be ignored, particularly because there was no clear-cut distinction between the civil and military spheres of noble life. The situation was complicated further by the obvious point that such private interests were not static but dynamic, while military service in itself, and the benefits which accrued from it, heavily shaped this picture. Louis XIV consequently had to adapt his military control mechanisms so they could work for his wider political and social purposes. To a certain degree the same sets of concerns applied to the appointment of junior generals and corps commanders. Naturally, it was not too difficult to appoint trustworthy people to command during limited conflicts, such as the – War of the R´eunions, but in major wars the situation was far more complicated. Owing to the massive growth of the land forces and the increasingly difficult task facing generals, Louis found himself thrown back onto men whose political interests could not always be comfortably accommodated but who were nevertheless among the best men for the job. As a consequence of this he was forced to shower them with largesse, and further advantages could be expected if the recipient of the king’s grace only kept going in the same vein. It was ever more apparent to contemporaries that the king had to bend before the dictates of a small pool of talent – talent that was certainly loyal to the Bourbon dynasty, but which did not always accept the precise rules of the political game Louis had been trying to hand down since . As the next section will show, he had succeeded in reclaiming the prerogative right to appoint whomsoever he pleased as supreme commander of an army, but by  contemporaries had still not been shaken out of their old conviction that the king had an absolute obligation to reward loyal service and good deeds. Louis XIV had still not succeeded in decoupling the idea of social and political advancement from that of explicit royal obligation to his subjects.                                           Between the s and  there was considerable confusion surrounding the king’s scope for appointing g´en´eraux en chef to command his armies were he not to lead them in person. A combination of highly unstable power politics and an increasingly aggressive corporate mentality among the marshals of France forced the crown into making a whole series of unsatisfactory appointments. The crown’s reliance on the great nobility for the raising of troops and the defence of provinces was stronger before the s than afterwards, and the claims of some men to command armies were therefore difficult to ignore. The rivalries, aspirations and political  

Louis XIII and Richelieu had faced the same problem earlier in the century: Parrott, ‘Richelieu, the Grands and the French Army’, pp. –. See Conclusion, pp. –.



The high command of the French armies manoeuvrings of the grands accordingly had to be weighed up with the utmost seriousness and this deeply coloured the crown’s choice of army commanders. At the beginning of the Dutch War, for the first time since , Louis XIV was faced with the need to divide his army operating in the Low Countries, although he remained in overall command. When on  April  he allocated the commands, the marshals of France Bellefonds, Cr´equi and Humi`eres all refused to accept subordination to the mar´echal de Turenne, the g´en´eral en chef of the army. In appointing Turenne Louis was reasserting the ancient royal right by which he could name absolutely anybody he wished as commander-in-chief, and give them authority over all other serving officers, including marshals of France. Bellefonds, Cr´equi and Humi`eres knew nothing of the legitimacy of such a practice and insisted that no marshal could be elevated above another in a military command. Their adamant refusal to knuckle under provoked a furious king to disgrace all three of them. However, lawyers acting for Cr´equi confirmed that they were in the wrong: the idea of splitting armies up into corps so that one marshal would not serve beneath another was comparatively recent, dating from France’s entry into the Thirty Years War when it was dictated by political necessity. As one councillor of the Paris Parlement put it, ‘You know Monsieur that these days in France every example makes a rule, and that every claim becomes in the end a legal title, which is a very considerable abuse.’ In his expert opinion, the king’s appointments policy was only following past precedent from the period before . The interim period had been unusual: ‘As for  or  years the Marshals of France have only obeyed the king, or Messieurs the Princes of the Blood, they have come to believe that it was one of the rights of their charges and they are obliged to uphold it.’ Faced with a battery of evidence, Cr´equi, Humi`eres and Bellefonds capitulated to the king. On Turenne’s death three years later Louis promoted eight lieutenant-generals to the dignity of marshal of France and simultaneously issued an edict, known as the 

   

Bib Ars , fols. r –r : Du Bouchet to Cr´equi, Oct. . Louis Andr´e erroneously believed that the charge of Mar´echal g´en´eral des camps et arm´ees du Roi, recreated for Turenne in , gave him the status of a semi-Constable with rights of command over everyone except princes of the blood, a view Corvisier also accepted (see Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; Corvisier, Louvois, p. ). However, it did nothing of the sort. It gave no institutional rights over the marshals of France and was in fact, as an eighteenth-century m´emoire put it, ‘une charge de Marechal g´en´eral de camps et non une charge de Marechal general de France’. The post was created and filled to ensure that somebody had full institutional control over the issuing of marching routes for a force passing through foreign territory. Turenne performed this role only once in . The post was actually accorded to him to compensate him financially for his services to the crown, at a time when provincial governorships were not especially lucrative (SHAT A , no. bis: memorandum [c. ]). S´evign´e Lettres, vol. I, p. : S´evign´e to Mme de Grignan,  Apr. ; SHAT A , no.  (): Louvois to Cr´equi,  Apr. . Bib Ars , fols. r –r : Du Bouchet to Cr´equi, Oct. . Ibid., fols. r –r : Caumartin to Haqueville, Oct. . Ibid., fols. r –r : Cr´equi to Bellefonds,  Oct. ; fol. r : Albret to Bellefonds, [ or  Oct. ]. See Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –, for a more detailed relation of the dispute.



The appointment of general officers ‘ordre de Tableau’, laying down that marshals of France elevated at the same time would take their seniority according to the date of their nomination as a lieutenantgeneral. Contrary to historical orthodoxy there was nothing new in principle about the ‘ordre de Tableau’, for an edict of  had stipulated that when two marshals of France were serving in the same army the most senior would take precedence in command (below any g´en´eral en chef who might be appointed, such as Richelieu or a prince). But this too had been effectively a dead letter after , and the  edict was thus a vital reaffirmation and clarification of the principles of hierarchy. By  Louis thus seemed not only to have reasserted in full his prerogative of choosing a commander-in-chief, but he had also driven wedges between all the marshals of France by undermining their sense of equal status, just enough so as to restore their subordination to the king but not so much as to damage corporate pride in their dignity. When on  March  Louis created seven new marshals of France he explicitly ranked them according to seniority and there was not a murmur of protest. Of course, Louis also carried on occasionally placing princes holding lieutenant-general rank above marshals of France, as had happened in –, and as he did with Vendˆome, Monsieur, the duc de Bourgogne and the Grand Dauphin. Louis’s recovery of full appointing authority came just at the time France’s armed forces were expanding dramatically, so that as early as  even Cr´equi saw the increasing need for two marshals of France to command an army. It was no longer, in his view, a case of leading armies of , men; some were now , strong. The other marshals understood the problem, but it was still difficult to enforce the ‘ordre de Tableau’ and just as tricky to maintain good relations between two marshals holding independent commands in the same region. By the mid-s the explosive tension that lasted from the sixteenth century to the Dutch War had somewhat abated, a direct result of Louis XIV’s reclamation of his unfettered juridical right to appoint to general officer commands. All the same, personal and political strife within the high command by no means evaporated. Within each rank the question of seniority remained a troubling one, and a whole host of problems surrounding status, authority and deference were never fully eradicated during the ancien r´egime. The generals allowed social rank to intrude into military command, to the continual frustration of the court, but equally they deplored the idea of command by roulement, or rotation, which largely avoided the question of military seniority. At the beginning of the  campaign Louvois used an expedient to try to avoid trouble: Cond´e’s army, destined for Franche-Comt´e under the king, was split into four parts, each commanded by a lieutenant-general. This attempt to overcome aristocratic pretensions and prejudices, which had become    

SHAT A , no. : r`eglement,  July . Bib Ars , fol. r : Caumartin to Haqueville, Oct. . Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Mar. . SHAT A , no. : Cr´equi to Louvois,  Aug. .





Vauban, vol. II, p. : notes.

The high command of the French armies entrenched since the s and s, only brought complaints from the duc de Navailles that Fourilles, as a mere chevalier, did not merit an independent command, while the duc de Luxembourg was particularly resentful at the command given to the marquis de Rochefort, a fellow captain of the Gardes du corps who had been only a colonel when Luxembourg was already a lieutenant-general. This tinkering was only conceding to the lieutenant-generals exactly what the marshals of France had forced on the crown during the Thirty Years War: equality of status and separate corps commands because they would not subordinate themselves to another of the same rank. By the end of that year the generals themselves were beginning to complain about quarrelling and the chaotic organisation of their ranks. The expansion of the field armies in the Dutch War and the consequent need for more general officers forced Louis to clarify the rules of seniority, and he seized the opportunity of Turenne’s demise in  to enforce a stricter hierarchy not only on the marshals of France but also on the generals. It also gave him the perfect opportunity to ram home the message that he would not allow social prestige or the dynasticism of the grands to distort his distribution of authority and command in the armies. Henceforth, all general officers of the same rank would always take their seniority from the date of their commission in that rank, while those promoted to a particular rank on the same day would take their seniority amongst each other from the seniority they held in their previous rank. A principle of hierarchy had been firmly etablished and, by , fully accepted, though loopholes still remained if the commander-in-chief was only a simple lieutenant-general: it was important, in this circumstance, not to foist upon him subordinate lieutenant-generals who actually predated him in this rank.                                       Of course, the king had to choose subordinate generals carefully anyway. What needs to be borne in mind is that Louis XIV could make matters easier for a commanderin-chief, or more difficult, by the appointments he made to subordinate posts, and by the way he treated these senior officers. The ultimate sanction to keep these men in line was, of course, dismissal in disgrace from the service. Less harshly, further promotion could be denied to any officer showing himself to be fractious, unreliable or disobedient. Fortunately most senior officers could be kept compliant by the hope (however remote) of greater things to come. All this notwithstanding, the king and the Le Tellier knew that these career-orientated means of controlling generals were inadequate on their own.    

SHAT A : Luxembourg to Louvois,  July , cited in Rousset, vol. II, pp. –. Rousset, vol. II, p. . SHAT OM : ordonnance,  Aug.  (n.b. one day after the ‘ordre de Tableau’); Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –. SHAT A , nos. , : Louvois to Catinat,  Apr.,  Apr. .



The appointment of general officers The Le Tellier family therefore sought to build up a network of supporters among the general officers, seeking to place at least one ally in each army command. Even if they did no more, these men could act as informants on the commander-in-chief, in the case of Huxelles in the s actually verifying the veracity of dispatches written by his commander to the court, which Barbezieux had had copied to him. In the first two decades of the ‘personal rule’ it had not been easy to suborn senior officers into the Le Tellier circle, for many still enjoyed strong ties to the likes of Cond´e and Turenne or prided themselves on having no master but the king. But during the s Louvois worked hard to cultivate certain select and talented young officers either already possessing general rank or likely to achieve it. Some had links of kinship to the Le Tellier and their relations (e.g. Tallard, Huxelles), but others coolly attached themselves to Louvois to secure promotion and social advantages. The marquis de La Trousse, who was employed by Louvois in manipulating politics at the court of Turin and in savagely suppressing the Huguenots, was even able to marry his daughter into the highest level of the Savoyard aristocracy through the aid of his patron the Secretary of War. Military service in northern Italy was particularly associated with Le Tellier favour. Advancing via the inspectorate was also an option of growing attraction for ambitious officers in this decade, though qua inspectors they had no command authority over an army in the field. Of course, as time went on some officers receded in Louvois’s favour while others acquired it, and when Barbezieux took over in July  he had his own preferences, though by and large he continued with his father’s clientele. In , for example, he could rely upon Genlis in the army of Catalonia, Harcourt on the Flanders-Moselle front, Huxelles in Germany, and Usson and Tess´e in Italy. Usson, however, blotted his copybook by tolerating largescale pillage and by being negligent over the collection of contributions, so he found himself persona non grata with the War Ministry by the following year. Villars found Barbezieux turning against him within a few short months of the Secretary’s succession, ascribing his fall from favour to the spiteful whisperings of jealous rivals. 







SHAT A , fols. r –r : Barbezieux to Huxelles,  May ; A , fol. v : to Saint-Silvestre,  Mar. ; A , fol. r : to Chazeron,  Mar. ; Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, p. ; Noailles, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –. Labatut, Les ducs et pairs de France au XVIIe si`ecle, p. ; La Chesnaye, vol. I, p. ; vol. V, p. ; AAE MD France : Savoie (my thanks to Robert Oresko for this reference); Sourches, vol. I, p. , June ; vol. I, p. ,  Dec.  et seq.; vol. II, p. ,  May ; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Sep. ; SHAT A : Louvois to La Trousse,  July  (my thanks to Greg Monahan for this reference); Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Apr.  et seq.; vol. II, pp. –,  July ; Feuqui`eres, M´emoires, pp. –. SHAT A , no. : Genlis to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , no. : Genlis to Barbezieux,  Dec. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Genlis,  Feb. ; A , no. : Beuvron to Barbezieux,  June ; A , fols. r –r : Barbezieux to Huxelles,  May ; A , no. : Usson to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A , no. : Grignan to Barbezieux,  Jan. . SHAT A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Feb. ; fol. r : to Julien,  June ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  Jan. ; A , no. : Julien to Barbezieux,  June ; Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, p. .



The high command of the French armies Indeed, sidelining generals they regarded as suspect or unreliable was an important matter for the Le Tellier. By resisting the king’s orders to evacuate Nijmegen in early , Bellefonds – a marshal of France holding a subordinate command – was disgraced for the second time in as many years, while Louvois did nothing to protect him. The comte de Guiscard’s career was held back for a very long time because he and Louvois were on poor terms. Officers like him, who possessed some talent, might be given fixed frontier governorships at Louvois’s instigation to restrict their activities and provide them with little opportunity to shine as military leaders. The War of the R´eunions was the moment when the Le Tellier came closest to dominating the high command. In  the mar´echal de Cr´equi’s army operating against the city of Luxemburg was entirely full of Louvois’s men as subordinate generals. Yet Louvois could not ensure his cronies held a monopoly of command: the king had appointed Bellefonds to command the army of Catalonia which, though it failed to capture Gerona, did defeat the Spanish in battle. Moreover, throughout the period under consideration in this book generals enjoyed multifarious connections and did not look to the Le Tellier alone. Some were related not just to important courtiers but also to other ministers: the marquis de Feuqui`eres’s father, a leading diplomat who died in , was the first cousin of Pomponne, the former Foreign Secretary sacked in  who returned to the conseil d’en haut at Louvois’s death. From then on, at Pomponne’s orders, Feuqui`eres kept him and Foreign Secretary Colbert de Croissy fully abreast of developments in the theatres where he served, and he made his requests for royal favour through the foreign affairs team rather than through Barbezieux. The marquis de Gac´e was promoted to mar´echal de camp without passing through brigadier rank, thanks to the influence of Colbert de Seignelay, his niece’s husband. Anybody enjoying the support of Mme de Maintenon could expect considerable favour from the king – something that made the Le Tellier very uneasy.      -- The appointment and dismissal of commanders-in-chief of the armies was a much greater problem for both king and ministers, just as it had been for Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin prior to . Before the middle of the Dutch War difficulties were compounded by confusion in the hierarchy of command and by the perpetuation of dubious notions about the royal prerogative of appointment. Like   

Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, p. ; Wolf, Louis XIV, p. ; Vauban, vol. II, p. : Vauban to Cladech,  Oct. ; Sourches, vol. I, pp. –, Aug. . Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Apr. ; vol. I, p. ,  May . Sourches, vol. I, p. , – Nov.  et seq.; vol. III, p. ,  Apr. ; Bib Ars , fols. r , r , r , r , r , r –r : Feuqui`eres to Pomponne,  June,  July,  July,  July,  Sep. ,  June ; SHAT A : Barbezieux to Harcourt,  Sep. . Soubise, Asfeld and Vins – all generals – enjoyed close ties to Pomponne.



The appointment of general officers Richelieu, Mazarin had repeatedly placed the command of armies in two pairs of hands, one of which was militarily accomplished and the other politically reliable. But in the early s the young Louis XIV was put at the head of field forces in an attempt to establish tighter control over the generals and military operations. He quickly acquired a taste for command, which he exercised on many occasions before retiring from active campaigning in . Similarly, Louis placed the Dauphin with his armies after  and his grandson the duc de Bourgogne after . Not only did this sharpen the skills of his heirs in preparation for their own assumption of control, but it also gave the war effort in the theatre in question something of a boost. One of the most notable effects of Louis installing either himself or a royal prince – legitimate or otherwise – at the head of an army was to inspire the troops and raise morale. Even the dullest of princes could enliven the spirits of the ordinary troops, and the most charismatic, like Vendˆome, could transform the entire mood of a battered and depressed army. As Quarr´e d’Aligny put it, ‘When the master is in his army, nothing is impossible for the French.’  There were also, however, serious political considerations in play. Indeed, at the very heart of Louis’s decisions on commanders lay his own dynastic interests. Louis XIV’s military career has been presented by some as an exercise in personal vainglory, and there is certainly some truth in this. In fact, many French aristocrats in the late s loathed the king’s pride which led him to attribute all success in the War of Devolution to his own genius while he barely acknowledged in public the contribution of others. Yet he sincerely believed that the crown should not depend solely upon its noble subjects for military leadership – he and his male relatives should also lead by example. Louis’s own military career was centred upon the successful capture of dozens of towns in the Low Countries. All this was not, however, without its attendant drawbacks. Unlike his father Louis XIV had not been forced to play an active role after  to stave off military failure, and many generals preferred the king to remain at court directing and coordinating the war effort rather than campaigning personally. If Louis were out in the field then that theatre would receive extra priority, while other armies found themselves neglected, especially with regard to financial and logistical support. Other commanders also had to tailor their operations to pin down the enemy and prevent them reinforcing  





Parrott, ‘Richelieu, the Grands and the French Army’, pp. –; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –, . Gaya, L’art de la guerre, pp. –; SHAT A , fols. r –r : Louis to Vendˆome,  June ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Louis,  June ; A , no. : ‘Relation’ by Esgrigny,  June ; Quarr´e, M´emoires, p. . Lynn, ‘A Quest for Glory’, pp. –; J. Cornette, Le Roi de guerre. Essai sur la souverainet´e dans la France du Grand Si`ecle (Paris, ), pp. –; Saint-Maurice, vol. I, p. : Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Sep. . Parrott, ‘Richelieu, the Grands and the French Army’, p. ; M´emoires de Catinat, vol. III, p. : Catinat to Vendˆome,  Apr. . Louis’s great-grandfather, Philip II of Spain, provides the most famous example of a monarch rarely going on campaign.



The high command of the French armies the army facing the king. The relative strategic merits of such prioritising faded into the background. Within the high command of the army led by the king his presence was a source of constant anxiety: field actions had to be avoided at all costs lest the king’s amour propre or person be placed in danger. To Louis’s everlasting regret he allowed his generals to veto a battle against William of Orange at Heurtebise in  because of fears for his safety. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Louis’s presence at a major siege could be crucial. In  he led the army of Flanders against the fortress of Namur in part to give heart to the Turks fighting the Habsburgs in the Balkans and to relieve some of the pressure on them. But had he not been at Namur, the French would probably have broken off the siege owing to atrocious weather conditions. Namur was, instead, captured. Furthermore, if the king or the Dauphin led troops personally into Germany, by the terms of the  alliance with the Helvetic Confederation then, and only then, could Swiss mercenaries be put into the field against the Habsburgs in the Empire. Similar advantages and disadvantages attended upon the presence in the field of the Grand Dauphin – known as ‘Monseigneur’ to contemporaries. Although at the age of twenty-six Monseigneur was despatched without the king to head the assault on Philippsburg in the Rhineland in , he was placed in the care of the mar´echal de Duras, the marquis de Chamlay and Colbert de Saint-Pouange; and he received regular advice by his father’s own hand, though almost none of these letters survive. Monseigneur himself modestly felt he had a lot to learn, but his first two outings, in  and , augured well. Cond´e for one, writing to his close friend the bishop of Autun, was pleasantly surprised by the Dauphin’s performance at Philippsburg: Monseigneur performs marvels there. He has gone resolutely into the trenches and with the greatest calmness in the world. He obliges all the officers whom he makes greatly love him. I have read three or four of the letters he has written to the King, which have surprised me. In all this, there is no flattery, and in fact he has performed there in an astonishing fashion.

His exclusion from command in  was to preserve his honour: he had received the surrender of the Palatinate towns in the name of Elisabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orl´eans, and promised to uphold the capitulation agreements; but now the order had been given to devastate the region he could not very well be sent back to oversee this betrayal. The following year, fearing a major Imperial offensive on the Rhine, Louis placed Monseigneur again in charge of the army of Germany under Lorge, where he restored order and discipline upon his arrival, though he still felt he    

Ekberg, The Failure of Louis XIV’s Dutch War, p. ; SHAT A : Barbezieux to Luxembourg,  June; to Joyeuse,  June; to Lorge,  June ; Rousset, vol. II, pp. –. AAE CP Turquie , fols. r –v , r –r , v : Louis to Chˆateauneuf,  Apr.,  June ,  Apr. ; Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. II, p. . AAE MD Suisse , fol. v : memorandum,  Nov. . SHAT A : ‘Avertissement’ [c. –]; Lavall´ee, vol. III, p. : Dauphin to Maintenon,  Oct. ; ACC O, vol. , fol. r : Cond´e to Autun,  Oct. .



The appointment of general officers was an apprentice. By , however, he was much more confident and Louis was genuinely delighted at his son’s progress. He accordingly charged him with driving deep into Germany to give heart to the Turks, to force Emperor Leopold to conclude that simultaneous wars against both France and the Ottoman Empire could not be fought, and to scare the German princes into agreeing peace terms. A year later, commanding the army of Flanders with Luxembourg as his principal adviser and deputy, Monseigneur seemed finally to be at ease, accomplishing a prodigious speedmarch – worthy of Marlborough in the next decade – to protect French Flanders. Unfortunately, as with his father, the need to uphold the Dauphin’s honour had drawbacks. The generals serving under him were reluctant to take risks, even though the king was very keen that Monseigneur should win a full-scale pitched battle. The need to ensure the Dauphin commanded the cream of the army hamstrung operations in other theatres and brought about the ruin of the fortress of Pinerolo in ,  kilometres away, when the Gendarmerie, so vital for relieving the blockaded and bombarded town, could not be released from service in Germany until Monseigneur had returned to court. Dynastic pride was likely thus to induce Louis to make major strategic errors. Moreover, his own sense of insecurity and deep anxiety about being eclipsed by anybody other than his son meant he did not always make optimum use of his own relatives. Louis XIV’s brother Philippe, duc d’Orl´eans – known as Monsieur – was a major asset whom Louis shrank from deploying to full advantage. Philippe had captured Zutphen in  and Bouchain in , before winning a major victory at Cassel in  and following it up with a successful conclusion to the siege of SaintOmer. Louis was proud of his brother’s achievements, even to the point of placing a vast canvas by van der Meulen of the battle of Cassel on the great staircase at Versailles, but he was also horrified at Monsieur’s disregard for his own safety. He was henceforth confined to acting as Louis’s deputy when they campaigned together, as in  and , though in  he was entrusted with command in western France. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see this last appointment as an insult by an insecure elder brother, for in the Nine Years War Louis was consternated by the prospect of an Anglo-Dutch attack on the French coast. He could spare few regular troops for such an eventuality, but instead placed his trust in Monsieur. In the event of an invasion probably only Monsieur (or the king or the Dauphin 

 

Spanheim, Relation, pp. , ; Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. II, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Saint-Pouange to Louvois,  June ; Lavall´ee, vol. III, p. : Dauphin to Maintenon,  July ; vol. III, p. : Dauphin to Maintenon,  Aug. ; SHAT A , fols. r –v : Louis to Dauphin,  July ; AAE CP Turquie , fol. r–v : Louis to Chˆateauneuf,  June ; CP Allemagne , fol. v : Pomponne to anon.,  June ; BNF FF , fol. v : Dauphin to Vendˆome,  Aug. . Wolf, Louis XIV, p. ; SHAT A , fol. r : memorandum [c. –]; A , fols. r–v , v : Louis to Dauphin,  Aug.,  Aug. . Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. , , ; N. Barker, Brother to the Sun King. Philippe, Duke of Orl´eans (London, ), pp. –, –.



The high command of the French armies themselves) could have mobilised the gentlemen of Normandy, Brittany and Poitou in sufficient numbers to make up a force capable of repulsing the Allies when backed by a handful of regular battalions and several regiments of milice. Based at Laval in Mayenne, from where he could rush to any part of the coast, Monsieur was a highly active commander who not only supervised military administration but also repaired major local highways. But his career was also governed by that of his elder brother, and when the king retired from active campaigning so too, for precisely that reason, did Monsieur. Considering the duke was still in rude health, though aged fifty-three, with years of invaluable experience behind him, it was a dynastic decision which Louis could perhaps, at the time, ill afford to make. Louis trusted Monsieur, but he could not allow himself to be completely outshone by him. Yet when it came to the Cond´e Louis revealed all the submerged prickliness and insecurity of his character. Unsurprisingly, at first Louis was reluctant to place too much faith in the Grand Cond´e who had fought against him for eight years before , and though Cond´e was more experienced in the Low Countries than Turenne he was not a commander in the first year of the War of Devolution. It would be an error, though, to assume that Cond´e was brushed aside owing primarily to royal paranoia. Contrary to what has been assumed, his exclusion from command in  was not due to lingering royal resentment, but because, according to the Savoyard ambassador, the money he was owed by Spain, and which was enumerated in the treaty of the Pyrenees, was in arrears and would be threatened by his participation in an active assault on the Spanish Netherlands. This money was considered necessary because of his likely candidature for the throne of Poland. Later that year, however, Cond´e was named as commander of the army of Germany, in part so that Turenne would realise he was not indispensable. Cond´e’s task was really to prepare a force in his governorship of Burgundy from which to launch the invasion of the FrancheComt´e in February . In the Dutch War four years later Cond´e played a larger role, not only in the invasion of the United Provinces, but also in winning his last battle at Senef in  and rushing to Alsace in  to take command of the army of Germany after the tragic death of Turenne. But it was to be his last hurrah, and ten years of increasingly gouty retirement followed. In all this period – from  to  – he was no meek follower of Louvois’s orders, but trusted his own instincts and worked hard, if less overtly than Turenne, to counteract Le Tellier influence. By contrast, the Grand Cond´e’s son Henri-Jules, known as M. le Prince after , had his promising military career cut short when his father retired in . From 

 

Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  May ; SHAT A , no. : memorandum,  May, and ‘Supplement’,  May ; A , no. : Humi`eres to Louis,  June ; A , no. : Matignon to Barbezieux,  July ; no. : Humi`eres to Louis,  July ; Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Apr. . See Inglis-Jones, ‘The Grand Cond´e in Exile’. B´eguin, Les princes de Cond´e, pp. –; Saint-Maurice, vol. I, pp. , : Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  May,  Oct. ; L. Lecestre, ‘La mission de Gourville en Espagne, ’, Revue des Questions Historiques  (), –, –.



The appointment of general officers then on, though he was consulted by Louis on important aspects of military policy and strategy, he was confined to acting as one of the king’s subalterns whenever he was in the field. The real victim of Louis’s mistrust was the Grand Cond´e’s nephew Franc¸oisLouis, who succeeded as prince de Conti in . During the s Conti twice disgraced himself, but in spite of a degree of military talent which contemporaries reckoned made him the equal of his uncle, his rehabilitation on the Grand Cond´e’s death was not a sincere gesture by Louis XIV. In the race for promotion he progressed no faster than his first cousin once removed, the duc de Bourbon, or the king’s bastard the duc du Maine. By way of a sop he was made one of the first five knights of the new Order of Saint Louis in  but Louis would not entrust him with an army because of his membership of the Cond´e line and his perceived character flaws. After Luxembourg’s death in January  Louis appointed Villeroi to be commander-in-chief of the army of Flanders and in April Sourches reported rumours that Conti, who had been Luxembourg’s number two and was by now a hero, was refusing to serve under him. What was not known was a confidential and extraordinary conversation between Louis and Monseigneur, who regarded Conti as something of a favourite. In a letter to Vendˆome in June Barbezieux revealed the nature of the discussion. This part of the letter is not in the minutes in the war archives but appears only in Vendˆome’s transcribed papers, so, if genuine, must have been added by Barbezieux once a clerk had written the rest of the letter. Apparently Monseigneur had solicited the command of the army of Flanders for Conti but without success, for the king had on that occasion slapped him down. He asked Monseigneur: If he had forgotten that if the prince de Cond´e had won the battle of Saint-Antoine [] he would have shared the kingdom with him, and that he was surprised that he dared to ask him for a command of such importance for a prince of that house, that their interests and those of the State did not allow them ever to become more powerful than they are. Thus the house of Cond´e is on the floor.

The king was determined it should stay there. Despite being ready for command fifteen years earlier, only in  did a desperate Louis provide Conti with the army of Flanders, but the prince died before the campaign began. What the legitimate lines of the house of France found difficult to stomach was the contrasting favour the king bestowed on his bastards and the duc de Vendˆome,   

M´emoires de Primi Visconti, p. . Roujon, Conti: l’ennemi de Louis XIV, pp. –, –, , , ; S´evign´e, Lettres, vol. III, p. : S´evign´e to pr´esident de Moulceau,  Dec. . Roujon, Conti, pp. –; Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Apr. ; BNF FF , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  June . Perhaps Louis’s fear was not so misplaced if we are to believe a recent book which argues that a later prince de Conti sought to usurp the throne in the s: see J. Woodbridge, Revolt in pre-Revolutionary France: The Prince de Conti’s Conspiracy against Louis XV, – (London, ).



The high command of the French armies grandson of Henri IV’s illegitimate son. Though even as late as the s neither Maine nor Toulouse were sufficiently old or experienced to be entrusted with an army (there were few Grand Cond´es about who could thrash the opposition at the age of twenty-one), they did work their way through the general ranks, becoming junior lieutenant-generals by . Vendˆome, though, was by the middle of that decade revealing hitherto unsuspected talents, leading the king to commission secret reports from his superiors about his abilities. Having commanded detached corps in the Cˆote d’Azur region for three years running, in  Vendˆome was a natural candidate to take over the army of Catalonia, and not just because his military credentials were sound. His position as Henri IV’s great-grandson was of vital importance in his appointment. During  Vendˆome had seen his political situation strengthen, largely because he was a stalking horse for the political and social aspirations of the king’s bastards, Maine and Toulouse. On  April  C´esar de Vendˆome had received letters patent from his father, Henri IV, giving him a special rank above the peers of France and the princes e´trangers, but below the princes of the blood, a precedence of particular relevance in the Paris Parlement, at court, and in the event of the legitimate royal line of France dying out. In the aftermath of Henri’s murder later that month C´esar failed to get these letters registered in the Parlement, but their existence did set a precedent which Louis XIV was determined to follow to elevate Maine and Toulouse to a ‘rang interm´ediaire’. On  and  May  royal orders gave the duc de Vendˆome precedence immediately after the princes of the blood and proposed the registration of the  letters patent. On the th, Louis issued letters patent to both Maine and Toulouse, giving them the rank between Vendˆome and the princes of the blood, and Maine was received in this status by the Parlement on  May, provoking a walk-out by Cond´e, his son Bourbon and Conti. On  May Louis reissued the letters of  for Vendˆome, and nineteen days later the duke was received in the Parlement in the rank immediately below Maine. Vendˆome had achieved the status that had eluded his father and grandfather, and on  September his position was boosted still further by his appointment to replace Maine as General of the Galleys. Barbezieux told him, in so many words, that it was now just a matter of time before he was given a whole army to command.     



BNF FF , fols. v –r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  June ; FF , fol. r : comments of Bellerive. SHAT A , fol. v : Louis to Catinat,  May ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Catinat,  Oct. . BNF FF , fols. r –r : Harlay to [Pontchartrain?],  May . J.-P. Desprat, Les bˆatards d’Henri IV. L’´epop´ee des Vendˆomes – (Paris, ), pp. , , ; Labatut, Les ducs et pairs, p. . BNF FF , fols. v –r : arrˆet of Paris Parlement,  May ; fols. r –r ; Clair. , fols. r –r : royal declaration,  May ; fols. r –r : relation of events of  and  May ; Dangeau, vol. V, pp. , –,  May,  May . SHAT A , no. :  Oct. .



