Strains on Europe’s Bureaucratization of Violence 173French Ministry of War accordingly decreed in 1781 that to qualify for
infantry and cavalry commissions candidates must prove four quar
terings of nobility. Ambitious noncoms were the only constituency
within the army displeased by this act, since the artillery remained, as
before, open to commoners with suitable mathematical skills.^34
Frederick the Great set the style for this kind of aristocratic reaction
by systematically excluding commoners from the Prussian officer
corps after 1763. He did so because he distrusted the calculating spirit
that he associated with men of bourgeois background—exactly the
traits that dominated and inspired Gribeauval and his circle. Freder
ick, indeed, was dismayed by the new developments in artillery, real
izing that Prussia was poorly equipped to compete with Russia’s great
iron industry, or even with Austria and France, in a technological arms
race. He reacted by downplaying artillery while emphasizing disci
pline and “honor,” i.e., the traits that had always made Prussian of
ficers and men ready to sacrifice their lives on behalf of the state.
Frederick and his successor thus chose to rely on old-fashioned mili
tary virtues and deliberately turned their backs on rational experi
mentation and technical reform of the sort Gribeauval carried
through. In 1806 the cost of this conservative policy became evident.
At the battle of Jena, Prussian valor, obedience, and honor proved an
inadequate counterweight to the new scale of war the French had
meanwhile perfected, thanks, in large part, to the often reluctant hos
pitality French army commanders showed to the rational and experi
mental approach to their profession.^35
Command technology, seeking deliberately to create a new
weapons system surpassing existing capabilities, has become familiar
in the twentieth century. It was profoundly new in the eighteenth; and
the French artillerymen who responded so successfully to Gribeau
val’s lead deserve to be heralded as pioneers of today’s technological
arms race. Yet it is easy to exaggerate. Systematic and successful
though the effort was, it remained isolated and exceptional. As had
happened after 1690, when the flintlock musket and bayonet achieved
- Among other factors, this “noble reaction” may have reflected population growth.
With more younger sons to look after, noble families presumably looked more eagerly
for army commissions and resented untitled upstarts all the more warmly. - On Frederick’s motivation see Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army,
1640–1945 (Oxford, 1956), p. 16. On the aristocratic reaction in the French army see
Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years War, p. 143; David Bien, “La réaction
aristocratique avant 1789: L’example de l’armée,” Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations
29 (1974): 23–48, 505–34; David Bien, “The Army in the French Enlightenment:
Reform, Reaction and Revolution,” Past and Present, no. 85 (1979): 68–98.