EARLY MODERN MILITARY THEORY

A number of strategic, tactical and organizational issues preoccupied military theorists from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries and had considerable impact on the way in which wars were fought and conflict envisaged within a political and social context.

CITIZENS VS. PROFESSIONALS

The debate over the use of citizen versus professional soldiers, which preoccupied theorists throughout the early modern period, was initially stimulated by consideration of republican government and focused on the merits of citizen militias against mercenaries. For Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), councillor to the Florentine Republic after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494, an armed citizenry was desirable on both practical and moral grounds. Machiavelli's practical case rested on systematic denigration of the effectiveness of mercenary forces, creating a potent mythology that survives to this day. The moral argument rested on the conviction that participatory republicanism was the best means of transcending the human pursuit of self-interest, and that military service for all citizens would instill communal values and civic virtue. Despite challenges to these arguments—notably the rout of Machiavelli's own Florentine militia in the face of Spanish mercenaries at Prato in 1512—the ideal of a citizen militia enjoyed wide currency. Almost all military writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries made reference to the potential advantages of raising, drilling, and deploying citizens, even as the major European states filled the ranks of their armies with mercenaries.

As mercenaries were in turn incorporated into professional standing armies in the later seventeenth century, the effectiveness of these forces was no longer denied, but critics argued that they underwrote governmental despotism and were a constant incitement to territorial aggression. In Britain the notion of standing armies was regarded as incompatible with representative government, better guaranteed by a county militia officered by the local elites. In other states and for different reasons, militias were being reinvigorated from the later seventeenth century as many rulers sought ways to enlarge the size of their armed forces without crippling the state with the burdens of a vast, professional military establishment. The obvious problem confronted by theorists was how to make such parttime soldiers into an effective force. Jacques de Guibert's Essai général de tactique (1772; Essay concerning tactics) forcefully championed the potential of small, highly motivated citizen armies. The arguments, prefiguring the French "nation in arms" of the Revolutionary wars, were, in a sense, a return to the ideals of Machiavelli. Imbued not with republican virtue but with nationalist fervor, the aggressive élan of citizen soldiers would overcome the narrow professionalism of traditional armies.

For some theorists, especially in the sixteenth century, the debate about the benefits of civic militias was part of a larger attempt to locate military development and innovation within a context of Classical Roman military culture. If a citizen militia was fundamental to the greatness of RepublicanRome, then it was no less desirable to incorporate other aspects of Roman, even Greek, military thinking into current debates about strategy and tactics. The military treatises of Vegetius (fl. 4th century c.e.) and Aelianus (c. 170–235 C.E.) were regularly reprinted from the late fifteenth century on. Classical prescriptions might provide convenient justification for reforms and developments that were actually responses to a more pragmatic reality. Thus the reformer of the Dutch army in the 1590s, Prince Maurice of Orange-Nassau (1567–1625), could base his proposals for more rigorous drilling of his soldiers; smaller, linear formations; and sequential firing of his harquebusiers on prescriptions for the training and deployment of the Roman legionaries. Less plausible when transposed to an early modern context was the hostility of some Roman theorists to permanent fortifications; a disdain for weapons that detracted from direct, hand-to-hand combat; and a strong espousal of the offensive in almost all tactical circumstances.

Application of Roman models to military thinking by early modern Europeans should not be seen in isolation, but as part of an enthusiasm among a humanist-educated elite for almost all aspects of Roman politics, culture, and social organization. The reinvigoration of Stoic philosophy to underpin the military drill and justify the subordination of the individual, as pursued by the Netherlandish political philosopher Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), had a strong following in the early seventeenth century. The recourse to classical models remained commonplace among theorists into the eighteenth century. Jean-Charles de Folard (1669–1752) had no hesitation in using Polybius to justify his own arguments for the deployment of infantry in column rather than in line on the battlefield.

A MILITARY NOBILITY?

Changes in the character of early modern warfare increasingly defined the military role of the nobility as an officer class rather than as individual specialist warriors. But this evolution raised major questions about noble participation in a much more expensive military role. Poverty, according to many theorists from the late sixteenth century onward, was depriving the traditional nobility of their military birthright, while military specialization and technical expertise were consolidating this exclusion. Successive works urged preferential treatment for the lesser nobility in military posts. For the French theorist Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722), the old French nobles were racially distinct from the rest of the population, conquering Franks rather than indigenous Gauls. More prosaic theorists argued that the social background of nobles habituated them to command and responsibility and therefore made them an optimal, if not a genetic, officer corps. Thus when Frederick the Great (ruled 1740–1786) reduced the Prussian army in peacetime, he purged the officer corps of "common riff-raff," arguing that the nobility's innate sense of honor justified their preferment. But the notion of "reduction" exposes the gap between theory and reality. Few theorists before the 1790s would argue in favor of a non-noble officer corps, an elite of pure merit. Yet the military reality of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, compounded by the financial and administrative weaknesses of governments, was a market in officerships making wealth the prime determinant of appointment to a unit command and subsequent promotion. Frustration at an officer corps that appeared to exclude so many of the "natural leaders" was seized upon in the aftermath of military setbacks such as that of the Austrian army in the 1740 war against Prussia and the French defeat at Rossbach in 1757 to justify Prussian-style purges of non-nobles. Proposals for the better training and incorporation of lesser nobles into the armies had, in France, already been advanced by French theorists, most notably the chevalier d'Arc in his Noblesse militaire (1756; A military nobility), and this was anticipated in 1751 by the foundation of the École Militaire, primarily as a means to ensure that training and cadetships could be offered to nobles of modest background.

