Lords of France: Roads to the Enlightenment

volksmarschall said:

We demand that you leave the Dutch alone!

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Listen we're being greeted like liberators right now this is a great war just keep on reading what Tocqueville has to say and don't worry your pretty head about those dissenters Robb or Boheme

The Duchy of Lorraine had a long and storied relationship with Calvinism and with the Protestant faith in general. It was there were Jean Cauvin was able to finally settle down and teach his faith to commoners, the site of the first Church built explicitly as a Protestant Church, and through the 17th century it was the pathway through which French thought came into Germany.


However, its place as the ‘Holy Land of the Huguenots’ was a horrible position to be in during the late 17th century. With five major Protestant powers (England, the Netherlands, Prussia, Saxony, and Scandinavia) all of whom with a stake in the Rhineland meant that warfare was a constant for the small beleaguered state, and interventions into the duchy’s politics slowly became an expectation. The Dutch were steadily losing their passion for the defense of the Holy Land, and these wars led to the emptying both of the Moselle and of the Duchy’s treasury. Charles I Duke of Lorraine was an old man by the time that the Franco-Dutch War began and he, as well as many others in his court, were all coming to the belief that Lorraine should have a new protector.




As Louis and his men marched into Lorraine, they met a very small amount of resistance. Each patrol that his scouts found surrendered their arms, and the Ducal Guard was nowhere to be seen. As Louis closed on Metz he discovered why. The whole Lorraine army, 10,000 strong, had all garrisoned in the fortress of Metz, making the city near impregnable for an army of just 25,000. Louis considered sending for reinforcements through the rest of the day before he saw a messenger galloping from the city with the Lorraine banner in his hand. The messenger moved off his horse in the middle of the camp, and unfurled a message titled ‘conditions for the surrender of the Holy Duchy’.

1.Charles I would accept the Bourbon line as the rightful rulers of all France, and join arms with Louis XIII de Orleans-Bourbon in his fight against the Valois.
The Duchy of Lorraine and the Bishopric of Trois-Eveches will be acknowledged as independent provinces of France, with all of the rights given to Flandres, including:
2A. The right to raise its own army and only provide a troop of volunteers to the Army of the Kingdom of France
2B. The right to its own system of courts, according to the laws of Luther and Calvin
2C. The right to collect its own taxes and only provide 30% of them to the treasury
2D. The right to collect its own tolls
However, the defense of the Meuse being key to the defense of the Kingdom, the Kingdom of France will fulfill the obligation of building, maintaining, and manning the fortresses on the northern border of Lorraine so long (and only so long) as they remain the north-eastern border of France
The Kingdom of France will accept the right of the Huguenots to worship in the Church of their own choosing. Officers will not be passed over based on religious beliefs, and the Army of the Kingdom of France will accept all Christians as soldiers.

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The treaty fit right into Louis’ policies. He had been working to assimilate the army’s Protestant and Catholic sections for years with strong resistance from the Parisian and Lyonnais parlements (not to mention the army), and a new edict of tolerance had been a major policy Louis had been working towards for years (again with the resistance of the Parisian and Lyonnais parlements). Added to this the addition of a ten thousand man army and the easy annexation of Lorraine, and Louis road into Metz to accept Charles’ terms by the end of the night.




With this accomplished, Louis gave the command of the Royal Army over to Turenne, and road back to Paris to conduct the war from the Louvre. His ride was cold, and rain prevented his carriage from moving at full speed, so the next night he ended up staying in a small town in Champagne for a night. As he rode on the next day his carriage was animated by the sounds of his ever worse coughing.

Pick which one I should do next: Marlborough's counter-offensive in the Netherlands or the Plague of 1683 (and Colbert's attempts to keep the treasury above water)

Thanks guys I'm starting up that entry now.

Also I've been reading this book that I want to strongly recommend called Publishing the Prince which is partially about the attempts of one major translator and one publisher to publish Machiavelli's works, but also about the little-mentioned transition from the Humanist intellectual ideal of quoting the ancients to the Enlightenment environment of contemporary political criticism. It's a great book and it really smooths out the path from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and I'm probably going to write a two-part piece in LoF2 that deals with that precise transition in Henri and Louis' reigns.