The appointment of general officers Vendˆome’s success as a military commander was, after , vital if Louis were to consolidate the position of his own bastards. The king soon discovered he had unleashed a major talent, and though he still failed to give the army of Catalonia the support it deserved, he could afford to run it on an inadequate budget given Vendˆome’s ability. Vendˆome moved quickly to stabilise a dangerous strategic situation, retrenched his forces, and then routed the Spanish in battle in , leaving the road open for the capture of Barcelona. Barbezieux told Vendˆome that Louis esteemed him so highly he even re-read letters being sent to him before signing, something he never did with other generals. Vendˆome’s possession of the post of General of the Galleys brought him a degree of power over his theatre of war without precedent during Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’, while his third cousin, the comte d’Estr´ees, to whom he was very close, was put in charge of the Mediterranean sailing fleet under his direct orders. By coordinating his land and naval forces Vendˆome was able to take Barcelona, albeit with heavy casualties and with insufficient forces to encircle the city, by mid-August . Vendˆome enjoyed the king’s highest esteem and deepest trust, and he was fortunate indeed that he also had an excellent personal relationship with the marquis de Barbezieux. This was just as well for Barbezieux too. The Le Tellier may have been exceptionally powerful ministers, but there was a limit to their authority. Louvois and Barbezieux, no less than Michel Le Tellier, had to treat royal princes with the greatest of respect and could not actually order them to do anything. Instead they sought to stoke up an amicable relationship, while gingerly manipulating the men around a princely commander-in-chief, but this was politically dangerous, even where the minister was acting in the king’s best interests. By conspicuously declining to appoint the princes of Cond´e or Conti, or Monsieur and his son the duc de Chartres – the future regent – to the command of a major army between  and , Louis made the task of the war ministers rather easier. And because the Dauphin was effectively seen as part of the king – and he was particularly obedient to his father – he too posed little problem for the Le Tellier, about whom he seemed to have no strong opinions. Furthermore, the king’s grip on the French armies was all the firmer because for the first forty years of his ‘personal rule’ he had to confide only one such force to the command of a fellow sovereign: the army of Italy came briefly under the control of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy for a mere six weeks at the end of the war in Italy in . An alliance with another state dictated from political and social necessity that a French army be placed under the command of another sovereign if that prince were to take the field in person. In the s the duke of Modena had led French forces in Lombardy, while in the Spanish Succession conflict Louis had to allow, first, for Victor Amadeus again, and then for Max Emmanuel, elector of  

This is a summary of the longer and more detailed account of Vendˆome’s record in Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –. SHAT A : Louvois to Humi`eres,  Mar. , in Rousset, vol. II, pp. –: Louvois was anxious lest his attempts to manipulate the circle around the duc d’Orl´eans were discovered.



The high command of the French armies Bavaria. French generals found both men extremely difficult to accommodate. But from  to  neither Louis nor the Le Tellier had to worry seriously about this issue. Instead they could concentrate on choosing commanders from among French subjects and apply their minds to the delicate business of French domestic political considerations.   GRANDS  --:                    One of the most notable political changes of Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’ was a reduction in the provincial power bases of princes and peers as the royal court became the principal pole of political attraction both for the grands and for local petitioners. But this does not mean that the provincial links of Louis XIV’s leading courtiers were wholly severed or bypassed by the royal administration. The importance of provincial governors as lobbyists at court for their localities and as important (if on the whole somewhat diminished) figures for military patronage and organisation has already been noted in the General Introduction. What now needs to be stressed is the continuing link between provincial governorships and appointments to military command, which map  will help to illustrate. During the Franco-Spanish war of – it had been common to see provincial governors placed in command of armies operating within or out of their jurisdictions. For example, in the s the comte d’Alais, governor of Provence, had been in charge of the southern Alps theatre of war, and from  the prince de Conti, governor of Guyenne, had commanded Louis XIV’s army in Catalonia. It is true that after  the provincial governors saw their power nibbled away by governors of individual major fortresses, by the Secretary of State for War, and by whoever was appointed to be commander-in-chief of the army in the region. However, if the provincial governor himself were to be appointed to that post his power remained extensive. Rochefort in the Dutch War was governor of Lorraine and briefly commander of the army of Germany before his premature death. In the Nine Years War the pattern was far more striking. The mar´echal d’Humi`eres had been appointed governor-general of French Flanders, having campaigned extensively in this  

 



SHAT A , fol. r : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Sep. . Villars found Max Emmanuel exasperating. See R. Mettam, ‘The Role of the Higher Aristocracy in France under Louis XIV, with Special Reference to the “Faction of the Duke of Burgundy” and the Provincial Governors’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge, ); B. Nachison, ‘Provincial Government in the Ancien Regime: The Princes of Cond´e in Burgundy, –’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Iowa, ). See also pp. –. Parrott, ‘Richelieu, the Grands and the French Army’, p. ; R. Oresko, ‘The Marriages of the Nieces of Cardinal Mazarin. Public Policy and Private Strategy in Seventeenth-Century Europe’, in R. Babel, ed., Frankreich im europ¨aischen Staatensystem der fr¨uhen Neuzeit (Sigmaringen, ), pp. –, –; SHAT A , no. : Louis XIII to Isola,  June . Bib Maz , fols. r –r : memorandum [c. –]; fols. r –r : ‘Observations’ [c. –].



The appointment of general officers ` es -A. Maréchal d'Humiéres French Flanders -army of Flanders 1689; separate corps 1690 --93

D. Maréchal de Duras -Franche-Comté -army of Germany 1689--90

B. Maréchal de Luxembourg -Champagne -army of Flanders 1690--1

A B

C. Maréchal de Boufflers -greater Lorraine -army of the Moselle 1692--4

C D

E

G G. Duc de Gramont -- Béarn -defensive command against Spanish Navarre 1689--97

E. Duc de Vendôme -separate corps to defend Côte d'Azur 1693--5

F

F. Maréchal de Noailles -- Languedoc and Roussillon (brother also as deputy governor of the Auvergne) -army of Catalonia 1689--95

Map  Provinces where the governor commanded an army or important corps, –.

region, and his letters patent explicitly noted how this connection would ease the administration of this key province. It was no surprise, therefore, that he was appointed commander of the army of Flanders in  and, after his dismissal for incompetence, he then commanded a separate defensive corps in the province for the next four years. His successor as commander-in-chief, the mar´echal de Luxembourg, 

The high command of the French armies took over in  at a time when he was governor of Champagne, another key province for the northern theatre of war. Boufflers in – was both governorgeneral of greater Lorraine and commander of the small but vital army of the Moselle. In  he succeeded Humi`eres as governor-general of French Flanders while exercising one of the two major commands in the army of Flanders. Further east the mar´echal de Duras, an active governor of the Franche-Comt´e since its acquisition in , was placed in charge of the army of Germany in –. His province was vital for the logistical support of this force. In the south the duc de Vendˆome, governor of Provence, was given charge of an autonomous corps of several thousand men defending the Cˆote d’Azur in –, being succeeded by his brother for the years –. Vendˆome’s ability to animate the province, building on the sound administration of his long-time deputy there, the comte de Grignan, was a vital part of his command. In B´earn and Lower Navarre, at the western end of the Pyrenees, the resident governor and viceroy, the duc de Gramont, ran a purely defensive command against Spanish Navarre throughout the Nine Years War, and would have been army commander there had Louis decided to open a sixth front. Most notable of all, though, was the duc de Noailles. Not only was he governor of Roussillon in his own right, but his brother was the lieutenantgeneral (deputy governor) of the Auvergne and since  he himself had been interim governor of Languedoc during the minority of the title-holder, the duc du Maine. On  December  Louis XIV even appointed the duke’s nine-year-old son Emmanuel-Jules, comte de Noailles, to the lieutenancy-general of Guyenne, which the king had given the family to sell. His family therefore enjoyed massive influence in a great swathe of France vital to the army of Catalonia, which Noailles commanded from  to  precisely because of his local power and knowledge. He actively managed the provincial authorities of Languedoc and Roussillon, and ministers found their writ could not easily be enforced.   GRANDS  --:                                    Alongside geographical connections and personal charisma as preferable attributes for a commander to possess, sufficient competence to manage and lead increasingly large armies remained a key consideration for Louis XIV when making appointments. Yet high politics and traditional considerations continued to intrude, as they had done before , and in the case of some commanders one cannot help thinking that the king willed their competence against all the evidence that they were inadequate for the job. Because the case of the mar´echal de Luxembourg – the most 

SHAT OM : letters patent for Humi`eres,  July ; king’s order,  June ; BNF NAF , fols. r –r , r –v , r–v : Louis to Gramont,  and  Aug.,  Dec. ; Noailles, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. –, –, –, –, –, –.



The appointment of general officers successful French general between Turenne and Cond´e earlier and Villars in the s – is so extraordinary he will be discussed separately, but the other generals appointed by Louis before the War of the Spanish Succession are worth considering for what they reveal about Louis’s priorities and French domestic politics and government. As Louvois grew in confidence and power it became clear to the king that some generals could not receive supreme commands unless he wished to disrupt his own war effort. The mar´echal de Bellefonds, the comte de Choiseul and numerous other officers who had risen to the rank of general in the s enjoyed very patchy careers, but after Louvois’s death in  many, including some who had previously refused to serve, now returned to active command. As Mme de S´evign´e sarcastically noted: ‘It is said that Louvois’s tomb produces miracles; it makes see a blind man who is our friend Choiseul, about which the public has had real joy, and it makes walk people with broken legs, who are the mar´echal de Bellefonds and Montrevel.’ Some, however, had talents that Louvois could not afford to waste. Foremost among them was Turenne, whose spats with Louvois have already been described. Quite simply, Louis owed his strong position in the s to Turenne’s defeat of the Frondeurs and his victory at the battle of the Dunes, and, as his two great biographers noted, Turenne had done a great deal to rebuild and reform the army after the treaty of the Pyrenees. He was literally indispensable as an organiser, planner, strategist and commander, though the king was anxious that he did not agglomerate too much power and influence. Turenne was given direct access to Louis at almost all times, certainly up to the s. He also cooperated effectively with his old rival the Grand Cond´e during the Dutch War, though by then Cond´e was foremost in Louis’s favour. Indeed, during the years – Turenne was allowed much of his old leeway to conduct operations as he saw fit because his forces were under strength and Louis needed all of the old man’s genius to make the best of them. Nevertheless, these years were far from easy. Louvois and Turenne were in a state of mutual antagonism, reflecting not just a different approach to the management of the war but also the variety of logistical and manpower problems the marshal faced. The king himself had to keep the peace between them. The promotion of both Bellefonds and Cr´equi to the mar´echalat in  was worrying for the Le Tellier because of the connections both men possessed to Nicolas Fouquet: the former was a cousin and the latter a close friend of the disgraced former Surintendant des finances. Cr´equi had actually been exiled from court earlier in the  



Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  Aug. ; vol. V, p. ,  June ; Pinard, Chronologie historiquemilitaire, vol. III, p. ; S´evign´e, Lettres, vol. III, p. : S´evign´e to Bussy-Rabutin,  Apr. . B´erenger, Turenne, pp. –; C.-G. Picavet, Les derni`eres ann´ees de Turenne (–) (Paris, ); Sonnino, Louis XIV and the Origins of the Dutch War, pp. , –, ; Sonnino, ‘The Marshal de Turenne and the Origins of the Dutch War’. Rousset, vol. I, pp. –, –; Ekberg, Failure, pp. , , , –; M´emoires de Primi Visconti, p. ; BNF NAF , fols. r –r : Louis to Turenne,  June ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. . See also pp. –.



The high command of the French armies decade because of his ties to Fouquet, but he was subsequently rehabilitated and led a large corps in the  invasion of Flanders. After his second disgrace in – Cr´equi was restored to command, only to be routed by the duke of Lorraine at Konz-Saarbr¨ucken and then to suffer a mutiny among his officers which resulted in the loss of the city and entire archdiocese of Trier in . Not for another eighteen months did he return to favour, but he then excelled himself, getting the better of Lorraine on several occasions. He did, after all, have something to prove. When Louis finally attacked the great fortress of Luxemburg in  Cr´equi, by now a firm ally of Louvois, was his choice as commander-in-chief of the army sent against it. Cr´equi’s death in , on the eve of the Nine Years War, following on from Schomberg’s departure for Hohenzollern and then Orange service the previous year, was a real blow to France. The problems of command politics during the Dutch War have been explored earlier, but it is important to extend this inquiry into the Nine Years War. The year  was an unpleasant shock for anybody confident in the skill of French arms. Humi`eres’s performance in the Spanish Netherlands, even before his defeat at Walcourt, had given the king considerable cause for concern, to the point where he let it be known that he had given the marshal the right to decide on operations for himself: Humi`eres was, in other words, deemed entirely responsible for the setbacks that year in Flanders. The duc du Maine’s account of the conduct of the campaign, given to his father the king, was enough to get Humi`eres removed from overall command, but Louvois, worried that his ally was dragging him down too, had already been fuelling the king’s suspicions that the hapless man was inadequate for the task. In fact, one suspects Louis might have been pushed into appointing him against his better judgement: when Humi`eres had commanded a separate corps in Flanders during , Louis and Louvois had sent him prescriptive orders even more refined and detailed than any others sent to fellow commanders operating in this theatre throughout the ‘personal rule’, a sure sign that the king and his minister had little faith in either the sagacity or aptitude of a man nicknamed ‘le mar´echal Sans-Lumi`ere’ by contemporaries. The same year Duras, who had apparently coped well with the siege of Philippsburg in , was removed as commander-in-chief of the army of Germany. To be fair, the disastrous performance of this French army should not be blamed wholly upon Duras: he was certainly lackadaisical and a strategic incompetent, but Louvois and the king had not listened to his concerns and flatly, and arrogantly, contradicted his own more realistic assessment of the situation in the Rhineland. Duras shouldered   

Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Oct. ; Rousset, vol. II, pp. –; Dussieux, L’arm´ee en France, vol. II, pp. –. See above, pp. –, and chapter , pp. –. Lavall´ee, vol. III, p. : Maine to Maintenon,  Aug. ; Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. , ; SHAT A : Louvois to Humi`eres,  Aug. , in Bingham, ‘Louis XIV and the War for Peace’, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Humi`eres,  Oct. , in Hardr´e, pp. –.



The appointment of general officers the blame for the collapse of French arms north and east of the Rhine, but his family’s position could not be ruined, especially as he himself was the doyen of the marshals of France and a captain of the Gardes du corps. He was therefore replaced, before the end of the  campaign, by his brother the mar´echal de Lorge. This replacement of one commander by another reflected the very real problem facing Louis in , namely the spiralling of the Nine Years War to cover Germany, Flanders, Spain, Ireland and the sea, with northern Italy similarly transformed into a war zone the following year. There were few commanders available with sufficient capacity to run armies now topping , men. The king was forced to turn to men out of step with the Le Tellier family, most notably Luxembourg and Lorge. Lorge and Duras were Turenne’s nephews through his sister, and Lorge especially absorbed their uncle’s loathing for Louvois. The frostiness between Lorge and the minister was in  transformed into the naked hostility described in chapter , when Lorge came to fear the consequences of attempts by Versailles to restrict his room for manoeuvre. Should he meet with disaster at Allied hands or allow the honour of the Dauphin to be compromised it would surely bring the disgrace of his house, the Durfort. Louis XIV had too much respect for the memory of Turenne and too little desire to destroy the prestige of the La Tour d’Auvergne clan to remove Lorge from command, but there is a strong case for saying that he should have done exactly that. Lorge was a bungling incompetent in the matter of operations, making a complete mess of the army’s movements and repeatedly arranging matters so that his cavalry consumed all the forage in key areas earlier than it should have done. Several testimonies bear witness to his inability to organise a march or to think strategically. The reader of government correspondence gains the strong impression that as the s wore on Lorge was being nursed through his campaigns by a series of minders – SaintPouange, Chamlay, Huxelles, even the Dauphin – until in  the mar´echal de Choiseul was made Lorge’s co-commander and then given free rein to command half the army. Yet Lorge continued as overall commander-in-chief until the end of , doing immense damage to France’s chances of winning the Nine Years War, and he was only replaced fully by Choiseul because of his slide into physical decline. A renewed vigour was noticeable in the army of Germany in , despite Choiseul’s near blindness. It is difficult to explain why Louis did not remove Lorge earlier, especially as Barbezieux thought little of his abilities. One can only suggest 

 

Bingham, ‘The War for Peace’, pp. –, –; SHAT A : La Fonds to Louvois,  Aug. ; A : La Fonds to Louvois,  Sep. ; Spanheim, Relation, p. ; Dangeau, vol. II, p. ,  Sep. . SHAT A , fol. r−v : memorandum [c. –]; no. : Lorge to Louvois,  Sep. . SHAT A , no. bis: Barbezieux to Choiseul,  May ; A , no. : to Vendˆome,  Oct. ; Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, pp. , –, –, –. See also Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –, for full details of the devastating criticism of Lorge.



The high command of the French armies that Lorge’s position in society and at the head of the army of Germany was somehow part of Louis’s desire to balance the interests of aristocratic families. If so, this policy extracted a high military price. Lorge was, like Duras, a captain of the Gardes du corps and thus close to the king. So too were Franc¸ois de Neufville, mar´echal-duc de Villeroi – a personal favourite of Louis XIV – and Anne-Jules, mar´echal-duc de Noailles. From such men Louis was prepared to tolerate considerable incompetence, one can only surmise for personal political reasons. Villeroi had proved himself to be a resourceful and well-organised subordinate to Luxembourg, but when he was called on to succeed Luxembourg as head of the army of Flanders in  disaster ensued. While William of Orange besieged French-held Namur, Villeroi was dilatory in challenging the prince de Vaudemont’s Allied army of observation in western Flanders. Villeroi seems to have known he was out of his depth, seeking royal approval for fairly unimportant decisions he had taken and actively soliciting royal replies about the most trivial matters. Louis XIV repeatedly had to reassure his favourite, while correcting some very basic errors in troop disposition, never mind some alarming strategic proposals. As with Humi`eres in  and the early part of , Louis had to spell out his orders in great detail. Villeroi’s aide Puys´egur, who ironically had done nothing to make the encounter with Vaudemont a success, was nevertheless indispensable. Villeroi, like Lorge, had to be chaperoned, and the king saw Puys´egur as vital for keeping up the marshal’s morale and ensuring he gave the proper orders: he was even summoned to court in the middle of a campaign to confer with the king. In  Villeroi could not be trusted to run the siege of Ath, so Catinat, now freed from the Italian theatre by the treaty of Turin, was brought in to secure the town. The mar´echal-duc de Noailles, who was so close to Mme de Maintenon that his son married her niece in , had been appointed to command the small army of Catalonia nine years earlier because of his connections to her and the king and because of his towering presence in the south-west of France. At first all went well, and Noailles proved able enough to keep the Spanish at bay until he was given extra resources in  and began to push south along the Catalan coast. Then in May  he won a stunning victory at the battle of the Ter, which he followed by capturing the key fortress of Gerona. But things were already starting to go wrong. Having promised the king he would take Barcelona, Noailles now found it to be a logistical impossibility, and his resistance to all entreaties to get on with it began to 



Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, p. ; SHAT A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Villeroi,  June ; fol. r : Louis to Villeroi,  July ; fol. v : Louis to Villeroi,  July ; fols. r –r : memorandum [ July ]; A : Louis to Villeroi,  June ; A s, no. : [Choiseul-Praslin] to Cond´e, July ; Wolf, Louis XIV, p. ; Bib Ars , fol. r : memorandum,  July ; BNF FF , fol. r–v : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  July ; fol. v : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Aug. ; fol. r : notes of Bellerive. SHAT A , fol. v : Louis to Villeroi,  July ; A s, no. : Maine to Cond´e,  Aug. ; A : Louis to Catinat,  May,  June .



The appointment of general officers sow doubt in the king’s mind about his marshal’s courage. This was compounded when Louis discovered, in the succeeding winter, that Noailles had lied about his activities at the Ter. Anxious to cover up the full extent of his worsening rheumatism he falsely painted himself as the architect of the victory, when in fact he was stricken with pain and missed most of the battle. Barbezieux, bitterly resentful at the highhanded treatment the marshal doled out to him and irritated by the way Noailles ran his army like a personal fiefdom, made sure that Louis got the full picture from two of Noailles’s subordinates. Yet Noailles’s retirement was a protracted affair and says much about Louis’s deep desire to avoid creating offence and his sentimental attachment to weak but faithful servants. The king seems to have resolved not to employ Noailles again at the head of the army of Catalonia, but for the sake of Noailles’s honour he relented in the spring of , almost certainly under pressure from Mme de Maintenon. All the same, Noailles’s health was so bad that Louis most probably knew he would be forced to relinquish command. There was simply no need to hatch an elaborate conspiracy in which Noailles would arrive at the army and then, citing ill health, hand over to the duc de Vendˆome. The king, anticipating the worst, equipped Noailles with letters to send to Vendˆome in Provence calling him to the Pyrenees in the event of his complete incapacity. Faced with a total collapse in the French position in Catalonia on his arrival in mid-May Noailles came close to a complete breakdown and two weeks later sent for Vendˆome. Despite his manifold shortcomings, Noailles remained on good terms with Louis and he was generously received at court in July . His capture of Rosas and Gerona, his loyalty to Louis and to Mme de Maintenon, and the leading political role the family played in the Roussillon, Languedoc and the Auvergne, meant he was able to retire at a time of his own choosing, as would Lorge a few months later. Louis could not face sacking either man. His lapses of resolve with Villeroi, Lorge and Noailles can have stemmed only from his personal predilections for these men. His apparent weakness in the face of their deficiencies was a direct result of his deep-rooted concern to balance the interests of the grands at court, in the provinces and in the army. 



See Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. – for a full discussion of the – crisis in the army of Catalonia’s command. See also Lavall´ee, vol. IV, pp. , –: Maintenon to Bishop Noailles,  Apr.,  May ; Noailles, M´emoires, vol. I, p. : Noailles to his mother the dowager duchess,  Dec. . BNF FF , fols. r–v , r–v : notes of Bellerive; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. II, pp. –; SHAT A , fols. r –v : clerk’s note, and Louis to Vendˆome,  May ; A , nos. , , : Esgrigny to Barbezieux,  May,  May,  May ; no. : Noailles to Louis,  May ; no. : Saint-Silvestre to Noailles,  May ; no. : Trobat to Barbezieux,  May ; A , no. : Trobat to Barbezieux,  June ; no. bis: Noailles to Louis,  June ; no. : Noailles to Barbezieux,  June . Different conspiracy theories were posited by Saint-Simon and the chevalier de Bellerive. Saint-Simon’s account of the episode is riddled with errors.





The summits of ambition and the rewards of good service: the bienfaits du roi and the high command Louis XIV may not have been the best assessor of men’s abilities and temperaments, but he was without question a shrewd judge of human motivation and he must surely qualify as one of history’s great practical, political psychologists. Louis learned many lessons from Mazarin, but one of the most significant concerned the distribution of royal largesse. He had seen the cardinal, neither feared nor loved to any significant degree, at the mercy of many grands, forced to purchase their support by gifts, titles and administrative concessions at a very high price indeed. These people demanded material and honorific rewards for loyalty to the crown, and by and large Mazarin was forced to give in to them provided the queen mother, Anne of Austria, could be squared. Louis was well aware that the power of the monarchy rested upon a large degree of reciprocity, but he was determined to break any perceived automatic link between deed and reward. The bienfaits du roi would henceforth, from , be distributed on the basis of Louis’s caprice, at a time of his own choosing. Yet the king could not get away from the fact that his subjects sought both inducements for good service, and rewards – which in turn might encourage men to greater things and give hope to others. Dynastic loyalty to the Bourbon was not strong enough in itself to produce sufficient active effort on the crown’s behalf. Nor was emotional satisfaction from serving the king, undoubtedly a factor in men like the duke of Berwick – motivated by hatred of King William and the Protestant Stuart succession – adequate recompense for arduous service. Generals may have been charmed by Louis XIV’s letters to them but they expected more than mere ‘politesse’ and cheap verbal expressions of appreciation. The king had additionally to play on both hope and the gratitude of the beneficiaries of his graces. The complex interplay of gratefulness and guilt in a human being could be dramatically heightened if a recipient of titles, large gifts and major military promotions from the king felt so honoured that he could only reciprocate by devoting to the crown many subsequent years of service to the best of his ability. Throughout his reign Louis demonstrated an unpredictability in the matter of advancing people, often responding to great deeds with nothing but words of praise,  

Louis XIV, M´emoires, p. . BNF NAF , fols. r –r ; Lavall´ee, vol. III, pp. –: Maintenon to abbess of Fontevrault,  Sep. .



The bienfaits du roi and the high command but equally he sometimes appeared to reward failure. For the greatest honours he could bestow he preferred to make promotions in batches and before awarding, for example, governorships he tried to await a favourable opportunity created by death or retirement. What was perennially true was the unpredictable timing of his announcements and the restrained manner in which he celebrated the preferment of an individual. Leaving this aside, it was relatively easy for the king to employ such a system of incentives and to be sparing in his graces during peacetime, or when a war was going well. It was much more difficult to keep matters under control during the middle years of the Dutch War and throughout the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession.                  Military promotion as a reward for the successful performance of duties and as an acknowledgement by the king that an officer had superior talents was deemed worthy in itself, but some senior officers genuinely worried that there were too many generals, with a significant proportion incapable of performing their functions adequately. In July  Luxembourg had complained to the king that there were far too many generals in the army of Flanders, while Feuqui`eres, writing in c. , lamented the dramatic increase in their number over the previous two decades or so. There were insufficient lodgings available on campaign for the excessive number of lieutenant-generals and by the War of the Spanish Succession too few of these men were either good enough to command an army wing or even bothered to participate in actions. The rise in the number of mar´echaux de camp, though also dramatic, was nevertheless more justifiable because of the burden they carried in army administration. The post of lieutenant-general had first appeared only under Louis XIII and numbers began to multiply during the s as the regent and Mazarin sought to buy political support. The mar´echaux de camp dated from the reign of Francis I and also increased in numbers between  and , though in their case with some administrative rationale. After the Peace of the Pyrenees the numbers of such general officers fell back, only to grow again from the s. But it was in the Nine Years War that the number of general officers was vastly inflated. On  March  Louis XIV announced twenty-eight new lieutenant-generals and twenty-six new mar´echaux de camp. Just under three years later, in January , although troop and army numbers had remained roughly static, Louis promoted another sixteen men to lieutenant-general and twenty-seven to mar´echal de camp. Casualty and natural wastage rates do not account for these bulk promotions, so what could  

Desormeaux, Histoire de la maison de Montmorenci, vol. V, p. : Luxembourg to Louis,  July . The letter does not appear in the SHAT registers. BNF FF , fol. r ; SHAT MR , fol. r–v ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –, .



The high command of the French armies be their justification? It was certainly true that the Nine Years War required more general officers than the Dutch War: the number of armies and men in uniform hit its ancien r´egime ceiling in –, while the generals themselves clearly believed that a large number of them was necessary to preserve discipline. Yet the suspicion remains that Louis began the practice (which his two successors continued) of promoting large numbers of men for essentially political reasons, so as to recompense their loyalty and obedience and to ensure their continued good service. Louis’s desire to encourage dedication to duty among colonels and brigadiers who were under increasing pressure owing to the nature of the costly and demanding conflicts played no small part in his promotion strategy. This posed potentially serious problems for managing general staffs composed of men who might be unsuitable for the rank they held. All the same, military promotions did not have to devalue senior ranks. From the mid-s competent generals close to the marquis de Barbezieux might also be given the opportunity of acting as regimental and garrison inspectors. Furthermore, important governorships, or command of whole regions during winter months, could be parcelled out to genuinely talented and diligent general officers. Despite his irrational favour for some men Louis would not knowingly put a complete imbecile in charge of either a major frontier fortress or a wintering army in border regions. A fortiori, command of occupied enemy fortresses demanded a safe pair of hands. Governorships of towns in the French interior – and even some on the frontiers – were used for the most part as sinecures – resources for senior officers in military service – as were the governorships of some very minor provinces such as Foix. The governorship of Mont-Dauphin was worth , livres per annum and was given to lieutenant-general Polastron, also the lieutenant-colonel of the r´egiment du Roi infantry.  In such cases the lieutenant de Roi and the major of the fortress took over the absentee governor’s responsibilities. At a more exalted level both Noailles and Vendˆome were made viceroy of Catalonia in –, receiving tributes from the conquered parts of the province. Promotions, governorships and command appointments therefore brought in considerably more money for some generals. Louis even carried on paying the salaries attached to the governorship of territories he was forced to cede in peace treaties –  



 

SHAT A , no. : Boufflers to Louis,  May . Sourches, vol. II, pp. –,  Dec. ; Dangeau, vol. II, p. , notes of Saint-Simon. Only a small proportion of general officers can be accounted for by men who served in the Maison du Roi and who required general rank only for occasional field detachments: see SHAT A , fol. r : memorandum [c. ]. SHAT A , no. : Langallerie to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A , no. : Beuvron to Barbezieux,  June ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Genlis,  Dec. ; A , no. : Genlis to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. I, p. . Dangeau, vol. VII, p. ,  Mar. ; vol. VIII, p. ,  Apr. ; Villars, vol. I, p. ; Lavall´ee, vol. III, pp. –: Maine to Maintenon,  Oct. . Dangeau, vol. V, p. ,  Aug. ; SHAT A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  July .



The bienfaits du roi and the high command Catinat got , livres per annum from his defunct province of Luxemburg, and Lorge , e´cus from greater Lorraine after the Peace of Ryswick. Indeed, monetary reward was vital for many generals. Salaries were supposed to be paid in arrears, every six weeks, but in reality they were among the first to be squeezed if revenues came under pressure. ‘Reliefs’ for the issuing of back pay were forthcoming as and when funds were available, but in the meantime generals had to dip into their own capital, not just to keep body and soul together but to bail out the king’s army. To recompense what could be vast sums (Boufflers spent over , livres at the peacetime camp of Compi`egne in ), Louis also issued gratifications, which occasionally were also made as overt rewards rather than mere expenses payments. Huxelles got , livres from the king after the siege of Mainz in . This was fairly straightforward. But there were other more complex ways of giving the generals financial inducements. In the ‘civil’ sphere, the comte de Tess´e intrigued successfully with Barbezieux for the lucrative court post of Premier Ecuyer to the new duchesse de Bourgogne in . Louis himself exploited the desire for prestigious civilian posts by diverting the money paid for them to his generals, if the acquirer of the office were not personally active in the armed forces. Generals who held important military or civil offices might see their personal credit rating boosted by the king: Louis raised the brevet de retenue on Lorge’s captaincy of the Gardes du corps from , to , livres in May , thereby guaranteeing Lorge’s capital investment in the post. An outright grant for land improvement worth , livres was given to Humi`eres in . The most regular financial reward, though, was the annual pension, which was designed for the most senior echelons of the army to recognise their importance, more than just their expenses on the king’s behalf. Louis rewarded not only success in this way, but also valiant failure: in  Governor Guiscard got a , livres pension and Mesgrigny, the defending engineer commander, a , livres pension for their unsuccessful defence of Namur, and lieutenant-general Crenan’s pension was increased from , to , livres after a five-year defence of Casale in Italy. More unusually, a general who was also a provincial governor might be given the usufruct of urban local taxes for a number of years, worth tens of thousands of livres. Of course, military rank, positions and money were essentially means to an end – the social advancement and security of a family, always under threat because of dynastic fluidity and impermanence. Ultimately this meant the acquisition or perpetuation of titles, dignities and honours, and there was no better route to achieve      

Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  Dec. . SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Bouchu,  June ; A , no. : Quinson to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  Sep. ; vol. III, p. ,  Dec. . SHAT A , nos. –: Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; Dangeau, vol. VI, p. ,  May . BNF FF , fols. r , r : anon. to Noailles,  May,  May ; Dangeau, vol. V, p. ,  May ; vol. I, p. ,  Apr. . BNF FF , fol. r ; Dangeau, vol. V, pp. –,  Oct. . Dangeau, vol. VII, p. ,  Oct. .



