The Military Revolution Debate

Readings On The Military Transformation Of Early Modern Europe

Clifford J Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429975899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book brings together, for the first time, the classic articles that began and have shaped the debate about the Military Revolution in early modern Europe, adding important new essays by eminent historians of early modern Europe to further this important scholarly interchange.

Aspects

5

Recalculating French Army Growth During the Grand Siede, 1610-1715

John A. Lynn

BY THE END OF THE SEVENTEENTH century, European warfare had become an affair of giants, as colossal armies battled against one another. France boasted the greatest of these Goliaths, a force which totaled as many as 400,000 soldiers, at least on paper. It was the largest and hungriest institution maintained by the state. That this Titan existed by 1700, no one denies; but the pattern and timing of its growth and its final dimensions remain matters of debate. This article presents a new and more rigorous calculation of French army expansion 1610-1715.

For over a century, historians divided French military expansion into two stages. First, in order to challenge Spain, Richelieu and Louis XIII assembled an army of unprecedented size in 1635. Totaling 150,000 or more, this force was at least twice as large as any previous wartime military maintained by the French monarchy. A second phase of growth followed the military and administrative reform associated with the first decades of the personal reign of Louis XIV. Troop strength reached 280,000 during the Dutch War (1672-78) and hit 400,000 in the War of the League of Augsburg (1688-97), continuing at that level for the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14).

Since the mid-1950s, proponents of a Military Revolution in early modern Europe, most notably Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker, have insisted that the need to raise and support armies larger than ever before called for administrative, fiscal, and governmental reforms.¹ This side of the Military Revolution has attracted historians and social scientists concerned with state formation, most notably Charles Tilly, who writes, “As they fashioned an organization for making war, the king’s servants inadvertently created a centralized state. First the framework of an army, then a government built around that framework—and in its shape.”² Of course, reason dictates that in order for military necessity to have brought on government reform, the growth of the army must have predated that reform, not the other way around.

Recently published revisionist scholarship jettisons this long-standing portrayal. The most serious attack denies military growth prior to 1659, while asserting that growth after that date came as a by-product of social stability under Louis XIV. David Parrott, a young English scholar, has played a key role in questioning substantial military expansion before the Peace of the Pyrenees.³ While not the first, he has been the most effective in arguing that very little actual reform occurred during the war years of the Richelieu era.⁴ Concerning army growth, Parrott states that the historical thesis that Richelieu instituted a virtual administrative revolution is, “underpinned by an assumption that the size of the army increased massively from 1635. But this assumption proves ... untenable.”⁵ His research has already influenced others, including Jeremy Black, who praises it as “a fundamental work of revisionism.”⁶ In his recent A Military Revolution?, Black embraces Parrott’s arguments, putting them in even stronger terms than Parrott intended. Black disputes the concept of a Military Revolution, particularly as originally proposed by Michael Roberts, who assigned it to the century 1560-1660. Crucially, Black ascribes all French military growth to Louis XIV’s personal reign. The fact that he shifts the time period away from Roberts’s original dates is of little consequence in itself, since others, including Parker, had done that before. However, much more essential, Black insists that the military expansion occurring after 1660 came only as the consequence of increased government capacity made possible by social and political compromises hammered out under Louis XIV. Therefore, Black reads out the army and war as causes of political change, and instead reduces them to mere effects.

While controversy over the Military Revolution draws attention to military expansion during the mid-seventeenth century, André Corvisier requires historians to look again at the army that fought the last war of the Sun King. For years Corvisier has argued that the forces mobilized to fight the War of the Spanish Succession approached in size those raised by revolutionary France nearly a century later. Recently he restated this thesis in the first volume of the new Histoire militaire de la France.⁷ He constructs his argument by attaching additional contingents, such as the navy and provincial militias, to the 300,000 French troops he claims for the regular army. Corvisier’s controversial mathematics seems to flow from his resolution to demonstrate both that a high percentage of the French male population was involved in the profession of arms and that a patriotic wave à la 1792 engulfed the France of the Sun King. In this last concern he follows the lead of Emile G. Léonard, who posited this view in the 1950s.⁸

Revisionist challenges to traditional conceptions of army growth as they relate to the Military Revolution, state formation, and a “patriotic” effort under Louis XIV make a recalculation of military expansion necessary. Until the last few years, it was acceptable to speak of army size by appealing to official financial and military statements, états, but today an evaluation of army size demands a new methodology employing a wider range of source material.

Methodology: Distinctions and Sources

An effort to set the record straight must be very careful concerning exactly what is to be counted and the kinds of sources to be employed. Trying to fix army size involves a good number of technical points, but many of them come down to not comparing apples with oranges. The first and the most basic difference to bear in mind is that between a field force and a state’s entire army. A single field force, usually assembled in one location under one commander, only constitutes part of the total armed might of the state, which may have more than one army on campaign at the same time, while committing still other troops to garrison duty. As strange as it may seem, historians are forever muddying the distinction between the troops marshaled for a single battle and the army as whole.

