2
The Profession of Arms
"Since every man has to choose a profession . . ., it seems to me that there is none more honorable or more essential to a gentleman than that of arms. . . . [N]obility is acquired by arms; it is by arms also that it ought to be maintained." Thus Nicolas Faret, in his enormously popular depiction of how the honnête homme ought to make his way in the world.[1] In fact, most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century nobles never ventured into war but instead lived quiet lives as country gentlemen.[2] But the wealthier nobles did expect to perform military service; and Faret's comment suggests the centrality of warfare as one of the myths that defined the early modern nobility even for those who stayed home. In public discussion, their sacrifices in war justified privilege and gave nobles the right to address the king in special terms. More privately, war offered a cultural reference point, a source of stories and a model of behavior. Even the pacific Gilles de Gouberville read chivalric tales in his quiet Norman manor. Such talk of war defined the outer limits of the noblesse d'épée as a social group. The language of the nobles' disputes with other social groups more often centered on the incomprehension of soldier for civilian than on questions of genealogy.[3]
[1] Nicolas Faret, L'honnête homme, ou l'art de plaire à la cour, ed. Maurice Magendie (Paris, 1925; repr. Geneva, 1970), 12. It is worth noting that although the passage imitates Castiglione, Faret's emphasis is very different; what Castiglione makes a preference between two acceptable courses, Faret makes virtually obligatory. The work's popularity is suggested by its reprintings in 1630, 1631, 1633, 1636, and twice in 1639 (ibid., li).
[2] A point emphasized by James Wood, The Nobility of the Election of Bayeux, 1463–1666: Continuity Through Change (Princeton, 1980); and Jean-Marie Constant, "Nobles et paysans en Beauce aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles," Thèse d'Etat, University of Paris IV, 1978.
[3] For a vigorous statement of the nobles' claim that they paid an impôt de sang , see François Bluche, Louis XIV (Paris, 1986). For other discussions of nobles' military involvement and attitudes, see Jonathan Dewald, Pont-St-Pierre, 1398–1789: Lordship, Community, and Capitalism in Early Modern France (Berkeley, 1987), 168–78; Ellery Schalk, From Valor to Pedigree: Ideas of Nobility in France in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Princeton, 1986); Madeleine Foisil, Le sire de Gouberville: Un gentilhomme normand au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1981); and (with a very different analysis from the one presented here) Denis Crouzet, "Royalty, Nobility and Religion: Research on the Wars in Italy," Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 18 (1991).
This chapter attempts to define some of the meanings that war had for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century nobles. Such meanings may seem obvious, in view of the role arms had played in aristocratic self-perceptions through the Middle Ages; and historians of the early modern nobility have not hesitated to contrast the calculating, self-controlled mentality of the educated magistrate with the backward outlook of the warrior.[4] Yet, so this chapter argues, warfare as practiced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in its own ways corroded traditional forms of thought. For seventeenth-century nobles, the experience of war was only partly an inheritance from the Middle Ages. The changing technology, expanding scale, and increasingly bureaucratic organization of seventeenth-century warfare required specific forms of calculation and political reflection. Just as important, military careers unfolded in ways that detached nobles from inherited settings and forced them to confront intellectual and moral novelties.
Warfare, as Nicolas Faret made clear, was a professional choice, a focus for the ambition which (the previous chapter argued) offered seventeenth-century nobles a guiding theme for understanding their lives. That ambition had an important place in military careers seemed obvious to contemporaries. We have heard the poet Malherbe contrast the moderate ambitions appropriate to a robe career with the lofty but uncertain ambitions appropriate to warfare.[5] Others used comparable language. Arnauld d'Andilly described his military uncle as governed by "wild ambition [une ambition démesurée ]."[6] Henri de Rohan made ambition central to his view of proper government policy toward the army. Worried that young men might satisfy their ambitions elsewhere, he proposed that government "encourage men of honor and ambition to enroll, both by [giving them] hope of advanc-
[4] George Huppert, Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes: An Essay on the Definition of Elites in Renaissance France (Chicago, 1977), 45.
[5] Above, Chapter 1.
[6] Robert Arnauld d'Andilly, Mémoires, in M. Petitot, ed., Collection des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France , 33–34 (Paris, 1824), 33: 326.
ing to other honors if they embrace the craft of warfare and by closing off any other means of advancing [parvenir ]."[7] Even those most delicate in their social discriminations accepted that advancement through military service was commonplace. "Bourgeois manners can sometimes be lost in the army," conceded the snobbish La Rochefoucauld, "but never at court."[8]
Basic realities of military practice underlay La Rochefoucauld's assumption that bourgeois families would use military service as a means of social mobility. Already by the late sixteenth century, the French army needed a substantial number of commoners as officers.[9] The linkage of war with economic advancement was still older. Froissart had described the straightforward economic motives of fourteenth-and early fifteenth-century captains. The Bascot de Mauléon, whom he met at the comte de Foix's court, immediately impressed Froissart with the worldly success he had attained: "He arrived with plenty of followers and baggage. . . . He had as many pack horses with him as any great baron, and he and his people took their meals off silver plate." Froissart promptly set out to understand this success story, drawing from the Bascot a tale of unpredictably changing fortunes: "Sometimes I have been so thoroughly down that I hadn't even a horse to ride, and at other times fairly rich, as luck came and went." Military life in the late Middle Ages was crudely oriented to financial success, and indeed was one of the great avenues to success.[10] But, in contrast to the language of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Froissart and the Bascot placed images of fortune at the center of their understanding of success. Triumphs and reverses succeeded each other without apparent order, not as part of a coherent strategy of advancement. For most late medieval nobles, actual experience of war was more haphazard still; it involved only very occasional service in the enormous, unruly hosts the French kings led into battle.[11]
[7] Henri de Rohan, Le parfait capitaine ou abrégé des guerres des Commentaires de César, new ed., expanded (n.p., 1757), 176–77.
[8] François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes et réflexions diverses , ed. Jacques Truchet (Paris, 1977), 79 (no. 393).
[9] André Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1789 , trans. Abigail T. Siddall (Bloomington, Ill., 1979), 163.