The high command of the French armies this than military service (even if the untimely end of family lines was an occupational hazard of war). Louis XIV expressed it succinctly himself: ‘Distinctions of rank . . . are virtually the first motive of all human actions, but especially of the most noble and of the greatest.’ Some honours could not be transmitted by inheritance, though their possession by a scion would add to the lustre of the whole family for several generations. This applied in particular to the membership of chivalric orders. The Order of Saint-Michel, founded by Louis XI in  in imitation of the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece, had lost much of its prestige after , for the crown felt compelled to dole out membership to hundreds of ill-qualified men to buy support during the civil wars. By the early s Louis XIV was deeply unhappy about the state of the Order, so he set up a commission of investigation which rejected  per cent of claimants as knights. In January  an edict limited membership to  French-born knights,  of whom were also allowed to be knights of the Saint-Esprit. All had to be Catholic, over thirty years old, have enjoyed at least two generations of nobility and have performed over ten years of distinguished military service. Despite these stipulations many of the holders under Louis XIV were given their membership for artistic services of one kind or another, and by  the Order was effectively redundant. By contrast the Order of the Saint-Esprit, founded in  by Henri III to bind Catholic nobles to the king through fraternal sentiment, religious piety and oaths of loyalty, enjoyed a renaissance under Louis XIV. The Order had never been explicitly associated with military service, reflecting lineage and birth rather more, but its composition was manipulated under Louis XIII, first by Luynes and then by Richelieu to suit their own interests. Anne of Austria in turn had plundered its endowments to use them as a source of credit to pay Swiss troops during the Frondes. Membership of the Saint-Esprit, with its light-blue sash and insignia of the Holy Dove, was highly prized, and over the course of the middle decades of the seventeenth century it evolved from its earlier fraternal character into a fully fledged instrument of state. After the promotion of sixty-three nobles and eight clerics in , there were only a dozen further entries into the Order over the next twenty-seven years, five of which were royal princes and five foreign princes. The Order therefore withered in numbers until by  there were sixty vacancies out of a hundred places. By , when Louis was forced to abort a mass promotion because of serious precedence disputes, the Order was down to only twenty-eight knights. The eruption of war   



Louis XIV, M´emoires, p. . Herman, ‘Knights and Kings in Early Modern France’, pp. –. Ibid., pp. –, –, –; J.-P. Labatut, ‘Louis XIV et les chevaliers de l’Ordre du Saint– Esprit’, in Noblesse, pouvoir et soci´et´e en France au XVIIe si`ecle (Limoges, ), pp. –, originally published in XVIIe Si`ecle  (), pp. –; AAE MD Suisse , fol. v : anon. to marquis de Saint-Coutet,  Aug. . Note how Louis was reluctant to make individual promotions, but wished to award in batches.



The bienfaits du roi and the high command in the Rhineland in autumn  therefore provided a good opportunity for both rejuvenating the Order and encouraging the military elite. As that year’s campaign drew to a close and it appeared that the conflict would not be over by Christmas after all, Louvois persuaded the king that it was vital to reinforce the military promotions of the autumn with social promotions, and particularly to create new knights of the Saint-Esprit. The demand for places was insatiable, and seventy-five new knights were admitted, representing almost all the grands and many other senior families of the kingdom. The new composition of the Order was shaped by the influence of several key players, including Monseigneur, Monsieur and other princes. The greatest influence on the whole process, however, was Louvois. Sourches remarked on the widespread surprise at Louvois’s ability to pack the promotion with military officers, who accounted for half the places. The king, however, realised that the entire military elite, and especially the subordinate generals – not just Louvois’s clients – had to be given enticements and encouragement in a war which could well last for several campaigns. Louis knighted at least one lieutenant-general, the comte de Saint-G´eran, in spite of Louvois’s hostility. The Order retained its new character, and was used to bind the high-ranking military officers more tightly to the crown: between  and  a further thirty-nine knights were created, of which about half were military officers. By now the Saint-Esprit had been complemented by the Order of Saint-Louis, a body founded in  which was far less corporate in character and far more socially disparate. Several generals were made grand crosses, commanders or knights in the years after its establishment, even though they were knights of the Saint-Esprit as well. Membership of these Orders brought pensions to the knights, but much greater status and power came from promotion to the dignity of mar´echal de France. Technically it was not a military rank at all, though it was awarded for exemplary military service. As late as the sixteenth century the title was held by only two men at any one time, but the demands of domestic politics and military necessity saw numbers swell until the corporate body contained, at times, over a dozen men under Louis XIV. In the absence of the Constable after , the marshals as a collective body held ultimate jurisdiction over the king’s armed forces in judicial matters and were expected to monitor the activity of commissaires des guerres. They had no absolute right to command an army, but as they had achieved their positions through military prowess it was expected that they would be the most serious contenders for an appointment. Certain high social ranks, in particular royal princes, never became marshals of France, in spite of their outstanding military records, as it would have been beneath their dignity. In some respects the title was akin to that of a life peerage: 

 

Herman, ‘Knights and Kings’, pp. –, –, ; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Mar. ; vol. II, p. ,  Dec. ; Sourches, vol. II, pp. –,  Dec. ; SHAT A , no. : La Fr´ezeli`ere to Louvois,  Dec. . Dangeau, vol. IV, pp. –, – May ; Herman, ‘Knights and Kings’, p. . On Louis XIV’s minority and youth, see Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –.



The high command of the French armies it was earned, supposedly, on merit, it could not be transmitted to descendants, and it gave the marshal’s family a social status akin to that of the grands. Of course, it had a peculiar cachet of its own and many peers and dukes active in the armed forces sought to achieve this status to add to their existing ones. Equally, however, many marshals lacking ducal status were anxious to achieve it because this latter dignity was, in contrast, inheritable. For the king to elevate a general to the mar´echalat the recipient would have served for many years in subordinate military roles as a corps commander or a second-incommand, and usually would have accomplished a major victory or made a significant contribution to one. Because the dignity was so prized, Louis XIV preferred to make promotions in batches, as he did in , , ,  (when a staggering eleven names were announced) and . Though there were single elevations for Lorge in , the comte d’Estr´ees in , Villars in , Berwick in  and Matignon in , ministers were repeatedly met with silence from the king when they put forward the name of a prot´eg´e. Despite this attempt by Louis XIV to use collectivity to defuse tension, some of his promotions were very controversial. The elevations of Cr´equi, Bellefonds and Humi`eres in  were deemed particularly undeserving by public opinion, while others of greater distinction were passed over. Louis’s aim at this time seems to have been both to encourage loyal military courtiers and to make it clear to the ministers, who apparently had no hand in this business, that the king was the ultimate arbiter of his subjects’ destinies. The promotion of  did not confine itself to rewarding military talent. The comte d’Estrades, the Graf von Schomberg, the duc de Navailles, the duc de Luxembourg and the duc de Duras had all served well in the previous campaigns, and Luxembourg and Schomberg in particular were overdue for the title. But other influences were at work, not least the king’s desire to promote his favourite the comte de La Feuillade, colonel of the Gardes Franc¸aises. Mme de S´evign´e felt that the comte de Rochefort benefited directly from Louvois’s favour, and that the other seven new marshals had received the honour essentially to disguise this. Primi Visconti, recognising that Louvois alone could not have pushed the king, was both more circumspect and deeply smutty: ‘As the last [Vivonne] was brother to Mme de Montespan [mistress of the king], it was said that seven had been made marshals by the sword, and one by the scabbard.’ As he well knew, a multitude of pressures were at work, including Colbert, Monsieur and Cond´e, not just Louvois and Montespan. Eighteen years later, at the next big promotion, Louis raised seven others to the  



See the list in F. Bluche, Louis XIV (Oxford, ), pp. –; BNF FF , fols. r –r : Le Peletier to Catinat,  Mar. . Saint-Maurice, p. : Saint-Maurice to San Tommaso,  July ; A. Ch´eruel, ed., Journal d’Olivier Lef`evre d’Ormesson,  vols. (Paris, –), vol. II, p. ; Spanheim, Relation de la cour de France en , p. . S´evign´e, vol. I, p. : S´evign´e to comte de Grignan,  July ; M´emoires de Primi Visconti, p. . Vivonne was then General of the Galleys too.



The bienfaits du roi and the high command mar´echalat. Catinat had more than earned the dignity, as had Noailles, by virtue of their hitherto successful commands over the armies of Italy and Catalonia. Tourville too had fought hard for the king at sea in two major battles. The comte de Choiseul and Joyeuse were experienced and reliable generals, and Villeroi had yet to demonstrate fully the failings which would later be so evident, though the conclusion that royal favouritism played a large part here is unavoidable when one considers the ranks of disappointed aspirants, especially Colbert’s brother the comte de Maul´evrier, and the prince de Soubise. But these two men were close to the mar´echal de Luxembourg, and none of those who actually received a marshal’s baton were. Indeed, the final recipient, the marquis de Boufflers, was elevated in such a way as to humiliate Luxembourg and denigrate his services: in Boufflers’ provisions as marshal the king ascribed to him Luxembourg’s battlefield victories of Fleurus and Steinkerque, and then singled out his capture of Furnes and Dixmude in early ! All this notwithstanding, the real prize for those who did not possess one was a dukedom or a peerage. Such honours could either come as rewards or inducements, but increasingly Louis felt the need to provide incentives for dedication and sometimes found himself forced to swallow the subtle but louring demands of subjects. In March  Duras had been elevated to the status of duke in order precisely to encourage him to live up to the expectations caused by his new position during the coming campaign, and to facilitate his son’s marriage to the daughter of the comte de La Marck. Duras’s letters patent raising his marquisate to a duch´e-pairie in  had never been registered, so Louis provided him with new letters, this time for a dukedom alone – this, unlike a peerage, would not entail the trouble and expense of litigating for its registration in the Paris Parlement. In March  his brother, the mar´echal de Lorge, was raised to the dignity of duc de Quintin two years after he had first asked the king for such an honour. Unfortunately, in neither case did such promotions turn a mediocre general into a genius. It is also worth noting in Lorge’s case that Louis conferred the new title on him at a time when Lorge and Louvois were on bad terms and Louis needed to introduce a palliative into the situation. Nine years later, shortly after the accession of the duc d’Anjou to the Spanish throne as Philip V, Louis promoted Harcourt, former commander of the army of the Moselle, to the title of duke, a decision he had no choice but to make if Harcourt were to be taken seriously as the new French ambassador in Madrid. Elevation to the mar´echalat could, if the circumstances were right, be swiftly followed by a dukedom, and Villars was rather piqued when one failed to materialise in . Boufflers had been made a duke in  only two and a half years after becoming a marshal. The 

 

Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Mar. ; Sourches, vol. IV, p. ,  Mar. ; Bib Ars , fols. r –r : Soubise to Pomponne,  Oct. ; BNF NAF , fols. r –r : ‘Provisions’,  Mar. . Dangeau, vol. II, pp. –,  Mar.,  Mar.,  Mar. ; vol. III, pp. –,  Mar. ; BNF FF , fol. v ; La Fayette, M´emoires, pp. –; BNF Clair. , fol. r .  Villars, M´emoires, vol. II, pp. –. Sourches, vol. VI, pp. –,  and  Nov. .



The high command of the French armies excuse in this case was his courageous but failed defence of Namur, while his similarly hopeless defence of Lille in  earned him the peerage to go with it. His was glorious failure, and heroism deserved its rewards. What is less easy to understand is why Louis rewarded the less-than-heroic failure of Humi`eres to manage the  campaign in Flanders. In May that year Humi`eres made a pitch for a dukedom through the duc du Maine and Mme de Maintenon, if not other intermediaries as well. When it was announced in April  that he would not serve again as head of the army of Flanders Louis bought his quiescence and continued cooperation in this region by promoting him to duke. Humi`eres could be expected to remain loyal to the king, but it was an open question whether he would still work happily with Louvois. To shore up his position the minister therefore helped engineer the marriage of one of the marshal’s daughters to the marquis de Chappes, a Le Tellier ally. As Humi`eres had no son left alive, and he did not wish to settle the dukedom on his second daughter’s husband as he had disowned them, the title passed through his third daughter to her new husband. Dukedoms, peerages and elevations to the mar´echalat were but the most obvious and long-lasting means by which Louis assisted those men and their families for whom he had particularly high regard. He would also step into disputes over inheritance and status, which he normally preferred to avoid, if he wanted to help a particular commander. Equally, he could sit on his hands or be distinctly unhelpful towards those men he did not fully trust. The most notable victim of the king’s political anxiety, desire for balance and own political interests was the mar´echal-duc de Luxembourg, whose situation between  and his death in  brought together all the troublesome elements discussed in this chapter. The final section will therefore tell his story.                     :                                          Of all the generals Louis had to deal with after , Luxembourg presented him with the greatest problems. His appalling relations with Louvois, stemming from the  Alsace campaign and Louvois’s attempt to destroy him during the ‘Affair  



Lauzun, similarly lacking in talent, was also made a duke in  for services to the exiled house of Stuart, but in this case the promotion was made at the behest of James II’s queen, Mary Beatrice. Though peerages were essentially the ‘icing on the cake’ of social reward, they could not always be issued. In – Louis found himself boxed in by a promise he had made to the Charost not to create any more peers before their own peerage was registered. See Dangeau, vol. III, pp. –, notes of Saint-Simon. Humi`eres was necessary in Flanders because the province was still but weakly loyal to the French monarchy: see A. Lottin, ‘Louis XIV and Flanders’, in M. Greengrass, ed., Conquest and Coalescence. The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe (London, ), pp. –; A. Croquez, La Flandre wallonne et les pays d’intendance de Lille sous Louis XIV (Paris, ). Both authors fail to appreciate the role of the governor. Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  July ; vol. I, p. ,  Oct. .



The bienfaits du roi and the high command of the Poisons’, posed Louis a considerable dilemma which came to a head in . As it became obvious that Humi`eres was inadequate and Duras would have to be removed Louis had nowhere else to turn for the command of the army of Flanders but Luxembourg. Moreover, Luxembourg was a very destabilising force within the ranks of the peerage and his personal interests were in some ways at variance with those of the king. Through his  marriage to Madeleine-Charlotte-Bonne-Th´er`ese de Clermont de Tonnerre, Franc¸ois-Henri de Montmorency-Bouteville had become duc de Piney-Luxembourg when Madeleine’s cleric half-brother, Henri-L´eon d’Albert de Luynes, ceded the title and all his wealth to her as part of the marriage settlement. The house of Luxembourg had a rightful claim on the duchy of Luxemburg dating back to , when on the extinction of a senior branch of the house it was seized by Burgundy. In  it passed to the Habsburgs. Between  and  the French kings consistently upheld the claim of the house of Luxembourg to the duchy, and in  and  Henri III raised the claimant, the comte de Saint-Pˆol, to the status of duke and peer of France as duc de Piney-Luxembourg, giving the family the right to transmit the title through the female line to keep the claim alive, should that prove necessary. This happened twice, in  and again in  with the Bouteville marriage, and this second transfer remained the source of great controversy until . In spite of this Louis XIV confirmed the new duc and duchesse de Piney-Luxembourg in the family’s rights at the time of the marriage. In particular he confirmed that the duke’s seniority as a peer of France derived from the  elevation. The king did, though, advise Luxembourg not to try to register his status in the Parlement until a more opportune moment in the future, when obstruction by other peers would be less likely to succeed. In  Louis issued yet more letters patent in order to emphasise that there had been a continuous and unbroken line of succession in the duch´e-pairie since , and hence an unbroken royal recognition of the house of Luxembourg’s claim to the sovereign duchy, which was asserted with Louis’s support at the – Nijmegen negotiations that ended the Dutch War. So far so good, but after  Louis XIV’s support for the house of Luxembourg became a positive embarrassment, as the chambre des r´eunions at Metz asserted unprecedented French claims on most of the duchy of Luxemburg. As the r´eunion crisis moved to a climax in – Louis could not give a supreme command in a war fought precisely to secure the duchy to a man whose own claims on it starkly opposed his own. Furthermore, Luxembourg owned land in Champagne and the Barrois, in close proximity to the duchy. He also had numerous Montmorency cousins who held land in the Low Countries either as subjects of Louis XIV or of Carlos II of  

 ACC NA , no. : marriage contract,  Mar. . See chapter , p. . BNF Clair. , fols. r –r : e´dit, May ; Clair. , fol. r : ‘Lettres patentes’, Oct. ; Clair. , fols. r –r : memorandum [c. –]; fols. r –r : letters patent, Mar. ; fol. r : royal letters,  Apr. ; fols. r –r : legal factum for Luxembourg [].



The high command of the French armies Spain. Louis found himself in dynastic conflict with one of his own grands over the duchy of Luxemburg, which was to have ramifications for the war effort until . To compound matters, in the increasingly devout atmosphere surrounding Louis’s court and state, Luxembourg as a lazy, hard-living debauchee was distinctly out of step with the Zeitgeist. After  Luxembourg’s hopes for the recovery of the sovereign duchy of Luxemburg by his family must have been in tatters, but by the outbreak of the Nine Years War he was still reiterating his claims. Even in  other ducs et pairs were bringing up the question of the duchy to try to drive a wedge between the family and Louis. All the same, Luxembourg felt compelled to pursue an alternative family strategy. In January  he decided to reopen the question of his family’s status as  and  ducs et pairs de Piney-Luxembourg, by seeking registration in the Parlement of the  letters patent. He also called for a public royal acknowledgement of the status of princes e´trangers for his four sons. In return it seems he was prepared to soft-pedal on claims to the duchy of Luxemburg. This would have given the Montmorency-Luxembourg the same position as the Bouillon had achieved in the s, but nearly forty years on political circumstances had changed a great deal, even if Louis increasingly needed to keep Luxembourg loyal and active – during the Frondes the crown was gravely weak and needed to buy support from the Bouillon, a far cry from the situation of the late s. Louis needed a means by which he could delay for as long as possible any decision on Luxembourg’s uncomfortable claims, which were a threat to the docility of the grands at a time when Louis’s own bastards were reaching maturity and he needed all his political capital to assist in their elevation and establishment. As an attempt to boost the marital prospects of his heir, the prince de Tingry, in  Luxembourg asked the king to accord any future princesse de Tingry the ‘honours of the Louvre’, a set of privileges enjoyed only by princes and princesses of the blood, l´egitim´es and e´trangers. Though Louis did not immediately grant the request, and Tingry  









AAE CP Allemagne , fol. r : Pomponne to anon.,  June ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Oct. ; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  May ; Saint-Hilaire, M´emoires, vol. I, p. . Even S´egur failed to spot the importance of the sovereign duchy of Luxemburg to the mar´echal-duc: see Le tapissier de Notre Dame, pp. –. Alphonse Sprunck does not even mention him in his article on the duchy: ‘La question du Luxembourg au temps de Louis XIV’, H´emecht () (), –. Spanheim, Relation, pp. –; duke of Berwick, M´emoires du mar´echal de Berwick e´crits par lui-mˆeme,  vols. (Switzerland, ), vol. I, pp. –; Villars, M´emoires, vol. I, p. . Ironically, given the rumours about his homosexuality, a scurrilous book was also written on the subject of Luxembourg’s wenching: anon., Histoire des amours du mar´echal duc de Luxembourg (Cologne [Holland?], ). BNF Clair. , fols. r –r : memorandum, ; fol. r : memorandum [c. –], fol. r : memorandum, ; fol. r : ‘Sommaire du Procez’ [c. ]; FF , fols. v –r : notes of premier pr´esident Harlay. Both families founded their claims upon extremely uncertain inheritance laws regarding female successions, upon which I plan to write an article at some future date. See La Chesnaye, vol. III, pp. –; vol. XIX, p. . BNF Clair. , fol. r : memorandum [c. –]; Labatut, Les ducs et pairs de France au XVIIe si`ecle, p. .



The bienfaits du roi and the high command married the duc de Chevreuse’s daughter the following year, the recognition of this particular claim could be made without much risk. It was important not to drive the Montmorency-Luxembourg into exile, perhaps even into Imperial service, by entirely snubbing their aspirations, as Louis was doing with the Savoie-Soissons. The king seems, therefore, to have resolved upon ignoring the Piney-Luxembourg claims of the family and instead decided to rehabilitate the Montmorency name, which had been disgraced in  and . In , at the same time as according Tingry and his wife the ‘honours of the Louvre’ (which kept alive the hope of future recognition as princes e´trangers), Louis granted Tingry letters patent for the dukedom of Beaufort. The next year Louis permitted the exchange of this title for that of Montmorency, a swap facilitated by the Cond´e who had held the latter dukedom since . The king accorded the additional favour of allowing the new dukedom to pass through the female line in the absence of male heirs. As well as meeting the less controversial of the family’s claims Louis also gave Luxembourg himself an increasingly important political role, which went alongside his existing captaincy of a Gardes du corps company. Even prior to his recall to army command in  Luxembourg was acquiring considerable authority: in September  he was given the governorship of Champagne, worth , livres per annum; in December he was made a knight of the Saint-Esprit; in September  his son the comte de Luxe was presented with the r´egiment de Provence infantry; and in November Louis presented his son Henri-Thibault with the lucrative abbey of Saint-Mihiel. Luxembourg was also forging closer links with the duc du Maine. The mar´echal-duc was potentially both dangerous and valuable, and he had to be kept tractable through displays of royal favour. This was all the more true from . During – Louis XIV had to maintain a delicate balance between his Secretary of State for War and his most important general. Their mutual hatred was so strong that Louis gave Luxembourg full authority to communicate with him directly, bypassing Louvois should he so wish. Louvois’s conduct during the  campaign even suggests that the king’s minister may have been prepared to put 



  

One should note the close interrelationship between the Albert de Luynes (of which the Chevreuse were the main branch), the Albert de Luxembourg (also a cadet branch of the Albert de Luynes) and the Montmorency-Luxembourg in the marriages of ,  and . See also Spanheim, Relation, p. . In  Louis’s scorn for Prince Eug`ene de Savoie-Soissons drove him into Imperial service, where he distinguished himself playing a major role in the conquest of vast swathes of the Balkans for the Habsburgs for over fifty years, and wreaking revenge on France in the War of the Spanish Succession. His hopeless elder brother, the comte de Soissons, followed him into exile and, in his case, insignificance in . BNF Clair. , fol. r : notes in margin of second memorandum [c. –]; fol. r : memorandum [c. –]; FF , fols. r –r : letters patent for dukedom of Beaufort, May . Dangeau, vol. II, pp. , , ,  Sep.,  Dec. ,  Sep. ; vol. III, p. ,  Nov. ; S´egur, Le tapissier de Notre Dame, p. . Chevalier de Beaurain, M´emoires pour servir a` l’histoire du mar´echal duc de Luxembourg, pp. –.



The high command of the French armies in jeopardy the French war effort in order to destroy Luxembourg in the course of a single season. Louvois deliberately deprived Luxembourg of some of his best troops and tried to send him into the region of the Spanish Netherlands between the rivers Sambre and Meuse which was less propitious for campaigning. Only a direct appeal to the king by Luxembourg succeeded in having the orders withdrawn. At the same time, in order to protect his position and the French frontier, Louvois provided Humi`eres, now a corps commander in his province of French Flanders, and Boufflers, on the Meuse, with sufficient troops to guard against any Allied invasion which might follow a hypothetical disaster in the Spanish Netherlands. Unhappily for Louvois Luxembourg won a tremendous victory at Fleurus on  July but he was unable to follow up this success because his army was too enfeebled, owing to casualties, logistical strains and Louvois’s machinations. Luxembourg’s difficulties were further compounded by being stripped of troops to reinforce Monseigneur in Germany. Throughout the campaign, and even after Fleurus, Luxembourg and Humi`eres struggled for possession of the best troops. Louvois ordered Luxembourg to transfer some of his forces to Humi`eres’ command, but without specifying which ones. Humi`eres complained to the minister that Luxembourg was now sending him the dregs of the army. In  Luxembourg also enjoyed the spectacle of Louvois getting nothing for his contribution to the capture of Mons in April, while he, Luxembourg, was now lavishly rewarded both for the earlier Fleurus victory and for his conduct during the siege. In May Louis gave the duc de Montmorency a brevet de retenue of , livres on Luxembourg’s captaincy of the Gardes du corps and made him governor of Normandy, worth another , livres per annum more than the governorship of Champagne, which Luxembourg seemed happy to relinquish as he was made commandant of Normandy and bailli of Rouen for life. Nevertheless, Louvois was still very much alive until  July, and before his death that year Louis had to step in twice more to keep the peace between him and Luxembourg. The minister’s passing was not mourned by the house of Montmorency. Matters did not, however, get any easier. After a good start, relations between Luxembourg and Barbezieux rapidly deteriorated as the marshal became increasingly riled by the young Secretary’s attempts to interfere, as he saw it excessively, in his conduct of the army. Moreover, Louis was increasingly concerned that Luxembourg’s victories in Flanders were achieving nothing and only sapping French manpower. Luxembourg, sensing royal resentment that he was accumulating  



Ibid., pp. –; Desormeaux, Histoire de la maison de Montmorenci, vol. V, p. ; S´egur, Le tapissier de Notre Dame, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Humi`eres to Louvois,  July . Dangeau, vol. III, pp. , ,  May,  May ; Luxembourg to Mme de Maintenon,  June , cited in Desormeaux, Montmorenci, vol. V, p. ; ibid., vol. V, pp. –; Beaurain, M´emoires . . . du mar´echal de Luxembourg, p. . SHAT A : Barbezieux to Luxembourg,  July ; see Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –.



The bienfaits du roi and the high command too much glory at the expense of the Dauphin, even confessed to the king that he feared another battle would adversely affect him politically, whether it was a victory or not. Aside from any distaste the king may have felt at his commander’s lifestyle, Louis’s cold attitude towards Luxembourg also stemmed from the marshal’s obvious factional recommendations for patronage and from the indignation of the Vendˆome brothers and Maine that Luxembourg’s written report of Steinkerque had downplayed their roles while Albergotti’s verbal report of the battle, presented at court, had totally ignored them. Louis’s problem, however, was that Luxembourg’s success was making him indispensable in the absence of other generals with similar stature. The reduction of Luxembourg’s authority could be partially achieved by building up the marquis de Boufflers as a counter-weight. Fortunately for Louis, and Barbezieux, Luxembourg’s successes were matched in October  by Catinat’s stunning defeat of the Allies at La Marsaglia in Piedmont. Catinat had clearly earned his promotion to mar´echal de France earlier in the spring, and both king and minister did little to hide their joy at an alternative source of good news. By contrast Louis, who had initially appeared pleased by Luxembourg’s victory against William of Orange at Neerwinden in August, was increasingly peevish as the Dauphin failed to achieve the much-needed breakthrough in Germany. Luxembourg’s position was never to be so strong again. In April  the abb´e de Luxembourg had been made Grand Master of the newly reconstituted Order of the Saint-Esprit de Montpellier, giving him commanderies at his nomination worth altogether over , livres per annum, an important piece of patronage delegation by Louis. However, it should be seen as yet another gesture by Louis to avoid meeting the principal Montmorency-Luxembourg claims. The Paris Parlement had opened Luxembourg’s case for the registration of his dukedom and peerage by an arrˆet of  March , and in all e´tats de France Luxembourg and his children were placed in the ranks of the princes e´trangers. Yet Louis was not keen for the case either to reach a speedy conclusion or to be brought before him for a decision, and he insisted that it should be handled through the Parlement, just as he did over all such precedence disputes, in order to avoid aristocratic resentment being directed against the crown. He also refused to meet any of Luxembourg’s requests: the survivance on the Gardes du corps captaincy for Montmorency (never yet granted to anyone); reimbursement of sums drawn since  on his father’s confiscated county of Bouteville; and the re-establishment of his rights on the    

SHAT A : Luxembourg to Louis,  Aug.,  Aug. ; A : Louis to Luxembourg,  Aug.,  Aug.,  Aug.,  Sep. . Bib Ars , fol. r–v : Feuqui`eres to Pomponne,  Sep. . On Boufflers’ rise, see Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –. SHAT A , fol. r : Louis to Catinat,  Oct. ; BNF FF , fols. r –r : Chaulieu to Vendˆome,  Oct. .



The high command of the French armies county of Ligny. By the end of the  campaign Luxembourg was thoroughly frustrated and worried about his own standing with the king. For the  campaign Louis decided to control Luxembourg and rein in his authority by placing Monseigneur at the head of the army of Flanders for the season, with Barbezieux’s deputy Saint-Pouange as a super-intendant with full autonomy from the War Ministry. It was probably hoped Luxembourg would get Monseigneur into a battle, as his track record at securing a field combat to date was so good. Relations between Barbezieux and the marshal that year were more harmonious, but this was largely because Barbezieux had to give priority to the army of Flanders owing to the Dauphin’s supreme command there. Barbezieux could not risk sabotaging this army’s performance for factional ends. Though little was expected that year owing to logistical breakdown, the campaign was a success of sorts in that it prevented setbacks and Monseigneur proved how effective a general he could be by spectacularly blocking Allied access to French Flanders with a speed march. Monseigneur’s increasingly high regard for Luxembourg meant that the marshal was better received at court at the end of the  campaign, not least by the king, than had been the case in the preceding years. This was partly because Luxembourg had avoided giving battle once Monseigneur had left for home in September. Louis had actually gone so far as to inform Luxembourg with a hint of menace: ‘I would have been extremely vexed had there been some action after the departure of my son.’ There were consequently some small rewards for Luxembourg and his cronies. In June Louis had promoted Albergotti, Luxembourg’s confidant, to mar´echal de camp, though this was done simultaneously with the promotion to the same rank of the mar´echal de Noailles’s brother. In September Louis also promised Luxembourg help in a dispute between his sister the duchess of Mecklenburg, and the duc de La Force. While the case of Luxembourg versus the other peers of France was building up that year, finally coming before the Parlement in  following his death, Luxembourg continued to pursue other avenues to raise his family’s status. Sometime in  (and probably as a reward for Steinkerque, Neerwinden and continued loyalty) Louis promised to make his third son, the comte de Luxe, a duke upon his 





Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Apr. ; BNF Clair. , fol. r : ‘Sommaire du Procez’ [c. ]; Desormeaux, Montmorenci, vol. V, pp. , ; SHAT A , no. : Luxembourg to Louis,  Oct. ; no. : Boufflers to Louis,  Nov.  [wrongly dated to Oct. by transcribers]. Desormeaux, Montmorenci, vol. V, pp. –, –; BNF FF , fol. v : Dauphin to Vendˆome,  Aug. ; SHAT A , fol. r–v : Barbezieux to several intendants,  May ; fol. r : Barbezieux to Boufflers,  May ; fol. r : Barbezieux to Bagnols,  May ; fol. r : Barbezieux to Luxembourg,  July ; fol. r : Louis to Dauphin,  Aug. ; fol. r : Barbezieux to Saint-Pouange,  Aug. ; fol. r : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Aug. ; fol. r : Louis to Luxembourg,  Sep.  (citation). SHAT A , fol. r–v : Louis to Monseigneur,  June ; A , fol. v : Louis to Luxembourg,  Sep. .



