160 Chapter Five
not normally set limits on military enterprise. Costs of such items
were comparatively small.^15 Food, fodder, horses, and transport were
what usually ran short. All the same, the artisan production of mus
kets, cloth, shoes, and the like, and the manufacture of artillery pieces
in state arsenals could not easily be expanded. Accordingly, wars were
usually fought with stocks accumulated beforehand. When serious
losses occurred, as happened to Prussian armies in the Seven Years
War, purchase abroad became necessary, and this of course required
money. The principal international arms market continued to center
in the Low Countries, most notably at Liège and Amsterdam.^16
A third limit was organizational and tactical. Europe’s standing ar
mies carried into the eighteenth century many traces of their origin
from privately raised mercenary companies. As a result, proprietary
rights often conflicted with bureaucratic rationality in matters of re
cruitment, appointment, and promotion. Professional skill competed
with patronage and purchase as paths to advancement, while both
were tempered by the principle of seniority on the one hand and by
acts of valor in battle on the other. Appointments and promotion
often reflected the king’s personal choice or those of his minister of
war.
The consequent erratic and changeable patterns of personnel ad
ministration found expression in France through heated debates over
tactics. Rival groupings of officers embraced rival doctrines, and used
those doctrines as tools in their struggle for places in the military
hierarchy. But claim and counter claim could be settled only by exper
imental held maneuvers or by test firings and the like. Debate, fueled
by clique rivalries for promotion, therefore, had the remarkable effect
in France of opening the door on systematic testing of new materiel
(especially field artillery) and tactics. Under these pressures, the fixity
of Old Regime military practices had begun to crumble even before
the French Revolution came along to accelerate and magnify what
rivalry among professionals had already begun.
The limits of command technique, of supply, and of organization
- According to an official reckoning made soon after the Seven Years War ended,
only 13 percent of Prussia’s total expenditure in that war went to pay for materiel; and
weapons, powder, and lead, together, required a mere 1 percent. Paul Rehfeld, “Die
preussische Rüstungsindustrie unter Friedrich dem Grossen,” Forschungen zür bran
denburgischen undpreussischen Geschichte 55 (1944): 30.
- Violet Barbour, Capitalism in Amsterdam in the 17th Century, reprint (Ann
Arbor, Mich., 1963), pp. 36–42; J. Yerneaux, La métallurgie liégeoise et son expansion au
XVîle siècle (Liège, 1939); Claude Gaier, Four Centuries of Liège G unmaking (London,
1977).
