Giant of the Grand Siècle

Download or read book Giant of the Grand Siècle written by John A. Lynn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-14 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An "invisible giant," the seventeeth-century French army was the largest and hungriest institution of the Bourbon monarchy; yet it has received incomplete treatment and is poorly understood. Combining social and cultural emphases with more traditional institutional and operational concerns, this book examines the army in depth, studying recruitment, composition, discipline, motivation, selection of officers, leadership, administration, logistics, weaponry, tactics, field warfare, and siegecraft. The portrait that emerges differs from what current scholarship might have predicted. Instead of claiming that a "military revolution" transformed warfare, Lynn stresses evolutionary change. Questioning widely-held assumptions about state formation and coercion, he argues that this standing army was primarily devoted to border defense, and only rarely to internal repression.