(^174) Chapter Five
an enduring “classic” form, field artillery design reached a plateau with
Gribeauval’s achievement. The field guns of other European armies
lagged behind the French in varying degrees when the revolutionary
wars began; by the time peace returned in 1815 all the great powers
had come more or less abreast of the weapons the French began with.
No further fundamental change took place until breech-loaders came
in after 1850.
Clearly, a sharp stimulus was required before the routines of mili
tary life could be sufficiently shaken up to allow the sort of change that
French artillery achieved between 1763 and 1789. Details of Gribeau
val’s personal career probably mattered, for he was sent to study Prus
sian artillery methods in 1752 and then, in 1756, transferred to the
Austrian service where he played a conspicuously successful role in
the Seven Years War by first capturing a Silesian strong point with
siege guns and then defending another town against Prussian attack
for much longer than anyone thought possible. When he returned to
France in 1762, therefore, Gribeauval was thoroughly familiar with
improvements the Austrians had already made in their artillery. A
vision of the possible—of how a more systematic approach could
create a new kind of weapon and profoundly alter conditions on the
battlefield—presumably took root in Gribeauval’s mind as a result of
his encounter with foreign practice.
But the will to do something drastic clearly depended also on the
widespread sense among Frenchmen that something was wrong with
the way their government in general and the army and navy in par
ticular had been managed. When the vision of the possible thus united
with a widely diffused dissatisfaction with existing arrangements, the
kind of breakthrough that Gribeauval’s reform constituted became
possible. But such circumstances were unusual. The ordinary practice
and routine of European military establishments were not yet system
atically disturbed by research and development teams of the kind
Gribeauval headed. Command technology, in short, remained excep
tional, and but little noted or understood outside of a small circle of
professional artillery officers. Yet as a “cloud no bigger than a man’s
hand” and a sign of things to come, the remarkable success achieved by
Lieutenant General Gribeauval and his artillery designers deserves
more attention than it has usually been accorded.^36
- I depend heavily on Howard Rosen, “The Système Gribeauval: A Study of
Technological Change and Institutional Development in Eighteenth Century France”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1981). Some of his insights are available in his “Le
système Gribeauval et la guerre moderne,” Revue historique des armées 1–2 (1975):