Marlborough had always been under the employ of the Saxon crown. From his time as the General of the Cavalry in the Stuart regime, he had been recruiting officers and soldiers into the Order of the Secret Cross, a group of Reformist Christians who hid their religious identity in order to better operate within the Stuart court, with the aim of destroying the Stuarts. His work was invaluable in making the Glorious Revolution work, for instance his selection of the Earl of Suffolk, an Order member, as the head of the London Police. Over the 1660s and early 1670s Suffolk managed to allow several major English protestants to ‘escape’ over the years, and suppressed information of a growing Saxonism in Parliament. Sadly for Marlborough this meant that his importance to the Saxon plot was soon eclipsed by Suffolk’s, and Marlborough’s position in the coming Saxon order was rapidly diminishing. In order to strengthen his position, he offered his services to August Wilhelm as the main operative in the English diaspora and as a spy within the higher ranks of the French military.


When the Glorious Revolution came, Marlborough was forced to leave his native land and move to the new court of the Stuarts in Caen. It didn’t take long for his hatred of the place to get the better of him, and he offered himself as the Marshal of France’s mercenary forces, which allowed him to leave the court and start recruiting yet more soldiers to the Saxon cause.




Leading France’s contingent of mercenary soldiers had its benefits. Marlborough spent most of the 1670s fighting in France’s proxy wars against the Holy Coalition, which allowed him to fight besides fellow Protestants and offered a reason to pack the French mercenary regiments with Protestant officers and soldiers.


His success in the Swiss Civil War(1) and in putting down the Baden-Baden Movement (2) led to him rapidly moving up the ranks at Saint Cyr. It was his success which led to his being put as the head of the Armee du Nord, the force which consisted of the contingent of French mercenaries (who by now were commanded entirely by members of the Order of the Secret Cross), and an army of 40,000 men led by Turenne. This was the army he led into the Netherlands.


The victorious advance of Marlborough through the southern Netherlands was planned far in advance, Marlborough sent Louis’ battle plans to both the Saxon and English crowns, and both England and Prussia waited to send their troops to the Netherlands until Marlborough was past the Rhine. And thus, on the morning the 15th of June, 1683, Turenne’s scouts found evidence of a landing of English troops outside of Utrecht. However the army was small enough for Turenne to deal with on his own, and Marlborough suggested that they split their armies to fight their two enemies simultaneously and hasten the march to Amsterdam. But as morning turned to noon, turenne saw a massive army on the horizon--the combined army of Marlborough and Johann.




The Battle of Utrecht was a massacre: with Turenne facing an overwhelming force attacking on three fronts, he immediately established a 10,000 man rearguard and ordered his troops to start withdrawing to the Rhine. But the rearguard barely lasted two hours before it was broken, and the retreat turned to a rout, with Turenne losing nearly 30,000 men. The Armee du Nord, which was meant to withdraw to Antwerp, only reformed two months later in Amiens, by which time Marlborough had been reinforced by a brigade of Prussians and the entirety of the English Expeditionary Force.


Marlborough’s betrayal and alliance with Johann utterly destroyed the French advance into the Netherlands and began the second part of the Franco-Dutch War. Turenne’s section of the Armee du Nord lost half its men in the Battle of Utrecht, and the loss of nearly 60,000 French soldiers (including the lost mercenaries) in a single battle sent France into a desperate spiral to find more men.


As news came to Saint Cyr of Marlborough’s betrayal, the Cabinet of France looked desperately to each other. The King was desperately sick, and the news of his greatest general’s betrayal would surely have killed him. And thus, it was decided that Colbert would secretly become regent of the Kingdom.






1.Another war fought between the Reformists and Catholics in Switzerland over the control of the country, ending in the creation of the United Swiss Confederacy and the inclusion of Geneva, Grissons, and Valais into the Confederacy
2.A rebellion of ultramontane catholic aristocrats who sought to undo the Rhenish Confederacy’s edict of tolerance and bring the Confederation under the control of the Holy Coalition.

