Michel Le Tellier, l (1603–1685)
François Le Tellier, (1641–1691)
Michel Le Tellier, l (1603–1685)
Appointed “Intendant to the Army of Italy” by
Louis XIII (September 6, 1640), Le Tellier developed a system of standardized
supply that ultimately included extensive use of magazines. This innovation was
further advanced and completed by his son and successor, the marquis de Louvois
(François Le Tellier). The idea of maintaining reserves of food, cloth, and
fodder for transport horses and cavalry mounts, and dry powder and shot, was an
old one. But primitive levels of bureaucracy in early modern states meant that
most armies through the end of the Thirty Years’ War were forced to rely on an
admixture of plunder and plunder’s handmaiden, contribution, for supply. No
European army had its own transport corps before the mid-century mark. Instead,
leased civilian wagons and teamsters, or requisitioned wagons on the march-with
or without compensation-were standard. Le Tellier changed much of this by
imposing tight contracts on merchants, insisting that they actually maintain at
the ready all wagons and draft animals leased to the Army, even during the
winter months when little to no campaigning was underway. Appointed secretary
of war a month before Louis XIII died, under Jules Mazarin Le Tellier set about
fundamental reform of French military supply and transportation. For the first
time, a systematic study of the matériel requirements of the French Army was
made. This led to reforms that much reduced corruption by contracted sutlers and
royal officials, who were long used to padding their accounts with bills for
phantom supplies and services. Reform included standardization of food,
armaments, uniforms, and equipment provided to the troops. Le Tellier even
regulated the number of carts and teams allowed officers, strictly according to
rank, of course.
Le Tellier then drafted standardized contracts issued to
sutlers, through which he could better estimate and control expenses. To
further reduce wastage and corruption, contracted goods were no longer
delivered directly to colonels of regiments. Instead, they were dropped at
central depots under control of royal agents (“général de vivres”).
Transport was arranged through major sutlers given special powers to draft
wagons and teams, as well as laborers, millwrights, cooks, and bakers. Le
Tellier set aside a reserve of government-owned wagons and horses, which
carried the first few days’ worth of supplies whenever the Army moved into the
field. Beginning in 1643, he set up a series of magazines along the usual
routes used by the Army when it moved out of its base area toward the Rhine;
that is, at Metz, Nancy, and Pont-a-Mousson. The next year he built a fodder
magazine for the cavalry during the siege of Dunkirk. In 1648 he set up more
magazines at Arras and Dunkirk for use whenever the Army besieged Ypres, which
was often. Le Tellier thus ensured that soldiers received working equipment and
regular pay, as well as food, clothing, and shelter. He improved the magazine
system during Turenne’s 1658 campaign of sieges against Dunkirk, Brégues,
Oudenaarde, and Ypres. These innovations altered the conduct of logistics in
early modern warfare and set the standard for the next 150 years. Yet, in Le
Tellier’s lifetime, these changes had but a modest effect on specific
campaigns. Real progress toward a permanent magazine system was made by his son
during the wars of Louis XIV.
Suggested Reading: Louis André, Michel le Tellier et
l’organisation de l’armée monarchique (1906).
marquis de Louvois, (1641–1691)
Né François Le Tellier. Successor to his father, Michel Le
Tellier, as principal military and strategic adviser to Louis XIV. He was the
main transformer of the French Army into an instrument of royal authority and
foreign policy. In part, he accomplished this by helping his father and Louis
establish the Régiment du Roi in 1663 as a model for all French infantry
regiments. He also founded the Royal-Artillerie in 1673 as a professional and
concentrated artillery arm. These reforms had influence on military developments
far beyond France.
Following a pattern set by his father, with whom he
understudied from 1662 to 1670, Louvois lobbied hard for bullying wars as the
main basis of French foreign policy. He did so not least as a means of creating
opportunities to concentrate more power and wealth in his own hands. He was
centrally involved in reorganization of the French Army away from private
regiments and mercenaries to a more professional officer corps and to regular
units raised from the king’s subjects. He exercised such strict control over
officers, however, that tactical and operational mediocrity was often the
result. In logistics he found a calling, notably fully developing the magazine
system left in rudimentary form by his father. Among Louvois’ more important
innovations was to introduce portable ovens to bake bread during halt days
while a French army was on the move. At the onset of the Dutch War (1672-1678),
Louvois accumulated in forward magazines enough grain to provide the advancing
armies with 200,000 rations per day for up to six months-an unheard of
achievement in European warfare since the fall of Rome. This effort is widely
regarded by historians as his finest. It ensured Louis XIV early military
success that would not be replicated in later, longer wars fought without
Louvois at his side. For this material accomplishment, regardless of Louvois’
many and deep moral flaws, he is properly regarded by historians as the first
great civilian “minister of war.”
Louis XIV drilled himself as a form of childhood play, and
continued to play at war as a man, and then as king. He believed that
discipline, rather than bloody mayhem, was what won battles and insisted on
constant drill, at least twice per week, even for garrison units. His regiments
drilled through the winter and during the rare summers when they were not in
the field. Early in his reign, Michel Le Tellier and Louvois helped Louis found
a special regiment, the Régiment du Roi (1663), to model and demonstrate proper
drill to the rest of the French Army. This regiment, and then all French drill,
was overseen from 1667 by inspectors-general.
One of Louvois’ most crucial reforms was to institute
musketry drill, upon discovering that many French infantrymen, especially
peasant conscripts, went into battle not knowing how to load or discharge their
main weapon. The French emphasis on drill thereafter grew so fierce that the
intendant responsible for drill in the French Army, Colonel Jean Martinet,
original colonel of the Régiment du Roi, became so infamous for fussy, even
merciless insistence on the smallest detail of uniform discipline and drill
that his name entered the universal military lexicon as a pejorative for
inflexible drill instructors.
As for his moral failings, they were many and great. For
instance, during Turenne’s march through the Palatinate in 1674, Louvois
demanded that the harshest methods be used against German villagers who
resisted by any means, or who refused to pay contributions. During the War of
the Reunions (1683-1684), he again displayed a penchant for personal cruelty
and brutality in punishing villagers. He once ordered fully 20 villages be
bombarded and burned in retaliation for the loss of two French barns. Although
he was patron to Vauban, the two disagreed about whether to use bombardment as
an alternative to siege warfare. John A. Lynn, the leading modern historian of
the French Army, maintains that Louvois took a savage approach to war and that,
for him, bombardment of towns with mortars during the 1680s “became
something of a blood lust.” Nor did his none-too-gentle master in
Versailles voice any objection. In 1688 Louvois began to raise new provincial
militia to supplement the regular regiments. These were gainfully employed when
Louis started the Nine Years’ War (1688-1697) that fall. Louvois planned the
1688-1689 devastation of the Palatinate (1688-1689) on a map, reveling yet
again in the destruction of German towns and cities, and even individual
chateaux. His death on July 16, 1691, removed from inner policy circles a
baleful and brutish influence on Louis XIV, a monarch who needed little
encouragement to indulge his own vices and a pronounced preference for war over
diplomacy.