The bienfaits du roi and the high command eventual marriage which came about in January . Luxembourg also managed to provide handsomely for his daughter, Ang´elique-Cun´egonde de Montmorency, who on  October was married with the king’s blessing to Louis-Henri, chevalier de Soissons, only bastard of Louis de Bourbon, comte de Soissons (killed by his own clumsy hand when in rebellion against Louis XIII in  at La Marf´ee). By marrying into an illegitimate but royal line Luxembourg’s daughter had a greater claim to princely status for any children she might have. Soissons was also the favoured heir of the duchesse de Nemours, last of the line of the house of Orl´eans-Longueville, and it was expected she might try to ensure he succeeded upon her death to the sovereign principality of Neuchˆatel in the Helvetic Confederation. In such an eventuality Luxembourg’s sons would then have a full princess for a sister. Additionally, by marrying Ang´elique-Cun´egonde to a man who was technically a bastard, Luxembourg was able to insist on providing a small dowry, supplemented by the duchess of Mecklenburg’s agreement to leave the couple , livres at her death. The real dowry came from Mme de Nemours, who immediately ceded to Soissons land and titles and inserted the order of succession to Neuchˆatel and Valengrin into the marriage contract. Though this is pure conjecture owing to the disappearance of all his private papers, Luxembourg may also have been calculating that the advanced age of the chevalier de Soissons (born ) meant he was unlikely to produce heirs. He may have hoped that in such a case the guardianship of Neuchˆatel would pass to Ang´elique-Cun´egonde. Control of the sovereignty could then be bargained away for other political advantages, or even pass into Montmorency hands. Whatever the motives, this marriage implied a far greater likelihood that the most cherished ambitions of the Montmorency-Luxembourg would be realised. But all was not easy for Luxembourg. A major scandal erupted in August involving the Dauphin and his secret wife Mlle de Chouin, the king’s illegitimate daughter the dowager princesse de Conti, and an insincere male admirer of the princess named Clermont-Chatte who was serving in the Maison du Roi, who was a close client of Luxembourg, and who actually became the inamorato of the Dauphin’s wife. The essentials of the drama were that Luxembourg and the prince de Conti were using the cynical Clermont-Chatte to try to ‘govern’ the Dauphin. Unfortunately the marshal’s courier had given Barbezieux deeply incriminating letters from  



Dangeau, vol. V, p. ,  Jan. . Dangeau, vol. V, p. ,  Oct. ; BNF FF , fol. r : Serignan to Noailles,  Aug. , reveals how Mme de Nemours, the duchess of Mecklenburg and Mme de Luxembourg’s brother the bishop of Noyon repeatedly lobbied the king for the marriage; NAF , fols. r –v : marriage contract,  Oct. ; P. de Guibours, P`ere Anselme, Histoire g´en´ealogique et chronologique de la maison royale de France,  vols. (Paris, –), vol. I, p. ; L.-E. Roulet, ‘Le XVIIe si`ecle’, in L.-E. Roullet et al., Neuchˆatel et la Suisse (Neuchˆatel, ), pp. –. The marriage was so secret that for a while even Mme de Maintenon, whose morganatic liaison with the king it uncannily paralleled, remained in the dark: Lavall´ee, vol. III, p. : Dauphin to Maintenon,  July .



The high command of the French armies Clermont-Chatte, so presenting him with a major opportunity to discredit Luxembourg and Conti with the king even further. As if this were not bad enough, Luxembourg’s good working partnership with Villeroi came to an end out of competition for the favours of the same dowager princesse de Conti; and Boufflers, though forced to play second fiddle as commander of the relatively neglected Meuse force that year, continued his unstoppable rise: on Humi`eres’ death he was made governor and lieutenant-general of both French Flanders and Hainault and governor of the town and citadel of Lille. The tensions inherent in a general staff system which operated like miniature courts in the field were being exacerbated, this time deliberately for the king’s own political benefit. It is a straightforward matter to explain why Louis rewarded Luxembourg in the way he did between  and . He hoped to hold onto his services, and would do so by almost any reasonable means. But he was not prepared to recognise the family as princes e´trangers without the agreement of the peers of France, nor would he entrench them militarily through a survivance on the Gardes du corps. Luxembourg was even accused by popular opinion of seeking elevation to the position of Constable, which was out of the question as far as Louis was concerned. To grant them such favours would create for his successors a great hostage to fortune. Why, though, did Louis even wish to maintain him at the head of the army of Flanders when Luxembourg’s legal factums in the s continued to claim the sovereign duchy of Luxemburg, when the marshal was increasingly unpopular among the other grands, and when his victories led to no lasting gains? Barbezieux sought his removal, as his father had done in –, of that there can be little doubt. The Le Tellier had their own domestic political interests and the Montmorency-Luxembourg were considered inimical to them. But for the king it was not so simple. Luxembourg may have represented a volatile element in French political life, but Louis wanted to keep him as a g´en´eral en chef because he was superficially successful and kept the Allies at bay in Flanders. If he achieved little of lasting concrete impact he at least lowered Allied morale and contributed to the illusion of French military invincibility, thereby also keeping French spirits high at a time of deteriorating financial and economic circumstances. Furthermore, if Luxembourg were dismissed there was always the 

  

Bib Ars , fols. r –r : ‘Memoire sur l’exil de Madlle de Chouin en ’; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. II, pp. –: Boislisle’s notes on Clermont-Chatte are not wholly accurate, it seems; Dangeau, vol. V, pp. –,  Apr. . G. Ziegler, The Court of Versailles (London, ), p. ; BNF NAF , fol. r : genealogy of the Boufflers family, n.d.; fol. r : provisions of governor of Flanders,  Aug. . See chapter , pp. –. When Luxembourg was taken ill on New Year’s Eve  Louis told the abb´e de Dangeau, ‘Si nous sommes assez malheureux pour perdre ce pauvre homme-l`a, celui qui en porteroit la nouvelle au prince d’Orange seroit bien rec¸u’, a reflection of the value Luxembourg had in the eyes of the Allies: Dangeau, vol. V, p. ,  Dec. .



The bienfaits du roi and the high command outside chance he would sell his services abroad, as had Schomberg and Eug`ene of Savoie-Soissons. Louis XIV’s handling of Luxembourg is immensely instructive not merely for our understanding of the way he ran his armies but also for the way he governed France. Louis preferred to control Luxembourg by judicious use of patronage and favours, so as to keep him tractable, but also by using other players as counter-weights. First Boufflers was built up; then Villeroi and Joyeuse – also made marshals of France – were placed with Luxembourg; and finally in  Monseigneur was put in command in Flanders to eclipse Luxembourg’s authority while benefiting from his guidance. Had Luxembourg not died on  January  the campaign of that year may also have seen Monseigneur in command. Luxembourg’s case may have been unique in the complexity of problems it posed for Louis, at least in the period – , but the principles which lay behind the king’s management of this difficult figure similarly underpinned his behaviour towards his other military commanders. Certainly Louis did not wish his ministers to have too much independent authority over his generals. But, more importantly, Louis was caught in a paradox which shaped the appointments he made to the supreme commands of his armies throughout his ‘personal rule’: he was anxious to achieve control over his leading subjects, but he also wished to use them as highly autonomous g´en´eraux en chef. To overcome this apparent contradiction he was prepared to play ruthlessly upon the ambitions of his subjects in order to secure the best possible services from them. It was a game that required on the part of the king considerable knowledge of the private interests of his subjects, and a degree of self-restraint and cool detachment few rulers in history have been able to achieve. Louis’s ability to meet this central challenge is the subject of the conclusion to this book. 

Louis XIV, M´emoires, p. .



Conclusion

The preservation of the dynasty The development of the French army after , whether during conflicts or in the interludes of peace, was not driven forward simply by experience and by the lessons of immediate past performance in war in the years –, –, –, – and –. The nostrum that conscious, willed change was brought about in a reactive and proportional manner by rational statesmen infused nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing on the war machines of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. It is a view which has some merit, but it is only part of the story. The French army was also heavily shaped by immediate political and personal concerns, whether those of the monarch or of his subjects. The king of France’s standing army in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries developed on the rock of private – and essentially dynastic – interest. I do not intend to advance a monocausal explanation of the way the army developed; indeed the book has gone to great lengths to show the other pressures making for change. Dynasticism does, however, provide the crucial prism through which change must ultimately be viewed.                               At the apex of the dynastic society stood Louis XIV, who was as captivated by concern for ghosts, kin and progeny as any of his noble contemporaries. In his M´emoires for the instruction of the Dauphin, he stressed to his son that he had to be an upholder of the glory of his ancestors and a trustee for his successors. Certainly, Louis combined such explicit dynasticism with a sense of duty to his people and a responsibility for their welfare before God, but, to the modern eye, the manner in which he conducted public affairs might all too easily give the impression that he only gave priority to his obligations to his people when it was expedient to do so. It cannot be denied that in the years – Louis sacrificed the overhaul of the French state and the moral and social reformation of the country on the altar of dynastic strength, and he did not really seek to revive a more pacific and reformist approach for another twenty years. However, on behalf of Louis a number of pleas can be entered in mitigation. First, how could seventeenth-century French propertied society (under the widest definition) have had confidence in a king to uphold their 

Louis XIV, M´emoires, pp. , .



The preservation of the dynasty legitimate dynastic interests if he were not prepared to defend his own using the arbitration of diplomacy and arms? Louis’s subjects were prisoners of an outlook which meant they could not easily deny the king the very right to defend the same sort of interests – centred largely on property and legal rights – they wished to uphold in their own cases. Indeed, if the social hierarchy was broadly to be maintained then they had to assist the king in his times of need. Second, given the poor intelligence of the time, and the profound mutual suspicion entertained by rival powers in an era of minimally regulated international relations, it was hardly surprising that princes and even republics blundered into wars in defence of their interests. They frequently misread the strength and intentions of their neighbours. Third, war was by no means regarded as dishonourable by contemporaries, and was seen as a natural state and an unfortunate consequence of the Fall of Man into sin. Louis once told Vendˆome: ‘You know well that the profession of war is that which, of them all, procures more honour to a man who acquits himself well in it, and that it also covers him with as much shame and infamy if he acquits himself badly.’ Fourth, and perhaps most importantly from our perspective, at the time the M´emoires were written in the s Louis may have been deluding himself that he was actually above personal interests, and even if that is an exaggeration he never seems to have lost the conviction that only the elevation of his interests to tower above those of any of his subjects could maintain stability within France. It was precisely this concern – to uphold, even strengthen, the position of the Bourbon dynasty, and to manage and regulate the private interests of his subjects – that lay at the heart of Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’. It was a dynamic process of management, and the monarchy could never, in this respect, sleep. Nowhere was this more true than in the case of the army, the subject of this book. During the Franco-Spanish war of – the army had shown itself prone to stagnation, disintegration and political disloyalty, sometimes, as in –, at frightening levels. The memory of his youth, it is safe to say, never left Louis XIV, who, acutely conscious of the need to balance private interests as far as possible, administered his army as much like a household of sniping servants as a modern military machine. If subsequent historians forgot it, Louis always remembered that the French state was fundamentally dynastic, from the top to the bottom. The further down the chain of authority one got, however, the less the king understood the needs of his subjects, and the more likely he was to countenance measures and policies which were counter-productive to effective administration. This was probably inevitable in such a personalised system of government, given the size of the state by the end of the seventeenth century. In the absence of a chief minister after March  Louis needed to elevate the Secretary of State for War to a superior political and social status in the realm if he were to be an effective administrator for the king, and this could only be achieved 

BNF FF , fol. r : Louis to Vendˆome, Sep. .



Conclusion by the active supervision and protection of the Le Tellier family’s private interests. But this was complicated by Louis’s perennial concern, at its height in the s and early s, to appear in full control of the kingdom and not to be ‘governed’ by any ministers. He accordingly had to achieve political balance between the different ministerial dynasties, and could do this not only by the distribution of administrative responsibilities but also by exploiting their social ambitions. He was, by and large, extremely successful in this approach, but there are good grounds for believing that he came to regret loading so much responsibility and prestige on Louvois during the s. Not that he avoided the same mistake, if a mistake it had been, with Chamillart in the s. At a lower level, the civilians working for the War Ministry – the commis in the central bureaux, the intendants and the commissaires des guerres – all had their own private interests, but the handling of these people by king and ministers did not always produce positive results for the monarchy. In particular, the government (though perhaps not Barbezieux) badly miscalculated the effect of remodelling the nature and venal structure of the offices of commissaire and contrˆoleur des guerres in the early s: the disruption, corruption and administrative deterioration which flowed from imposing swingeing financial burdens on these officials to prop up the central treasury had no net benefits for the French army or war effort whatsoever. Essentially there were far too few intendants and commissaires, never mind contrˆoleurs, to cope with the demands of service and to administer the logistical needs of a wartime army which expanded three-fold between the War of Devolution and the middle of the Nine Years War. Moreover, the essentially personal ties which bound these agents to the Secretary of War, while loosened after , mitigated against the creation of a clear hierarchy of functionaries which the Le Tellier in any case never seemed anxious to establish. Any improvement in subordination was heavily dependent upon individual circumstances and the ambition of particular intendants. Nor could the intendants be expected by the Le Tellier to bring the generals under control – on the whole they were too nervous of their own positions to act as the minister’s cat’s paw in this respect. In the last resort even they had their own private interests to uphold, and if they proved less corrupt than commissaires and contrˆoleurs des guerres this was probably a product of their greater financial security. The problem of family interest and family ambition was presented in starkest relief by the examination in chapter  of the military treasury of the Extraordinaire des Guerres. This body dispensed tens of millions of livres on the king’s behalf to his army and logistical entrepreneurs, and also collected a small proportion of income from frontier provinces and through contributions and confiscations levied on alien territories. After  the treasurers, who owned their offices, were answerable to the Secretary of War, but they ran their operations in a fog of mystery which the royal council found exceptionally difficult to penetrate. Their activities relied entirely upon the maintenance of public confidence in their liquidity and credit rating, and while they benefited from the improvement in royal finances and accounting 

The preservation of the dynasty procedures in the first decade and a half of the ‘personal rule’, when matters began to deteriorate, especially after , they faced a mounting burden to sustain the war effort. Furthermore, the personal ambition of Louvois to subject the fortifications and artillery to his own control led him to impose additional burdens on the Extraordinaire des Guerres, forcing it to handle much of the financing of these two areas. To maintain their operations the Treasurers-General relied upon a network of commis in the provinces, but to back their activities they had to draw upon extensive and complicated networks of investors, to whom they were, in many cases, personally related. All these financiers had investments in the activity of other financiers, with the concomitant danger that should one source of money fail, or a senior individual go bankrupt, then the knock-on effect for the whole royal fiscal system could be severe. Limited reform to the system in the early to mid-s allowed the Treasurers-General to hold their underlings to account more easily, but royal policies in the Nine Years War, and events and pronouncements in the months around the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession, crippled the Extraordinaire des Guerres. Once again, Louis had misjudged the interests and situations of his servants, although, given the secrecy which surrounded their affairs, this is – at least in part – understandable. When it came to the army itself Louis XIV strove to remodel the system of regimental and company ownership in order to allow and regulate the purchase of commission. Allied to this, he tried to preserve each regiment and even each company on a footing for as long as possible. This was nothing less than an attempt to break the cycle of disintegration and disbandment which had so badly afflicted France’s land forces during the war of – by giving the officer corps a greater material stake in the army. In essence, he was consciously engaged upon the creation of a sustainable standing force, which could act as a cadre for wartime expansion. Moreover, improved delivery of pay (which was sustained at least until the s) and better conditions of service were instrumental in giving regimental officers greater material stamina, even if it took forty years to evolve a satisfactory pattern of procedures and channels, both for disbursing money to officers and to guide and regulate them in spending it. Though Louis was not wholly in the picture about the state of his officers, he nevertheless appreciated that they had non-military interests to safeguard – those of their family – and there was no point in putting them under so much pressure in the army that they felt compelled to retire swiftly from service either in a state of ruin or pre-emptively to avert such a possibility. The king’s active steps to stimulate order in the army were given succour by the continuing attempts of private citizens and public officials alike to reform manners, and to encourage modesty in behaviour, courtesy and civility. Unfortunately many regimental officers continued to put their affairs under excess strain, a direct reflection not just of the youth of many junior officers, but also of the more destructive competitive culture of risk and personal and dynastic ambition from which they came and which continued to so dominate the noble world. 

Conclusion At the apex of the army stood the high command. The general officers of the army had to be handled in a manner similar to the ministers, not only because they possessed immense authority and prestige – and had the potential to devalue or elevate the position of the ruling Bourbon – but also because Louis XIV was consciously blending together the social and political worlds of the ministeriat and the higher echelons of the military. Louis realised that the excessive use of ministerial directives, spying by intendants, and threats of disgrace and removal from command were poor psychological tools for securing the successful performance of duties by his senior military officers. He therefore availed himself of a range of gifts, promotional strategies and appointments to prestigious or lucrative posts as a way of inducing vigorous management and political docility from his generals. Such forms of bribery – some more subtle than others – were linked directly to the social and political aspirations of whole families as well as individuals. Given the power devolved, and the whirlpool of ambition, social competition and family pride that was involved, only the king could hold the ring between the multifarious factions, connections and families. In the case of the high command, though, Louis was prepared to tolerate mediocrity from some to whom he felt a particular personal attachment, while others who were vastly more successful might find themselves kept at arm’s length for political reasons. It was not necessarily a recipe for a winning war effort, but the king’s concern was to balance this imperative with the need to consider the long-term security of his dynasty on a domestic level.                     :                                If he never uttered the great words ‘apr`es moi, le d´eluge’, it is nonetheless hard to escape the conclusion that Louis XIV worried a great deal about the throne he would pass on to the Dauphin and their successors. Having witnessed at first hand the grievous disruption of the Frondes, and with a schooling in history which revealed both the religious wars of the sixteenth century and the troubles of his own father’s minority, Louis was set on nothing less than the reshaping of the rules and conventions of French political life. Traditionally this has been interpreted as a campaign to crush the high aristocracy, but, as historians have known for some three decades, this view is seriously deficient. Indeed, Louis XIV believed that ultimately his throne, or rather that of his successors, was best defended through the political and military support of the princes and peers in the service of the crown. He was enough of a realist to understand that such goodwill could not be commanded – it had to be cultivated, and carefully so. Giving the grands leading roles in the state 

For the provincial governors, see Mettam, ‘The Role of the Higher Aristocracy in France under Louis XIV’; for the army, see Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, which appeared thirty years later.



The preservation of the dynasty was vital, and if some families were in a poor financial condition by the time of the Nine Years War, others were excessively encumbered with duties serving the king. That was how Louis XIV liked it. Choosing the right people for the key jobs, attracting men and women directly into the king’s service and encouraging cultural notions more favourable to monarchical power played a vital part in maintaining stability in late seventeenth-century France. Moreover, through the force of his own personality, displayed most obviously at court, Louis XIV altered the tone of dealings between the higher nobility and the king. In particular, he had to eradicate the view of service which had so crippled Mazarin’s ministry: nobles expected that loyalty would be reciprocated with material and honorific rewards from the crown, and were grossly offended when these were not forthcoming. As chapter  made clear, Louis came nowhere near to suppressing the notion that the monarch should at some stage recognise the cumulative services of a subject and grant him, or her, some largesse; but he did break the expectation of automatic reward for service, and requests for the bienfaits du roi on the whole lost their overtones of blackmail by the mid-s. Yet, despite any ideas he might have had that he was above private interest, Louis could not avoid getting immersed in personal wrangling with the grands in the cockpit of politics. If he waded into the political arena he did, of course, have to tread extremely warily and judiciously. For instance, whenever possible he avoided antagonising people by refusing their requests directly, instead instructing ministers to write on his behalf to deal the blow of rejection. A similar desire not to be associated with disappointments and controversy among the upper elites meant that he passed the buck to the law courts or functionaries of the royal household to adjudicate precedence disputes between families, which often, as a result, took years if not decades to settle. Louis knew that whatever he thought about his place above society, others would be quick to see personal interests at work in his decisions if it so suited them. Of course, much of the time they would have been right. So was the stability of French politics under Louis XIV a product simply of the king’s tactical skill at handling his most senior subjects and ministers? Roger Mettam’s argument was, and remains, that Louis XIV joined in the factional game, took over some political networks, encouraged the ministers to build up their own links, and ruled through a ‘king’s faction’. This is true, in so far as it goes – Louis XIV was not actively hostile to the higher aristocracy in the way that Charles XI of Sweden seemed to be. He leaned heavily upon a number of key families – the Villeroi, the Noailles, cadet and distaff sides of the La Tour d’Auvergne, the Cr´equi, the Harcourt, the Bellefonds, the La Feuillade, the Albert (Chevreuse and Chaulnes),   

A fact recognised by one of the best-informed courtiers: see Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  Feb.  et seq. SHAT A , fol. r : Louis to Dauphin,  July ; Sourches, vol. VI, p. ,  July . Turenne’s nephews Duras, Lorge and the comte d’Auvergne, as well as Auvergne’s nephew the comte d’Evreux.



Conclusion the La Rochefoucauld – some for the court, others for the church, others for the army, others for diplomatic activity, others for provincial government. The Villeroi, the Noailles and, in spite of Louis’s reservations about them, the La Tour d’Auvergne were involved in a prominent way in all these areas. The idea of a ‘king’s faction’ looks all the more attractive if the king’s own relatives are considered, for the dynastic unity of the Bourbon was never, in Louis’s mind, guaranteed. Even with his own son Louis de France, the Grand Dauphin, matters became complicated as the king aged: especially after the fistula episode in  when the Dauphin took on a more public role, people began to seek the favour of, and access to, his son. Two years later the king reached fifty, and nobody could have predicted that he would survive in good health for another twenty-seven years, outliving the Dauphin by four. Unsurprisingly, then, during the s the Dauphin became more and more a focus for those princes and peers who looked forward to the next reign, although he could be trusted to remain loyal and quiescent, and the king positively encouraged his son’s pursuit of gloire in the field. Philippe, duc d’Orl´eans, Louis XIV’s brother, similarly never showed signs of troubling the peace, but he enjoyed a substantial following of clients and his court at Saint-Cloud was negligible neither in size nor in importance. Relations between the sovereign and his sibling were unusually strained only in the early s and in the last year of Philippe’s life: first, Louis went to war with Philippe’s son-in-law, Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, in ; and then in  and again in  the marriage, career and settlement of Philippe’s son, the duc de Chartres (and future regent), had to be negotiated. On top of this, Louis retired Philippe from active military service the same year as he withdrew from the field himself –  – because he felt that his brother could not be allowed to go on accumulating military glory in his absence. If there was no real problem with the Dauphin and if relations with Orl´eans were generally good, Louis was positively anxious about the activities of the cadet branches of the Bourbon – the Cond´e and Conti – who had actually fought against his government during his minority and youth in the s and s. Whatever his personal sentiments, Louis XIV could not ignore or belittle too much these cadet princes, who, like his grandfather Henri IV, might one day be called to the throne should the main line fail. If carefully controlled they might even be useful in the field of international relations: the Cond´e were closely integrated into the politics of the Holy Roman Empire by virtue of marital connections, and, as a reflection of the (unacknowledged but obvious) share in sovereignty which the princes possessed, they received envoys from foreign powers. However, Louis never trusted HenriJules, prince de Cond´e (after ), sufficiently to give him command of an army; 

 

On the comte d’Auvergne and Low Countries politics, see Sourches, vol. I, p. , Aug. ; vol. II, p. ,  Aug. ; P`ere Anselme, Histoire g´en´ealogique et chronologique de la maison royale de France, vol. IV, p. . James Legard of Oxford University is currently completing a D.Phil. thesis on the Dauphin. An article on the house of Bourbon-Orl´eans and the army is in preparation.



The preservation of the dynasty and he viewed with deep suspicion as a potential frondeur Cond´e’s first cousin Franc¸ois-Louis, prince de La Roche-sur-Yon and then, in , prince de Conti. What complicated matters was the fact that Conti was exceptionally gifted and intelligent, and a natural leader of men. The danger for the king lay in the sentiments a prince of the blood could engender in the hearts of Frenchmen, especially if he possessed charisma. Louis accordingly believed it vital that all members of the royal family should define themselves by reference to its head – himself – and be seen to do so. When he could he would support their aspirations – as with Conti’s campaign for the Polish throne in  – – but, in the last resort, the interests of cadets would be sacrificed for those of the main line: within a handful of years of the Polish episode Louis stepped back from supporting Conti with military force in his dispute with Madame de Nemours and the Helvetic Confederation over the Neuchˆatel succession. The princes of the blood, and all fils de France bar the Dauphin, had to be kept on a very tight rein. What was sauce for the legitimate goose was not, however, sauce for the bastard gander, as Louis XIV would stop at almost nothing to build up the power of his illegitimate sons. His motives were undoubtedly complex, probably mixing personal guilt and responsibility for their presence in the world with a sense that they could ultimately be useful to succeeding monarchs if they were immersed in ideas of conformity and obedience. Certain charges de la couronne in the army and navy provided ideal posts, possessing a mixture of prestige and authority, with which to endow his bastards and assure them a prestigious and practical future in the kingdom. The problem was that contemporaries could now present Louis as embarking on the satisfaction of his personal dynasticism at the expense of the good of the state and the interests of elite society, a theme Saint-Simon took up with relish in his memoirs. Beginning in  Louis resurrected the charge of Grand Admiral of France for the two-year-old comte de Vermandois, his bastard by the duchesse de La Valli`ere. On Vermandois’s early death in  he was succeeded by the six-year-old comte de Toulouse, Louis’s bastard by the marquise de Montespan. Toulouse played an ever more active role in the management of the navy after , even taking control of its direction during the regency of –, and the charge remained in his possession and then that of his son the duc de Penthi`evre until . The power of the bastards, and Louis’s determination to elevate them to a major role in the 

 

For evidence of connections between princes of the blood and foreign rulers, see Henri-Jules de Cond´e’s letters to the Duchess Sophia of Hanover between  and  in BL King’s Mss. . For indications about the idea of a stake in sovereignty, see BL Add. Mss. , fol. r–v : Jersey to Vernon,  May ; Louis XIV, M´emoires, p. . Louis XIV, M´emoires, pp. , . On Conti, see Roujon, Conti: ennemi de Louis XIV; the duc de La Force, Le Grand Conti (Paris, ). SHAT OM : r`eglement,  Nov. ; BNF Clair. , fol. r : provisions of Grand Amiral de France for Vermandois, ; FF , fol. r . See also NAF , fol. r : Pontchartrain to Gramont,  Oct. ; Daniel, Histoire de la milice fran¸coise, vol. II, pp. , .



Conclusion state, was most evident, however, in the case of Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, duc du Maine, first born of Louis’s offspring by Mme de Montespan, whose picture graces the front of this book. In  Maine was installed, aged four, as ColonelGeneral of the Swiss and Grisons, though he did not begin to exercise authority until . Eight years later, in , Maine was invested as prince des Dombes, a sovereign principality flanking the north-eastern shores of the Rhˆone above Lyon, when the Grande Mademoiselle, Gaston d’Orl´eans’s daughter, handed it over as the price for releasing her husband, the comte de Lauzun, from Pinerolo. This territory gave Maine a social status which could trump his position as a prince l´egitim´e, and, though only twelve at this time, made him even more difficult to ignore as a political force. He received his baptism into actual administration in September  when he succeeded his uncle, the mar´echal-duc de Vivonne, as General of the Galleys. Louis’s behaviour towards the princes l´egitim´es and the military charges de la couronne is deeply instructive of his personal priorities and his willingness to depart from his normal cautious approach to domestic high politics. A major problem came with the king’s determination to advance the career of the duc du Maine by giving him every possible opportunity to command the cavalry. In April , while still under twenty, Maine was appointed commandant of the horse of the army of Flanders, and, according to Louvois, was extremely successful in getting a firm disciplinary grip on the cavalry regiments under his command. The same appointment was made in  and again in , when Rosen, both a lieutenant-general and Mestre de camp g´en´eral of the cavalry, suffered the indignity of being elbowed out of command of the horse in the army of Flanders, even though he was also senior in the field to Maine, who in  was still only a mar´echal de camp. During the  campaign it was Villars’s turn to be sidelined, and in order to avoid a major clash of rights, the comte d’Auvergne – Colonel-General of the cavalry – was retired from field service. Self-evidently the king was prepared to disrupt the established command pattern of the cavalry in a blatantly political move to advance his own bastard’s interests. Notably, this period coincides with the time when Louis was trying to put pressure on Auvergne to cede his charge of Colonel-General to Maine. From  Maine grew to covet this position and made repeated attempts to be invested with it. In March , when Louis went to Compi`egne accompanied by Maine, largely to watch troop movements and preparations for the forthcoming campaign, Auvergne did not go with them. The marquis de Dangeau claimed Louis had actually forbidden Auvergne from going to Compi`egne because as Colonel-General he would have 

 

I am currently researching for a number of articles on matters related to the duc du Maine, including the Dombes, his roles in the army, and his patronage authority. Meanwhile, see Dangeau, vol. VIII, p. ,  Jan. ; Sourches, vol. VII, p. ,  Jan. . Sourches, vol. III, p. ,  Apr. ; SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Chamlay,  July . Dangeau, vol. III, pp. , ,  Apr. ,  Mar. ; vol. IV, pp. –, –,  Mar. ,  Apr. ; SHAT A , no. : Barbezieux to Villars,  June .



The preservation of the dynasty the unchallenged right of commanding all the cavalry there. On the basis not only of his own knowledge but also of a discussion in  with the chevalier du Rozel, one of the mestres de camp of the r´egiment des Carabiniers (of which Maine was colonel), Saint-Simon recorded: ‘M. du Maine . . . did the impossible, and the king too, so that the comte d’Auvergne would sell him his charge of Colonel-General of the cavalry, which nothing could induce him to do.’ Frustrated though he might have been, Louis still had too much respect for property rights and too sensitive a set of political antennae to confiscate the office in the light of Auvergne’s adamant refusal to sell it. In an attempt to compensate Maine for his inability to make him Colonel-General of the cavalry, Louis determined that he would carve out other prestigious positions for him. When, in the winter of –, he grouped all the carabinier companies together as the r´egiment des Carabiniers, consisting of five brigades, the king installed Maine as mestre de camp en chef. What happened next suggests that the king was not being disappointed in his hopes that his bastards would work within the established rules. Louis wanted to exempt Maine from Auvergne’s jurisdiction as Colonel-General, but Maine diplomatically decided it would be better if he did indeed put himself under Auvergne’s authority like any other cavalry mestre de camp. The annus mirabilis for Maine came in : first, in early summer, along with Toulouse and Vendˆome he was given a special juridical status as prince l´egitim´e in the Paris Parlement; and then, barely five months later, he succeeded Humi`eres as Grand Master of the Artillery, resurrecting the influence of the post, and passed the Galleys on to Vendˆome who in  became commander-in-chief of the army of Catalonia. The bastard interest – for Vendˆome was grandson of Henri IV’s bastard C´esar de Vendˆome – was acquiring unprecedented influence over the armed forces, and this was to grow still further in the early s. Like the duke of Monmouth in Britain during the s, Louis XIV’s bastards were using the army as the centre of their power base. At first glance Louis XIV’s bastards might be taken as the nucleus of a ‘king’s faction’ in the latter part of the reign, but it would be more accurate to see matters simply in terms of the king and his immediate family. To clinch this argument one need look no further than Louis’s second wife Mme de Maintenon. Prone to favouritism, Maintenon acted as protectress of the Noailles family, and championed two successive Mestres de camp g´en´eraux of the dragoons in the    



Lavall´ee, vol. III, pp. –: Maine to Maintenon,  Oct. ; Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Mar. . Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Mar. , notes of Saint-Simon; Saint-Simon, M´emoires , vol. I, pp. –; vol. XI, p. . Daniel, Milice fran¸coise, vol. II, p. . Maine had a monopoly on making patronage recommendations for the regiment: see BMG Saugeon , no. : ordonnance,  Dec. . Neither Maine nor Vendˆome treated the Galleys as a mere sinecure. See, for example, Vendˆome’s correspondence kept at Chantilly, in series S, vols.  and , for –. My research on the artillery and arms production will be published separately. SHAT A , no. : Maine to Chamillart,  May .



