Richelieu's Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624-1642. David Parrott
David Parrott, Richelieu's Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624-1642 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xxiv + 599 pp. $90. ISBN 0-521-79209-6. Historians of early modern Europe have been debating questions relating to the nature and extent of the Military Revolution for several decades, and have been arguing about the evolution of absolutist monarchy in France even longer than that. David Parrott's thoroughly researched study of French military administration makes important contributions to both debates. Parrott demonstrates that Cardinal Richelieu, instead of being an innovative modernizer of France's military system who embraced new ideas, made the bureaucracy more efficient, and concentrated power in his own hands, in fact failed to initiate effective reforms in military administration, and owed what limited success he had in expanding and strengthening the French army to improvised expedients and the cultivation of the great nobles and existing clientage networks. Parrott chooses as his first target the tendency of military historians to use the battle of Rocroi in 1643 as the starting point for discussions of the French role in the modernization of warfare, as well as their reliance upon printed manuals and literary sources instead of archival materials. These approaches, he notes, led to the assumption that the period leading up to Rocroi was one during which the French military leaders, acting under Richelieu's tutelage, adopted significant reforms in military organization, training, and tactics in emulation of the Dutch and Swedish models. Parrott argues that these manuals tended to offer less practical advice than conscious emulation of classical models, and he adds that there is precious little evidence to demonstrate that any French commanders attempted to put the teachings in the manuals into practice. While the French may have plagiarized Dutch and Swedish textbooks in writing their own, they seem to have modeled their forces and tactics after those of the supposedly outdated Spanish. The one clear change in the army that took place in the years before Rocroi, the creation of a large and powerful cavalry force, imitated the practices of their Spanish and Imperial rivals as well as those of the Swedes, and was not something promoted in the manuals at all.