Richelieu's Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624-1642. (Reviews).

David Parrott, Richelieu's Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624-1642

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xxiv + 599 pp. $90. ISBN 0-521-79209-6.

Historians of early modern Europe have been debating questions relating to the nature and extent of the Military Revolution for several decades, and have been arguing about the evolution of absolutist monarchy in France even longer than that. David Parrott's thoroughly researched study of French military administration makes important contributions to both debates. Parrott demonstrates that Cardinal Richelieu, instead of being an innovative modernizer of France's military system who embraced new ideas, made the bureaucracy more efficient, and concentrated power in his own hands, in fact failed to initiate effective reforms in military administration, and owed what limited success he had in expanding and strengthening the French army to improvised expedients and the cultivation of the great nobles and existing clientage networks.

Parrott chooses as his first target the tendency of military historians to use the battle of Rocroi in 1643 as the starting point for discussions of the French role in the modernization of warfare, as well as their reliance upon printed manuals and literary sources instead of archival materials. These approaches, he notes, led to the assumption that the period leading up to Rocroi was one during which the French military leaders, acting under Richelieu's tutelage, adopted significant reforms in military organization, training, and tactics in emulation of the Dutch and Swedish models. Parrott argues that these manuals tended to offer less practical advice than conscious emulation of classical models, and he adds that there is precious little evidence to demonstrate that any French commanders attempted to put the teachings in the manuals into practice. While the French may have plagiarized Dutch and Swedish textbooks in writing their own, they seem to have modeled their forces and tactics after those of the sup posedly outdated Spanish. The one clear change in the army that took place in the years before Rocroi, the creation of a large and powerful cavalry force, imitated the practices of their Spanish and Imperial rivals as well as those of the Swedes, and was not something promoted in the manuals at all.

The traditional assumption that Richelieu directed coherent military reforms also takes a sound beating from Parrott. He depicts the cardinal as someone who had bitten off more than he could chew when he moved France into direct involvement in the Thirty Years War in 1635. Before that date, the French had gotten by with a military system less developed than those of the active belligerents in the war.

Instead of relying on entrepreneurial military contractors who raised their own units and maintained them from year to year, the French maintained a small core of veteran regiments, and supplemented them with regiments raised on an ad hoc basis by noblemen looking to use them as a means to attain prestige and advancement. This system was effective so long as the French only had to maintain armies on one or two fronts at a time, and only undertook one campaign of any significance per year, if that. Direct participation in the war, however, forced them to maintain six or seven armies at once, and Richelieu failed to create any organized system capable of doing so. Instead, he issued a flurry of special commissions to tackle specific problems, and drew largely upon officials already in the bureaucracy to carry out these tasks. These commissions produced mixed results, and in the end, the most effective means of fielding armies and keeping them in the field long enough to accomplish anything was to rely on the ai d of high-ranking nobles whose status gave them enough authority over their subordinates to get them to work together. Far from taking power away from the grands, Richelieu had to concede more to them. Similarly, he found himself forced to draw on existing institutions and clientage networks that he could not directly control in order to raise, supply, pay and control the vast numbers of soldiers recruited into the army each year, and only managed this at dreadful cost to the taxpayers, especially the peasants and the inhabitants of towns where soldiers were quartered.

In the end, Parrott determines that Richelieu achieved just enough success in his military efforts to avert major disaster, and to maintain viable armies in the field on multiple fronts. These armies, however, were still raised, trained and managed in traditional ways, learned to fight through practical experience, and did not gain superiority over their opponents. They were funded not by a streamlined fiscal system, but through high taxes and short-term borrowing managed by officials whose corruption was encouraged by the system. Most of the armies' successes, moreover, were the product of decentralization and delegation of authority to military commanders and officials, and what limited attempts Richelieu made to concentrate power in his own hands or those of his own clients produced a backlash that threatened to destroy the monarchy a few years later. Parrott's thorough research and cogent arguments make his work required reading for any serious student of military history or the French monarchy in the sev enteenth century.