Conclusion s – the comte de Mailly and the duc de Guiche. And Louis was prepared to go to extreme lengths to indulge her. Not until the  military manoeuvres at Compi`egne, fourteen years after their secret marriage, did Louis openly consort with Maintenon beyond the confines of the court, causing a great deal of surprise to his soldiers and officers who had known nothing of the intimacy of their relationship. But Louis had already dropped a colossal hint about Maintenon’s status as his wife: in July  the chevalier de Mursay, son of Maintenon’s cousin the marquis de Villette, was made colonel of the r´egiment de la Reine dragoons. Doubts about the ‘king’s faction’ as an apposite theoretical model also arise if one considers the royal court. This institution was one of Louis XIV’s key instruments for remoulding the relationship between the monarchy and its leading subjects, and thereby enhancing the long-term chances of political stability and the perpetuation of his dynasty’s power. The story of its expansion, both physically and in terms of numerical attendance, is well known and will not be repeated here. What needs to be restated is the way that Louis sought, in the s, to create a court-based service nobility, strongly linked to the army, by enhancing the pull of the royal household. This does not necessarily accord easily with the idea of a ‘king’s faction’. In  Saint-Maurice, the Savoyard ambassador, reported to his master Duke Charles Emmanuel that Louis advanced all those who attended on his person, with the result that grands rushed to acquire court offices and the king was well served. It was no coincidence that infantry colonelcies ended up in the hands of the most exalted young nobles at court. The appointment of the comte du Lude, a Premier gentilhomme de la chambre du Roi, as Grand Master of the Artillery that same year was attributed precisely to the king’s wish to encourage men to become courtiers. If there was a particularly strong drive in the aftermath of the War of Devolution to attract people to court, the policy had begun earlier in the decade with the establishment of the Chevaux-l´egers Dauphins for officiers r´eform´es and the recasting of the two companies of Mousquetaires du Roi as training units for the most promising young officers. The extent to which the preservation of the dynasty and the strengthening of the state was intimately linked to the cultivation of the high aristocracy can be seen with great clarity in the case of those elite foot and horse units which guarded the   

 

SHAT A , nos. , : Mailly to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; Dangeau, vol. IV, p. ,  Feb. ; vol. V, p. ,  Mar. . Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  July . Mme de S´evign´e expressed the situation rather well in a letter to her daughter, Mme de Grignan: ‘What is certain, is that far from [the king] all services are lost: in other times it was the opposite’ (S´evign´e, vol. II, p. :  Jan. ). Saint-Maurice, vol. I, p. : Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Dec. ; Louis XIV, M´emoires, p. . J.-C. Petitfils, Lauzun, ou l’insolente s´eduction (Paris, ), pp. –; Saint-Maurice, vol. I, pp. –: Saint-Maurice to Carlo Emanuele II,  Aug. ; AA w, n.p.: Faultrier to Louvois,  Dec. .



The preservation of the dynasty king and came under his direct personal command. Most of the guard units of the mounted Maison militaire du Roi were fully militarised and not only protected the court but also set the tone for the entire French army. Linked to the household was the Gendarmerie de France, consisting by  of sixteen companies of heavy cavalry. In these two bodies alone about , nobles were enrolled in that year, more than  per cent of all nobles serving in the army. The massive r´egiment des Gardes Franc¸aises, though not part of the royal household, acted as guards in an outer circle of policing defences around the court. Together with the even more bloated r´egiment du Roi infantry, the king’s private regiment, it occupied a privileged position in the military structure: between them these two foot regiments accounted for nearly , men, and provided a disproportionate number of future colonels for other regiments. Louis XIV deliberately kept ministerial responsibility for all these forces vague, with the Secretary of State for the Royal Household possessing limited jurisdiction over the Maison militaire, and the Secretary of War was responsible only for its upkeep and logistical support on campaign. There was, however, no vacuum of responsibility, for it was provided by the king himself and those men who directly commanded these forces. In the Maison militaire the captains of the Gardes du corps and the captain-lieutenants of the Gendarmes and Chevaux-l´egers de la Garde wielded immense power over the management of their companies and strongly influenced their staffing – the officer ranks of some units were dominated by members of the same family. Similarly, in  Louis massively subsidised his favourite, the duc de La Feuillade, to purchase the post of colonel of the Gardes Franc¸aises and allowed him a great deal of autonomy in running the regiment, so much so that when La Feuillade died at the end of  the king suspended the colonelcy for several months so that enquiries could be held about its administration before another trusted officer, the marquis de Boufflers, could be installed as the new colonel. The two successive colonel-lieutenants of the r´egiment du Roi between  and  were intimately linked to Mme de Maintenon and the royal bastards. But taking those units which linked the court and the army in their totality, the idea of a ‘king’s faction’ falls down. Within the Maison militaire Louis maintained an effective political balance of the leading families of the realm, though in the years –  not one company had a captain allied to the Le Tellier. Indeed, the political and administrative influence of the Le Tellier in the most exalted of the king’s forces was negligible. In all these units Louis XIV personally blocked ministerial 

For a more thorough treatment of aspects of this subject see my article, ‘Louis XIV, Aristocratic Power and the Elite Units of the French Army’, French History  (), –; and for further indepth political analysis see my D.Phil. thesis, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, chapter . Guards receive only passing mentions in the otherwise excellent essays in J. Adamson, ed., The Princely Courts of Europe  – (London, ). Royal guards receive negligible treatment by John Lynn in Giant. Two exceptions to this general neglect are P. Mansel, Pillars of Monarchy. An Outline of the Political and Social History of Royal Guards  – (London, ); and the remarkably farsighted Z. Harsany, La Cour de L´eopold Duc de Lorraine et de Bar ( –) (Nancy, ).



Conclusion inspectors’ oversight, curtailed ministerial influence on patronage almost to the point of non-existence and installed commanding officers who were by no means close to the Le Tellier. His motives were simple: he regarded himself as the first soldier of the realm, he sought an active personal role in disciplining the nobility and turning them into the finest officers in Europe, and he wished to work in close partnership with his leading subjects to achieve this; but through his willingness to accommodate the political, dynastic and status interests of the officers – of all ranks – of the elite units, he hoped to safeguard the future of the monarchy through the careful nurturing of loyal and contented sentiment. This state was best achieved by allowing grands to surround themselves with men who would add lustre to their units and permitting them to manage those forces free from ministerial control. In the end, in spite of evidence that Louis XIV did indulge favourite families and individuals, Mettam’s theory of a ‘king’s faction’ as crucial for the governance of France does not really stand up to scrutiny. For a start, the very idea of a ‘faction’ is too unwieldy in a society where private interests were fluid and dynamic, and where families at loggerheads over one matter might pool their strength over another. Furthermore, if leaned on too exclusively a ‘king’s faction’ threatened to resurrect precisely the problem of ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ which had damaged the body politic under Richelieu and Mazarin, and which Louis was determined to avoid as far as possible. In any case a ‘king’s faction’ would supply too narrow a base of talent for the increasingly demanding task of governing the realm, staffing the court and running the armies and navies. When it came to selecting the senior officers of the Maison militaire du Roi and commanders-in-chief of his armies, Louis XIV could never afford to restrict his choices to men and families whose interests were entirely in line with his own. Luxembourg was a captain of the Gardes du corps from  to , as well as a g´en´eral en chef in some of those years. The B´ethune de Charost (Gardes du corps captains – and again after ) were strong and vocal supporters of Nicolas Fouquet throughout his imprisonment. The marshal von Schomberg had strong international links, especially in the Palatinate and the Dutch Republic, and stubbornly persisted in his protestantism before leaving France in . The La Tour d’Auvergne (including Duras and Lorge) also had powerful international connections, again in the Holy Roman Empire and the United Provinces, and were not easy to control, especially in the s. Even the Noailles became a problem in the last ten years of Louis’s life because of the Jansenist and Quietist disputes. But because none of these were princes of the blood with a claim on the throne – like the Cond´e or Conti – it would have been almost impossible for them to suborn the loyalty of his subjects, and they could be gainfully employed for the most serious 

One should remember in all this that Louis XIV was anxious about his own security, especially in the aftermath of the assassination plots of the late s, so the officering of his guard units really did matter. My thanks to Paul Sonnino for drawing this to my attention.



The preservation of the dynasty of tasks. The worst they could do, like Prince Eug`ene de Savoie-Soissons, was to go into the service of another sovereign. Although, as both Eug`ene and Schomberg demonstrated, that could be immensely damaging to France, it nevertheless did not threaten to destabilise the internal affairs of the realm and the security of the dynasty. At the core of Louis XIV’s approach to governance was the balancing of rival interests. Rather than create a restrictive ‘king’s faction’, from which by definition most would be excluded, he sought to encourage all his subjects to look to him for the fulfilment of their aspirations. Central to this was maintaining multiple channels of access to his person – officers of the Maison militaire, senior court officers like the Grand Chambellan and the Premiers gentilhommes de la chambre du Roi, ministers, generals and princes. In the s and s Louis was so determined to build up the size of the court that one gets the impression that he even envisaged that the high aristocracy would act to complement the influence of the ministers on his person and his kingdom. Above all, under the umbrella of ideological hegemony and devotion to the king (a crucial proviso), Louis wanted to maintain a degree of pluralism in French public life which had been lacking under Richelieu, while avoiding the instability of his own first two decades on the throne. If Louis XIV’s personal interest in the prospects of his illegitimate descendants led him to depart from the path of political prudence and to stir controversy, this was understandable on a basic human level. And he did try to move gradually and, crucially, on the basis of their proven competence – he would not expose them by promoting them above their perceived abilities. In the end, however, the favouring of his bastards reflected the fact that, in his sense of priorities, dynasticism trumped all else.                        As far as Louis was concerned, however, a major structural overhaul of power in the French army was more significant for the long-term security of the Bourbon dynasty than this accomplished political juggling act which a successor might misjudge. Knowing in particular the dangers attendant upon a royal minority or a weakminded king, he actively set out to dilute – but not shatter – the ties which bound the grands to the lesser nobility, and to remodel the rules of patronage in such a way that there would never be more Frondes. Even had nobles wished to maintain what were effectively armies within the army, which had allowed the rebellions of the s and the Frondes to occur in the first place, this was, as early as , no longer practical. Responsibility for this dramatic, even revolutionary shift in political power can be attributed, on the one hand, to a deliberate policy of the king to control patronage distribution more closely than ever before, and, on the other, to a significant shift in the patterns of noble service resulting from the maintenance of the standing army. Since the early sixteenth century French monarchs had been trying to assert a monopoly on the issuing of military commissions, with varying degrees of success, 

Conclusion but control over patronage was disrupted by the presence of powerful prerogative charge-holders. From  the first duc d’Epernon’s power over patronage in the infantry had been enormous, in part a reflection of his provincial power base in Guyenne which provided many army officers. Unfortunately he could not be trusted or relied upon, so from  Henri IV began a subtle erosion of his rights, taking back delegated powers and personally naming officers to important vacancies. At this time Epernon also had to contend with a rival source of administrative power in the shape of the three successive Constables from  to : Montmorency, Luynes and Lesdigui`eres. Louis XIII, encouraged by Richelieu, continued to pursue the same policy of sapping Epernon’s authority in –. During his ministry Richelieu managed to restrict the prerogatives and rights of the Colonel-General of the infantry to the privilege of presenting candidates to the king for some officerships in the four ‘vieux’ regiments and the r´egiment des Gardes Franc¸aises (including its e´tat-major which administered the regiment as a whole), to the exclusion of all other patrons. Epernon also retained the right to appoint directly the captain of one company in each ‘entretenue’ regiment. Nevertheless, Epernon only retained his post thanks to political inertia and the useful role his family played in the southwest. When most of the family became a positive liability to Richelieu in , Epernon was disgraced and his post was abolished two years later. By the late s the king provided commissions for all infantry officers, but mestres de camp were sent blank commissions from Paris so they could fill the captain and subaltern posts with whomsoever they chose or with candidates that the Colonel-General had recommended to Richelieu. In the cavalry, until at least , the duc d’Angoulˆeme and his son the comte d’Alais appear to have exercised a preponderant, though by no means monopolistic, influence over the appointment to positions within this arm. Richelieu and other grands would use their influence with the king to secure positions for their own clients, but the Colonel-Generals were very much part of this game and had the advantage of possessing detailed knowledge of the mounted forces and their personnel. The need to build support for the new regency government led Queen Anne and Mazarin to delegate authority to Alais, who seems to have come close to total control over the cavalry: he was appointing to all vacancies (even if he acceded to the requests of grands) and from  he appears to be actually issuing the commissions. He certainly closely controlled the right to name to all inferior regimental posts of 





A. Corvisier, ‘Les guerres de religion,  –’, in Contamine and Corvisier, Histoire militaire de la France, vol. I, p. ; A. D. Lublinskaya, French Absolutism: The Crucial Phase,  – (Cambridge, ), p. . P. Bertin, ‘Les Colonels G´en´eraux de l’Infanterie’, Revue Historique des Arm´ees  (), –; L. Mouton, Le duc et le roi: D’Epernon. Henri IV – Louis XIII (Paris, ), pp. –, ; D. Buisseret, Henry IV (London, ), pp. –; BNF FF , fol. r ; Parrott, ‘Administration of the French Army’, pp. –; Parrott, ‘Richelieu, the Grands and the French Army’, p. . Parrott, ‘Administration of the Army’, pp. –.



The preservation of the dynasty captain and below. Political weakness also prompted the government to resurrect the position of Colonel-General of the infantry in  for Bernard, second duc d’Epernon, who had succeeded his father as duke the previous year and who now returned from exile. As the government’s patronage base weakened and the domination of the army by Cond´e required some form of counter-balance, the authority and prestige of the infantry Colonel-General rose. He reasserted his right to nominate candidates for all vacancies, and he presented to all positions among inferior officer ranks, such as sergent-major, aumˆonier, surgeon-major and mar´echal des logis in the e´tats-majors of regiments. During the Frondes Epernon even forced Mazarin to acquiesce in the resurrection of moribund posts so that he could provide sinecures for his partisans. In the intervening years between the untimely death in  of the duc de Joyeuse – cavalry Colonel-General – and the recreation of the post for Turenne in , Michel Le Tellier seized the opportunity of a vacuum in the cavalry and the crushing of Cond´e’s partisans in the kingdom to try to restore royal control over military patronage. In spite of his protests, Epernon was restricted to merely suggesting candidates for vacancies in the infantry and to issuing lettres d’attache to go with the crown commissions. Of further significance was the death in  of Epernon’s only son the duc de Candale, who held the survivance as Colonel-General of the infantry, leaving in turn no surviving brothers or sons. The subsequent death of Epernon in  therefore gave the king an ideal opportunity to abolish the post once again. By this time Le Tellier had more or less succeeded in enforcing the rule that all officers had to be provided by the king, and from then on Louis would rarely send out signed blank commissions – and only then to his most trusted officers. Instead, throughout the rest of the ancien r´egime, the War Ministry was to fill out and process the commissions of nearly all officers in the domestically raised French forces, though some mercenary formations continued to exercise a degree of autonomy in this regard. No longer could colonels fill regiments with captains and subalterns purely of their own choosing, or be forced into installing a general’s clients in such posts without the authorisation of the crown. It was a real watershed, and it dented severely the patronage power of the grands which had helped turn the royal army by  into, in Le Tellier’s words, a ‘republic’. Not least this was because many nobles     

SHAT A , no. : nomination to cavalry officerships,  Apr. ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. . Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, p. . Inglis-Jones, ‘The Grand Cond´e in Exile’, p. ; BNF FF , fol. v . SHAT MR , no. : ordonnance,  Nov. ; Andr´e, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, p. ; Andr´e, L’arm´ee monarchique, pp. –. For example, in , at the start of the Nine Years War: Sourches, vol. II, pp. –,  Dec. . For each of the cavalry r´egiments d’Humi`eres, d’Aumont, de Noailles and de Boufflers the abb´e de Dangeau noted: ‘Le Roi lui done la disposition des charges du Regt.’ (BNF FF , fols. v , v , v , r ). On the problems this caused to Louvois, see SHAT A , no. : Boufflers to Louvois,  Nov. ; A , fol. r : Louvois to Boufflers,  Nov. ; BNF FF (i), fols. r , r .



Conclusion had wanted, since at least the early sixteenth century, to receive their provisions of service from the king, out of a sense of honour and attachment to the crown. Now they would all get them. Although cases emerged throughout the reign of officers getting into service without a royal brevet, it seems that this was comparatively rare, and if they were discovered then they and their colonel would be severely punished. From the early s onwards the rules of patronage dispensing were profoundly altered, but the king could not possibly hope to know whom to appoint to every position that came vacant. This was a fortiori the case as the army expanded dramatically over the subsequent three decades. As a consequence Louis XIV continued to depend heavily upon the recommendations, not just of the Secretary of War, as is commonly supposed, but also of generals, colonels themselves, military inspectors, courtiers, the Colonel-Generals of the cavalry and dragoons, and other ministers. No less a person than Barbezieux acknowledged that officers needed to be proposed by somebody of stature if they were to be considered seriously for advancement. Particularly ambitious officers would try to attach themselves to the Le Tellier, while those perhaps a bit less ambitious would look to a general or courtier who had sufficient stature in the king’s eyes to secure patronage for his clients. To reiterate, Louis kept multiple channels of influence open to his person, and was more than prepared to stymie Louvois’s recommendations for patronage, or indeed those of others such as the duc d’Orl´eans, if he lacked enthusiasm for the candidate. The normal procedure followed by the king when filling vacancies was outlined in  by his son, the duc du Maine: Most of the time it is useless to propose for a company more than four or five persons. It is necessary to note very scrupulously everything one knows about their candidatures; after which one can reveal one’s opinion. The king likes it to be done this way, in order to make easy for him a degree of detail which he could not have in his head like the person who commands these men, and which concerns officers who have hardly the honour of being known to His Majesty. Moreover, this puts him in a position to judge on the basis of the laid-out facts whether the opinion one has formed is judicious, whether the consequences are clearly drawn, and whether the conclusions are reasonable. 



  

Baxter, Servants of the Sword, p. ; BNF FF , fol. r : Le Tellier to Mazarin,  Oct. ; FF , fol. r ; SHAT A , no. : Louis to Catinat,  July ; A , no. : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Sep. ; A , fols. r , r : to Tess´e,  Aug.,  Dec. . Of the latter, Pomponne and the duc de Beauvillier were obvious patrons: Bib Ars , fol. v : chevalier de Corbet to Pomponne,  Aug. ; Bib Ars , fol. r–v : Guiscard to Beauvilliers,  Sep. . On the patronage power of the Colonel-Generals, see Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp. –. Note that even the comte de Toulouse as Grand Amiral de France had to channel his patronage recommendations through the king and had no prescriptive rights of appointment, but his voice carried as much weight as the Secretary of State for the Marine in the s. SHAT A : Barbezieux to Chazeron,  Jan. . Sourches drew this distinction: vol. II, p. ,  Aug. . Ibid., vol. II, p. ,  Aug. .



The preservation of the dynasty This was Louis’s preferred method of working and it allowed his most senior subjects a great deal of influence in military patronage. Boufflers for one, as colonel of the Gardes Franc¸aises after , worked along these lines. There were, however, regiments where the king gave the colonel almost complete freedom in filling officer positions: those belonging to princes of the blood, princes l´egitim´es, and to the most trusted of peers and marshals. In the case of those belonging to royals, the owner of the regiment presented to the position of colonellieutenancy and his or her choice was rarely vetoed by Louis. Plenty of other regiments owned by senior nobles close to the king were also staffed at all ranks by men whom they had named to the War Ministry. To give an example, the Grand Cond´e, in retirement after , continued to involve himself in his infantry regiment’s business and maintained his hold over regimental patronage. When the colonellieutenant, the marquis de Nesle, went on leave from the regiment, Cond´e wrote to the lieutenant-colonel Pomerol: ‘You will do me the pleasure of informing me of the merit and service of the officers to fill the vacant places, so that I can speak to M. de Nesle on his return, or give orders during his absence for anything which is pressing. Let me know also which posts are vacant.’ Moreover, in contradiction of Maine’s prescription for placing names before the king, grandee proprietors of ordinary regiments did not present Louis with a choice of two or more men for each vacancy. They set down exactly whom they wanted to fill the officerships of their regiments, and they hoped and expected the crown would comply with their wishes. In this respect they had considerably more discretion than the commanders of the units of the Maison militaire du Roi or the colonel of the r´egiment des Gardes Franc¸aises. In the normal regiments of cavalry, dragoons and infantry colonels had to be consulted about officers joining their regiments if they had not nominated the candidate themselves, and this was especially the case for those men filling the positions of major and aide-major.  Nevertheless, the scope for influencing appointments to vacancies in the army was somewhat reduced by the establishment of a career structure with guidelines for promotion. The existence of officiers r´eform´es during the eras of peace curtailed the ability of colonels or anybody else to choose regimental officers, 

 



SHAT A A., fol. r : ‘M´emoire instructif que j’ay fait pour mon fils le Prince de Dombes en novembre mil sept cent dix, pour luy donner les notions qui sont necessaire au Colonel General des Suisses’; A : Louis to Boufflers,  Aug. ; SHAT Ya: ‘Memoire des officiers que Mr . le Maral . de Boufflers croit les plus propres pour remplir les charges vaccantes du regiment des gardes franc¸oises’ [Aug. ]; Saint-Simon, M´emoires, vol. III, pp. –. ACC I, vol. , fol. r : Grand Cond´e to Pomerol,  Oct.. Examples are legion: SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Catinat,  Nov. ; A , no. bis: Catinat to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  July ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Catinat,  Aug. ; A , no. : Catinat to Barbezieux,  July ; A : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  June,  Aug. ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Louis,  June ; ACC S, vol. , fol. v : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Sep. . SHAT A , no. : Louvois to Bouchu,  Sep. ; A , fol. v : Barbezieux to Poudens,  June .



Conclusion because the king insisted on respecting an order of seniority among these men when filling vacancies. Actually, if the r´eforme system was to work and inspire trust, then Louis had no choice. Moreover, in – and  – – periods of wartime – the existence of cadet companies further restricted the scope for recommending young men to the king for subaltern posts. That said, in both the Dutch War and the Nine Years War Louis’s instinctive preference for promoting men within a regiment gave more influence to the colonels who knew their officers and could express views on their capacities. Many of the candidates put forward by generals and inspectors to fill vacancies were actually the favoured choice of the colonel, or even of the officers of a regiment who found themselves without a colonel, and who asked, in a corporate spirit, for a particular individual to assume command of them. Constructing a model of patronage for the French officer corps is complicated by the plurality of people who were accepted, after , as having the right to suggest candidates to the king. Even if there was some restriction caused by career structures, especially in the s, and even if Louvois in particular pushed his own favourites, that did not mean that Louis XIV did not welcome suggestions from many sources.                                          At the core of the grands’ military and political power before  had been their ability to attract men into the military forces they maintained, ostensibly on behalf of the king. To a considerable extent ties of kinship, service and ‘fid´elit´e’ continued to play an important part in the creation and composition of the grands’ regiments throughout Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’, though such connections were weaker than before. Noble respect for, and desire for leadership from, the grands arose in large part because of the limited geographical horizons and conceptions of the provincial nobility during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Franco-Spanish war of – exposed larger numbers of them to long-distance travel and to new social and political experiences and contacts, but it was the mass employment of the nobility for longer periods of time in the armies of Louis XIV that really raised their sights to an inter-provincial, national or even international plane. And when the provincial nobility began to realise that the army and the crown mattered more than provincial contact they downscaled, in the words of Jonathan Dewald, their ‘diffuse respect for the great’. Nevertheless, such ties were by no means entirely broken, and because nobody has yet followed up Sharon Kettering’s work on clientage for  



SHAT A , no. : Catinat to Louvois,  Oct. ; A , no. : Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Nov. . See also pp.  – , . SHAT A , no. : Vendˆome to Barbezieux,  Oct. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Coigny,  Aug. ; A , fol. r : Crenan to Barbezieux,  Sep. ; A , no. : Vendˆome to Louis,  Aug. ; A : Barbezieux to Vendˆome,  Oct. . Dewald, Pont-St-Pierre, p. .



The preservation of the dynasty the period after  it is worth trying to explain how the system operated in the era of Louis XIV and thereafter. The composition of many of the grands’ regiments is unknown, or the information is at best patchy and incomplete, but where it does survive it confirms a degree of patrimonial and clientage ties in these units, a pattern which may have been repeated, albeit on a smaller scale, in regiments and companies owned by lesser nobles. Generally speaking, it seems that somewhere around onefifth of officers in a regiment owned by a grand had some sort of tie to their colonel which predated their entry into the regiment. Connections could be formed on the basis of household service, kinship, friendship or military links forged by other members of a noble family. Loyalty to particular aristocratic houses – and not just to princes but to non-royal dukes as well – remained a compelling factor of service for some nobles in some regiments. By far the strongest basis for connection between grandee colonels and the officers of their regiments was the possession of provincial governorships and, to a lesser extent, the location of their landed estates. This was particularly the case on the frontiers, especially in those provinces as yet but weakly (and perhaps only temporarily) attached to France. Similar patterns of connection can also be detected in the interior. It is true that most of the provincial governors and even some of the provincial lieutenant-generals were absentees, passing most of the year at court, with the armies or on estates they held in other provinces. Many governors during Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’ held little or no land in the provinces they officially ‘governed’. This semi-detachment stemmed from Louis’s policy of restricting the holder of a governorship to a fixed term, albeit renewable, and rotating some governors. A resident lieutenant-general, usually though not always drawn from a senior local family of e´p´ee stock, was frequently deputed to act as governor in the title-holder’s absence, and they worked alongside the provincial intendant. But whether resident or not, one of the key functions of a lieutenant-general or governor was to act as a conduit for the provincial nobility’s aspirations, and if a governor were to be able to hold his head high at court he would have to take this role seriously. These aspirations were directed more at military service than anything else. 

 

For the Noailles, see SHAT A , fols. v – r : Noailles to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; A , fol. r : Barbezieux to Noailles,  Aug. . For the Orl´eans, see Xc: report on the r´egiment de Chartres cavalry,  Aug. . For the La Tour d’Auvergne, see BNF FF , fols. r –r ; FF , fol. r ; SHAT A , no. : Auvergne to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; no. : Auvergne to Barbezieux,  Aug. ; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Dec. . For the Rohan, see La Chesnaye, vol. XIII, pp. –; vol. XVII, pp. –; SHAT Yb, fol. r–v : ‘Controle Cavalerie du  aoust  au er octobre ’, r´egiment de Rohan. BNF FF (i), fols. r , r ; FF (i), fol. r . See also correspondence of duc de Gramont as governor of B´earn in BNF NAF , NAF , NAF . Beik stated, on the basis of little-cited evidence, that the provincial intendant became the ‘broker’ for army patronage. If this is at all the case for Languedoc then he must have worked very closely with the governor, and with Bonzi and Noailles who played key roles in this: see Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France, p. .



Conclusion The Lyonnais, a pays d’´election, provides evidence of the power wielded by some governors over provincial regiments. The r´egiment du Lyonnois infantry had been in the hands of the Neufville de Villeroi family since before . It provides a clear, if rare, example of a regiment which remained centred around the province whose name it bore and which was owned by the provincial governor. Its identification with the Villeroi was so strong that it was the only regiment with a provincial name to bear the livery of its colonel (while all the others bore the king’s arms). In March  Franc¸ois de Neufville, duc de Villeroi from  and a marshal of France after , passed the colonelcy on to his son Nicolas, marquis d’Alincourt, who successfully commanded the regiment during the Nine Years War and also married Marguerite Le Tellier in . Of the known lieutenant-colonels, La Platiere (–) was given the sinecure of governor of the small castle of Joux in the western Lyonnais and later died at Lyon, and Tricaut ( onwards) was from the neighbouring province of Bugey. The major from December  was the chevalier de La Riviere, son of the deceased first duc de Villeroi’s late captain of guards. In  Manvile, captain of the grenadier company in –, became commandant of the chateau of Pierre Sc¸ize, the major fortress inside Lyon, as did one of his successors, Poligni, in the later s. The conclusive proof for pre-existing links between the Villeroi and the officers of their regiments comes from a report on the r´egiment de Villeroi cavalry dated October . In  Villeroi had installed as mestre de camp Rochebonne, son of the provincial commandant of the Lyonnais. Of the thirteen captains listed, one was from the Lyonnais, one was Villeroi’s former ADC, one began as a trooper in the regiment in , and no obvious Villeroi connection was noted or existed for the rest; of the lieutenants, five began as troopers in the regiment, one began in the Gardes du corps du Roi (quite possibly Villeroi’s own company), and six others have no apparent connection; but of the cornets, five were from the Lyonnais, two began as troopers in the regiment, and five others have no apparent connection. The mestre de camp r´eform´e attached to the regiment was also from the Lyonnais, though a capitaine r´eform´e had no connection. Therefore, about  per cent (and maybe even more) of registered officers in the regiment held ties to the Villeroi which preceded their commissions as officers. The case of the regiments owned by the Villeroi may have been an exaggerated version of normality, for the Lyonnais was a small, compact province and the family were probably the most powerful provincial governors of Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’, a reflection of the king’s profound friendship for them. On the other hand, other governors also enjoyed Louis’s trust and confidence, and they used their positions either to attract men into their own regiments or 

 

Daniel, Milice fran¸coise, vol. II, p. ; SHAT A , no. : Boufflers to Barbezieux,  Mar. ; BNF FF (i), fols. v –r ; G. Monahan, Year of Sorrows: The Great Famine of  in Lyon (Columbus, OH, ), p. . SHAT Xc: report on Villeroi cavalry of  Oct. ; BNF FF , fol. v . Sourches, vol. II, p. ,  Dec.  et seq.; Dangeau, vol. I, p. ,  Aug. .



The preservation of the dynasty to influence other regiments raised within their area of jurisdiction. In , the governorship of Languedoc was passed to the eleven-year-old duc du Maine. As a result, the duc de Noailles was provided with a commission for three years to act as governor during Maine’s minority. His governorship was renewed by the king until , when he became senior lieutenant-general of the province as Maine began to take a more active interest. Until Maine began exercising his authority Noailles held much sway over Languedoc. In the autumn of  Noailles contributed to the raising of the second r´egiment de Languedoc dragoons, and the marquis de Ganges, nephew of the comte de Ganges (who had been colonel of a similarly raised dragoon regiment in –) and also a baron of the estates, was appointed colonel. In the autumn of  it was decided that the second regiment would be split in two to form, with seven freshly raised companies, yet another dragoon regiment. The cost of the new regiment was to be shared between the king and the province, and the duc de Noailles was charged with organising its establishment. The new regiment was given to the marquis de Ganges, and became the r´egiment de Ganges dragoons, while the colonelcy of the second Languedoc dragoons was taken over by its lieutenantcolonel, Dossillon. In September  he was succeeded by his brother and in May  he in turn was followed by Margon, the lieutenant-colonel. In June , when Louvois was unhappy with the performance of the first Languedoc dragoons, he wrote to Trobat, the intendant d’arm´ee of the army of Catalonia and a man devoted to Noailles, asking him which officers would be most suitable for dismissal from service. The ties between Noailles and the nobles of Languedoc and Roussillon, where he was governor in his own right, crystallised over the course of the s and s. In October  Noailles was given permission to dissolve his regiment of milice which he had personally raised in Roussillon, and to incorporate the officers and men into his new infantry regiment. When he came to compose his own new cavalry regiment during the winter of , he seems to have drawn upon the nobility of Languedoc to fill the officer ranks. In  the marquis de Caylus, who had been a captain in Noailles cavalry since , bought the first r´egiment de Languedoc dragoons from the comte de Ganges for , livres, receiving the king’s approval thanks to Noailles’s support. Caylus went on to marry a cousin of Noailles’s close friend Mme de Maintenon. In July  two new subalterns, recommended by Noailles to his son the comte d’Ayen, arrived to join the r´egiment de Noailles cavalry, bringing with them from Languedoc a party of recruits. As late as ,  per cent      

BNF FF , fol. r : ‘Gouverneur de Languedoc’. BNF FF , fol. v ; Noailles, M´emoires, vol. I, p. . SHAT A : Louvois to Trobat,  June ; Louvois to Noailles,  Nov. ; BNF FF , fols. v , v . Pinard, Chronologie historique-militaire, vol. II, p. . BNF FF , fol. r ; FF , fol. r ; SHAT A , fols. v –r : Noailles to Louis,  Aug. . BNF FF , fol. r : comte d’Ayen to duc de Noailles,  July .