[10] Jean Froissart, Chronicles , ed. Geoffrey Brereton (London, 1968), 280, 288. See Philippe Contamine, Guerre, Etat et société à la fin du moyen âge (Paris, 1972), 441–48, and K. B. Macfarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), for discussions of the economics of medieval warfare.
[11] Contamine, Guerre, Etat et société, 44–45.
Although the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought alternative models of what it meant to be noble, they also brought a greater demand for soldiers, as armies grew in size and war became more ferocious. The army also became increasingly professional, providing long-term careers rather than occasional marauding.[12] In these circumstances, advancement within the army had a meaning that had not been possible in the years around 1400. Experience of battle was probably more common among the seventeenth-century nobility than among their sixteenth-century ancestors, for after 1635 the French army began a breathtaking expansion. The army had numbered 50,000 in the mid-sixteenth century. By the end of the religious wars it had reached 80,000, and it nearly doubled after 1635, when France entered the Thirty Years' War; after a small decline in the later seventeenth century, it swelled to 360,000 by 1710.[13] Its numbers alone assured that the army would be a mechanism of social mobility.
For nobles and bourgeois alike, service began very young, at the age of sixteen or seventeen.[14] Early experience of war gave a decisive turn to their views of the world, leaving many eager to fight throughout their lives and shaping even ideas about youth itself. After a few years in Jesuit colleges, his parents sent Bussy-Rabutin to war at age sixteen, then brought him back to Paris for some training at an academy: "[B]ut having for a certain time commanded a regiment, I had difficulty lowering myself to the obedience of a schoolboy and only stayed there eight months."[15] Military life meant early adulthood and reduced education, and it early left nobles disinclined to accept many forms of authority.
Nobles' enthusiasm for military activity suffered only from the relative peace that France enjoyed during the first third of the seventeenth century. Between the peace with Spain in 1598 and the formal French entry into the Thirty Years' War, only a few occasions offered the experiences and profits of warfare. During these years, nobles who
[12] Ibid., 536–46.
[13] Geoffrey Parker, Europe in Crisis, 1598–1648 (London, 1979), 70; William Doyle, The Old European Order, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1978), 242.
[14] For examples, Charles de Saint-Evremond, Oeuvres en prose , ed. René Ternois, 3 vols. (Paris, 1962–66), 1: xxiii-xxiv; Roger de Bussy-Rabutin, Mémoires , ed. Ludovic Lalanne, 2 vols. (Paris, 1857; repr. Westmead, 1972), 1: 5–8; Sieur de Pontis, Mémoires , in M. Petitot, ed., Collections des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France , 31–32 (Paris, 1824), 31: 213–14; Blaise de Monluc, Commentaires, 1521–1576 , ed. Paul Courteault (Paris, Pléiade, 1964), 50; Dewald, Pont-St-Pierre , 168–69.
[15] Bussy-Rabutin, Mémoires , 1: 8.
wanted experience of war had often to seek it abroad, and they did so in large numbers, traveling first to Holland and then to Germany. War was yet another characteristic seventeenth-century impetus to mobility, reinforcing the effects of duels and political miscalculation in creating exiles. "France being at peace, he went off to serve in Holland," as a genealogist wrote of one early-seventeenth-century nobleman.[16] Arnauld d'Andilly used almost the same words of his uncle: "[S]ince at that time there were no wars elsewhere, M. Arnauld went to seek it in Livonia," under Gustavus Adolphus.[17] The baron de Sirot, who eventually played a distinguished role in the Grand Condé's campaign of 1639, served for two years in France, then entered Maurice of Nassau's army, then fought in Piedmont, then in Hungary, and then under Wallenstein in Germany; after a brief stay at his estate, he fought in the Swedish army against Wallenstein, before rejoining the French armies at the time of the French entry in the Thirty Years' War. At that time, having served in a half-dozen armies across Europe, he was twenty-nine years old.[18] The connection between war and travel was not new. At the age of seventeen, wrote Monluc, "desire to go to Italy overtook me, from the rumors circulating about the fine fighting [beaux faicts d'armes ] there"; he discussed his plans with a neighbor of his father's, "who told me so many things and recounted so many fine exploits, happening there every day," that the young man immediately set out to cross the mountains.[19]
Especially in the uncertain international politics of the early seventeenth century, such careers posed problems of moral choice. The comte de Souvigny recalled his uncle's experience: "Since there was peace in France, he went to the siege of Ostend, preferring to serve the king of Spain rather than the Dutch, because he was a good Catholic." Two of Souvigny's brothers, a few years later, went off "to learn to serve the king in Holland," but returned when they were told "that they could not attain their salvation so long as they served the heretical Dutch against the Catholic king of Spain."[20] Conversely, Henri de
[16] François-Alexandre Aubert de La Chesnaye-Desbois, Dictionnaire de la noblesse . . ., 15 vols. (Paris, 1770–86), 9: 290.
[17] Arnauld d'Andilly, Mémoires , 33: 326–27.
[18] M. le duc d'Aumale, Histoire des princes de Condé pendant les XVIe et XVIIe siècles , 6 vols. (Paris, 1885), 4: 15.
[19] Monluc, Commentaires , 30.
[20] Comte de Souvigny, Mémoires , ed. Ludovic de Contenson, 3 vols. (Paris, 1906–09), 2: 44, 278.
Campion found himself in the Spanish armies in the Netherlands in 1634, on the eve of French entry into the Thirty Years' War and long after French opposition to Spain was clear, a situation he justified by the fact that "in truth I was just a poor younger son trying to make my way [à faire fortune ]."[21] National and religious interests balanced uncertainly in such cases, leaving the individual nobleman very much on his own. He was seeking experience and skills, not responding to demands from the state or expectations generated by feudal tradition. "I was, at that time, in Germany, whither the wars, which had not yet finished there, had called me": so begins the century's most famous exploration of the individual's fundamental separation from society's moral and intellectual orders.[22] For early-seventeenth-century noblemen, Descartes's experience of voluntary exile, war, skepticism, and moral relativism must have carried familiar echoes.