THEORISTS OF TACTICS AND STRATEGY

Military theorists concerned not with large conceptual issues but with the practical detail of winning wars were essentially a new phenomenon in the eighteenth century. Two centuries earlier there are a few examples of writers who combined memoirs and general observations with some military thinking: in France, François de La Noue's Discours politiques et militaires (1587; Political and military discourses) is an obvious example, while Machiavelli's Arte della guerra (1521; Art of war) offers much detail on deployment, tactics, and strategy, albeit within a framework of Roman examples. Much of the writing of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, most notably the extensive works of Johann Jacobi von Wallhausen and Jacob de Gheyn, is concerned with the disposition and deployment of troops: elaborate guides to creating formations, marching order, and establishing fortified encampments. Indicative of priorities is the general concentration of prescriptive material on sieges rather than field campaigns: a French theorist such as La Valière devotes 15 pages of his Pratique et maximes de la guerre (1675) to deployment of armies on campaign, and 126 pages to the conduct of sieges. Raimondo Montecuccoli's Sulle battaglie (On battles; written between 1639 and 1642 and drawing on his experiences in the Thirty Years' War), which discusses both battlefield tactics and campaigning based on maneuver, is unusual and looks forward to an epoch in which discussion of tactical theory and the conduct of war was commonplace.

The proliferation of such works in the eighteenth century is perhaps predictable; while there had been significant technological and organizational change in warfare from the late seventeenth century, this did nothing to reduce uncertainty about optimal approaches to battles and campaigning. Should infantry be massed in depth or deployed in line, especially given the growing number and effectiveness of artillery on the battlefield? Jean-Charles de Folard's arguments for the tactical superiority of the column was echoed by French theorists throughout the century such as Baron François-Jean Mesnil-Durand and Paul-Gedeon Joly de Maizeroy, and a tactical theory stressing shock and the advantage of taking the offensive was not an innovation of the Revolutionary wars. More fundamental were attempts to assess whether improvements in communications, supply systems, and the mobility and training of armies rendered a war of maneuver more or less viable. If Antoine Manasses de Pas, marquis de Feuquières, was relentless in his emphasis on offensive, battle-seeking strategies in his Mémoires sur la guerre (1725; Memoirs concerning warfare), the Les rêveries, ou mémoires sur la guerre (written 1732, published 1756; Reveries on the art of war) of the successful commander Maurice de Saxe offer a more nuanced weighing up of the merits of battle and maneuver in a campaign. Much eighteenth-century theory would reinforce a disposition to avoid the hazard of battle in all but exceptional circumstances. The experience of war in central and eastern Europe and colonial warfare, as in America in the 1770s, generated a series of treatises exploring small-scale conflicts fought between light or irregular troops and emphasizing speed, surprise, and the initiative of relatively junior officers. Faced with the alternatives of massively costly set-piece battles and sieges and large-scale and probably indecisive campaigns of maneuver, theorists such as Lancelot Turpin de Crissé in his Essai sur l'art de la guerre (1754; Essay on the art of war) explored the techniques of partisan or local warfare as a possible means to gain the advantage over traditional, regular forces. This interest in the potential of irregular warfare also revived wider questions of the treatment of civilian and noncombatant populations, likely to change if armies found themselves engaged in warfare against irregulars and partisans. Most theorists were confident that eighteenth-century war had become more restrained and more respectful of the rights of noncombatants. They looked back to the early seventeenth century as a dark age of religious fanaticism and military brutality, while turning a blind eye to contemporary battlefield casualties, indifference to suffering, harsh exactions on civilian populations, and systematic destruction of the supply potential of territory, all of which arouse considerable skepticism about "enlightened warfare" among modern historians. There is plenty of evidence that the techniques and assumptions of Revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare had been anticipated in the writings and theorizing of the preceding decades.

See also Aristocracy and Gentry ; Humanists and Humanism ; Lipsius, Justus ; Machiavelli, Niccolò .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Barker, Thomas M. The Military Intellectual and Battle: Raimondo Montecuccoli and the Thirty Years' War. Albany, N.Y., 1975. Includes a translation of Montecuccoli's Sulle battaglie.

Gheyn, Jacob de. Waffenhandlung von den Rören, Musqueten, und Spiessen. The Hague, 1608. Reprint, London, 1986.

La Noue, François de. Discours politiques et militaires. Paris, 1588. Reprint, Geneva, 1967.

Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Art of War. Translated by Ellis Farneworth. Indianapolis, 1965.

Saxe, Maurice de. Reveries on the Art of War. In Roots of Strategy. Edited by T. R. Phillips. Harrisburg, Pa., 1943.

Secondary Sources

Bitton, Davis. The French Nobility in Crisis, 1560–1640. Stanford, 1969.

Devyver, André. Le sang épuré: Les préjugés de race chez les gentilshommes français de l'Ancien Régime, 1560–1720. Brussels, 1973.

Dewald, Jonathan. Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715. Berkeley, 1993.

Luvaas, Jay, ed. and trans. Frederick the Great on the Art of War. New York, 1999.

Neill, Donald A. "Ancestral Voices: The Influence of the Ancients on the Military Thought of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries." Journal of Military History 62, no. 3 (1998): 487–520.

Oestreich, Gerhard. Neostoicism and the Early Modern State. Edited by Brigitta Oestreich and H. G. Koenigsberger. Translated by David McLintock. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1982. A somewhat fragmentary work that explicitly links the Neostoic philosophy of Justius Lipsius to debates about military reform.

Smith, Jay M. The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600–1789. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996.

David Parrott