DensleyBlair said:

A top update, Merrick! So enjoyable, in fact, that I got sidetracked reading about our timeline's Marlborough and forgot to comment straight after reading.

Nevertheless, I greatly enjoyed reading about his defection. He sounds every bit as savvy here as in real life. It will be very interesting to see how exactly this affects France, seeing as we've only been given small details so far. Colbert as effective regent doesn't sound brilliant for stability...

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Yeah we're going to get a lot of the cool nonsense he did in order to keep the kingdom from going bankrupt in the next section, though France faces a double crisis--A plague/famine and a rapidly receding treasury.

GulMacet said:

Now THAT is how Protestantism fights!

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Via defections?????


Sorry I haven't been updating guys, this was my last NYC -> DC commute that I'll ever have to do, I just attended my last class of graduate school and am officially no longer a student and am instead an 'ordinary guy'.

Colbert came to power during France’s most vulnerable point since the Fronde. Plague was wracking the country, Louis himself was succumbing to it. Worse still, the Franco-Dutch war began after a brutally cold winter and a sparse fall, and with the war draining France’s resources even more, a minor famine broke out into a full fledged agricultural crisis. Worse still, France’s treasury was rapidly depleting, and the cost (both financial and human) of replacing the 50,000 men lost in the Battle of Utrecht while maintaining a world-wide naval war with England stood to bankrupt the Crown of France within the end of the year.




Bread prices soared as peasants fled plagued areas, and even with the small harvest France had hundreds of acres of land left fallow. From 1683 to 1685, France lost almost a quarter of its population, with the greatest losses occurring in the previously well off areas of Flanders and Champagne. The plague, which in all likelyhood was a form of tuberculosis, wracked the cities the worst, a doubly horrid event given that peasants fled their towns to seek employment there. And so France was ravaged by a twin crisis--her economy was in freefall and her treasury was depleting rapidly. Although Colbert had had some experience in stretching the livre, during the two financial crises and several wars fought during Louis’ reign, the Franco-Dutch War would stretch his abilities to the limit, both to preserve the treasury and to save France’s economy.


Colbert’s first problem was the sudden shortfall in French troops, which was growing wider as hostilities commenced on the Rhenish front. First, he looked to the easy solution; he sent diplomats across Europe looking for mercenaries and subsidies. In this, he was relatively successful; the Swiss offered two regiments of mercenaries as well as a subsidy of 16,000 livres a year, and while the Kings of the Holy Coalition were want to give support to their great foe, a good deal of dukes within Italy and Spain were willing to support France with troops or money. All in all the first diplomatic mission accrued France a yearly subsidy of 25,000 livres as well as a one time benefit of 17,000 and several tons of bread provided by the Catholic church.


With bankruptcy staved off for another couple of months, Colbert focused on supporting the French economy. The plague, which was dying down by the end of 1683, had left Eastern France and Flandres decimated, but this played into Colbert’s hands. He had always resented the strength of the Municipal provinces and the stranglehold they possessed over the French economy, and while he petitioned them (a third time) for more money and men for the war, he began spending massive amounts of money to jumpstart the industry of the towns of France (in particular Troyes, Rouen, La Rochelle, Montpeliers, and Saint-Etienne). New clothing and iron industries popped up in those areas, primarily in service to the army, sporting the newest technology available at the time (including new water wheels). Mills were chartered across the basin of the Seine, new docks were created across the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, a huge paper industry was formed in Lille, and the towns around Paris grew the first ever concentrated machine-building industries, which helped supply an explosion in printing presses over the next century. Beyond this, Colbert put Vauban in charge of creating the “Royal Road” system, which operated on its own tolling system and which guaranteed a safe travel between towns and cities.