Of course military careers might lead to immorality for simpler reasons, because of the brutality that camp life and fighting involved. This was one reason that notable families sometimes sought to discourage their sons from entering "the profession of arms." To seventeenth-century social theorists, military service was unquestionably the most glorious pursuit in French society, and for high aristocratic families it offered the only conceivable choice of career.[23] But this hierarchy of values was not so clearly established that families always welcomed their sons' choice of the military life. On the contrary, they often sought to direct their sons elsewhere. Early in the seventeenth century, the président de Nicolay received a letter from a provincial cousin whose son had decided on a military career. The son had made his choice despite his father's wishes; a military career was here an assertion of individuality. "The efforts I had made to follow in the traces of our forefathers and the advice you have always given me to set my children to studying," wrote the boy's irritated father to Nicolay, had led him to have the boy educated with care; "but I have been frustrated in these plans because he has entirely departed from my intentions in order to take up the path of arms. I have placed ex-
[21] Henri de Campion, Mémoires , ed. Marc Fumaroli (Paris, 1967), 48–49.
[22] René Descartes, Discourse on Method , trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (London, 1968), 35. For Descartes's self-conscious use of the genre of aristocratic autobiography, see Georg Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie , 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1969), 4: 736–37.
[23] For instance, Roland Mousnier et al., Problèmes de stratification sociale: Deux cahiers de la noblesse pour les Etats généraux de 1649–1651 (Paris, 1965).
amples before him, and above all of you, my lord, who hold the finest dignities in France; but these have not changed his opinion; I am therefore compelled to send him to Paris to be trained at the academy, so that (God willing) he may appear among men of honor at least through arms, if he does not wish to through letters."[24] In this family, as in many others, there was nothing obvious about the superiority of arms to letters. Rather, a military career violated paternal ambitions and expectations.
Nicolay's cousin believed that letters offered surer hopes of advancement than arms (a point discussed above, Chapter 1). The squalor and uncertainties of camp life likewise encouraged hesitation. The brother of Madame de La Trémoille's secretary served in Holland in the 1620s, and a friend described his circumstances and concerns. When his father sent money, he immediately spent it all. "I advised him to save that money for his needs," reported the friend, "but he told me that he preferred to spend part of it, since he might lose it or have it stolen in the disorder and license of war. Such caution makes me think that he is not at all debauched, and that he wants to make something of himself. . . . [H]e told me that he has decided to go to Amsterdam and place himself with some merchant, a plan that I approved all the more fully because I see that the soldier's lot is very miserable."[25] The young man's father agreed. He commanded him to "continue in the army in that land if he cannot find some merchant with whom to apprentice himself. . . . [His father] orders him also to learn mathematics, as do several persons in his situation."[26]
The exchange illustrates again the complex cultural lines that met in a military career. There was little visible glory here. The young man was on his own, far from home and subject to the "license of war." Relatives and friends watched him closely, but they could only hope that readiness to spend frivolously actually betokened good sense and resistance to temptation. The young man was expected to use his time in Holland as an apprenticeship, to acquire the mathematical skills he would need whether merchant or soldier. The young man's social
[24] AN 3 AP 59, 3F 4, 21 July 1605. See also Huppert, Les Bourgeois Gentils-hommes , for stress on the self-confidence of the robe and its dislike of military values; and John Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450–1620 (Baltimore, 1985), for the demilitarization of aristocratic values in sixteenth-century Europe.
[25] AN 1 AP 648, dossier Champdor, March 1626.
[26] Ibid., 25 May 1626.
position was strikingly fluid: he came from the lettered milieu of seigneurial officials and secretaries; he served in the military; but he and his family were quite ready for him to undertake a mercantile career—which, surprisingly, proved to have intellectual affinities with the military. Even without the dangers of battle, military life posed worrisome threats to the young man's well-being: theft, debauchery, uncertainty.[27] The end of a military career was still less attractive, as even its enthusiasts acknowledged. "The fear of finding oneself poor and crippled, after having long served," wrote Henri de Rohan, "is a powerful bridle holding back [enlistments]." Rohan's solution was to encourage "men of ambition and ability [vertu ] to enroll freely, by closing the door on any other means of advancing."[28] Poverty was not a real concern for the high aristocracy, but they too could fear the scars and decrepitude military life might bring.
To these doubts about the value of a military career the evolution of tactics during the seventeenth century added further anxieties. "Nowadays we wage war as foxes rather than lions," observed Rohan, "and it is founded rather on sieges than on battles."[29] As Geoffrey Parker has pointed out, even the great battles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrated the prominence of siege warfare, for they arose from confrontations between besiegers and relief columns.[30] With the development of both artillery and fortifications, soldiers spent much of their time in trench warfare, amid horrors that (because of their authors' focus on glorious events) receive only casual mention in military memoirs.
Even without life in the trenches, there were horrors. Henri de Campion described the siege of Saverne, in Alsace, which its defenders had fortified brilliantly. After a disastrous full-scale assault, the army settled down "to attack the besieged foot by foot." When a sortie by the besieged killed five hundred attackers in one day, "the stench of
[27] Cf. Hale, War and Society , for further stress on the unpleasantness of military life; similarly, James Wood, "The Royal Army During the Early Wars of Religion, 1559–1576," in Mack P. Holt, ed., Society and Institutions in Early Modern France (Athens, Georgia, 1991), demonstrates the very heavy losses that the French nobility suffered in sixteenth-century combat.
[28] Rohan, Le parfait capitaine , 177-78, 179; cf. Monluc's awareness of captains' fear of poverty in old age, quoted above, Chapter 1.
[29] Le parfait capitaine , 207; see Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1988), 16, for the circulation of this remark in England.
[30] Parker, Military Revolution , 16.
their corpses, which we could not remove, and which were all on top of one another, was one of our great inconveniences during this siege." After forty days and two thousand deaths among the attackers, a lack of food finally forced the defenders to surrender. The next year, half of Campion's army died of plague "because of the multitude of women and children who were there and the pillage and, I believe, as punishment for all the evils that we did"; he himself contracted dysentery and, after five months of dragging illness, recovered only after leaving the army.[31]
Military life thus embodied a paradox obvious to thoughtful contemporaries. On the one hand, this was the pursuit for which the nobility existed, and which writers commonly presented as society's most glorious activity. On the other hand, warfare involved moral discomfort and physical squalor. War itself became steadily less glorious, as firearms and siege tactics increasingly dominated its practice. More profoundly, the pursuit of military experience required young men to leave the control of parents and feudal superiors, and it often led them to strange lands and heretical religions. It is not surprising that fathers hesitated to encourage their sons to pursue such a career.