Conclusion of the officers of this cavalry regiment came from either the Auvergne (another Noailles sphere of influence) or Languedoc, and/or they had served in the Gardes du corps where the duke was also one of the four captains. Of the princes l´egitim´es, the duc de Vendˆome inherited the regiment bearing his name in  and ran it like a private estate. He was prince d’Anet in the Seine valley and governor both of the surrounding region of the Vendˆomois and of the extreme south-eastern province of Provence. On top of this, he possessed the duch´e-pairie of Vendˆome and countless smaller terres throughout France. Of his regimental officers from the period before  for whom any information survives, Provenchere, lieutenant-colonel in – was from Provence; at least three members of the Limboeuf family, ‘du Vendosmois gentilsh˜o[mm]es’, served in the regiment, two of them as lieutenant-colonel; Rochambeau, ‘g[entilhomme]. de Vendosmois’, was the major in , another Rochambeau was lieutenant-colonel in the War of the Spanish Succession, and another was captain of the grenadier company until ; Danfreville, ‘g. d’aupr`es d’Anet’, acted as Vendˆome’s aide-de-camp in Italy in the s; two men called Anastasi, of unknown origin, were lieutenant-colonel in – and major from October  to October . Striking, however, is the abb´e de Dangeau’s assertion about one particular family: ‘Noland, gentleman from around Anet, Captain in Vendosme. There are  or  of that name in this regiment.’  It is obvious from even this incomplete picture that officers went into the service of the duc de Vendˆome in his regiment because they already possessed ties to him or his family. These ties persisted through the War of the Spanish Succession. A report on the officers of the two battalions of the r´egiment de Vendˆome dated October  lists the place of origin of eighty-five out of the eighty-eight officers: seventeen alone had direct territorial links with Vendˆome as governor of Provence or they came from the area around Vendˆome’s estate of Anet in eastern Normandy. The chevalier de La Maure, from Marseille, had exchanged his company in the r´egiment de Normandie for one in Vendˆome in November . The fact that princes, peers and courtiers owned between them dozens of regiments, encompassing hundreds of thousands of men posed very few problems for Louis XIV, for a number of reasons. First, the collective power of the princes, dukes, governors and generals may have made them indispensable to the crown for raising troops, motivating provincial nobles, maintaining regiments and commanding larger concentrations of men, but these families did not possess a homogenous set of interests. On the contrary, the world of the aristocracy was highly competitive,    

SHAT Xc: report on Noailles cavalry,  Oct. . BNF FF , fols. r –r ; FF (i), fols. r –r ; FF , fol. r : list of infantry regiments in France []; SHAT A , no. : Vendˆome to Louis,  Aug. . SHAT Xb: ‘Estat des services des officiers qui composent le Regiment de Vendosme’, [Oct.] . The mechanistic argument, that because regiments no longer overwhelmingly bore the names of their owners this somehow made them all the more ‘royal’, should be dismissed for its obvious failure to take any account of who those proprietors were: Corvisier, Louvois, p. ; Rousset, vol. III, pp. –. See Rowlands, ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration’, pp.  – .



The preservation of the dynasty with families pitting rival claims to inheritances, offices and rank against each other. On the whole Louis XIV kept these tensions under control. Second, the cost of war in an era of crown insistence upon tougher discipline and higher standards made it more difficult than earlier in the century for each aristocratic family to support and control more than a handful of units. Moreover, when an army found itself short of cash the general officers were forced to advance their own money and to take out loans on their own personal credit to prevent military collapse. This problem could be intensified by the ownership of several regiments. The comte de Tess´e’s views on this predicament are highly revealing, in that they hint at the real reason why the grands under Louis XIV had less military independence relative to the crown than during previous reigns: ‘Nevertheless, given that a multiplicity of infantry regiments never suits the possessor, I beg you to remember the fine words of M. de Vivonne, who said, when selling those which he possessed, that not being able to live from administration he aspired to live from [the sale of ] his regiments.’  General officers thus recognised that raising, owning and maintaining several regiments or battalions was an undesirable and impossible prospect for most nobles, given that Louis XIV expected higher standards in the French armies than had Richelieu and Mazarin. Third, the ceiling on the number of regiments the grands owned also reflected both the approval of the king for acquisitions and the number of adult (or teenage) males in the family pursuing a martial career. There seems to have been an unwritten code that no single individual could own more than one regiment in each of the categories of infantry and cavalry, plus a company of Gendarmes and a company of Chevaux-l´egers. This came to apply to the dragoons too as they grew in prestige in the eighteenth century and were acquired by dukes and princes. The only exceptions to this were the cases of generals or provincial governors able to recruit regiments in remote frontier regions. In an era of increasingly expensive standards, and particularly in a period dominated by war after , individual grandee families showed little inclination to expand their direct, proprietary military entourages. Whether it was cause or effect, this made manifest the significant shift in noble attitudes between  and  which, in part, reflects the changing ethos of obedience and honnˆetet´e discussed in the General Introduction to this book and in chapter . Honour still derived principally from military service for most nobles and martial values continued to dominate well beyond Louis XIV’s reign, but influence over subordinate nobles within the state, and the quality of one’s personal service to the king now counted far more than the possession of large, semi-private, military entourages as a reflection of one’s status and self-esteem. It may even be the case that the very notion of openly 



In the War of the Spanish Succession the progressive deterioration of French state finances forced the officers to make more of a contribution, where they could, to the upkeep of their regiments and, if generals, of the armies they commanded.  See pp.  –  and  – . SHAT A , no.: Tess´e to Barbezieux,  Oct. .



Conclusion challenging the sovereign power in western Europe was now redundant. Even if a leading aristocrat or prince had been willing to raise and maintain, albeit with crown support, a dozen regiments, the ability of the French state to crush that force if it were used in rebellion was indubitable, given the huge size of the royal army by the s. There was quite likely no point in disgruntled grands even considering armed rebellion, except perhaps during a regency when the political loyalties of large parts of the officer corps might become confused. Finally, but most importantly, the existence of a standing army, maintained over a continuous and ever-lengthening period of time, and composed of a very large number of units even in peacetime, blew apart the old clientage system that had permitted the French religious wars and the Frondes. As described in this chapter, grandee proprietors of regiments – colonels-in-chief, as they are still called in the British army to this day – might have been able to install clients in their units, but very few colonels were able to keep up the domination by their personal fid`eles of the officer ranks of their regiments. The longer a regiment was maintained on a permanent footing the more the personal link between the officers and the proprietor was diluted. In the infantry, apart from the dozen or so regiments which were specifically and permanently earmarked for princes or a few peers in the  – era, regiments periodically changed hands and colonels came and went every few years. Ambitious junior officers, on the look-out for advancement, also transferred between regiments, in a quest for promotion, with a far greater degree of regularity than in the past. Neither senior officers nor the king nor the Le Tellier particularly wanted to transfer officers between regiments because they preferred to enhance good esprit de corps and corporate loyalty; but they recognised that it was necessary to provide an adequate system of promotion that rewarded talent and effort, and the by-product of this was a weakening of bonds between grands and the rest of the nobility. Opportunities for self-betterment grew in wartime, as the armies expanded and conflict took its toll on the officer corps: men were killed, invalided out of service, or forced to retire for financial reasons. Captains and lieutenants frequently ended up serving in regiments where they had no prior geographical or social connections to their colonel. With the exception of the units of the Orl´eans (and possibly the Cond´e) only a minority of officers in each regiment by  possessed long-standing ties to their colonel. This was particularly the case in the prestige regiments such as the ‘Vieux’, ‘Petits-Vieux’ and the Carabiniers. In such circumstances it would not be wise for an officer to hitch himself too closely to his colonel, unless the colonel enjoyed considerable and stable favour at court. 

 

Similarly, if there was a succession dispute, as in Spain or, between  and , in the British Isles. The Hanoverian governments in Britain were careful not to allow Jacobite suspects to become army officers for precisely this reason.  See chapter , pp.  – . E.g. Montbas, Au service du Roi, pp. –. BNF FF , fol. r ; FF (i), fols. r –r , r –v , r ; FF (ii), fols. r –r ; FF , fols. v – r ; FF , fols. v –r ; FF , fols. r–v , r –r .



The preservation of the dynasty By the s the circumstances for a grandee seeking to raise viable forces or to defy the crown, even had they wanted to do so, were decidedly unpropitious. Just to remove any lingering doubts in noble minds, in  the king set an example to the second estate when he struck against the houses of Bourbon-Conti and La Tour d’Auvergne. In the summer of that year Louis’s third cousins once removed, the prince de Conti (who was also the king’s son-in-law) and the prince de La Roche-sur-Yon, left for Hungary to serve Emperor Leopold against the Turks, thus incurring the king’s wrath. Both princes were stripped of their regiments: La Roche-sur-Yon cavalry was handed over almost intact to the infant duc de Bourgogne, Louis’s grandson, but Conti infantry was entirely disbanded. The different treatment meted out reflected the fact that the most senior officers of Conti infantry, including the future mar´echal de Tallard, had deserted the regiment to serve with their colonel in eastern Europe, while the officers of La Roche-sur-Yon cavalry had wisely obeyed their proprietor’s order not to follow him; only the prince de La Roche-sur-Yon’s fid`ele, the chevalier d’Angoulˆeme, mestre de camp-lieutenant of the regiment, was sacked. Less than two months later the king completely disbanded the r´egiment de Turenne, because the young prince had also left for Hungary and his uncle the cardinal de Bouillon was in disgrace. The regiments of Conti and Turenne were staffed by officers who believed it more honourable to follow or support their colonels than abandon them and obey the king. Louis XIV therefore broke both regiments and sent a powerful message to the French officer corps (already absorbed by La Roche-sur-Yon himself) that their duty was first and foremost to the monarch. If they allowed loyalty to a grand to interpose itself between them and the sovereign they would be destroyed. Louis scarcely enjoyed having to take such a step but it was decisive in its effect. This book is an explicit rejection of modernisation theories of the early modern state. Even the concept of ‘state-building’ should be discarded for France in this period because it strongly implies a teleological sense of direction towards a leviathan which nobody in a position of power seriously sought to achieve – to put it at its plainest, in the s neither Louis XIV, his ministers nor his generals believed that it was possible to expand the army to the size it actually reached in the s. Rather than a drive to ‘state-build’, the French state under Louis XIV was shaped instead by Bourbon dynasticism, a term which can and should include tensions within the ruling house; by family interests; by personal rivalry; by highly traditional senses of obligation and chivalry; and, at the end of the day, by the need to find money to fight wars. There was no coherent development or programme during Louis XIV’s reign except the preservation and strengthening of the ruling line of the dynasty, and the 

Belhomme, Histoire de l’infanterie en France, vol. II, p. ; BNF FF (ii), fol. v ; La Chesnaye, vol. IV, p. ; Roujon, Conti, p. ; Sourches, vol. I, p. ,  Apr.  et seq.; p. , June ; p. ,  July ; Dangeau, vol. I, pp. , ,  June,  June ; p. , July–Aug. ; SHAT OM : ordonnance,  June .



Conclusion maintenance of the prestige of the house of Bourbon as a whole. To achieve this, Louis XIV had to reimpose order on his forces and crush for ever the possibility that the army could be used by his subjects, even and especially by princes of his own house, against the ruler. This could not be realised by making the army politically ‘neutral’, for in a society where politics was fundamentally socio-politics this was not a realistic, nor probably even a conceivable, possibility. The key instead was a complete overhaul of the patronage and clientage system as it affected the armed forces. On top of this, Louis had to reorder the finances of the realm to reduce the scope for disorder and breakdown, and up to a point, as chapter  demonstrated, he had some success. Only the sheer size of the war efforts and the strain under which he put the fisco-financier system in the s and s undermined the earlier developments and improvements in military administration. The changes of the s, s and s in both the army and the financial world had not evolved to cope with the stresses of the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession, let alone both of them consecutively. Authoritarian action and policies played their part, and without some reassertion of hands-on prerogative power by the king in the s many improvements would not have taken place. But beyond this Louis XIV knew that he could not rule by fiat, nor employ purely the sticks and rods of ‘auctoritas et disciplina’; if he tried such an approach in the army (or elsewhere), except where it was really needed to crush blatant disorder, he would hand down an impossible system to his successors which would threaten perhaps not another Frondes, but certainly a mutinous force. Furthermore, Louis also had to reshape an army that would not only be politically docile, but also capable of pressing his case on the international stage. The key to success in both respects was the accommodation of the interests not just of his leading subjects but also of those nobles who staffed the lower ranks of the officer corps, however much Louis might have underestimated the degree of difficulty under which they sometimes laboured. It is surely no coincidence that the minority of Louis XV was the most quiescent in French history. The regent Philippe, second duc d’Orl´eans, benefited two-fold from the military inheritance of Louis XIV: his grip on power was never seriously threatened, and he was able to deal a swift knockout blow to the Spain ruled by his cousin Philip V in the  war. Louis XIV brought the dynastic state to its apogee, and his ability to do so reflected not only his skill as a politician – leaving aside some serious errors of judgement – but also his instinctual empathy for the personal and dynastic interests of his servants. Certainly neither of his successors took such a close interest in the affairs of their subjects. The last word should be left to Voltaire, who depicted Louis XIV almost as a mere country gentleman in his chˆateau, with the same general concerns and interests as any other noble. This impression is perhaps more accurate than we have previously imagined, and perhaps that is what truly enabled Louis XIV to transform the French army, preside over its voluminous growth and restore stability to France. 

Appendix 

Defining the grands The complicated stratification of the French nobility means we have to be exceedingly careful in the use of our terms. In particular, defining what is meant by ‘high aristocracy’, or by the label of grand, poses certain problems. The term grand was used in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to describe the most important nobles in France, but the nature and extent of the power they wielded changed along with the nature and power of the royal state. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in the era of political disruption in the kingdom, grands enjoyed a territorial base and large entourages, and raised significant numbers of troops, sometimes for use against the crown. By , as the Conclusion makes clear, this was no longer the situation. Etiquette and court practice reveals how the grands remained the same sorts of people as before, but in larger numbers and in a different political and cultural situation. As long as one recognises that contexts shift, it is quite valid to describe people in this way, as contemporaries did. Just because the position of the grands was associated with pomp, ostentation and intrigue at court, it does not mean they necessarily lacked power. Moreover, all social distinctions are based on a mixture of political influence, economic power and psychology. So who were the grands? David Parrott’s article on Richelieu, the grands and the army encapsulated princes du sang, princes l´egitim´es, princes e´trangers, pairs de France and ducs within this term. But over the course of the second half of the seventeenth century a large number of ducs et pairs or ducs a` brevet were created. In his notes of the s the abb´e de Dangeau, brother to the diarist, defined grands as the king, the queen, the enfants de France, princes and princesses of the blood, ducs et pairs and ‘autres seigneurs de qualit´e’. The eighteenth-century historian Gassonville, in his documents on the Maison militaire du Roi, described grands as princes, marshals of France, captains of the Gardes du corps du Roi, ‘et autres Seig.s de Qualit´e’, who should all be saluted by royal guards when they passed. By , therefore, we should take grands to be not only princes of the blood, princes l´egitim´es and princes e´trangers but also marshals of France, dukes of various kinds and the upper reaches of the court nobility. Together   

 Forster, The House of Saulx-Tavanes, pp. –. See pp.  – .  BNF FF , fol. v . Parrott, ‘Richelieu, the Grands and the French Army’, pp.  – . BNF FF , fol. r .



Appendix  these families had a virtual lock on provincial government, the high command and the prestige military units, though their influence with the king varied according to their personal relations with him. There were, however, men such as Catinat, Tess´e or Boufflers who were critically important figures in the military administration and who only become courtiers, and arguably even grands, once they had reached the high command and even through their ultimate elevation to the mar´echalat, a dignity which should be seen as a form of life peerage. This was inferior to a duch´e or duch´e-pairie, but brought great prestige to a family even after the death of the holder.



Appendix 

The proportion of revenue generated by the Extraordinaire des Guerres as a ‘primary receiver’ A caveat should be entered here. The evidence is far too fragmentary to make a wholly accurate estimate of the amount of income generated for the War Ministry from its own sources, such as contributions and confiscations levied on enemy and neutral territory, the fining of officers, and revenue from provinces administered by the Secretary of State for War. But John Lynn’s estimates are so different to my own it is important to try to come to a rough assessment. Lynn’s estimates depend upon the misreading, in my view, of one key document and a doctoral thesis, and upon a narrow base of knowledge of the ministerial correspondence. The summary list of extraordinary receipts into the Extraordinaire des Guerres which still exists for  appears to total . million livres. Of this, about  per cent came from contributions; about  per cent from confiscations; and the other  per cent came from a mixture of windfall revenues, bankers’ bills of exchange processed by the Extraordinaire des Guerres for other people, fines on officers for misconduct, extra surplus revenue budgeted for but not used, customs tolls on the Rhine, the sale of materials, and profits from sick soldiers hors de combat. But this list has been grievously misinterpreted by Lynn. To begin with, the first part of the list, which has disappeared, entries  to , would have been ordinary receipts, such as assignations through the bureau des finances and ordinary revenue coming in from the ‘pays conquis’, so one should not assume, as Lynn does, that they represent more contribution entries, particularly since the existing entries cover all principal geographical regions within reach of contributing. Second, Lynn confuses total war expenditure, which he claims was  million livres, with the money processed directly by the Extraordinaire des Guerres. He therefore believes that the extraordinary receipts should be considered as representing over  per cent of military expenditure when in fact it was less. Third, Lynn does not appreciate that these accounts cover only the northern half of France. In the southern half at this time, for which no accounts survive, there were a good number of garrison troops, cavalry, and the army of Roussillon, but this army had only marginal success in raising contributions compared to the army of Flanders. To achieve a degree of accuracy requires an awareness of all these points. In  the Extraordinaire des Guerres received perhaps  million livres, including the 

The thesis is: Ferguson, ‘Blood and Fire’.



Appendix  ustencile, but this omits the cost of e´tapes, forage, other winter quarters subsidies, and bread and beef supply, all of which came to over  million livres and perhaps as many as  million. Contributions and confiscations therefore represented only between . and . per cent of total state-disbursed expenditure on the land forces, and even these figures still exclude pensions lavished on military officers, probably in the region of  to  million livres more paid through the Tr´esor royal. For the Nine Years War Lynn’s guesstimate of  per cent seems even further adrift. We are fortunate that Extraordinaire des Guerres accounts for the southern half of France survive for . In that year contributions, confiscations and other sources in that region brought in only – per cent of revenue. On top of this, Treasurer-General Turmenyes received around  million livres of assignations that year for all his operations; winter quarters, forage, bread supply costs and revenue from the ‘pays conquis’ all required the state to handle another  million or so (in cash or kind). If for a moment we accept Lynn’s belief that  per cent is a good estimate of the proportion that contributions made to income of the Extraordinaire des Guerres in the northern half of France (which is probably  per cent too much), then the aggregate proportion of Extraordinaire des Guerres funds derived from contributions, confiscations and other sources was no higher than about . per cent. If we further factor in military pensions, winter quarters subsidies and the like, ‘extraordinary receipts’ of the Extraordinaire des Guerres come to somewhere around only . per cent of total land force expenditure, not  per cent. Moreover, it must be added that  and  were years when French armies were comparatively successful at pulling in contributions. Certainly, from  the armies were much more on the defensive, the contribution management in Germany was botched, and many extraordinary receipts in Catalonia disappeared into people’s pockets. Villars’ campaign in Germany in , when over  per cent of his army’s revenue came through contributions or related means, was exceptional. Contributions were important in Piedmont in – but provided only around one-eighth of funds elsewhere in the same years, falling even further from  onwards. Many demands were not even met. It is really unsurprising, then, that in  contributions and confiscations accounted for only . million livres, or  per cent of total expenditure on the land forces of around  million. All this is a very long way from  per cent of total military expenditure. None of this negates the point that contributions could be a useful source of revenue which could make all the difference between a sedentary force and a campaigning army, but it is important to strangle at birth the myth that the Extraordinaire des Guerres had a pot of gold on which it could draw. 



If one excludes the windfall revenues, even under Lynn’s figures contributions and confiscations came to only . per cent of the revenue of the Extraordinaire des Guerres. See AN G , no. : Extraordinaire des Guerres summary of accounts for , . Ibid., no. : Extraordinaire des Guerres accounts for  []; no. : assignations received by Turmenyes for July ,  Aug. ; no. : e´tat of ustencile for  –  [c. –]; Lynn, Giant, pp.  – .



Bibliography The sources cited in the bibliography consist of those I have personally consulted. There are occasional references in the footnotes to other sources which have been kindly provided by other scholars, but which I have omitted from the bibliography.             Name and numbers refer to registers or cartons of manuscripts except where otherwise stated.

France Archives Cond´e, Chˆateau de Chantilly (ACC) Cabinet des Titres (Series A–U) A Carton ; A Register  ( E); E ; I ; O ; O ; S –; T –; U ; Nouvelles Acquisitions  and 

Cabinet des Livres (Manuscripts) Ms. D 

Archives des Affaires Etrang`eres (AAE) Correspondance Politique (CP) Allemagne  Angleterre –; Supp. – Autriche ; ; Supp.  Turquie –; –

M´emoires et Documents (MD) Suisse ;  Turquie ; 



Bibliography Archives Nationales, Paris (AN) Archives Priv´es (AP)  AP;  AP

Series AF IV  Plaq.I Series G  (Papers of the Controller-General of Finances) ; ; ; –; ; –; ; –; ; ; 

Series K (Royal papers) A

Series KK (Royal papers) –

Series T 

Archives of the Biblioth`eque du Minist`ere de la Guerre, Chˆateau de Vincennes (SHAT BMG) Manuscripts A. I. b. vols. – (Collection Saugeon of royal ordonnances)

Archives of the Service Historique de l’Arm´ee de Terre, Chˆateau de Vincennes (SHAT) Series A  (Ministerial Correspondence) ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; –; ; ; ; ; –; –; –; ; ; ; –; –; ; –; ; ; ; ; –; –; ; –; ; –; ; ; –; –; –; –; –; ; ; –; –; –; ; ; –; –; ; –; –; –; –; ; –; –; –; –; ; ; –; ; –; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; –



Bibliography Series A  s;  Series A  A.–; A.– Series A  Con II–III; Con LXXXVI

Series Xb –; ; ; ; – Series Xc – Series Ya ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;  Series Yb ; – Series Yc Yc– Series MR (M´emoires et Reconnaissances) ; ; ; ; ; –; ; ; ;  Ordonnances Militaires (OM) – (–May ) Ordonnances du Roi – carton

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

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Bibliography Courtin, A. de, Nouveau trait´e de la civilit´e qui se pratique en France parmi les honnˆetes hommes (Paris, ) van der Cruysse, D., ed., Madame Palatine: lettres fran¸caises (Paris, ) Dangeau, P. de Courcillon, marquis de, Journal du marquis de Dangeau . . . avec les additions in´edites du duc de Saint-Simon, ed. E. Souli´e, L. Dussieux and P. de Chennevi`eres,  vols. (Paris, –) Daniel, G., Histoire de la milice fran¸coise,  vols. (Paris, ) Etienne-Gallois, A., ed., Lettres in´edites des Feuqui`eres tir´ees des papiers de famille de Madame la duchesse Decazes,  vols. (Paris, –) Faret, N., L’honneste homme, ou l’art de plaire a` la court, ed. M. Magendie (Paris,  edn) Feuqui`eres, A. de Pas, marquis de, M´emoires de M. le marquis de Feuquiere, lieutenant general des arm´ees du roi, contenant ses maximes sur la guerre, & l’application des exemples aux maximes (London, ) – earlier editions are bogus and unauthorised. Foisset, P., ed., ‘M´emoires militaires de Pierre Quarr´e, comte d’Aligny’, Soci´et´e d’Histoire, d’Arch´eologie et de Litt´erature de l’Arrondissement de Beaune, M´emoires Ann´ee  (Beaune, ) Forster, E., ed., A Woman’s Life in the Court of the Sun King: Letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz, – (London, ) Gaya, L. de, L’art de la guerre et la mani`ere dont on la fait a` present (The Hague,  edn) Trait´e des armes, des machines de guerre, des feux d’artifice, des enseignes, et des instrumens militaires (Paris, ) Gaydon, chevalier de, ‘The Chevalier Gaydon’s Memoir of the Regiment of Dillon, ’, ´ Briain, The Irish Sword  (–), –, –, –; ibid. ed. and trans. L. O  (–), –, –, –, –; ibid.  (–), –, –, –; ibid.  (–), –, –, –. Geffroy, A., ed., Madame de Maintenon d’apr`es sa correspondance authentique. Choix de ses lettres et entretiens,  vols. (Paris, ) Grimoard, P., ed., M´emoires et lettres du mar´echal de Tess´e contenant des anecdotes et des faits historiques inconnus, sur partie des r`egnes de Louis XIV et de Louis XV,  vols. (Paris, ) Hardr´e, J., ed., Letters of Louvois (Chapel Hill, NC, ) Jordan-Smith, P., and S. Burrell, eds., Amiable Renegade: The Memoirs of Capt. Peter Drake – (London, ) La Colonie, J.-M. de, M´emoires de M. de La Colonie, Mar´echal de Camp des Arm´ees de l’Electeur de Baviere,  vols. (Brussels, ) La Fayette, Madame de, (?), ‘M´emoires de la cour de France pour les ann´ees  et ’, in R. Duchˆene, ed., Madame de La Fayette: oeuvres compl`etes (Paris, ), pp. – La Fontaine, sieur de, Les devoirs militaires des officiers de l’infanterie, contenant l’exercice des gens de guerre, selon la pratique de ce temps (Paris, ) Lamont, M. de, ‘The Duties of all the Officers of the Foot’, in The Art of War in Four Parts (London, ), pp. – ‘The Duties of a Soldier’, in ibid., pp. – La Valli`ere, F. de La Baume Le Blanc, chevalier de, ‘The Duties of a General’, in ibid., pp. – Lavall´ee, T., ed., Correspondance g´en´erale de Madame de Maintenon,  vols. (Paris, –)

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Bibliography Le Bouyer de Saint-Gervais, B., ed., M´emoires et correspondance du mar´echal de Catinat,  vols. (Paris, ) Lecestre, L., ed., M´emoires de Saint-Hilaire,  vols. (Paris, –) Louis XIV, king of France and Navarre, ‘R´eflexions sur le m´etier de roi’, in Oeuvres, ed. P. A. Grouvelle and P. H. de Grimoard,  vols. (Paris, ), vol. II, – M´emoires for the Instruction of the Dauphin, ed. P. Sonnino (London, ) Mallet, J.-R., Comptes rendus de l’administration des finances du royaume de France (London, ) Manesson Mallet, A., Les travaux de Mars ou l’art de la guerre (Amsterdam, –) Massiac, M. de, M´emoires de ce qui s’est pass´e de plus considerable pendant la guerre depuis l’an  jusqu’en  (Paris, ) M´er´e, A. Gombault, chevalier de, Oeuvres, ed. C.-H. Boudhors,  vols. (Paris, ) Millot, C.-F. X., M´emoires politiques et militaires, pour servir a` l’histoire de Louis XIV et de Louis XV. Compos´e sur les pi`eces originales recueillies par Adrien-Maurice, duc de Noailles, mar´echal de France & ministre d’´etat,  vols. (Lausanne, ) Mirmand, Henri de, ‘M´emoire in´edit d’Henri de Mirmand’, Bulletin de la Soci´et´e de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Fran¸cais  (), – Montbas, baron J.-F. Barton de, Au service du Roi. M´emoires in´edits d’un officier de Louis XIV, ed. vˆıcomte H. de Montbas (Paris, ) Morains, F. de, Le major parfait qui enseigne avec facilit´e le maniment des armes () Muralt, B.-L. de, Lettres sur les Anglais et les Fran¸cais (Lausanne, ) Primi Visconti, Giovanni Battista, conte di San Maiolo, M´emoires sur la cour de Louis XIV, –, ed. J.-F. Solnon (Paris, ) Racine, J., Oeuvres,  vols. (Paris, –) Richard, M., ed., M´emoires d’Isaac Dumont de Bostaquet gentilhomme normand (Paris, ) Rochas d’Aiglun, E. de, ed., Vauban: sa famille et ses e´crits, ses oisivet´es et sa correspondance,  vols. (Paris, ) Saint-Maurice, Thomas-Franc¸ois, marquis de, Lettres sur la cour de Louis XIV –, vol. I, ed. J. Lemoine (Paris, ) Saint-Remy, P. Surirey de, M´emoires d’artillerie recueillis par le Sr. Surirey de Saint Remy commissaire provincial de l’artillerie, & l’un des cent & un officiers privil´egiez de ce corps,  vols. (Paris, ) Saint-Simon, L. de Rouvroy, duc de, M´emoires du duc de Saint-Simon, ed. A. de Boislisle  vols. (Paris, –) Sarram´ea, F. de, Lettres d’un cadet de Gascogne sous Louis XIV, ed. F. Abbadie (Paris, ) Saulx-Tavanes, J. de, Memoires de Jacques de Saulx, comte de Tavannes, lieutenant general des arm´ees du roy (Paris, ) S´evign´e, Madame de, Lettres, ed. E. G´erard-Gailly,  vols. (Paris, –) Sourches, L.-F. du Bouchet, marquis de, M´emoires du marquis de Sourches sur le r`egne de Louis XIV, ed. G.-J. de Cosnac, A. Bertrand and E. Pontal,  vols. (Paris, –) Spanheim, E., Relation de la cour de France en , ed. E. Bourgeois (Paris, ) Trotti de La Ch´etardie, J., Instructions pour un jeune seigneur, ou, l’id´ee d’un galant homme,  vols. (Paris, ) Vog¨ue´ , marquis de, M´emoires du Mar´echal de Villars,  vols. (Paris, –)

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Bibliography              In order to avoid a vast list, I have largely confined this part of the bibliography to works cited in the text. I have omitted, in particular, nearly all the voluminous amount of material on foreign policy. Adamson, J., ed., The Princely Courts of Europe – (London, ) Alder, K., Engineering the Revolution. Arms and Enlightenment in France, – (Princeton, ) Anderson, M. S., War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, – (London, ) Andr´e, L., Michel Le Tellier et l’organisation de l’arm´ee monarchique (Paris, ) Michel Le Tellier et Louvois (Paris, ) Asch, R., The Thirty Years War. The Holy Roman Empire and Europe, – (London, ) Asch, R., and A. Birke, eds., Princes, Patronage and Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c. – (Oxford, ) Aspect, M. de, Histoire de l’ordre royal et militaire de Saint-Louis,  vols. (Paris, ) Audouin, X., Histoire de l’administration de la guerre (Paris, ) Aylmer, G. E., ‘Bureaucracy’, in P. Burke, ed., New Cambridge Modern History Companion Volume, vol. XIII (Cambridge, ), pp. – Bannister, M., ‘Crescit ut aspicitur: Cond´e and the Reinterpretation of Heroism, –’, in K. Cameron and E. Woodrough, eds., Ethics and Politics in Seventeenth-Century France. Essays in Honour of Derek A. Watts (Exeter, ), pp. – Barker, N., Brother to the Sun King: Philippe, Duke of Orl´eans (London, ) Barker, T., ‘Military Entrepreneurship and Absolutism: Habsburg Models’, Journal of European Studies  (), – ‘Armed Service and Nobility in the Holy Roman Empire: General Aspects and Habsburg Particulars’, Armed Forces and Society  (), – Barraz, F., Peter Stoppa –. La vie d’un commandant de r´egiment suisse au service de la France, sous Louis XIV (Cully, Switzerland, ) Baxter, D. C., Servants of the Sword: French Intendants of the Army – (London, ) ‘Premier Commis in the War Department in the Latter Part of the Reign of Louis XIV’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History  (), – ‘The Commissaires des Guerres in the s’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History  (), – Bayard, F., Le monde des financiers au XVIIe si`ecle (Paris, ) Bayard, F., and D. Dessert, ‘Les financiers dans l’´etat monarchique en guerre au XVIIe si`ecle’, in E. Le Roy Ladurie, ed., Les monarchies (Paris, ), pp. – B´eguin, K., Les princes de Cond´e. Rebelles, courtisans et m´ec`enes dans la France du Grand Si`ecle (Seyssel, ) Beik, W., Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, ) Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France. The Culture of Retribution (Cambridge, )

