The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

Stmins on Europe's Bureaucratization of Violence 171

were an important element in French victories from the Cannonade of

Valmy (1792) onwards, for Gribeauval created a truly mobile field

artillery, capable of reaching battlefields almost as readily as marching

infantry could do and able to bombard targets at a distance of up to

1,100 yards or so.

A second aspect of Gribeauval’s reforms was organizational. Trans­

port of the new field artillery became the duty of the soldiers who

fired them instead of remaining the responsibility of civilian con­

tractors as had previously been customary. Drill on the guns, practic­

ing motions needed to unlimber, position, aim, and fire, attained the

routine precision that had long been characteristic of small-arms drill.

Gribeauval also set up schools for artillery officers to teach theoretical

aspects of gunnery along with how to fit the new guns to approved

infantry and cavalry tactics. Rational management and design was thus

extended from materiel to the human beings needed to man the rede­

signed weapons. As a result, the medieval craft guild heritage disap­

peared entirely from the French service, and artillery took its place in

the new divisional structure side by side with infantry and cavalry as

part of a reorganized and redesigned command structure embodying

the results of rational thought and systematic testing.

Gribeauval’s career is interesting not only in itself and for its contri­

bution to French military successes after 1792, but also because what

he and his associates did marked an important horizon in European

management of armed force. These eighteenth-century French artil­

lerists set out to create a weapon with performance characteristics

previously unattainable, but whose use in battle could clearly be fore­

seen. With Gribeauval and his circle, in short, planned invention,

organized and supported by public authority, becomes an unmistak­

able reality. Perhaps the rapid development of catapults in the Hel­

lenistic age^33 and the remarkable design improvements that craftsmen

made in cannon during the fifteenth century, when iron projectiles

were first introduced, may have had something of the same character.

But information about these earlier cases is scant, and the artificers

who made catapults for Hellenistic rulers, as well as the bellmakers

who used their art to cast guns for Charles the Bold and Louis XI may

or may not have conceived in advance what better designed catapults

and guns could do. The matter is simply not on record. But in the case

of the French artillerists, it is perfectly clear that a reform party came

33: E. W. Marsden, Greek and Roman Artillery: Historical Development (Oxford, 1969),
pp. 48–49, says that the primary loci of invention were the court of Dionysios I of
Syracuse (399 B.C. ) and that of Ptolemy II of Egypt (285–246 B.C.).