Because contemporaries saw so clearly that warfare was a career, they gave considerable thought to the training and behavior that a young man needed to make his way successfully in it. Warfare did not demand the formal education of the future magistrate, but it did require a broad effort of self-formation. Social relations between magistrates and military nobles, whether at the level of seigneurial servants or at the more exalted level of the Président de Nicolay and his cousin, ensured that such awareness touched the robe milieu as well as purely military families. Three years after his father had first complained to the président de Nicolay, Nicolay's cousin was ready to begin his military career, and Nicolay offered some worldly advice: "Now that he has chosen the profession of arms, it seems to me that you ought to have him learn the trade at the start among the foot soldiers: among the king's guard, which is full of nobles and young men eager to get ahead [qui ont volonté de parvenir ], and be known by the king and his captains; or else in a good garrison, like that of Calais, under Monsieur de Vic, a very wise governor." After this year of apprenticeship,
[31] Campion, Mémoires , 79-88.
Nicolay recommended a place in the light cavalry, "who are always on duty, . . . well paid, and it suffices to have two horses, for the master and his valet." In the heavy cavalry, expenses would be higher and income less certain, "and, in addition, a young gentleman who wants to get ahead [parvenir ] should not launch himself immediately into the heavy cavalry."[32] For Nicolay and his cousin, the problem of success was at the heart of the military career; a young man who had chosen it needed to learn the métier and to place himself among others who were striving to advance. War required both formal training and more delicate choices about surroundings and companions.
Some years later, the comte de Souvigny likewise reflected on the kinds of knowledge a military career demanded. Having overcome his father's opposition, Souvigny spent nine months serving in the army with his uncle; then, during the winter, the uncle "boarded me at Lyon to learn mathematics and fortifications, from M. Le Beau, and dancing and marksmanship." This was in 1613, when Souvigny was sixteen years old. Near the end of his life, he urged a more formal version of the same program on his sons: if they were to enter the military, he urged them, "use your time carefully to learn history, all sorts of arithmetical rules, which are absolutely necessary to a man of war, the general rules of fortifications, to draw up plans of forts, battles, and camps, to form battalions, and even the orders of battle and camps. I have some knowledge of these things from practice more than from theory. . . . Thus I have not built on a good foundation and have only a confused knowledge [science ]." In place of such empirical confusion, he urged on his sons formal study of Euclid, recently translated into French; he also urged that "if in your garrison there are also masters to teach you to shoot and to dance" they should take advantage of the opportunity, but not to the neglect of other duties.[33]
Long before Vauban, thus, war was a science, requiring special forms of knowledge and a high degree of precision. Knowledge of ancient authorities counted as well. The Grand Condé was famous for his knowledge of ancient military writings. "His genius and experience are helped by everything that can be known of warfare," wrote Saint-Evremond. "[T]he arrangements [discipline ] of the ancients are
[32] AN 3 AP 59, 3 F 5, 7 June 1608.
[33] Comte de Souvigny, Mémoires , 1: 17; 3: 63–64.
as well known to him as those of the last centuries, and those of the last centuries as those of our own. That is to say that there has been no great siege or battle whose smallest details he does not know. The wars of Alexander and the Commentaries of Caesar move him enormously."[34] "No one could be better instructed than he in the discipline of the Romans. . . . [H]e had determined to follow them whatever the cost," wrote Arnauld d'Andilly of his military uncle;[35] Henri de Rohan thought ancient military knowledge sufficiently important that he translated and analyzed Casesar's Commentaries , specifically justifying its relevance to the age of artillery;[36] and William Louis of Nassau based his innovations in arranging troops on Roman military writings.[37] Military careers encouraged close study of the ancients and a belief that ancient knowledge had enduring, universal usefulness.
But this humanist belief in the value of literary study coexisted with an empiricist strain in the rhetoric surrounding military life. For war demanded sensitivity to particular circumstances and historical change, and an appreciation of progress. As much as in any area of seventeenth-century life, its practitioners used the rhetoric of Baconian science to describe the changes around them. Thus Rohan urged the aspiring captain to read the numerous treatises that had appeared on the science of fortification, but, "even better, [to learn] from the exercise of war, where every day experience adds something."[38] Arnauld d'Andilly praised his uncle for having "so deeply studied every aspect of war," but praised him above all as an innovator: "[S]uch exact discipline, and so many new formations invented by M. Arnauld, attracted from all sides . . . young gentlemen who came to learn their trade."[39] The successful warrior had to be something of an inventor. Everyone of course knew that firearms had changed military life, and in the 1570s Monluc offered conventional complaints about the harquebus's effects on the sociology of war: "I wish to God that they had never invented this cursed instrument! I wouldn't carry
[34] Saint-Evremond, Oeuvres en prose , 1: 110; see also Philippe Ariés, Centuries of Childhood: The Social History of Family Life , trans. Robert Baldick (London, 1962), for discussion of the Grand Condé's education.
[35] Arnauld d'Andilly, Mémoires , 33: 332.
[36] Rohan, Le parfait capitaine , passim, esp. Epistle vi.
[37] Parker, Military Revolution , 18–19.
[38] Rohan, Le parfait capitaine , 219.
[39] Arnauld d'Andilly, Mémoires , 33: 326, 336.
its marks, which still today leave me weak, and many brave men wouldn't be dead at the hands of those weaker and more cowardly than themselves."[40] For better and for worse, war seemed to demonstrate as few other domains of seventeenth-century life could the inadequacy of rules from the past and the danger of excessive generalizations; it both demanded close study of the past and enforced belief in intellectual progress.