Colbert, finally freed from Louis’ view of the economy and under a state of emergency which gave him a carte blanche, was finally able to enact his own view of the economy and right what he saw as the wrongs of Henri II’s administration. Henri II had been incredibly concerned with trade and his colonies, and shaped the French economy towards a dependence on those factors. Henri’s massive canal projects existed to connect inland cities to the ocean and help export the goods made in those cities, but trade had considerably weakened in the far more unstable world of the later 17th century, and Henri’s focus on his colonies had been repeated several countries over, meaning that French colonial goods (silk, spices, coffee, sugar, furs) were far less scarce and fetched a far weaker price. Colbert sought to put France again of her competitors yet again by creating a strong internal market and fostering domestic trade, technology, and the skilled transformation of colonial and national goods.


While many of these projects were relatively cheap (given that Colbert used, where he could, corvee or militia labor, that is, unpaid labor), they still put a larger hole in the French treasury at a point when the French surplus was at its end. As the campaign season was renewed in 1684, France found itself twenty thousand livres in debt, and her lackluster performance in 1683 meant that she was unlikely to find any direct subsidies. Instead, the treasury began looking desperately for loans, and Colbert spent the rest of the war desperately looking for funds.




Colbert looked to a series of policies before turning to the tried and true method the chancellors went to in earlier wars--currency manipulation. Knowing that France was in deep straits regarding her economy, Colbert purposefully put off currency manipulation as a last option. Instead he further moved France in his direction through the selling of privileges.


Privileges had long been used as an economic tool by the French bureaucracy; it allowed them to monetize a push towards reforms in times when money was scarce. Furthermore, the selling of privileges and offices was often the only way to capture any of the wealth which inhabited the pockets of France’s aristocracy, who had become tax exempt in the centuries hence. And so, Colbert sold the rights to participate in many reforms he had earlier discussed with Vauban, the main being the right to privately own one’s land. Over the course of Louis XII’s administration, a precedent had been set wherein the King had the final right to all lands in France, meaning that any aristocrat who died without a legal heir passed their lands directly to the king.


This precedent was used to justify the taking of rebel lands, and was uplifted from the archives by de Bossuet under Louis XIII to justify the takeover of the lands of the Duke of Burgundy. Over the course of Louis’ reign, the royal demense had grown and grown, and Colbert and Vauban both felt that this could be reformed as a means to expand the ‘new nobility’ and ‘entrench the spirit of the merchant in the land of the aristocracy’. Colbert therefore sold temporary privileges over the kings land for a ridiculously low price, but sold the right to keep this land in perpetuity for 100 livres each. This particularly affected Burgundy, where Colbert marked out baronies to be sold part and parcel for 300 livres each, along each of the rivers in three of the four counties of de jour Burgundy. He even sold some governorships and military offices.




This and several other ‘innovations’ succeeded in keeping France from bankruptcy for another two years, while substantially changing the landscape of France. While many of the new land owners were members of the bourgeousie, many towns and monasteries gathered money to buy the land under them, which ended a century of centralization of land ownership.


This could only have been done with Colbert as regent and executor of the Bourbon estate, for his last move was done on behalf of the Bourbon family and brought France into an age of modern governance. As the executor of Louis’ estate, Colbert ruled that all of the moneys belonging to the Bourbon dynasty be rolled into the funds of the treasury, with a fund to be established for the wellbeing of the Bourbons and the courtiers. With this action the Bourbons became the first destiny after the English Saxons to act truly as a head of state rather than as a feudal lord.


While these acts insured that the French state would not go bankrupt until the Treaty of Nijmegen, there was another problem which faced the army: the increasing unwillingness of the peasantry and urban artisans to join the army. When the plague ended in 1684, famines were still common throughout France (especially in the South), and with the towns and peasantry in far graver states than they were two years earlier (due to new taxes imposed both by Colbert and by their local lords), few young men were willing to leave their homes to fend themselves in order to join army life. Even with increased benefits given to recruitment officers and even after the employment of nearly every mercenary in France, Colbert was still facing a shortfall of 45,000 men. A series of stopgap measures (the redeployment of select members of the Pyrenees and Alps garrisons) were not enough, and soon Colbert was forced to take that most hated of actions--he called the militia.