This leads to the question of who should be counted as part of an army. Obviously, field armies and garrison forces composed of regular troops must be included, but who else? Local and provincial units who stayed at home to guard their towns and man their walls but were not supported by the monarchy and did not necessarily serve full time ought not to be tallied as royal troops. However, militiamen who after 1688 served the king at the front in their own or regular battalions belong in the totals presented here. Non-combatants traveling with the army pose another problem. Often discussions of early modern armies calculate the numbers of traders, women, and children who accompanied the troops; however, such camp followers will not be considered in this article. Neither do valets, pages, grooms, or other personal servants qualify.

In counting troop numbers, it is also important to differentiate when units are tallied. Above all, one must differentiate peacetime from wartime forces, because they differed in size and composition. Obviously, peacetime figures were much smaller than wartime numbers, with few exceptions. By 1670, wartime tallies generally stood three times higher than the number of troops maintained between conflicts. At the end of each war the government demobilized, or “reformed,” individual soldiers, surplus companies, and entire regiments. The fact that armies were much smaller during peacetime years under Louis XIV meant that when conflicts began these forces had to expand, and, understandably, this took some time. Beyond these dramatic shifts, more subtle rhythms determined army size during times of conflict. The combat strength of military units normally fluctuated over the course of the year. Established regiments enjoyed their most complete complement just as they entered the campaign season in May or June, but battle casualties and losses from disease and desertion eroded numbers over the summer months. Winter quarters provided time for rest, refitting, and recruitment. New levies arrived in late winter or early spring to flesh out units, so that they grew until they went off on campaign to repeat the cycle.

Not only does a careful accounting of army size need to bear in mind the nature of forces to be compared and the times when those forces are to be examined, but it must also take into account the different types of sources which provide the basis for such a study. In general this includes four varieties of records: 1) military ordonnances; 2) financial contrôles and états; 3) review reports and routes; and 4) miscellaneous correspondence. A minute study of the first, military ordonnances, promises to reveal the decrees altering army size. In the nineteenth century, Victor Belhomme made the most thorough attempt to undertake this laborious feat. He charted the number of French regiments year by year, sometimes month by month, for the entire seventeenth century.⁹ However, the problem with employing military ordonnances is that, as in other aspects of government as well, official ordonnances may bear little relation to reality. In fact, Belhomme’s figures are suspect, because they much exceed the levels generated by other sources until he deals with the period after 1670, by which time Louis and Louvois had imposed greater regularity on the system.

Administrators also left behind a number of contemporary états that supply numbers of troops for the army as a whole. Such états come in several forms. A small collection known as the “Tiroirs de Louis XIV” were reports and planning documents in the king’s own possession.¹⁰ In the majority of cases, however, official records stating the size of the entire army are financial documents generated as aids in estimating the cost of supporting the army in the present or coming year. Such financial contrôles provide a consistent, and convenient, source for the study of army size; therefore, generations of historians have uncritically appealed to them when judging army size. Yet the contrôles have recently come under attack. David Parrott questions their value, making the important and valid point that they were only financial documents designed to predict the amount of money that would be paid out by the monarchy for salaries and sustenance. Troop sizes drawn from them are entirely theoretical, so Parrott would completely discard them.¹¹ But this goes too far. True, contrôles were statements of anticipated expenditures rather than head counts; however, the expenditures in question were figured as a given number of payments to a given number of troops, and therefore they were related to a projection of army size.

Financial contrôles retain important value as theoretical maximums that can then be discounted to approximate real numbers. A basic method used to set army size in financial documents and other estimates of total army size involved calculating the number of companies or battalions and squadrons present, and then multiplying that number by the regulation complement of men set for that unit by ordonnance. While this method of calculation is not always explicitly employed, it is so common that it can be assumed as underlying virtually all gross statements of army size and cost. Working within the parameters of this seventeenth-century technique, other documents, review reports and étapes routes, allow the raw data supplied in états and contrôles to be refashioned into more realistic estimates of actual army size.

Review reports and étapes routes provide actual head counts of troops. Review reports were prepared by military bureaucrats for administrative reasons, as when distributing pay and rations to soldiers. Troops on the road traveling from place to place carried routes, documents that stipulated their route and the stops they were allowed to make along the way. At each stop they were entitled to rations and lodging, so the routes stated exactly how many men of what ranks were to be fed and housed. By their nature, review reports and routes dealt only with individual units or small groups of units, rather than with an entire army, but they will be put to a broader use here. Because the actual sizes of units can be calculated from reviews and routes, these numbers can be used to estimate the percentage of regulation strength actually present under arms. Gross statements of army size can then be discounted by this percentage to yield a reasonable estimate of real troop numbers.

The last category of sources covers a varied range of documents that, while not systematic, can be very useful. In particular, when government officials discuss the king’s forces in their letters and memoranda, they provide valuable corroboration of other sorts of documents, notably those financial controles that have come under attack. The use of sources in this manner underlines the fact that the best estimates of army size emerge from combining different sources and cross-checking whenever possible.

A Necess...