This sense of historical particularity reinforced a larger empiricism that military experience seemed to encourage. War, so the military nobles argued, created forms of knowledge inaccessible to others. "Those who have never left their well-carpeted studies or the dainty tables of the court can no more judge what war is or how diverse its effects are than a blind man can judge colors," wrote the baron de Villars in the early seventeenth century.[41] He referred not only to the violence but also to the mass of particular events that made up the experience of battle. Like Villars, other seventeenth-century military men stressed rejection of abstract and theoretical knowledge and suggested that real knowledge lay in particulars. This was a form of knowledge to which numerous noble memorialists laid claim, whether or not they spoke to the specific intellectual problems that fighting posed. "Those who write the large histories," wrote François de La Noue in the 1580s, "having so many facts to describe, more numerous than the leaves of an oak tree, cannot always do so while noting all the particularities that go with them."[42] "This is not a book for intellectuals," wrote Monluc in introducing his work. "They have enough historians; this is for soldiers and captains, and perhaps even a royal governor might find something to learn here."[43] Because so many particulars made up the reality of warfare, success in it (like success in court politics) remained uncertain, and this formed an additional element in the outlook that military life created. La Rochefoucauld viewed the military successes of the comte d'Harcourt as an instance of "the care that fortune has taken to elevate and cast down men's merits. . . . [S]he wishes to show the full extent of her powers when
[40] Monluc, Commentaires , 35.
[41] François de Boyvin, chevalier baron du Villars, Mémories , in M. Petitot, ed., Collection complète des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France , 28–30 (Paris, 1822), 28: 349.
[42] François de La Noue, Mémoires , in Michaud and Poujolat, eds., Nouvelle collection des mémoires relatifs à l'historie de France . . . , 9 (Paris, 1854), 593.
[43] Monluc, Commentaires , 22.
she selects mediocre figures [sujets ] to set on an equal footing with the greatest men."[44]
This Machiavellian vision of human affairs came naturally to seventeenth-century military men, and so also did Machiavellian forms of political reflection. War required that the captain view himself as a political leader, mobilizing his followers and carefully analyzing his opponents; and like so much else in seventeenth-century culture, it encouraged close study of individual personalities. In the mid-seventeenth century the duc de La Trémoille copied into his letter book a portrait of the great late-sixteenth-century captain the duke of Parma: "[M]aking war rather with his wits and speeches than with the force of his arms; using with great acuity nations' weaknesses to conquer them, and carefully applying himself to learn their weaknesses, foibles, impatience, suspicions, and envies, manipulating them according to their characters, and never failing to use the opportunities that they gave him."[45] War in these terms was closely linked to a broader vision of politics, in which rational manipulation replaced pure violence. The La Trémoilles showed other signs of taking such advice seriously. The comte de Laval's library in the early seventeenth century included most of the available literature on military practice and its political dimensions: Machiavelli's Art of War , "le livre sur le maniement des armes," works on Caesar and Maurice of Nassau, and a striking number of histories and memoirs, including Pasquier, Froissart, and Commynes.[46]
Seventeenth-century warfare, in short, encouraged noblemen to adopt important values of Renaissance humanism. This was a realm in which Roman and Greek knowledge was thought to have direct contemporary pertinence: the well-trained captain needed to have read both Caesar's tactics and Euclid's mathematics. He was to have read history; he needed rhetorical skills to mobilize his own troops and political insight in dealing with others. At the same time, he needed sensitivity to the role of progress in human affairs. Whatever reservations nobles may have had about the role of gunpowder in early modern warfare, new military technology required that they recognize the particularity of historical circumstances, the degree to
[44] La Rochefoucauld, Maximes et réflexions diverses, 151.
[45] AN 1 AP 397, 70.
[46] AN 1 AP 382, "Mémoire des livres et meubles. . . . "
which each age differed from the last. Warfare led nobles to a powerful engagement with contemporary intellectual life.
In the course of the seventeenth century, a further change strengthened these educative effects of warfare: the manners and practices of the court became an increasing presence in camp life. Writing in about 1660, the comte de Souvigny, it has been seen, assumed that his son might learn not only marksmanship but also dancing in his military camps. In this and other ways, seventeenth-century nobles increasingly sought to assimilate military life to models of courtly behavior. "I was certainly surprised in the evening," wrote Gourville of a visit to an army commander in 1654, "when supper was served, to see that it was done with the same elegance [propreté ] and delicacy that he would have had at Paris. Up till then no one had taken his silver dishes to the army, or had thought to serve entremets or fruit. But this bad example soon spoiled others, and this carried so far that today there are no generals, colonels, or maîtres de camp who lack silver dishes, and they believe themselves obliged to do like the others, insofar as they can."[47] Earlier in the seventeenth century, Campion described carting around his books on campaign, "with which I occupied myself fairly often, sometimes alone, more often with three of my friends in the regiment, men who were clever and very studious." They would read aloud from "some good book, whose finest passages we would examine, to learn how to live and die well."[48] In the winter, when campaigning ceased, life at moments could hold still more pleasures. Lodged at Lautrec, remembered Campion, "I spent a very agreeable three months. I struck up a friendship with a well-born and clever young woman, . . . with whom I passed some lovely hours."[49] For Campion and others, war's effects in some ways paralleled those of life at court, with efforts at self-improvement and polishing playing a large role in camp life. Despite the squalor of the trenches, war could be a school of elegant behavior.
Like the court, war also had elements of theatrical performance, in which actions were carefully observed and evaluated. As at court,
[47] Jean Hérauld, sieur de Gourville, Mémoires , ed Léon Lecestre, 2 vols. (Paris, 1894), 1: 108.
[48] Campion, Mémoires , 95, 96; see Jean-Marie Constant, Les conjurateurs: Le premier libéralisme sous Richelieu (Paris, 1987), for discussion of the political significance of these discussions.
[49] Campion, Mémoires , 120.
thus, the warrior had to exercise rigid self-control within a highly emotional setting. Monluc made the point in the later sixteenth century: "Those who want to gain honor by arms must resolve to shut their eyes to all dangers in the first battles where they find themselves. For everyone will be watching, to see what they've got inside. If at the beginning they carry out some striking action, to show their courage and toughness, they'll be marked and known forever after."[50] La Rochefoucauld likewise offered reflections on the ways in which war was a public performance. "Most men expose themselves enough in war to save their honor. But few want always to expose themselves enough to bring success to the plans for which they have exposed themselves," he commented; and "One does not want to lose one's life, and one wants to win glory; which means that brave men are more ingenious in avoiding death than are the litigious in preserving their property."[51] Despite the growing scale and ferocity of warfare, the seventeenth century brought only an increased awareness of its theatrical qualities. The development of journalism spread word of military achievements throughout society, and Louis XIV's eagerness to note and commemorate them had the same effect. At the end of the seventeenth century, war was still far from being an anonymous enterprise.