The militia had been reorganized over the course of Louis’ reign as a partially mobile force which maintained order in surrounding province, but, by and large these militiamen had already been sent to the front line. However, there remained a mass of militiamen who had remained unmobilized. Colbert’s call of 100,000 men from the fields may have led to some unrest, but the mass of new troops saved the day in the Netherlands and the Rhine. Colbert had kept France from the brink of loss, and had transformed the nation along the way.

Now, Child, you may be wondering this November: why do we celebrate Thanksgiving? The reason is simple: to give thanks, to our family, to our friends, our country, and most importantly to God. The story of the first Thanksgiving is a great one indeed, and the story of that great event holds the seeds of Quebecois independence! So read, child, and learn of the history of your great country!


In the olden days, Quebec was a colony of the dastardly French, who, then as today, loved conflict and hated peace, and for this reason the French brought our country into war with the Dutch and English colonies. In some ways, this was good: the Dutch had been pilfering (which is another word for stealing) French trade from the Indians for some time, and had paid many tribes to attack out innocent cities. So, in order to confront the Dutch nemesis, an army was formed, led by the Reverend Jean Talon, who marched south towards Manhatta.




Along the way, Talon and his men came across a small tribe, who offered food and drink to them and hospitality from the encroaching (which is a word for ‘coming’). As day turned to night, Talon began to tire before a vision of God appeared to him. God informed him that the Indians were under the employ of the Dutch, and that they planned to slit the throats of his men once they slept. With this knowledge, Talon took his men and burned the Indian village, the base of which is now a part of the city of Albany.




With his newfound communion with God, Talon led his men down the River of Man toward Manhatta, with Talon’s visions guiding them to friendly tribes and supplies of cannon. With these weapons he was able to gain a foothold over the Isle of Manhatta during the November of 1685. The Winter and Spring had been unseasonably warm, and the morning of February 3rd Talon gained yet another revelation, telling him that a storm was brewing off of the Atlantic Coast, a storm to wipe away the sin of the Dutch. His men kept down and sheltered in a small village north of New Amsterdam as they watched a hurricane wrack through the sinful city of New Amsterdam. With most of their fortifications destroyed, the army of New Amsterdam stood little chance of succeeding, but the Men of Talon fought anyway, disregarding the Dutchmen’s cowardly pleas. The Men of Talon swept through the town, smiting the gamblers, the drunkards, the whores and the money lenders. On that night, as his men partook in a feast of Turkey, potatoes, yams and apples, Talon received his final Revelation, that the New World was to be a sinless place, for it was inhabited by the Holy Natives, who had not partaken in the Apple of Adam. However, the New World could only flourish after it had cast off the shackles of the new, and only then would Quebec's greatness shine like a city on the hill.

The Dutch were to be kicked off of the continent, and Talon was the man to do it. When the war ended, Talon and the Prefect of Quebec stated that New Zeeland was their fundamental right, they had secured it through their blood and sweat, and the King of France acquiesced. New Zeeland was made into New Aquitaine, and formed the third province of Quebec.




And that is the tale of Thanksgiving, a holiday dedicated to ours, the Greatest Nation. It is there to remind us to give thanks to our friends, our family, our countrymen, and above all, to God, and to remember to attack and chasten sin at every opportunity.

Vocabulary Words
-Pilfered
-Encroaching
-Contracted​

Happy thanksgiving by the way

DensleyBlair said:

Good Lord, that Québec sounds unpleasant. The humorously condescending textbook extract took some of the sting out of the general feeling, but the Québécois Thanksgiving still strikes me as an incredibly spiteful occasion. I remain hopeful that that particular textbook was written a good time ago, and so is unrepresentative of the modern, moderate and modest nation.

Oh, and a belated happy Thanksgiving to anyone who may celebrate it.

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While this textbook is from the 40s (the last time that a Bonaparte implemented emergency powers) Quebec is a pretty brutal place with a really messed up history to 'the present day' (the 1980s)

The Franco-Dutch War consisted of two phases: one, a short period of time during the spring and summer of 1683, during which the French made rapid gains, taking Luxemburg and reinforcing the cities of the Dutch Bourbons. The betrayal of Marlborough and the switch retaking of the area up to the Rhine ended this phase, and the war became a brutal slog, with few decisive battles.


