3 - The use and abuse of servants: the Ministry of War, venality and civilian power in the army

Summary

The extent to which the civilian administrators of the War Ministry had achieved a firm grip over the armies and generals under Louis XIV has been one of the obsessions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography on the early modern French armies. Yet no serious attempt has been made for nearly a century to draw together the various branches of the département de la guerre, while the period after 1691 remains almost completely unexplored. The result is that old statist interpretations still hold much sway in our understanding of the development of the army. In his book on the intendants d'armée between 1630 and 1670 Douglas Clark Baxter saw an inexorable march of ‘progress’ by which the intendants, with the approval and prodding of the Secretary of War, gained civilian control over the armies, commenting: ‘the process had not ended by 1670, yet the trend was apparent’. His subsequent work has by and large reinforced this message. Louis André thought the civilian administrators were ‘prépondérantes’ by 1672.

It is true to say that intendants and commissaires des guerres played important roles in the army reforms of the years 1654–1701, but the claims of Baxter, Bonney and André are exaggerated, as both Baxter and André Corvisier have since acknowledged. Though they have provided little supporting evidence, both these historians now accept that these functionaries were reduced in importance as military officers came to play a greater role in the policing of the armed forces.