Engineering the Revolution

The centerpiece of Ken Alder’s provocative book Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 is the attempt on the part of technicians in charge of war production during the military crisis of the French Revolution to develop the fabrication of gunlocks composed of interchangeable parts. ¹ Others of us who have frequented technical reaches of the Archives nationales over the years have been intrigued to happen on fragmentary records of the short-lived Atelier de perfectionnement, directed by the mathematician Alexandre Vandermonde in 1794–95. From those papers it immediately becomes evident that Eli Whitney was by no means the first to imagine the advantages that interchangeability of parts would entail in the production of muskets. The Atelier de perfectionnement was only one feature, and a relatively minor one, of the immense effort that the Committee of Public Safety made to turn Paris into a national workshop serving the armies of the Republic in the year of the Terror, 1793–94. Alder has found, however, and this is the most original feature of his book, that not only the principle of interchangeability, but concerted attempts to realize it, were outgrowths of the program for reforming French ordnance initiated by Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval following the defeat of France in the Seven Years War.

After the humiliations suffered at the hands of Frederick the Great’s lightning armies, the French high command in the years before the Revolution replaced the system of siege warfare and reliance on defensive fortification devised by Vauban during the wars of Louis XIV with a hypothetical order of battle depending on fire and movement instead of position. At the level of government, the impetus came from Choiseul, in office from 1758 until 1770, and, within the military itself, from two leading innovators, J.-A.-H. de Guibert for general strategy and the reformation primarily of infantry and cavalry, and Gribeauval for ordnance and the reform of artillery. Guibert, the deeper thinker and more dashing figure, is better known to history. Their recommendations were complementary with respect to the general strategy of offensive warfare but contradictory in some measure with respect to firepower, since Guibert feared lest greater emphasis on artillery impede mobility. Alder barely mentions a third and closely related question, the marquis de Montalembert’s proposal of perpendicular fortifications to replace Vauban’s horizontal system. These issues were fought out in a battle of the books waged by the various factions within the military in the 1770s and 1780s. Alder’s concern is primarily with Gribeauval and his campaign to modernize the artillery.

The campaign was waged on two interacting fronts, one involving materiel, the other personnel. Examples of the siege guns of the time of Louis XIV, baroque in style and scale, may still be seen mounted before the Invalides in Paris. Starting in the 1720s the director general of artillery, Jean-Florent de Vallière, began the process of rationalization and replaced these three-ton monsters, many of which were one of a kind, as well as a somewhat miscellaneous variety of lighter pieces, with cannon of the calibers that remained standard throughout the eighteenth century: twenty-four- and sixteen-pounders intended for sieges and twelve-, eight-, and four-pounders employed as field artillery. The design of each class was uniform, and in principle, though not always in practice, all rounds of the specified weight fitted all cannon of that caliber. The strategy of the post-1763 Gribeauval “Moderns,” as opposed to the Vallière “Ancients,” called for still lighter and more mobile cannon. Barrels were less massive and shorter, mountings handier, and carriages more maneuverable. Firepower was to be greatly amplified by increasing the number of guns from 150 to 200 per division while augmenting the proportion of sixteen- and twenty-four-pounders. The new design involved changes in the process of production. In the old system barrels were cast in the form of hollow tubes surrounding a core of clay. The bore was then smoothed by reaming. In the new method barrels were cast in a solid mass of metal, and a...