Introduction

Summary

The French infantry used to be the worst in Europe, and has become the best mainly by the improvement in their officer material.

(Don Íñigo Fernández de Velasco y Tovar, Constable of Castile, Seventh Duke of Frías, 1684)

By 1688 the French army was without question better organised, better disciplined and considerably larger than it had been during the reign of Louis XIII and the ministry of Cardinal Mazarin. French generals on attachment to foreign armies found them woefully deficient by comparison with their own. Nevertheless, this comparative advantage has tended to obscure the very real problems of military administration faced by Louis XIV and his ministers, not least in their attempts to organise and direct campaigning in more distant theatres of war. Furthermore, one must recognise that if the system of regimental administration was a distinct improvement upon the first half of the seventeenth century it came in for heavy criticism both from contemporaries and from reformers in the mid-eighteenth.

The key to a larger and better army lies only in part in the improvement in civilian administration, as demonstrated in part I of this book. To present a full picture one must consider the quotation at the beginning of this introduction.