ENGLISH

Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610-1715

By John A. Lynn

Book information

Year
1997
ISBN
9780511572548, 0521572738, 9780521032483, 0521032482, 0511572549, 9780521572736
LCC
UA702 .L9523 1997
Open Library ID
OL7714899M
Language
english
Format
DJVU
Filesize
5 MB (4778754 bytes)
Pages
672\669
Topic
History
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

An "invisible giant," the seventeeth-century French army was the largest and hungriest institution of the Bourbon monarchy; yet it has received incomplete treatment and is poorly understood. Combining social and cultural emphases with more traditional institutional and operational concerns, this book examines the army in depth, studying recruitment, composition, discipline, motivation, selection of officers, leadership, administration, logistics, weaponry, tactics, field warfare, and siegecraft. The portrait that emerges differs from what current scholarship might have predicted. Instead of claiming that a "military revolution" transformed warfare, Lynn stresses evolutionary change. Questioning widely-held assumptions about state formation and coercion, he argues that this standing army was primarily devoted to border defense, and only rarely to internal repression.

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