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  • Vauban: De la gloire du roi au service de l’état
  • Janis Langins (bio)
Vauban: De la gloire du roi au service de l’état. By Michèle Virol. Seyssel, France: Champ Vallon, 2003. Pp. 433. €28.

Sébastien Le Prestre, marquis de Vauban (1633-1707), was seen by royalists as the model of the faithful servant and invincible soldier of a great monarch. Revolutionaries agreed with Fontenelle that "He was a Roman whom it seemed our century had stolen from the happiest times of the Republic," and Napoleon placed his heart in the Invalides. Among French military engineers there was a veritable cult of Vauban, and the Duc de Saint-Simon coined the word "patriot" when he extolled his virtues. After Anne Blanchard's excellent book Vauban, published in 1996, it seemed that little remained to be said. Yet Vauban continues to attract the interest of historians and admirers, and Michèle Virol's book succeeds in presenting new insight into this monumental figure.

Virol's Vauban consists of five parts: Vauban as man of science, as practitioner of siege warfare, as administrator, as "arithmetician," and as statesman. Unlike most biographies of Vauban, the emphasis is not on his military contributions and style—Virol's two sections dealing with this occupy only a little more than a quarter of the book. Instead it is largely an analysis of Vauban's surviving papers and the Oisivetés that are now available to scholars in the National Archives of France (with the permission of Vauban's descendants). The translation of Oisivetés could be rendered as "slothful or idle amusements," a humorously self-deprecatory title for twelve substantial volumes—mostly manuscript—by a man who conducted about fifty sieges, participated in the planning or building of 160 fortresses, and between 1678 and 1698 alone traveled more than 180,000 kilometers on his tours of France.

Virol paints a portrait of a man who evolved from being a devoted personal [End Page 874] retainer of Louis XIV to a man whose loyalty to his country gradually overshadowed his allegiance to his royal master. Some personal bitterness at the slow promotion of an obviously talented petty noble from the provinces in the snobbish world of the court nobility of Versailles played a part, but the main reason was Vauban's exercise of his engineering talent over more than fifty years. The instincts of a superb engineer with a perpetually enquiring mind, whose energy and many duties led him to acquire an intimate knowledge of his country and his people, led him to see his country as a kind of Fortress France that was to be protected and enriched.

Initially, Vauban saw France's military aspects in engineering terms—its bastions should be well proportioned and well placed and its walls sturdy. But like a good governor of a fortress, he was intensely aware that fortresses are defended by men, who must be fed, paid, treated fairly, and inspired to serve their king. The French population of the hexagone should also be fairly and sensibly taxed, given opportunities to make a decent living and the possibility of displaying merit and being rewarded for it. During the last twenty years of his life Vauban increasingly turned to the reorganization of military administration, reforms of noble status, internal navigation, the essential role of Paris in the kingdom, the encouragement of commerce and agriculture, and taxation.

His approach to all these problems was consistent with what could be called the paradigm of the engineer. Although not at all a great mathematician, Vauban was enamored of numbers and tables both to display information and as the basis for argument. In his quantitative arguments he often strayed beyond where better mathematicians would go. In his "political arithmetic" he was the inferior of William Petty, but he did develop a peculiarly French approach that fused the approach of the contemporary English practitioners of "political arithmetic" and the German practitioners of "statistik."

Vauban was not original in many of his military and economic innovations, but he had an uncanny talent for their modification, effective application, and implementation. He was an indefatigable autodidact who read widely (Virol provides an updated...

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