Even wounds and death carried these theatrical overtones: they were watched by a large public. In the 1620s the dowager duchesse de Longueville wrote to Madame de La Trémoille to congratulate her on "the news of the wounds of M. de Laval, your son, and the marvelous deeds he has done in Germany. . . . Praise God that his life is not in danger and that he will return to you full of glory and esteem."[52] Turenne's death (he was hit by a cannonball as he observed the preparations for battle) offered seventeenth-century writers an example of the completed military life: a death "so suited to such a fine life, surrounded by so many striking circumstances and coming at so important a moment," in La Rochefoucauld's words.[53]
The awareness that the warrior acted in a theatrical setting, observed by his fellows and commented on at court, encouraged contem-
[50] Monluc, Commentaires , 31.
[51] La Rochefoucauld, Maximes et réflexions diverses, 64 (nos. 219, 221).
[52] AN 1 AP 649, dossier Catherine de Gonzague de Clèves, duchesse douairière de Longueville, 26 XI, n.d. See also Madame de Sévigné, Selected Letters , trans. Leonard Tancock (London, 1982), 143–48, for Parisian and court perceptions of the crossing of the Rhine (17, 19 June, 3 July 1672).
[53] La Rochefoucauld, Maximes et réflexions diverses, 130 ("Des modèles de la nature et de la fortune").
poraries to take a complex view of the emotions of battle itself. Like life at court, the experience of war offered yet another stimulus for nobles to view human personality as infinitely complex, inadequately comprehended by generalizing formulations. Human feelings, concealed by the role-playing that battle demanded, might vary enormously. "Perfect valor and cowardice are extremes that rarely occur. The space between them is vast, and contains all the other kinds of courage: there are no fewer differences among them than among faces and temperaments," noted La Rochefoucauld, and he went on to list some of these, distinguishing men who were brave at the start of battle, fatigued thereafter; those who allowed themselves to be swept up by "general terrors"; those who were more afraid of bullets than of swords; and so on.[54]
Finally, warfare was connected with the court and with civil life more broadly, by the economic calculations that the captain needed to make. Economic concerns touched military careers at the outset, for, like positions in the judiciary and the financial administration, military positions were purchased, and positions of any consequence commanded high prices. In 1618, Jean Nicolay, first président in the Chambre des Comptes of Paris, spent just over 66,000 livres to buy a position as councillor in the Parlement of Paris for his oldest son; two years later a heavy cavalry position for his younger son cost him 75,000 livres.[55] These were enormous sums at a time when a wealthy provincial nobleman's yearly income rarely exceeded 15,000 livres and a substantial landed estate cost about 50,000 livres. This scale of investment meant that economic calculations immediately assumed a central place in a military career.[56]
But investment in office represented only a start. Thereafter arose the problems of recruiting soldiers, equipping them and assuring their wages, and surviving long periods of governmental neglect. "A captain should never be miserly," counselled Monluc in the later sixteenth century. "Miserliness brings a captain troubles at least as great as any other vice. For if you let yourself be dominated by greed, you'll never have decent soldiers around you. All the good men will flee, saying that you love silver more than a valiant man."[57] But the captain often
[54] Ibid., 63 (no. 215).
[55] AN 3 AP 20, 14 C 3, 14 C 10.
[56] See below, Chapter 5, for the functioning of venality in military offices.
[57] Monluc, Commentaires , 25–26.
had to be generous with his own money, and this remained the case well into the seventeenth century. "We are in garrison without having touched any of the king's money, and with no assurance of doing so," wrote one of Nicolay's relatives from his camp near La Rochelle. "I've had to maintain my company for the past three months out of the money you loaned me, buy arms, and raise [troops]. . . . I don't see any prospect of prosperity, and they remain indifferent to me [l'on ne me veut aimer ] no matter what I do, . . . at least [so it seems] by the effects that appear in our purses."[58] The same complaints echoed lower in the military hierarchy. In 1602 one of the La Trémoilles' agents asked that the profits of a shipwreck near the family's château of Talmont be given him, so that a family guard could "receive recognition for his vigilance at your castle as I promised; he has received nothing for three years, and I could be reimbursed for the advances I've made to the soldiers that I maintain there for your service."[59] Whatever the level, monetary calculations could never be far from the captain's mind.
Such conditions required that the captain act as both courtier and entrepreneur. He needed to make himself loved at court, to maintain his relations with the high officials who would secure the payment of his troops and his other financial needs; in 1653 Campion had to spend a month at court "soliciting payment of our winter wages" for his regiment.[60] Even in camp or in battle he needed to evaluate carefully the economic dimensions of his actions—sometimes to the point of comical involvement in local business affairs.[61] It was thus important that captains be "persons well-born and rich . . . being rich, they can keep their companies intact [faictes ]": so an aristocratic author reflected near the start of his "Treatise on the Light Cavalry."[62] Military profits might be high, but they came only after heavy initial investment and with continuous effort thereafter. At all levels of the military hierarchy, warfare involved the nobleman in complicated economic networks and exchange relations.
[58] AN 3 AP 21, 21 C 68, Vieupont to Nicolay, 25 November 1625.
[59] AN 1 AP 645, "mr Bessay" to Monseigneur, February 1602.
[60] Campion, Mémoires , 213.
[61] For an extreme example see Dewald, Pont-St-Pierre, 179–80. Saint-Evremond told a friend that he had turned a profit of 50,000 livres from his two years' service in Guienne during the Fronde (Oeuvres en prose, 1: xxvii).
[62] AN 1 AP 397, 4.
