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

This is an immensely useful, exhaustively researched study of how the government of Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, handled warfare from 1624 to 1642. Read along with two other recent studies by Wood and Lynn, it enables us at last to assess the impact of that other early modern "leviathan," the royal military establishment.¹ By extensively reevaluating nearly all aspects of Richelieu's army, Parrott calls into question the "military revolution" thesis according to which changes in seventeenth-century military tactics and training resulted in a larger, more disciplined army and stimulated the reformation of the state. He also challenges the related sociological thesis that the demands of warfare provided the primary impetus for the development of the modern state.²

Parrott argues that the French government was operating in a traditional mode that offered little evidence of revolutionary, bureaucratic reorganization. Military treatises of the day were backward and eclectic, showing no awareness of a new age dawning. Ministerial thinking, harking back to the religious wars, stressed massive siege operations directed at one front at a time. This tradition left France unprepared to fight a war of multiple fronts with manpower that was always inadequate. A year-by-year analysis of the war effort shows that France's results were far from stunning. Parrott shows that the army was dramatically smaller than traditionally thought. Instead of 120,000 to 130,000 men, the peak strength before 1635 was more like 30,000 to 40,000, and the maximum force, achieved only sporadically after 1635, was 70,000 to 80,000. The cost of open warfare was high, perhaps 20 to 30 million livres per year, but given its resources, France should have been able to foot this bill. Why then did the king have such trouble raising forces and paying for them?

Parrott cites a number of structural problems. First, France shied away from the entrepreneurial system of contracting out military recruitment to semi-independent captains, which was common elsewhere and which, paradoxically, was more effective than the French attempt to maintain state control. Foreign mercenary companies were self-sufficient and profitable, therefore better motivated and, with less turnover, more experienced. Because of the legacy of the religious wars, Louis XIII's ministers dreaded excessive independence on the part of their noble commanders. To discourage it, they carried out an unusual exchange of benefits between the government and the commanding officers. Control was exerted through the king's ability to issue commissions and disband companies. This function, which gave military commands an appearance of serving the king, flattered and enticed the noble officers. At the same time, state funding for the troops was always inadequate, forcing the unit commanders to borrow on their personal credit or risk having their companies disbanded. The ethic of military service to the Crown induced nobles to solicit commissions and tolerate these personal cash outlays, but not to take risks. Noble culture still required military service to establish legitimacy, but only for a campaign or two, rather than as a career commitment. Since they were never repaid, commanders were reluctant to jeopardize their forces by aggressive action, and their underpaid and undertrained troops suffered massive attrition through injury or desertion, which led to constant recruiting and inexperience in the field.

Another factor was France's unique credit system. Never having the ready cash to pay for spring troop mobilizations (most taxes came in late in the year), the government was dependent upon advances from financiers who took a large cut of the proceeds. Dependence on the credit of munitioneers to supply the troops led to similar problems of expensive credit, graft, and inefficiency. Tax revenues were increasingly committed long in advance, and vast sums were siphoned off by middlemen. To complicate matters further, government payments were made in the form of assignations on...