While Marlborough was able to inflict a horrid blow on the French army, he soon found that he was unable to make good on his counteroffensive. After spending his whole life around professional armies and mercenaries, Marlborough had to face one of the greatest flaws of the new mass armies marching across Europe: the harvest season. As summer turned to fall, much of Johann’s army left the field to go back to their villages and towns, desperate to keep the fragile economy of the northern Netherlands from the brink of total agricultural and economic collapse. The Netherlands was also experiencing a famine, and with the Scandinavians blocking off the Baltic Sea, a large portion of Polish surplus wheat was unavailable for Western Europe. Few peasants returned to the Dutch army, and for three years the Dutch front was silent, with Marlborough leading several attacks against Antwerp, Brabant, and Limburg, only to be repulsed by Vauban’s men and put into a position of begging parliament and Johann for yet more troops.




While the Dutch front remained silent due to lack of reinforcements from both the Coalition and the French, the Rhenish front became the major focus point of the war. While the Leger van de Valois was incapable of maintaining its size due to the peasantry’s need to tend the fields in a lengthened famine, Saxony and Prussia had no such problems. Eastern Europe faced perfect weather for planting, and without access to overseas markets Prussia exported much of its wheat to Saxony, allowing both kingdoms to maintain their armies at full capacity.


Because most professional troops were sent to the Dutch front, de Savoie was left with an army comprised mostly of conscripted peasants and artisans. This put the Rhenish Front at the fore of a new kind of warfare. Furthermore, the armies fighting on the Rhine were larger and more expensive than any point before. The largest army France had ever sent to the front beforehand went with Louis XII, which was 50,000 in size. In comparison, the armies fighting each other in the Rhenish Confederacy were each a hundred thousand strong. Each army was more effectively led than before, with a sizeable force of non-commissioned officers making sure that Colbert’s and August’s rules were followed. Over-ambitious generals were checked and for the first time, a King’s strategy could be felt in the front even if he was not there himself.




With the generals tamed, another force increasingly became problematic: the disciplining of the troops. Unlike the last period of mass warfare, there was no element of religious conflict in the War of the Rhine; France was defending a mixed ally against Protestants in order to support another Protestant monarchy. As the 17th century turned to the 18th, the religious tenor of Europe’s major wars desisted, and it became clearer and clearer that war was a battle for existence between religions but was rather a battle for the benefit of kings. Soldier’s songs became markedly more dour and rebellious over the period, mostly expressing a desire to return to the farm and a confusion as to what exactly they were fighting for.


This lack of passion on the part of the soldiers was seen through the three years that generals de Savoie and von Eilenburg spared from Mannheim to Wurzburg. Although the armies engaged with each other were the largest the world had seen since Cannae, this did as much good as ill. The armies were too large to engage with each other on any less than perfect conditions, and instead of that, they sent brigades against each other for reconnaissance and in order to take what small patches of advantageous ground they could. Inevitably, these brigades would be met by a far larger force and either sent off or forced to surrender. The men of both armies were wholly unwilling to perform the kind of heroic last stand which the armies of a century before engaged in with regularity.




Despite the iron will that held brigadier generals to the orders given to them, there was no such hold on the men they led. In several cases (for the French: Aschaffenburg, Ahorn, Oschenfurt; for the Saxons: Mannheim, Sinsheim, Deiburg) we see cases of whole brigades surrendering their weapons and banners to the enemy upon the possibility of combat with a superior force. De Savoie’s dragoon regiments in particular were able to capture the banners of twelve Saxon regiments during these skirmishes, bringing up yet another oddity of this new form of warfare. Despite a series of innovations which weakened the strength of cavalry on the battlefield (in particular bayonets, which were implemented for the first time in de Savoie’s army in 1685), cavalry was as important as ever before, to the degree that each infantry brigade would include a group of cavalry. This was not so much for their skill on the battlefield or even their reconnaissance abilities, as it was the fact that they were, still, the most professional soldiers in a given army. Because of this they were unlikely to break, unlikely to rout, and their presence made sure both that a retreat wouldn’t turn into a rout and that infantry were less likely to retreat.


