The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon by Christy Pichichero (review)

As Christy Pichichero notes in her Introduction, such was the barrage of anti-war polemic that the philosophes devoted to the practices of dynastic conflict throughout the eighteenth century, that the very phrase 'military enlightenment' seems frankly oxymor-onic (p. 2). It is entirely to her credit, then, that in this superbly researched, energetically argued, and extremely well written account, she shows the multiple ways in which the French army became a prime site of reform and rational improvement throughout the century, and, what is more, did so while consistently reflecting general trends within wider Enlightenment thinking. Focusing on the huge number of polemics and paper debates within the wider public sphere, Pichichero highlights in particular the accelerating move towards sensibility and even humanitarian impulses as the century wore on, with heigh-tened levels of compassion being extended to the military rank and file, enemy forces, prisoners of war, and non-combatants. Military enlightenment, she suggests, thus proved remarkably responsive to—but also elicited—wider social and cultural impulses. Pichichero goes beyond the debates themselves, tying in the discourses of improvement to the actual rolling out of army reforms. She is to be congratulated for squeezing far more out of the military archives in Vincennes than one thought imaginable. Particularly commendable, moreover, is her decision to extend her remit to cover the colonial dimension of wars in which France was engaged from the War of the Spanish Succession onwards, and to include in her compass the navy as well as the army. This makes her study the best and most comprehensive coverage that we have of the discourses and practices of French military reform through the eighteenth century across the globe. Hitherto historians have tended to view the humanitarian aspects of the military reforms on which she dwells as a manifestation of the gentlemanly, cosmopolitan civility of a noble officer elite destined for the scrapheap in the coming era of mass warfare. Here, in contrast, the emphasis is on the reforms as driven by the state, Enlightenment reformers and even public opinion, and also as presaging moves towards more humane warfare in the twentieth and twenty-first century. This provocative perspective—which sometimes skims close to (but avoids) teleology—severely underestimates changes across the nineteenth century, and occasionally leads Pichichero to flatten out complex debates involving a huge range of actors with sometimes ferociously divergent agendas. One wonders how signed up to the values of 'military enlightenment' many in the army actually were, for example, and the extent to which hostility and inertia operated to weaken or nullify reform. Pichichero seems particularly to underplay, for example, the conflictual intensity of reform debates in the 1770s and 1780s; the counter-Revolution was to recruit profusely from the ranks of the pre-1789 officer corps. Nevertheless, one ends by admiring the quality and breadth of Pichichero's research, which has triumphantly placed the conduct of war squarely within the domain of the Enlightenment, and indeed turned 'military enlightenment' from an oxymoron into a truism.