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Bibliography Belhomme, V., Histoire de l’infanterie en France,  vols. (Paris, –) L’arm´ee fran¸caise en  (Paris, ) B´ely, L., J. B´erenger and A. Corvisier, Guerre et paix dans l’Europe du XVIIe si`ecle,  vols. (Paris, ) B´erenger, J., ‘Charles Colbert, marquis de Croissy’, in R. Mousnier, ed., Le conseil du roi de Louis XII a` la r´evolution (Paris, ), pp. – Turenne (Paris, ) Berger, P., ‘Pontchartrain and the Grain Trade during the Famine of ’, Journal of Modern History Supp. ,  (), – ‘French Administration in the Famine of ’, European Studies Review  (), – Bergin, J., Cardinal Richelieu. Power and the Pursuit of Wealth (London, ) Bertin, P., ‘Les Colonels G´en´eraux de l’Infanterie’, Revue Historique des Arm´ees  (), – Billac¸ois, F., Le duel dans la soci´et´e fran¸caise des XVIe–XVIIe si`ecles: essai de psychosociologie historique (Paris, ) Bitton, D., The French Nobility in Crisis, – (Stanford, ) Black, J., A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society – (Basingstoke, ) Blanchard, A., Les ‘ing´enieurs du roy’ de Louis XIV a` Louis XVI. Etude du corps des fortifications (Montpellier, ) ‘Vers la ceinture de fer, milieu du XVIe – d´ebut du XVIIIe si`ecle’, in Contamine and Corvisier, eds., Histoire militaire de la France, vol. I, pp. – Vauban (Paris, ) Blaufarb, R., ‘Noble Privilege and Absolutist State-Building: French Military Administration after the Seven Years’ War’, French Historical Studies  (), – Bluche, F., ed., Dictionnaire du Grand Si`ecle (Paris, ) Louis XIV (Oxford, ) Bonnefoy, F., ‘Maximilien Titon, directeur g´en´eral des magasins d’armes de Louis XIV, et le d´eveloppement des armes portatives en France’, Histoire, Economie et Soci´et´e ,  (), – ‘Maximilien Titon, et le d´eveloppement des armes portatives en France, sous Louis XIV’, Revue Historique des Arm´ees  (), – Bonney, R., Political Change in France under Richelieu and Mazarin – (Oxford, ) The King’s Debts: Finance and Politics in France, – (Oxford, ) ‘Absolutism: What’s in a Name?’, French History  (), – ‘Was There a Bourbon Style of Government?’, in K. Cameron, ed., From Valois to Bourbon: Dynasty, State and Society in Early Modern France (Exeter, ), pp. – ‘Bodin and the Development of the French Monarchy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society th series,  (), – ‘ “Le secret de leurs familles”: The Fiscal and Social Limits of Louis XIV’s dixi`eme’, French History  (), – ‘The Eighteenth Century II. The Struggle for Great Power Status and the End of the Old Fiscal R´egime’, in R. Bonney, ed., Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford, ), pp. – ‘Revenues’, in ibid., pp. –

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  Bingham, R. B., ‘Louis XIV and the War for Peace: The Genesis of a Peace Offensive, –’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, ) Ferguson, R. T., ‘Blood and Fire: Contribution Policy of the French Armies in Germany (–)’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, ) Foissier, B., ‘Un commissaire des guerres de Louis XIV: Jean Chrisostome de Gresillemont –’ (m´emoire de maˆıtrise, Universit´e de Paris I, ) Gillet, D., ‘Etude de la d´esertion dans les arm´ees royales a` l’´epoque de Louis XIV’ (m´emoire de maˆıtrise, Universit´e de Paris I, ) Handen, R. D., ‘The Savoy Negotiations of the Comte de Tess´e, –’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, )



Bibliography Herman, C. W., ‘Knights and Kings in Early Modern France: Royal Orders of Knighthood, –’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, ) Inglis-Jones, J., ‘The Grand Cond´e in Exile: Power Politics in France, Spain and the Spanish Netherlands’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, ) Iung, J.-E., ‘Service des vivres et munitionnaires sous l’ancien r´egime: la fourniture du pain de munition aux troupes de Flandre et d’Allemagne de  a` ’,  vols. (dissertation for the diplˆome d’archiviste-pal´eographe, Ecole Nationale des Chartes, Paris, ) Mettam, R., ‘The Role of the Higher Aristocracy in France under Louis XIV, with Special Reference to the “Faction of the Duke of Burgundy” and the Provincial Governors’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, ) Nachison, B., ‘Provincial Government in the Ancien Regime: The Princes of Cond´e in Burgundy, –’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, ) Parrott, D., ‘The Administration of the French Army during the Ministry of Cardinal Richelieu’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, ) Poulain, N., ‘Le marquis de Beringhen (–). R´ecit de la vie d’un curieux et e´ tude de sa collection au Cabinet des Estampes de la Biblioth`eque Nationale’ (dissertation for the DEA, Universit´e de Paris IV, ) Rowlands, G., ‘Power, Authority and Army Administration under Louis XIV: The French Crown and the Military Elites in the Era of the Nine Years War’ (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, ) Stoll, M., ‘Claude Le Peletier (–) contrˆoleur g´en´eral des finances de Louis XIV’ (dissertation for the diplˆome d’archiviste–pal´eographe, Ecole Nationale des Chartes, Paris, ) Symcox, G., ‘Louis XIV and the War in Ireland, –. A Study of His Strategic Thinking and Decision-Making’ (Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, )



Index The military ranks given for individuals refer to the most senior and most important positions they held during the period –. ‘absolutism’, debate over, – Acad´emie royal de peinture et de sculpture,  academies for noble youth, , – accounts,  aides-de-camp of generals,  Alais, Louis-Emmanuel de Valois-Angoulˆeme, comte de, son of Charles d’Angoulˆeme (q.v.), Colonel-General of the cavalry, , – Albergotti, Francesco, conte di, mar´echal de camp, – alcohol, disruptive effects of,  Al´egre, Marie-Th´er`ese-Delphine-Eustachie de, see Barbezieux, marquise de Al´egre, Yves, marquis de, mar´echal de camp, – Alsace, province of,  ambition, –,  Andr´e, Louis, historian, , , , , , , n Andrezel, commissaire des guerres,  Anet, principality of,  Angoulˆeme, Charles de Valois, duc de, bastard son of Charles IX of France, Colonel-General of the cavalry,  Angoulˆeme, Louis, chevalier de, bastard son of Alais (q.v.), fid`ele of Conti,  Angoumois and Saintonge, province of,  Anne of Austria, queen of France (–), regent of France (–), consort of Louis XIII (q.v.), mother of Louis XIV (q.v.), , , ,  Antin, Antoine-Louis de Pardaillan de Gondrin, marquis de, legitimate son of Mme de Montespan (q.v.),  Antin, Julie-Franc¸oise de Crussol d’Uz`es, marquise de, wife of Antoine-Louis d’Antin (q.v.) and sister-in-law of Barbezieux (q.v.),  architectural activity, 

Argouges, Florent de, marquis du Plessis, intendant,  Armagnac, Louis de Lorraine, comte de, Grand Ecuyer du Roi, ; see also Lorraine, Armagnac branch arms industries,  arms supply, – army of Flanders,  Arnauld, Jean-Louis, Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, , –, n, ,  Arnauld, Marcelin, Treasurer-Provincial of the Extraordinaire des Guerres,  Artaignan, Pierre de Montesquiou, lieutenant-general,  artillery, , , ,  Artois, province of,  Asfeld, Benoˆıt Bidal, baron de, mar´echal de camp, n Aubert, commissaire des guerres,  Aumont, Anne-Charlotte de, see Cr´equi, marquise de Aumont, Louis-Marie-Victor, marquis de Villequier, duc de (), xxii,  Aumont, Madeleine-Fare Le Tellier, marquise de Villequier, wife of Louis-Marie-Victor d’Aumont (q.v.), xxii–xxiii,  Aumont, Marie-Madeleine de, see Beringhen, marquise de Autun, Gabriel de Roquette, bishop of,  Auvergne, Fr´ed´eric-Maurice de La Tour d’Auvergne, comte de, Colonel-General of the cavalry, , , – Avignon, Papal enclave of,  Bachivillers, Alophe de Gaudechart, seigneur de, lieutenant-general,  Bagnols, Dreux-Louis Dugu´e de, intendant of east Flanders, intendant d’arm´ee, , , 



Index Staffarda (), – Steinkerque (), ,  Ter, of the River (), – Walcourt (),  Baxter, Douglas Clark, historian, , ,  Bayeux, e´lection of,  Beaufort, Franc¸ois de Bourbon-Vendˆome, duc de,  Beauvez´e, sieur de, cavalry inspector, – Beauvillier, Paul de Beauvillier, duc de Saint-Aignan and de, Premier gentilhomme de la chambre du Roi, son-in-law of Jean-Baptiste I Colbert (q.v.), , , n B´echameil de Nointel, Louis, intendant of Brittany, intendant d’arm´ee, intendant of Philippe I, duc d’Orl´eans (q.v.),  Bedmar, Isidor Juan de la Cueva, marquis of, Spanish ambassador in France,  Beik, William, historian, –, n, n Bellefonds, Bernardin Gigault, marquis de, marshal of France (), , , , ,  Beringhen, Jacques-Louis, marquis de, Premier Ecuyer du Roi, xxiii,  Beringhen, Marie-Madeleine d’Aumont, marquise de, xxiii,  B´erulle, Pierre de, intendant of the Lyonnais,  Berwick, James Fitzjames, duke of, marshal of France (), bastard son of James II (q.v.), ,  Bezons, Franc¸ois Bazin de, intendant,  billeting of troops,  Billy, de, commissaire des guerres,  Black, Jeremy, historian,  Blois, Franc¸oise-Marie de Bourbon, Mlle de, bastard daughter of Louis XIV (q.v.) and Mme de Montespan, (q.v.)  Bodin, Jean, political theorist, – Bonn, city of,  Bonney, Richard, historian,  Bontemps, Alexandre, valet de chambre of Louis XIV,  Bonval, commissaire des guerres, – Bonzi, Pierre de, cardinal-archbishop of Narbonne, n Bouchu, Jean-Etienne, intendant of the Dauphin´e, intendant d’arm´ee, –, , –, , , – Boufflers, Louis-Franc¸ois, duc de, marshal of France (), Colonel of the Gardes Franc¸aises, Colonel-General of the dragoons, , , , , , , , –, –, –, , , 

Bagnols, Franc¸ois de, intendant of the Lyonnais, ,  Balagny, Jean, financier,  Barbezieux, Catherine-Louise-Charlotte de Crussol d’Uz`es, marquise de (), wife of Louis-Franc¸ois-Marie de Barbezieux, xxii–xxiii, ,  Barbezieux, Louis-Franc¸ois-Marie Le Tellier, marquis de, son of Franc¸ois-Michel I de Louvois (q.v.), Secretary of State for War (–) abilities and application to duties, –, –,  control over finance and logistics for armies, – crisis of career , – death,  debts,  early career, , , – Extraordinaire des Guerres, treasury of, –, ,  family ties, xxii–xxiii, –, n,  lack of enthusiasm for reforms to the War Ministry,  love of hunting, ,  management of regiments, , , ,  offices held and aspired to, , – relationships with generals, , , –, , , –, –, , , –,  relationships with princes, –,  relationships with War Ministry agents, –, , –,  Barbezieux, Marie-Th´er`ese-DelphineEustachie d’Al`egre, marquise de (), wife of Louis-Franc¸ois-Marie de Barbezieux, xxii, – Barentin, intendant of Maritime Flanders,  bastards, royal, see Louis XIV, and his family; Maine; Princes l´egitim´es; Toulouse; Vermandois; Blois; Conti, princesse de battles Beachy Head (), n Cassel (),  Crossing of the Rhine (),  Fleurus (), n, , ,  K¨onz-Saarbr¨ucken (), ,  La Marf´ee (),  La Marsaglia (), ,  Lens (),  Neerwinden (), –, , ,  Oudenarde (),  Rocroi (),  Senef (), 



Index Chaulnes, Charles d’Albert d’Ailly, duc de, ,  Chauvelin, Louis III, intendant of the Franche-Comt´e,  Chemerault, Jean-No¨el-Franc¸ois de Barbezi`eres, comte de, mar´echal de camp, ,  Chevaux-l´egers Dauphins, company of, see Gendarmerie de France Chevaux-l´egers de la Garde du Roi,  Chevreuse, Charles-Honor´e d’Albert, duc de, son-in-law of Jean-Baptiste I Colbert (q.v.), , ,  chief minister, position of, – Choiseul, Etienne-Franc¸ois, duc de, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (–), for the Marine (–) and for War (–), ,  Choiseul, Claude, comte de, marshal of France (), ,  Chouin, Marie-Emilie Joly, Mlle de, morganatic second wife of Louis de France, Grand Dauphin (q.v.),  Clerville, Nicolas, chevalier de, Commissaire g´en´eral des fortifications,  Clermont-Chatte, Franc¸ois-Alphonse de, chevalier de Clermont, – clientage among general officers, –, , ,  clientage in military units advancement of friends and relations, ,  dilution of clientage under Louis XIV, – financial assistance to subordinates,  loyalty to colonel/patron, , , –,  Cobban, Alfred, historian,  Coigny, Director-General of the cavalry,  Colbert, Charles, marquis de Croissy, see Croissy Colbert, Jean-Baptiste I, Controller-General of Finances (–), Secretary of State for the Marine and the Royal Household (–), Surintendant des Arts, Bˆatiments et Manufactures (–), , , , –, , , , , n, , n,  Colbert, Jean-Baptiste II, marquis de Seignelay, see Seignelay Coligny, Jean, comte de, lieutenant-general, – Collins, James, historian, –, n Cologne, prince-archbishopric of,  Colonel-General of the cavalry, , –, , –, –

Bouillon, Emmanuel-Th´eodose de La Tour d’Auvergne, cardinal de, ,  Boulonnais, province of,  Bourbon, Louis III de Bourbon-Cond´e, duc de, son of Henri-Jules de Cond´e (q.v.), – Bourdon, premier commis of the War Ministry,  Bourgogne, duc de, see Louis de France, duc de Bourgogne Bourgogne, Marie-Ad´ela¨ıde de Savoie, duchesse de (–), wife of Louis de France, duc de Bourgogne (q.v.),  bread, see supplies Brittany, province of, , ,  Bullion, Claude, Surintendant des finances –,  Burgundy, province of, ,  cadet companies –, – Campbell, Peter, historian, – Camus de Beaulieu, Germain-Michel, Controller-General of the artillery,  Carlier, Pierre, intendant,  Carlos II, king of Spain (r. –),  Casale Monferrato, fortress of, , , ,  casualties, , ,  Catinat, Nicolas, sieur de La Fauconnerie, marshal of France (), , , , , , , –, –, –, –, –, , , ,  cavalry, officers of the e´tat-major of the,  Caylus, Pierre-Joseph-Hyacinthe, marquis de, dragoon colonel,  Cent-Suisses de la Garde du Roi, company of, xxiii, – Chabrey, Benoˆıt, Treasurer-Provincial of the Extraordinaire des Guerres,  Chagniot, Jean, historian, –,  Chambre des comptes of Paris, , , n,  Chamillart, Michel, Controller-General of Finances (–), Secretary of State for War (–), , , , , , ,  Chamlay, Jules-Louis Bol´e, marquis de, , , , , , , , , , –, , , ,  Champagne, province of, ,  Charles XI, king of Sweden (r. –),  Charost, family of B´ethune de, n,  Charpentier, premier commis of the War Ministry,  Charuel, Jacques, intendant d’arm´ee, ,  Chˆatillon, Paul-Sigismond de Montmorency, comte de luxe, duc de, son of Franc¸oisHenri de Luxembourg (q.v.), –



Index Colonel-General of the dragoons, –, , ,  Colonel-General of the infantry, –, – Commissaire general of the cavalry, – Commissaires aux revues et logements des gens de guerre,  commissaires des guerres absenteeism,  careers of, ,  clientage relationships with the Le Tellier, – commissaires ordonnateurs, – complaisance for the interests of others, –, ,  difficulties with military officers,  dismissals of, – ennoblement,  evolution of the corps to , – fraud perpetrated by, –,  indebtedness in the s, –,  insufficiency of, –, – personal interests,  reforms to the corps in the s, – roles and tasks, –, , , , – scrutiny of,  traditional historiography,  trafficking in the posts,  communications difficulties, , , ; see also postal system Compi`egne,  military manoeuvres at, , ,  Cond´e, Henri-Jules, prince de, son of Louis II de Bourbon-Cond´e (q.v.), –, , , –, , n,  Cond´e, house of Bourbon-, , ,  Cond´e, Louis II de Bourbon, prince de, k.a. the Grand Cond´e, , , , –, , , , , ,  Constant, Jean-Marie, historian,  Constable, grand office of, , , ,  Conti, Anne-Marie de Bourbon, princesse de, bastard daughter of Louis XIV and Louise de La Valli`ere, wife of Louis-Armand de Bourbon-Conti (q.v.), – Conti, Armand de Bourbon, prince de, brother of Louis II de Bourbon-Cond´e (q.v.),  Conti, Franc¸ois-Louis de Bourbon, prince de La Roche-sur-Yon, then () prince de, son of Armand de Bourbon-Conti (q.v.), , –, –, –, ,  Conti, Louis-Armand de Bourbon (†), prince de, son of Armand de Bourbon-Cond´e (q.v.), , 

contributions, income from, –, – contrˆoleurs des guerres, , –, –, ,  Controller-General of Finances, office of, –, ; see also Colbert, Jean-Baptiste I; Le Peletier, Claude; Pontchartrain; Chamillart; Desmaretz Corneille, Pierre, dramatist,  corruption collusion between different officials, , , , – commis of the War Ministry as guilty parties, – difficulties detecting, –, – diminution of,  endemic nature in the system, –,  fight against, – fraud in accounts, – intendants or their bureaux as guilty parties, –, , , – link to administrative breakdowns,  minimisation of,  muster fraud, see muster fraud necessity of some corruption, –, ,  punishment of, – theft within the Extraordinaire des Guerres, – Corvisier, Andr´e, historian, , , , , n, n, , , , n councils, royal conseil de conscience,  conseil d’en haut, , , –, –, – conseil des d´epˆeches,  conseil royal des finances,  court, royal, , ,  Courtanvaux, Franc¸ois-Michel II Le Tellier, marquis de, son of Franc¸ois-Michel I de Louvois (q.v.), xxii, –, –, , , ,  Courtanvaux, Marie-Anne-Catherine d’Estr´ees, marquise de, xxii, ,  Courtilz de Sandras, Gatien des, military writer and thinker,  Courtin, Honor´e, diplomat, –,  Crenan, Pierre de Perrien, marquis de, lieutenant-general, governor of Casale (q.v.),  Cr´equi, Anne-Charlotte d’Aumont, marquise de, wife of Franc¸ois-Joseph de Cr´equi (q.v.),  Cr´equi, Franc¸ois, sire de, marshal of France (), , –, , –, ,  Cr´equi, Franc¸ois-Joseph, marquis de, son of Franc¸ois de Cr´equi (q.v.), lieutenantgeneral, , 



Index Croissy, Charles Colbert, marquis de, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (–), brother of Jean-Baptiste I Colbert (q.v.), –, , , , ,  Crozat, Antoine, financier, –

dynasticism of French noble families, –, – of the House of France, –, –, – proprietary theories of, – economic situation, see socio-economic structure Elliott, J. H., historian,  ennoblement, , ,  entrepreneurship, see regimental officers Epernon, Bernard de Nogaret de La Valette, second duc de, son of Jean-Louis d’Epernon (q.v.), Colonel-General of the infantry, ,  Epernon, Jean-Louis de Nogaret de La Valette, first duc de, Colonel-General of the infantry,  Epinoy, Louis de Melun, prince de, infantry colonel,  Esgrigny, Ren´e-Jou¨enne de, intendant d’arm´ee, , , , n, , – estates, relationship with the army of provincial, ,  Estates-General of France,  Estrades, Godefroy, comte de, marshal of France (),  Estr´ees, house of,  Estr´ees, Jean, comte de, marshal of France (),  Estr´ees, Marie-Anne-Catherine de, see Courtanvaux, marquise de Estr´ees, Victor-Marie, comte de, son of Jean d’Estr´ees (q.v.),  e´tapes, system of, , –, –, – Evreux, Henri-Louis de La Tour d’Auvergne, comte de, Colonel-General of the cavalry,  expenditure on military matters and war, –, ,  Extraordinaire des Guerres, treasury of the accountancy division, –, – accounts, ,  alternation of treasurers in office, ,  artillery funding, – associates and backers of, , – attempts at reform, , , –,  attractions of the service, – banking facilities,  bills of exchange, – commis, , , – commission on handling funds,  contributions from enemy territory, –, – corruption,  counter-productive royal policies, 

Dampierre, commissaire des guerres,  Dangeau, Louis de Courcillon, abb´e de, scholar,  Darbon de Bellou, Jean, premier commis of the War Ministry, Le Tellier family intendant, , – Dauphin´e, province of the,  Davis, Natalie Zemon, historian,  debasement of the currency, , ,  demobilisation, see r´eformes disbandments,  Desbournays, Ren´e de P´erouse, Inspector-General of infantry, – Deschiens, commis in the Finance Ministry, n desertion counter-productive government policies,  importance of fair pay and conditions for men, – methods of recruitment as a cause of,  numbers of deserters, – officer desertion,  penalties if caught, – weakness of policing methods, ,  Desmadrys, intendant of Maritime Flanders,  Desmaretz, Nicolas, Controller-General of Finances (–), nephew of Jean-Baptiste I Colbert (q.v.), n Desnanotz, commissaire des guerres,  Desnoz´es, Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres,  Dessert, Daniel, historian, – Dewald, Jonathan, historian, , , ,  Divine Providence, , , , ,  Dossillon, Ren´e, dragoon colonel,  dragoons, independence of from cavalry, ,  Du Bois, commissaire des guerres, ,  Du Bourg, mar´echal des logis de la cavalerie, cavalry inspector,  Du Bourg, L´eonor-Marie du Maine, comte, mar´echal de camp,  Du Fresnoy, Elie, premier commis of the War Ministry, , , – Duras, Jacques-Henri de Durfort, duc de, nephew of Henri de Turenne (q.v.), marshal of France (), –, , , , –, –, –, , 



Index disbursement of funds, –, , –,  e´tapes assistance, – excess of paperwork,  fortification funding, –,  historiographical neglect,  insolvency, , –,  ministerial oversight, – opportunities for advancement,  organisation after , – origins to , – regimental funds, management of, ,  shared liabilities, –, – sources of income, , , , –, –,  supporting supply companies,  theft, see corruption, theft Treasurers-General, , , , –,  Treasurers-Provincial, , 

Frondes, – rebellions of the,  Fumeron, Jean-Franc¸ois de, intendant d’arm´ee, ,  Gac´e, Charles-Auguste de Goyon de Matignon, marquis de, marshal of France (), k.a. mar´echal de Matignon, ,  Galleys of France, –,  gambling and chance, , – Ganges, Alexandre de Vissec de La Tude, marquis de, dragoon colonel,  garderobe du Roi, xxiii,  Gardes du corps du Roi, companies of the, xxiii, ,  Gardes Franc¸aises, r´egiment des, , , , , ,  Gaya, Louis de, military writer and thinker, ,  Gendarmerie de France, companies of, , –, , , – Gendarmes de la Garde du Roi, company of,  general officers additional financial support from crown for, ,  appointment of, –, –, – as fortress governors, ,  as provincial governors, –, , , –, –, ,  commanders-in-chief of armies, , – control of regiments and their officers, –, , ,  control over finances of the army, – control over logistics, – control over strategy and operations, – dismissals, , ,  guard companies of,  hierarchy of, – indebtedness of, – insubordination and disobedience of, – judicial authority, – nature of the ‘high command’, – patronage power of, – points of lobbying,  promotions in rank, – relationships between, –, –, –, ,  relationships with intendants, , – roles of subordinate general ranks, –,  social advancement of, –, – staff officers of the armies, – strain of command, 

family, advancement of, –,  family, notions of, –,  Faultrier, abb´e Joachim, secretary of the artillery,  F´enelon, Franc¸ois Salignac de La Motte, abb´e de, archbishop of Cambrai,  Ferguson, Ronald, historian, n Feuqui`eres, Antoine de Pas, marquis de, lieutenant-general and military writer, , n, –, , ,  financial contribution of the nobility to war, , , –, , – fiscal system and crown revenues, , n, , –, –, , –, , , n, n Flanders, French province of,  Flandrin, Jean-Louis, historian,  Florensac, Louis de Crussol d’Uz`es, comte de, mar´echal de camp,  Foissier, B., historian, – Forbonnais, Franc¸ois de V´eron de, financial historian,  Forster, Robert, historian,  Fouquet, Nicolas, Surintendant des finances –, –, , –,  Fourilles, chevalier de, Mestre de camp general of the cavalry, –,  Franche-Comt´e, province of, –,  Francesco I, duke of Modena (r. –),  Francis I, king of France (r. –), , ,  fraud, see corruption ´nigo Fern´andez de Velasco y Tovar, Fr´ıas, Don I˜ seventh duke of, Constable of Castile, 



Index general officers (Continued ) subvention of the military coffers by, , , – See also Barbezieux, relationships with generals; Louis XIV; Louvois, relationships with generals Genlis, Hardouin Brˆulart, chevalier de, Director-General of infantry, mar´echal de camp, , ,  Girard, Georges, historian,  ‘gloire’, concept of, , – governors provincial, , , , , – fortress,  Gramont, Antoine-Charles, duc de, governor of B´earn, , – Gramsci, Antonio, political theorist,  Grand Dauphin, see Louis de France, Grand Dauphin Grandmaison, Nicolas Leclerc de, Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres,  grands, definition of, – gratifications for expenses and wounds, – Great Chain of Being, n,  Gresillemont, Jean Chrisostome de, commissaire des guerres, – Grignan, Franc¸ois-Adh´emar de Monteil, comte de, lieutenant-general of Provence,  Gu´en´egaud, Henri, sieur du Plessis, Secretary of State for the Royal Household (–),  Guiche, Antoine de Gramont, duc de, son of Antoine-Charles de Gramont (q.v.), Mestre de camp general of the cavalry, – Guiscard, Louis, comte de, lieutenant-general, governor of Namur, , 

high command of armies, see general officers, relationships between historiography of the French army, –, –, , –,  ‘honnˆete homme’, see regimental officers; social conduct and mores honour, , , – hospitals (military), , –, ,  Hotman, Franc¸ois, political theorist,  Huguenots, , –, , ,  Humi`eres, Louis de Crevant, marquis de, marshal of France (), Grand Master of the Artillery, , –, , , , –, , ,  hunting, xxiii, , –, , n Huxelles, Nicolas de Laye du Bl´e, marquis de, lieutenant-general, n, , , ,  inspectorate, military Colonel-Generals and their deputies, – complaisance for the interests of others, , ,  dragoons inspected with cavalry,  effectiveness of new system from , , –,  excessive harshness of some inspectors, ,  hiatus of –, , – inspections by Louis XIV and ministers, ,  role of inspectors, , – splits within, – structure of the systems, –,  support and rewards for inspectors, – intendants, provincial auditing of accounts and financial monitoring, –, – corruption by their underlings, ,  corruption of, – dereliction of duty and fraud, ,  earlier careers, ,  management of occupied territories, ,  personal interests and ambitions, – provinces under War Ministry control, – relationships with each other,  relationships with governors and prelates,  relationships with ministers, , – roles and tasks, ,  work with the War Ministry, – Intendants d’arm´ee auditing of accounts and financial monitoring, , –, – clientage relationship with the Le Telliers, , –, 

Habsburg, Austrian branch of house of,  Hainault, province of,  Harcourt, Henri, duc de, lieutenant-general, , , ,  Hautefeuille, Gabriel-Etienne-Louis Texier, marquis de, colonel of dragoons,  Henri III, king of France (r. –), , , ,  Henri IV, king of France (r. –), , , ,  Herleville, Antoine de Brouilly, marquis de, governor of Pinerolo, ,  Herv´e, commissaire des guerres,  Hessein, secretary of the dragoons,  hierarchical principles, weakness of, –, –, , , , , –, , 



Index corruption on the part of, –, ,  dismissals, – earlier careers, – evolution of roles and tasks pre-,  hospital management, – overburdening,  personal interests and ambitions, –, – relationships with commissaires des guerres, – relationships with generals, , –, – relationships with other intendants, , , – roles and tasks, , –, , ,  salaries and rewards, ,  subvention of the military coffers by,  supply management,  sympathy with officers,  traditional historiography, – Invalides, Hˆotel des, 

La Gatine, commissaire des guerres,  La Goupilli`ere, Antoine Bergeron de, intendant of the Sarre, , , , – La Grange, Jacques, intendant of Alsace, ,  La Marche, province of,  La Marck, Henri-Robert Eschallard de La Boulaye, comte de,  Landais, Etienne I, Treasurer-General of the Artillery,  Landais, Etienne II, Treasurer-General of the Artillery, son of Etienne I Landais (q.v.),  Languedoc, province of, –, n, – La Raudi`ere, commis of the Extraordinaire des Guerres,  La Renaudi`ere, premier commis of the War Ministry,  La Reynie, Nicolas de, lieutenant-general of police of Paris, ,  La Rochefoucauld, Franc¸ois VII de La Rochefoucauld, prince de Marsillac, duc de (), xxiii, , , ,  La Rocheguyon, Franc¸ois VIII de La Rochefoucauld, duc de, Grand Maˆıtre de la Garderobe du Roi, Grand Veneur, son of Franc¸ois de La Rochefoucauld (q.v.), xxii, –, ,  La Rocheguyon, Madeleine-Charlotte Le Tellier, duchesse de, wife of Franc¸ois de La Rocheguyon (q.v.), xxii,  La Touanne, Charles Renouard, sieur de, Receiver-General of Finances, Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, , , –, –, , – La Tour d’Auvergne, house of, –, , , ; see also Bouillon, cardinal de; Turenne; Auvergne, comte de; Evreux La Trousse, Philippe-Auguste Le Hardy, marquis de, lieutenant-general, ,  Lauzun, Antonin Nompar de Caumont, marquis de P´eguilhan, duc de, Colonel-General of the dragoons, Captain of the Gardes du corps, , , n Lavardin, Jean de Beaumanoir, marquis de, French ambassador to Rome,  Law, John, Controller-General of Finances (),  Le Bret, Pierre-Cardin, intendant of Provence, ,  Le Camus, Etienne-L´eon, intendant of Pinerolo and then Nice, ,  Legoherel, Jean, historian,  Le Mari´e, Jacques-Louis, intendant, 