While von Eilenburg saw this as an advantage and relied more and more on his noble cavalry regiments, de Savoie saw this as a weakness. The dispersed cavalry of the Saxon style did not fit with France’s historic doctrines, tactics, strategy, but deviating from their methods led to a series of failed skirmishes in the northern Rhine. These failed skirmishes led up to the Battle of Zweibrucken, a total failure by the French during which most of de Savoie’s infantry were captured or lost. While the French cavalry did manage to destroy much of von Eilenburg’s cavalry, regardless the battle of Zweibrucken meant that the French had to concede the Saar to the Saxon army.


The failure at Zweibrucken did not spell the end of de Savoie, however. Von Eilenburg’s army would take months to siege Saarbrucken, and after that the five fortresses of the Moselle would be able to prevent a move into France. Furthermore, it allowed de Savoie time to implement his plan to solve the issue of his infantry’s weakness. Of the 30,000 infantry he brought to Zweibrucken, only the 9th Brigade (6,000 men) remained. These men, however, had been involved in multiple skirmishes through the year and had served with gusto in the battle of Zweibrucken, serving an excellent job as a rearguard and successfully defending the Hornback river crossing. They were experienced, hardened men, just the kind de Savoie needed.




The 9th Brigade was transformed, over the winter of 1685, into the 1st Grenadier Brigade. They were drilled non-stop, becoming the first infantry brigade in the French army to be taught by a standardized drill. They learned to march in lock-step, to volley-fire, to act both in loose and close order. They also became the centre of the new technologies being developed in France, such as long-wick grenades, flintlock muskets, and bayonets. The 1st Brigade was then separated into six companies, who were dispersed among the new infantry brigades recruited over the fall and winter, and tasked with training their green comrades. By the campaign season de Savoie’s army was as well trained as any army in Europe.


The Battle of Landau occurred in the Febuary of 1686, when de Savoie marched nearly all of his men to the north-eastern part of the Rhenish Confederacy to cut off the Saxon’s line of supply. The character of the battle was shown early on, during the skrimishes between Saxon cavalry and de Savoie’s new infantry brigades. Unlike earlier skirmishes, during which the infantry (Saxon or French) would crumble under the fire and shock of a cavalry company, de Savoie’s grenadiers were able to repulse the attacks against them and captured a whole company in the process.




When von Eidelburg marched the mass of his troops back from their winter quarters to meet de Savoie in Landau, he was marching against an entirely new army. While de Savoie had marched with 50,000 men in 1685, now he possessed an army of 75,000, and while de Savoie’s troops were green in 85, now they were a highly experienced and well drilled force. Never the less, von Eidelburg adopted the same strategy he had used in the Battle of Zweibrucken, hammering the French troops with artillery fire and sending his cavalry in with the hope of a quick victory.


This attack was met with an unexpected riposte; de Savoie had concentrated the entirety of his cavalry into two brigades of 12,000 men, and they counter-marched against von Eidelburg’s cavalry as de Savoie’s infantry continued to encircle von Eidelburg’s position. The charge of the Saxon cavalry was destroyed, and a second charge by the reserve cavalry was successfully repulsed by the new grenadier companies. With this second loss, von Eidelburg began to move to retreat, and lost two brigades as de Savoie’s cavalry overwhelmed his rearguard.


Four hours after the beginning of the Battle of Landau, the Saxons were kicked out of their position in the Rhine and were headed in a swift retreat towards Luxemburg. Hearing of this, Marlborough marched his whole army to Limburg, took it, and marched on. It seemed that the whole war would be decided by the upcoming Battle of Luxembourg.


Hey guys, sorry for the slow update, I’ve been finishing up my last final and lately I’ve been going to a lot of the marches in NYC and helping my friends get ready to move. Busy times! But the next entry or two should be the end of LoF1, so there’s that!