Failure to negotiate these relationships could be costly, in terms both of military effectiveness and of the nobleman's political standing. When the prince de Tarente could not assure his troop's payments in 1650, he was warned that his failure "leaves your company dying of hunger and ruins it from top to bottom."[63] The sums of money were often very large: in the same year Tarente borrowed 50,000 livres in order to raise troops to support the crown against the Bordelais frondeurs—a sum that required the prince's agents to turn to friends and bankers in La Rochelle.[64]
The Crown in fact used such nobles as Tarente for precisely this money-raising function, employing their financial credit with local merchants and their political credit with local nobles to raise armies it could not raise directly. When financial problems delayed his levies of troops in 1650, Tarente was warned about "the impatience that the court feels about your levies. My lord, I believe that it is very important for you to have some troops appear under your name before the peace with Bordeaux is concluded—very soon, it appears"; and his correspondent urged him to make as much use as possible of his followers within the local nobility in putting together these corps.[65] Failure to engage one's resources—both money and reserves of patronage—in military levies meant risking favor at court. Even in the mid-seventeenth century, the Crown could not do without the independent military power of such families as the La Trémoilles; such families' power to mobilize followers provided an important element in the royal army itself. Money and political maneuvering were central to a military career; they tended to overshadow the animal ferocity of combat and the chivalric traditions of military service.
In all of these ways, seventeenth-century war was a far from atavistic enterprise. It demanded of its aristocratic practitioners economic and political calculations, and some classical and mathematical learning. The successful captain had in certain ways to be a courtier, and even in the field his experiences in some ways paralleled those of the court. Like the court, war was a stage for carefully controlled performances, and, as at court, successful performance might lead to social
[63] AN 1 AP 443, no. 36, Beaugendre to prince de Tarente, 28 September 1650.
[64] Ibid., no. 10, "Estat des sommes empruntez par monseigneur . . . "; no. 30, St.-Maurice to prince de Tarente, 20 September 1650.
[65] Ibid., no. 30, St.-Maurice to prince de Tarente, 20 September 1650.
advancement. La Rochefoucauld even thought that army life improved manners, polishing away "l'air bourgeois ."
But war of course also stood outside established social norms. By its very nature violence represents destruction of order and the disruption of daily life, and seventeenth-century soldiers experienced especially savage forms of violence. Possibly the divergence between daily life and battlefield was less great than in our own time, given that violence was a more common element in seventeenth-century daily life; but seventeenth-century writers stressed the special forms of perception and behavior that war demanded—and the difficulty anyone who had not experienced war had in understanding what it was like. Seventeenth-century observers could cite impressive examples both of ferocity and of the reasonings that lay behind it. "When he took prisoners," claimed Tallemant of a sixteenth-century nobleman, "he had them killed by his son, who was only ten years old, to accustom him early to bloodshed and carnage."[66] This was an extreme and perhaps mythical instance, but in some degree all warriors were expected to share this combination of rage and indifference to blood. Bussy described the Grand Condé fighting hand to hand in the trenches, moved by a terrifying animal rage.[67]
But even rage and fear were also tactical instruments, elements in the highly rational conduct that seventeenth-century war demanded. Three generations before Richelieu, Blaise de Monluc used the term raison de la guerre to summarize the approach to violence that he advocated. Thus he described one massacre that he had directed and emphasized the example's broad relevance: "Don't think, those of you who read this book, that I ordered that execution so much to avenge my wound as to spread terror through the whole countryside," he wrote; " . . . and it seems to me that any captain at the start of a campaign of conquest ought to do the same against those who dare to hold out against him; he must close his ears to any talk of negotiation or truce. . . . [Y]ou need rigor (call it cruelty if you wish)."[68] Even in its violence, warfare for Monluc involved special forms of calculation. In such passages, he argued for a Machiavellian vision of the warrior's
[66] Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes , ed. Antoine Adam, 2 vols. (Paris, Pléiade, 1960–61), 1: 153.
[67] Bussy-Rabutin, Mémoires , 1: 143.
[68] Monluc, Commentaires , 409, 784.
situation. He had detached political from personal morality, so that his good captain could not be an entirely good man.
Monluc's vision required a comparable sacrifice of chivalric values. Though he worried about the socially corrosive effects of gunpowder, which seemed to eliminate honor from the battlefield and allow the cowardly to kill the brave, he also urged captains to relinquish honor as a measure for evaluating battlefield choices. Thus he offered strong defense of night-time retreats against the scruples of captains who might believe this to be cowardly behavior: "Have no shame about covering yourself in darkness. Far from being shameful, it's honorable to trick and mock the enemy who awaits you, and who at daybreak finds only your camp. It would be much more dishonorable and shameful to be beaten while you retreat, if you're so fussy. For God's sake, fight knowing what you're doing [à bon escient ]; stay in your position, if it's even slightly advantageous, and there wait for your enemy either to grow tired or to attack you, and you'll play with all the cards on your side."[69] War as Monluc conceived it demanded absolute rationality, an adjustment of means to ends that permitted the use of deception and every other possible advantage. Effectiveness rather than honor became an increasingly exclusive standard for judging military actions.
The seventeenth century brought some mitigation of this calculated ferocity, but no real diminution. Commanders themselves participated, rather than merely directing others' violence. Henri de Campion described the comte de Harcourt, one of the century's most successful commanders, in battle against the Spanish, in 1639. Having routed the enemy, a French officer sought to save a wounded enemy officer; Harcourt arrived, apparently also to help the man but in fact to finish him off, "cutting off half of his head." Campion, with his sensitivity and stoical morality, thought this an act "of pure cruelty" and "unworthy of so highly reputed a prince," but his own delicacy had its limits. When a French village violently refused to lodge his troops, he encouraged his soldiers to march on it, promising that "we would overwhelm them and that our troop could then pillage the town." He likewise described without comment having hanged the governor of a fort "for having held out in a fortress that couldn't withstand can-
[69] Monluc, Commentaires , 273. There were of course also practical reasons to avoid night-time retreats. Campion pointed out that darkness allowed frightened, retreating soldiers to escape the control of their officers and thus risked turning a retreat into chaos: Mémoires , 109.
non"—in other words, in what he knew to be a helpless situation.[70] For Campion as for Monluc, the captain was expected to employ techniques of calculated terror, whatever his personal morals. Like his travels, his planning on the battlefield detached the warrior from inherited ethics.