James II, king of England, Scotland and Ireland (r. –), ,  Jansenism, ,  Jossier de La Jonch`ere, family of, Treasurers-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, ,  Jossigny, premier commis of the War Ministry,  Joyeuse, Jean-Armand de, marshal of France (), ,  Kettering, Sharon, historian, , – ‘king’s faction’, idea of, –, – kingship, theories of, – Labatut, Jean-Pierre, historian, ,  La Cardonni`ere, Balthasar de, Commissaire general of the cavalry, ,  La Chaise, p`ere Franc¸ois de, confessor of Louis XIV (–),  La Chappes, Louis-Franc¸ois d’Aumont, marquis de, son-in-law of Humi`eres (q.v.),  La Cossi`ere, commis of the War Ministry,  La Fert´e, Henri-Franc¸ois de Senneterre, duc de,  La Feuillade, Franc¸ois d’Aubusson, duc de, marshal of France (), , , ,  La Fonds, Claude de, intendant of the Franche-Comt´e, intendant d’arm´ee, –, – La Force, Jacques-Nompar de Caumont, duc de, 



Index Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor (r. –), ,  Le Peletier, Claude, Controller-General of Finances (–), ministre d’´etat (–), –, , –,  Le Peletier de Souzy, Michel, brother of Claude Le Peletier (q.v.), Director-General of Fortifications, , , – Le Tellier, Camille, see Louvois, abb´e de Le Tellier, Charles-Maurice, see Reims, archbishop of Le Tellier, Elisabeth Turpin, wife of Michel Le Tellier (q.v.), xxii,  Le Tellier family and the house of Bourbon-Orl´eans, – court access, – court offices,  landholdings, ,  matrimonial activity, xxii–xxiii, –, – military service of, – wealth and investments of, –, ,  Le Tellier, Franc¸ois-Michel I, see Louvois, marquis de Le Tellier, Franc¸ois-Michel II, see Courtanvaux, marquis de Le Tellier, Louis-Franc¸ois-Marie, see Barbezieux, marquis de Le Tellier, Louis-Nicolas, see Souvr´e, marquis de Le Tellier, Michel, Secretary of State for War (–), Chancellor of France (–) Chancellor,  early years in office pre-, ,  family ties, xxii–xxiii, ,  financial oversight, – management of the regiments, – position in , – relationship to Le Peletier,  relationship with War Ministry agents, – shares office with Louvois,  traditional historiography on,  Le Tellier, Madeleine-Charlotte, see La Rocheguyon, duchesse de Le Tellier, Madeleine-Fare, see Aumont, marquise de Villequier Le Tellier, Marguerite, see Villeroi, duchesse de Lippe, August, Graf von, Imperial commander,  Longueville, Charles-Paris d’Orl´eans, comte de Saint-Pol, duc de, ,  Lorge, Guy-Aldonce de Durfort, comte de, marshal of France (), duc de Quintin, , , , –, , –, , , , 

Lorraine, Armagnac branch of the house of, ,  Lorraine, Charles V, duke of (r. –), ,  Lorraine, duchy of, , , ; see also Vaudemont Lorraine, Louis de, comte d’Armagnac, see Armagnac, comte de Lorraine, Paul, prince de, cavalry mestre de camp,  Lorraine, Philippe, chevalier de,  Louis de France, duc de Bourgogne (–), ,  Louis de France, Grand Dauphin (–), , , , , , , , –, –, , –, , , , , – Louis XIII, king of France (r. –), ,  Louis XIV, king of France (r. –) and army commanders, –, , – and his family, , , –, , , –,  and ministers, , , , , , –, – and the Extraordinaire des Guerres,  appointments made by, – approach to government, ix, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , –, , , –,  approach to the army, , , –, , , , , –, , , n, , n, , –, –, –, –, –, –, –, , , , –,  attitude to the War Ministry,  campaigning in the field, –, –,  decisions on patronage,  direction of the reign, , – grand strategy, , –, , – military promotions by, , –, –, – pluralistic approach, , , –, –,  social promotions (civil) by, , – state of health/mind, , , , n Louvois, Anne de Souvr´e, marquise de, xxii, ,  Louvois, Camille, abb´e de, son of Franc¸oisMichel de Louvois (q.v.), xxii, , ,  Louvois, Franc¸ois-Michel I Le Tellier, marquis de, son of Michel Le Tellier (q.v.), Secretary of State for War (–) accumulation of other offices and responsibilities, –, , , 



Index and the officer corps, , – apex of influence –, –,  character and attitude, , – control of artillery and fortifications, – control over logistics,  death,  deteriorating political position –, – early years in office –, – Extraordinaire des Guerres, treasury of, –, –, , – family ties and mistresses, xxii–xxiii, , , , , , ,  health,  management of regiments, , –,  pretensions and ambitions, ,  proximity to Louis XIV and the king’s women, ,  puritanical and religious sentiments, , , , , – relationships with generals, –, –, , , –, –, –, –, , , –,  relationships with other ministers, , –,  relationships with princes, –, ,  relationships with War Ministry agents, , ,  r´eunions, policy of, – traditional historiography on, – Lude, Henri de Daillon, duc du, Grand Master of the Artillery,  Luxembourg, Ang´elique-Cun´egonde de Montmorency-, wife of the chevalier de Soissons (q.v.),  Luxembourg, Franc¸ois-Henri de Montmorency, sieur de Bouteville, marshal of France, duc de Piney-, –, –, , , –, , , , , , –, , , –; see also Tingry; Chˆatillon Luxembourg, Henri-Thibault, abb´e de, son of Franc¸ois-Henri de Luxembourg (q.v.), ,  Luxembourg, house of, –, –, n,  Luxembourg, Madeleine-CharlotteBonne-Th´er`ese de Clermont de Tonnerre, duchesse de Piney-, wife of Franc¸ois-Henri de Luxembourg (q.v.),  Luxemburg, province and city of, , , , – Luynes, Charles d’Albert, duc de, Constable of France, , 

Lynn, John, historian, , , , , , n, , n, –, , n, , , , , , – Lyonnais, province of, ,  Mailly, Louis, comte de, Mestre de camp g´en´eral of the dragoons, – Maine, Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, duc du, bastard son of Louis XIV and Mme de Montespan, iv–v, , , , –, , , –, ,  Maintenon, Franc¸oise d’Aubign´e, marquise de, morganatic second wife of Louis XIV, , , , , , , n, , , , , –, , , –,  Mairon, commis of the Extraordinaire des Guerres,  Maison militaire du Roi, , , –, , , – Malta, Order of Saint John of Jerusalem based in,  Manesson Mallet, Allain, military writer and thinker,  Mansart, Jules-Hardouin, architect,  Mantua, duchy of,  Margon, sieur de, dragoon colonel,  Marlborough, John Churchill, first duke of, Allied Generalissimo in the War of the Spanish Succession,  Marshals of France, dignity and corps of, , , –, , –,  Martin, Ronald, historian, – Martinet, Jean de, mar´echal de camp, Inspector-General of infantry, – Martrais, Nicolas Bouret, sieur de, commis of the Extraordinaire des Guerres,  Mary Beatrice d’Este, queen of England, Scotland and Ireland –, consort of James II (q.v.),  masse, regimental funds of, – Matignon, marshal of France, see Gac´e Maul´evrier, Franc¸ois Colbert, comte de, brother of Jean-Baptiste I Colbert (q.v.), captain-lieutenant of the Mousquetaires du Roi (second company), lieutenant-general, ,  Maumont, Franc¸ois, marquis de, Inspector-General of the infantry,  Maximilian Emmanuel, electoral duke of Bavaria (r. –), , – Maynon, associated with the Extraordinaire des Guerres,  Mazarin, Jules, cardinal, chief minister of France (–), , , , , , , , –



Index municipal debt,  munitionnaires des vivres, see supplies Muralt, B´eat-Louis de, Swiss soldier and writer, , ,  Mursay, Philippe de Valois de Villette, chevalier de, first cousin once removed of Mme de Maintenon (q.v.), dragoon colonel,  muster fraud, administrative devices to prevent, , ,  collusion of commissaires des guerres, , ,  collusion of senior officers, –, , – fraudulent casualty lists,  inflation of troop numbers, , ,  limited degree of,  passevolants,  use of denunciation, , 

Mecklenburg, Elisabeth-Ang´elique de Montmorency, duchess of, sister of the Franc¸ois-Henri de Luxembourg (q.v.), – Mention, L´eon, historian,  M´erault, conseiller of the Paris Parlement Merveilhaud, subd´elegu´e of Namur,  Mesgrigny, Jacques-Louis de, comte d’Aunay, engineer,  Mestre de camp g´en´eral of the cavalry, –, – Mestre de camp g´en´eral of the dragoons, – Mettam, Roger, historian, –, , –,  Meulen, Adam Frans van der, painter,  Mignard, Catherine, comtesse de Feuqui`eres, sister-in-law of Antoine de Feuqui`eres (q.v.),  Mignard, Pierre, painter,  Milan, duchy of,  milice, regiments of, ,  ‘military revolution’, –, – mints, –,  Mongelas, Romain Dru de, Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, –, n, ,  Monmouth, James Scott, duke of, bastard son of Charles II of England,  ‘Monseigneur’, see Louis de France, Grand Dauphin ‘Monsieur’, see Orl´eans, Philippe I, duc de Montausier, Charles de Saint-Maure, duc de, governor then Premier gentilhomme de la chambre of Louis de France, Grand Dauphin (q.v.), xxiii, – Montausier, Julie-Franc¸oise de Saint-Maure, see Uz`es, duchesse de Montbas, Jean-Franc¸ois Barton, baron de, brigadier,  Montclar, Joseph de Pons de Guimera, baron de, Mestre de camp g´en´eral of the cavalry, n Montespan, Franc¸oise-Athena¨ıs de Rochechouart, marquise de, mistress of Louis XIV (q.v.), , , ,  Montmorency, house of, see Luxembourg, house of; Tingry Montrevel, Nicolas-Auguste de La Baume, marquis de, lieutenant-general,  Mont-Royal (Sarre), fortress of, – mooning,  Motley, Mark, historian,  Mousnier, Roland, historian, – Mousquetaires du Roi, companies of, –, , ,  Mulard, Etienne, financier, 

Naples, kingdom of,  Navailles, Philippe de Montaut-B´enac, duc de, marshal of France (), , ,  Necker, Jacques, Director-General of Finances (–), (–),  Nemours, Marie d’Orl´eans-Longueville, duchesse de, sister of Longueville (q.v.), ,  N´erestang, Achille de, Grand Master of the Order of Saint-Lazare,  Neuchˆatel, principality of, ,  Noailles, Anne-Jules, duc de, marshal of France (), , , –, , , –, –, –, , , , , n, – Noailles, Emmanuel-Jules, comte de,  Noailles, Jean-Franc¸ois, marquis de, mar´echal de camp,  Noailles, Louis-Antoine de, bishop of Chˆalons-sur-Marne, archbishop of Paris (–), ,  nobility, income and assets of, – non-commissioned officers, ,  notaries,  Noyers, Franc¸ois Sublet, sieur de, Secretary of State for War (–),  Noyon, Franc¸ois de Clermont-Tonnerre, bishop of, brother of Madeleine-Charlotte de Luxembourg (q.v.),  Officers, see general officers, regimental officers orders of chivalry and knighthood Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel and Saint-Lazare, , , – Saint-Esprit, , , n, –, 



Index Saint-Esprit de Montpellier, ,  Saint-Louis, –, –, ,  Saint-Michel,  Ordinaire des Guerres, treasury of the,  Orl´eans, Elisabeth Charlotte/Liselotte von der Pfalz, duchesse de, wife of Philippe I d’Orl´eans (q.v.), ,  Orl´eans, Gaston, son of Henri IV (q.v.), duc de,  Orl´eans, Philippe I, duc de, brother of Louis XIV (q.v.), known as ‘Monsieur’, –, , , , , , –, –, ,  Orl´eans, Philippe II, duc de, previously duc de Chartres, son of Philippe I d’Orl´eans (q.v.), regent of France (–), v, , ,  Orry, Jean, general des vivres, 

Poitou, province of,  Poland, French candidatures for throne of, ,  Polastron, Jean-Denis, comte de, lieutenant-general, lieutenant-colonel of the r´egiment du Roi infantry,  Pomponne, Simon Arnauld, marquis de, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (–), ministre d’´etat (–), , –, , , , , , , n Pontchartrain, Louis Ph´elypeaux, comte de, Controller-General of Finances (–), Secretary of State for the Marine and Royal Household (–), Chancellor of France (–), –,  postal system,  Prailles, commis of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, – Primi Visconti, Giovanni Battista, conte di San Maiolo,  prince e´tranger, status of, ,  princes l´egitim´es, , , – Prince of the blood, status of, , ,  private interest, place and role in society, , , –, , – Provence, province of, ,  Pucelle, Ren´e, First President of the Grenoble Parlement, nephew of Catinat (q.v.),  purchase of commission and transfer of units, –, – Puys´egur, Jacques-Franc¸ois de Chastenet, marquis de, mar´echal des logis des camps et armies du Roi, , 

paies de gratification, –,  Palatinate, county in the Holy Roman Empire, ,  Paparel, Claude, Treasurer-General of the Ordinaire des Guerres,  Paparel, Franc¸ois, Treasurer-General of the Ordinaire des Guerres, ,  Parker, David, historian, ,  Parlements Aix-en-Provence,  Grenoble, n Metz, ,  Paris, , – Parrott, David, historian, , ,  Parties Casuelles, treasury of the, , ,  patronage, system of military, –, –, –, , –; see also clientage pay system and structure, –, , –,  pensions for military officers, –,  Ph´elypeaux, J´erˆome, baron de Maurepas, Secretary of State for the Marine (–), son of Pontchartrain (q.v.),  Philip II, king of Spain (r. –), n Philip V, king of Spain (r. –), grandson of Louis XIV (q.v.), , , ,  Piedmont, principality of, , ; see also Savoy pillaging, – Pinerolo, province and town of, ,  Piney-Luxembourg, see Luxembourg, duc de PineyPinsonneau, secretary to Louvois and Barbezieux, , –,  Place Vendˆome, Paris, – Poisons, Affair of the, , –

Quinson, Jean-Raymond de Villardis, marquis de, Director-General of cavalry, lieutenant-general,  Radigues, brothel madam,  Rakoczi, Francis II, prince of Transylvania, Hungarian rebel against the Habsburgs,  Rannes, Nicolas d’Argouges, marquis de, Colonel-General of the dragoons,  R´ebenac, Catherine-Charlotte de Pas de Feuqui`eres, dame de, see Souvr´e, marquise de Receivers-General of Finances, , –, –, ,  recherches de noblesse, , ,  recruitment abuses of civilians, – animals,  bounties for recruits, – crown financial support, – financial support from corporate bodies, 



Index networks of friends and relatives,  non-enforcement of regulations,  officer ranks and their roles, –,  ownership of units, –, ,  pay, allowances, bonuses and grants, –, ,  physical brutality and violence, , , – private income, , , – promotions, –, , ,  punishments, inconsistency of,  retirement from service, , – self-discipline and lack of, –, , , , , –,  service to another sovereign, ,  shortfall of subalterns,  size of officer corps,  social background of, – standards of living, , ,  subaltern hardship, –, – subordination problems, , , , –, ,  supply of clothing and equipment for units, – theft of money,  valets of,  See also clientage regimental system and structure, , –, ,  regiments, cavalry Aumont, n Beringhen,  Boufflers, n Bourgogne,  des Carabiniers,  Cavanac,  Gournai, ,  Humi`eres, n La Roche-sur-Yon,  Noailles, n Prince Paul de Lorraine,  Rosel,  Roquepine,  du Roi,  Saint-Pouange,  S`eve,  Souvr´e,  Tilladet,  Turenne,  regiments, dragoons Du Breuil,  First Languedoc,  Ganges,  Hautefeuille,  La Reine, 

recruitment (Continued ) penalties for failure, ,  quality of recruits, , , – racoleurs (recruiting agents), ,  seigneurial recruitment, – shortage of,  territorial administrative recruitment,  transfer of recruits, ,  Redlich, Fritz, historian, n r´eformes of officers, –, , –, – r´eformes of units, , – regimental officers absence from units,  abuse and care of men, , –,  ages of,  ambition, – cadets, – chivalric orders and knighthoods, –, – commissions, issuing of, , , – corruption of War Ministry agents by, ,  credit, importance of system of, , –,  deaths in service,  debt, protection from, –,  demand for posts, – demobilisations, see r´eformes of officers desertion from the army by,  dismissals of, , ,  duelling, , , – economic circumstances of, , –, ,  education and ignorance, –, ,  extra financial assistance from crown for, , , –, –,  financial difficulties of captains, –,  fraud by, , , – gambling by,  imprisonment of, ,  inspection system, see inspectorate, military investment by officers in units, , –, , – leave from regiments, ,  length of service, – loss of Huguenot officers, – luxury and display, –, – maintaining unit strength, see casualties; desertion; recruitment management of regiment/company finances, –, , –, – marriages,  mendacity of,  mutinies,  mutual assistance of, , , –, 



Index Pezeux,  Second Languedoc, ,  regiments, infantry Boufflers,  Choisinet,  Cl´erambault,  Cond´e,  Conti,  Dauphin,  Feuqui`eres,  des Fusiliers de Tess´e, – des Gardes Franc¸aises, see Gardes Franc¸aises Labour  La Marine, n,  La Reine,  Les Landes,  Luxembourg,  Navarre, n Peri italien,  Picardie,  Provence,  Quercy,  du Roi,  Royal-Italien,  Tess´e, – Vendˆome, ,  Vieux and Petits-Vieux,  Vosges,  regiments, power of grands over, – regiments, price of, , – Reims, Charles-Maurice Le Tellier, archbishop of, son of Michel Le Tellier (q.v.), xxii, , , , n, , ,  rentes,  Retz, Jean-Franc¸ois-Paul de Gondi, cardinal de, n r´eunions, policy of, –,  reward, principles of, , –,  Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal-duc de, chief minister of France (–), , , , , n, , ,  robe nobility, military service of, , , ,  Robert, Louis, intendant d’arm´ee, –,  Rochambeau family, officers in Vendˆome infantry,  Rochefort, Madeleine de Laval, mar´echale de, wife of Henri-Louis de Rochefort (q.v.),  Rochefort, Henri-Louis d’Aloigny, marquis de, marshal of France (), , , ,  Root, Hilton, historian,  Roquepine, Franc¸ois-Jules de Bouzet, marquis de, cavalry colonel, 

Rosen, Conrad, comte de, Mestre de camp g´en´eral of the cavalry, lieutenant-general,  Rousset, Camille, historian, , , ,  Roussillon, province of, ,  Rowen, Herbert, historian, ,  Rozel, chevalier du, mestre de camp of Carabiniers,  Saint-G´eran, Bernard de La Guiche, comte de, lieutenant-general,  Saint-Hilaire, Armand de Morm`es, sieur de, artillery officer and memorialist,  Saint-Pouange, Gilbert Colbert, sieur de, premier commis of the War Ministry, n, –, –, , , , , ,  Saint-Remy, Pierre Surirey, sieur de, lieutenant of artillery and theorist,  Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de,  Sarre, province of,  Salic Law,  Sarmant, Thierry, archivist and historian,  Sarram´ea, Franc¸ois de, subaltern in the regiment de Languedoc infantry, , ,  Sauvion, Jean de, associated with the Extraordinaire des Guerres, –, , – Savigny, commis of the Extraordinaire des Guerres,  Savoie-Soissons, Franc¸ois-Eug`ene, prince de, Imperial commander, n, ,  Savoie-Soissons, Louis-Thomas, comte de Soissons, mar´echal de camp, elder brother of Franc¸ois-Eug`ene de Savoie-Soissons (q.v.), n Savoy, Anne-Marie de Bourbon-Orl´eans, duchess of, daughter of Philippe I d’Orl´eans (q.v.), wife of Victor Amadeus II (q.v.),  Savoy, state of, , , , ; see also Piedmont Savoy, Victor Amadeus II, duke of, see Victor Amadeus II, duke of Savoy Schomberg, Herman Friedrich, marshal of France, Graf von and duke of, , , , , – secretaries, royal in sixteenth century,  Secretaries of State French system of, , – social elevation of office-holders, ,  survivance on offices of,  Secretary of State for War, office of, , , , –, , –, –; see also Servien; Noyers; Le Tellier, Michel; Louvois; Barbezieux; Chamillart



Index Segent, commissaire des guerres,  Seignelay, Jean-Baptiste II Colbert, marquis de, Secretary of State for the Marine (–), , , , , –, ,  Servien, Abel, Secretary of State for War (–),  S´evign´e, Charles, marquis de, sous-lieutenant of the Gendarmes Dauphins,  sieges Aire (),  Ath (),  Barcelona (), , ,  Bouchain (),  Candia (–), ,  Casale Monferrato (),  Charleroi (),  Charleroi (), ,  Dixmude (),  Furnes (),  Gerona (),  Lille (),  Maastricht (),  Mainz (),  Mons (), –, , – Montm´elian (–),  Namur (), , , , ,  Namur (), ,  Nice (),  Philippsburg (),  Philippsburg (), , ,  Pinerolo (), ,  Rosas (),  Saint-Omer (),  Trier (), ,  Zutphen (),  size of army, , , ,  Smith, Jay, historian, , , n social conduct and mores, –, –, –,  socio-economic structure and situation of France, –, , –,  Soissons, Louis de Bourbon, comte de,  Soissons, Louis-Henri de Bourbon, chevalier de, bastard son of Louis de Soissons (q.v.), heir to Neuchˆatel,  Soubise, Franc¸ois de Rohan, prince de, lieutenant-general, n,  Sourches, Jean du Bouchet, marquis de, father of Louis-Franc¸ois de Sourches (q.v.), Grand Pr´evˆot de France,  Sourches, Louis-Franc¸ois du Bouchet, Grand Pr´evˆot de France, diarist, marquis de, ,  Souvr´e, Anne de, see Louvois, marquise de Souvr´e, Catherine-Charlotte de Pas de

Feuqui`eres, dame de R´ebenac, marquise de, wife of Louis-Nicolas de Souvr´e (q.v.), xxii,  Souvr´e, Charles de, marquis de Courtanvaux, father of Anne de Louvois (q.v.),  Souvr´e, chevalier de, bastard half-brother of Anne de Louvois (q.v.), infantry inspector,  Souvr´e, Louis-Nicolas Le Tellier, marquis de, son of Franc¸ois-Michel I de Louvois (q.v.), xxii, , , , ,  Spanheim, Ezekiel, ambassador of Brandenburg to France,  Sprunck, Alphonse, historian,  Strasbourg, city of,  ‘strat´egie de cabinet’, , –,  Sturgill, Claude, historian,  supplies of food for the military, –, , , – supply depots,  Surintendant des finances, office of, –,  Sweden, kingdom of,  Swiss forces in French service,  Tallard, Camille d’Hostun, comte de, lieutenant-general, ,  Tallon, Jean, intendant,  Tallon, Pierre, Treasurer-Provincial of the Extraordinaire des Guerres,  Terrat, Gaston-Jean-Baptiste, marquis de, Treasurer-General of Fortifications, –,  Tess´e, Ren´e de Froullai, comte de, Colonel-General of the dragoons, lieutenant-general, , , , , , –, –, , , , ,  Thom´e, Pierre, associated with the Extraordinaire des Guerres, –, ,  Thompson, I. A. A., historian,  Thorillhon, Joseph, sieur de Prades,  Tilladet, Gabriel de Cassagnet, chevalier de, brother of Jean-Baptiste de Tilladet (q.v.), lieutenant-general,  Tilladet, Gabriel de Cassagnet, sieur de, father of Jean-Baptiste (q.v.) and Gabriel de Tilladet (q.v.), xxiii,  Tilladet, Jean-Baptiste, marquis de, captain-lieutenant of the Cent-Suisses de la Garde, lieutenant-general, xxiii, – Tingry, Charles-Fr´ed´eric de Montmorency, prince de, duc de Montmorency, son of Franc¸ois-Henri de Montmorency (q.v.), –



Index Titon, Maximilien, arms supplier,  Torcy, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, marquis de, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (–), son of Croissy (q.v.), ,  Toulmont, premier commis of the War Ministry, premier commis of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, ,  Toulouse, Louis-Alexandre de Bourbon, comte de, bastard son of Louis XIV (q.v.) and Mme de Montespan (q.v.), Grand Admiral of France, v, , , , , , n Tourville, Anne-Hilarion de Cotentin, marshal of France (), comte de, ,  treaties of peace Nijmegen (/),  Ryswick (),  Turin (), , ,  Tr´esor royal, , , ,  Trobat, Raymond, intendant of Roussillon, intendant d’arm´ee, , –,  Trois-Evˆech´es, province of (Metz, Toul and Verdun), ,  Tuetey, Louis, historian,  Turenne, Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, vˆıcomte de, marshal of France (), Colonel-General of the cavalry, , –, , , , , ,  Turenne, Louis de La Tour d’Auvergne, prince de, great-nephew of Henri de Turenne (q.v.),  Turmenyes, Franc¸ois de, brother of Jean de Turmenyes (q.v.), Receiver-General of Finances,  Turmenyes, Jean de, sieur de Nointel, Receiver-General of Finances, Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, Garde du Tr´esor royal, –, n, –, –, , 

Vaudemont, Charles-Henri de Lorraine, prince de, military commander,  venality, system of, , , –, , , ; see also purchase of commission Vendˆome, C´esar (–), duc de, bastard son of Henri IV (q.v.),  Vendˆome, Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, duc de, prince l´egitim´e, grandson of C´esar de Vendˆome (q.v.), General of the Galleys, army commander, , , , , , , –, –, , , –, –, , , ,  Vendˆome, Philippe de Bourbon-, prince l´egitim´e, brother of Louis-Joseph de Vendˆome (q.v.), Grand Prieur de France of the Order of Malta, ,  Vermandois, Louis de Bourbon, comte de, bastard son of Louis XIV (q.v.) and Louise de La Valli`ere,  Verneuil, commis in the War Ministry,  Verneuil, Gaston-Henri de Bourbon, duc de, bastard son of Henri IV (q.v.),  Victor Amadeus II, duke of Savoy (r. –), , , , n, , –, ,  Villacerf, Edouard Colbert, marquis de, Surintendant des Arts, Bˆatiments et Manufactures (–), brother of Saint-Pouange (q.v.),  Villars, Claude-Louis-Hector, marquis de, marshal of France (), , –, , , –, ,  Villeroi, Camille de Neufville-, brother of Nicolas V, first duc de Villeroi (q.v.), archbishop of Lyon, ,  Villeroi, Franc¸ois de Neufville, second duc de, son of Nicolas V, first duc de Villeroi (q.v.), marshal of France (), captain of the Gardes du corps, xxiii, , , , , , , –,  Villeroi, Marguerite Le Tellier, duchesse de, wife of Nicolas VI de Villeroi (q.v.), xxii–xxiii, ,  Villeroi, Nicolas VI de Neufville, marquis d’Alincourt, duc de, son of Franc¸ois de Villeroi (q.v.), xxii–xxiii, ,  Villeroi, Nicolas V de Neufville, first duc de, marshal of France (), , ,  Villeromard, Franc¸ois Lemaire de, Treasurer-General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, , –,  Vins, Jean Garde, marquis de, lieutenantgeneral, captain-lieutenant of the Mousquetaires du Roi (second company), n

Usson, Jean d’Usson de Bonrepaux, lieutenant-general, ,  ustencile, tax and allowances of, –,  Uz`es, Catherine-Louise-Charlotte de Crussol de, see Barbezieux, marquise de Uz`es, Emmanuel de Crussol, duc de, xxiii,  Uz`es, Julie-Franc¸oise de Crussol de, see Antin, marquise de Uz`es, Julie-Franc¸oise de Saint-Maure de Montausier, duchesse de, daughter of Montausier (q.v.), wife of Emmanuel d’Uz`es (q.v.), xxiii,  Vauban, S´ebastien Le Prestre, sieur de, Commissaire g´en´eral des fortifications, , , , , 



Index War of Devolution (–), , , ,  Dutch War (–), –, –, ,  War of the R´eunions (–), ,  Nine Years War (–), n, –, –, –, –, , –, –, , –, , , ,  War of the Spanish Succession (–), n, , , –, , , , ,  William III, prince of Orange, king of England, Scotland and Ireland (r. –), , , , , ,  winter quarters, , , , –, n,  Wolf, John, historian, n women, subscription to military values of,  Wood, J. B., historian, 

Vivonne, Louis-Victor de Rochechouart, duc de, General of the Galleys, marshal of France (), ,  vivres, see supplies volunteers in regiments, noble,  Waquet, Jean-Claude, historian,  War Ministry at the centre clientage relationships to the Le Tellier,  commis and their interests, , , – corruption in, – structure of bureaux, – rewards for commis, – wars Habsburg–Valois Wars (–),  Thirty Years War (–), ,  Franco-Spanish War (–), , 

youth, difficulties of, , , , 



CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN HISTORY The Old World and the New ∗ .  .       The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, –: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries Wars ∗             Richelieu and Olivares ∗ .  .       Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc ∗   The Princes of Orange: The Stadholders in the Dutch Republic ∗        .    Lille and the Dutch Revolt: Urban Stability in an Era of Revolution ∗     .          The Continuity of Feudal Power: The Caracciolo di Brienza in Spanish Naples ∗             The Nobility of Holland: From Knights to Regents, –  . .  .        Early Modern Democracy in the Grisons: Social Order and Political Language in a Swiss Mountain Canton, – ∗        .     War, State and Society in W¨urttemberg, – ∗  .  From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain ∗       . .     The Reformation and Rural Society: The Parishes of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, – ∗ .         Labour, Science and Technology in France, – ∗           The King’s Army: Warfare, Soldiers, and Society during the Wars of Religion in France, – ∗     .    Spanish Naval Power, –: Reconstruction and Defeat ∗           State and Nobility in Early Modern Germany: The Knightly Feud in Franconia – ∗         The Quest for Compromise: Peace-Makers in Counter-Reformation Vienna           Charles XI and Swedish Absolutism, –  . .    

Noble Power during the French Wars of Religion: The Guise Affinity and the Catholic Cause in Normandy           The Reformation of Community: Social Welfare and Calvinist Charity in Holland, –         .      Henry IV and the Towns: The Pursuit of Legitimacy in French Urban Society, – .            -         The Limits of Royal Authority: Resistance and Obedience in Seventeenth-Century Castile       Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany        Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, –           Richelieu’s Army: War, Government and Society in France, –        The Emergence of the Eastern Powers, –  .  .     Monarchies, States Generals and Parliaments: The Netherlands in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries  . .           

Titles available in paperback marked with an asterisk ∗ The following titles are now out of print: French Finances, –: From Business to Bureaucracy . .       Chronicle into History: An Essay in the Interpretation of History in Florentine Fourteenth-Century Chronicles          France and the Estates General of  .             Reform and Revolution in Mainz, – . . .        Altopascio: A Study in Tuscan Society –            Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century                      The State, War and Peace: Spanish Political Thought in the Renaissance – .  .     ´     -          Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands, –              The Kingdom of Valencia in the Seventeenth Century        

Filippo Strozzi and the Medici: Favor and Finance in Sixtenth-Century Florence and Rome                    Rouen during the Wars of Religion   The Emperor and His Chancellor: A Study of the Imperial Chancellery under Gattinara      .       The Military Organisation of a Renaissance State: Venice c. –  . .           .  .     Neostoicism and the Early Modern State   Prussian Society and the German Order: An Aristocratic Corporation in Crisis c. –   The Changing Face of Empire: Charles V, Philip II and Habsburg Authority, –  . .    ´    -       Turning Swiss: Cities and Empire –        .     After the Deluge: Poland and the Second Northern War –         Classes, Estates and Order in Early Modern Brittany     .       

The following previously out-of-print titles are now available in the Press’s programme of digital paperback reprints: Neighbourhood and Community in Paris            The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle during the Wars of Religion    .    Society and Religious Toleration in Hamburg –           Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily   Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post–Tridentine Syndrome and the Ancien R´egime         Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Modern France .  .  .       Louis XIV and the Origins of the Dutch War          The Cost of Empire: The Finances of the Kingdom of Naples during the Period of Spanish Rule              The Armada of Flanders: Spanish Maritime Policy and European War, –  .  .        