Contemporaries were impressed by the special psychological impact of the experience of warfare and by the ways this experience separated nobles from other social groups. In combat as in other aspects of his life, the military nobleman was expected to regulate his passions in ways quite unlike other men. Passion was not to be entirely repressed. It was also to be used and even encouraged, for peasants and garrison commanders alike could thus be frightened into following the army's needs. But ferocity could recede as quickly as it had come. The day after Harcourt killed the Spaniard, a treaty allowed the Spanish to leave their besieged fortress; Harcourt and the Spanish commander "embraced each other on horseback."[71] Shifts between ferocity and gentleness formed part of the experience of battle and testified to the extraordinary psychological state that the combatant entered. Henri de Rohan offered more general reflections on the psychological impact of battle, but he too stressed that warfare involved a changed state of mind, something beyond ordinary social experience: "It's a maxim that any troop, no matter how big, if it has fought, is in such disorder that the smallest fresh troop arriving can absolutely undo it. . . . [I]t is a long and difficult task to try to restore in good order an army that has fought, to fight again: some amusing themselves by pillaging, others upset at returning to the peril; and all of them so excited that they don't understand or don't wish to understand our orders."[72] Entering combat meant a changed state of mind, a state of emotion from which there was no rapid or easy return. Seventeenth-century fascination with duelling, so François Billacois has suggested, reflected a similar sensitivity to extraordinary experience. Both the duelist and the warrior were men who had stepped beyond the normal limits of social behavior.[73]
[70] Campion, Mémoires , 131, 132, 77, 89.
[71] Ibid., 132.
[72] Rohan, Le parfait capitaine , 211. My understanding of these issues owes much to John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London, 1976).
[73] François Billacois, Le duel dans la société française des XVIe-XVIIe siècles: Essai de psychologie historique (Paris, 1986).
Seventeenth-century writers saw this psychological experience as founding a basic social distinction between military men and even the highest-born civil magistrates. Seventeenth-century writers had all about them examples of the mingling of military and robe families. Yet belief in the special experience that war constituted led them to treat the distinction between robe and sword as fundamental, resting on different visions of the world. Pascal took up this theme in the mid-seventeenth century and presented the contrast as one of divergent epistemologies. The world of the robe, as we have seen, represented for him a world of illusions and appearances, in contrast to the realities of warfare and violence: whereas magistrates used theatrical trappings to create power over people's imaginations, soldiers exercised power directly, with physical force.[74] Pascal placed the judicial apparatus of the state, its ceremonies, laws, and costumes, on the side of imagination. Reality lay with the soldiers; they held real power and provided the real basis of monarchy. Fascination with deception and illusion permeated seventeenth-century thought. The contrast that Pascal drew between judges and warriors gave the contrast between reality and illusion a social dimension.
The belief that they inhabited a separate mental world gave military nobles a powerful sense of their distance from the educated officials of the robe nobility. The sense of difference could generate intense bitterness. Thus Henri de Rohan, in the 1630s: "Most states today are founded rather on administration [police ] than on war, and try to maintain themselves rather than to grow. As a result, we have seen letters flourish and arms decay. . . . [M]en of letters nearly everywhere have occupied the governments of states, who, because they hate men of war, always mistreat them, and even advise using mercenaries rather than their subjects, a very pernicious maxim."[75] Rohan held these views despite the learning evident in the very work where he expressed them, his commentary on Caesar. His dispute with the "men of letters" concerned, not letters, but their lack of sympathy for violence. La Rochefoucauld suggested a comparable gulf of understanding when he described bravery as inappropriate to a magistrate, "even though he can be resolute in certain circumstances; he should appear firm and confident during a sedition that he must calm, with-
[74] Blaise Pascal, Pensées , trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London, 1966), 40–41. See above, Chapter I.
[75] Rohan, Le parfait capitaine , 175–76.
out fear of being false, and he would be false and ridiculous to fight in a duel."[76] By this point, differences between robe and sword had little to do with race; but they rested on a sense of difference that was nonetheless very powerful. Violence defined a special knowledge of the world; it gave the military noble access to realities that were closed to others.
In this common experience of violence, warfare represented probably the most visible tie between seventeenth-century nobles and their medieval past. At the level of ideologies, the ability to fight provided one foundation of the society of orders itself. Nobles claimed that the blood they shed in war compensated for their failure to contribute to the state's finances. At deeper levels, fighting gave nobles common experiences with ancestors and detached them from other social groups. We have seen how far this sense of special experience extended, setting the nobles in some ways outside the norms of civil society.
But seventeenth-century warfare involved more than these impulses, for it upset inherited situations. There was, first, the experience of social mobility, which contemporaries believed was an important, perhaps necessary, component of military success. Ambition was so central to military strength, in the view of Henri de Rohan, that the army could thrive only if other avenues of advancement were closed off. Even those born to high positions found that warfare detached them from their settings, by encouraging them to wander throughout Europe in search of experience and offices; especially during the early seventeenth century, these wanderings included contacts with religious heterodoxy, as young men journeyed to the Dutch and German "schools of war." Even without such specific intellectual dangers, wandering in search of military office was thought to have unsettling effects on ideas and morals (as we shall see in detail in Chapter 3). In these ways, war involved nobles in situations of social fluidity and individualistic calculation. Money's role in a military career had similar effects. Any significant military career forced the nobleman into large monetary transactions, and it typically required extensive borrowing as well.
Such monetary calculations reinforced the other ways in which, contemporaries thought, military careers demanded knowledge and
[76] La Rochefoucauld, Maximes et réflexions diverses , 126–27 (13, "Du faux").
reflection. There were the forms of numeracy and literacy that warfare demanded. Captains needed a certain level of mathematical education, in order to deal with firearms and fortifications, and knowledge of the ancients, whose teachings were still closely followed despite the advent of firearms. They also needed some knowledge of more recent military theorists. More important, there were the broader forms of thought that accompanied military activity: alertness to historical change and the particularity of events; interest in the political calculations that increasingly were thought to determine military outcomes in an age when warriors needed to be "foxes rather than lions." The seventeenth-century warrior had to think in terms of purposive and controlled action, with scant regard for ethical or social restraints.[77]
Underlying these specific perceptions and intellectual demands was the warrior's peculiar moral position, as a man acting at the limits of social order. Warfare involved the calculated release of passions, and even such thoughtful moralists as Henri de Campion found themselves deliberately terrorizing civil populations. Ultimately, it was this experience of savagery that separated nobles of the sword from the society around them; military nobles claimed to have experienced a separate mental world.
[77] For an illuminating discussion of the issue of purposiveness in seventeenth-century politics, see Elizabeth Marvick, The Young Richelieu: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Leadership (Chicago, 1983), 3–13.