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The Paris Ecole Royale Militaire: An Introduction

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The École Royale Militaire

Part of the book series: War, Culture and Society, 1750 –1850 ((WCS))

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Abstract

The introduction provides an overview of the Ecole militaire’s importance as a pedagogical institution with a broad view of its place in the history of education and French military reform. It underscores how this study fills the gap of an institutional study on this school, which though famous for its association with alumni like Napoléon Bonaparte has never been the subject of a dedicated scholarly monograph. It outlines the parameters of the study, providing an explanation of the book’s structure and summarising important themes that recur throughout the book. These themes include contemporaries’ opinions of it, its association with the Enlightenment, how technical (mathematical) its curriculum was, and its charitable nature. It also includes a map of French military schools and a synoptic timeline of its development.

[T]he young nobility must be sent to foreign wars. These suffice to maintain the whole nation in the émulation of glory, in the love of arms, in the contempt of fatigues and of death itself, and finally, in the experience of the military art.

—François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, Télémaque, Book XII, 171

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Friedrich Melchior, baron Grimm and Denis Diderot, Correspondance Littéraire, Philosophique et Critique de Grimm & de Diderot, depuis 1753 jusqu’en 1790, 15 vols (Paris, 1768–1770), vol. 4, 111. Grimm inserted this explanatory footnote: ‘L’auteur parle de la loterie de l’École royale Militaire, et de l’impôt qu’on a mis sur les cartes à jouer, pour subvenir aux frais de l’établissement de cette Ecole’.

    The stanza which followed those on the Ecole militaire turned to the Champ-de-Mars and closed: ‘Ainsi ce champ qu’on a tracé par faste/ Pour les généraux est trop vaste/ Et trop étroit pour les soldats’.

  2. 2.

    The marquis de Marigny, the marquise de Pompadour’s younger brother, served as the king’s guide to the royal academies and manufactures, for which he was gifted a portrait of Christian VII by Alexander Roslin. Alden R. Gordon, The Houses and Collections of the Marquis de Marigny (Los Angeles, 2003), 99.

  3. 3.

    Voltaire , ‘Assasinat’, Dictionnaire philosophique, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (Paris, 1817), vol. 7, 397. At this time, he wrote a letter to the Abbé Delille on 19 June 1764 sardonically noting: ‘Je vous félicite, Monsieur, d’être en relation avec M. Duverney. Il forme un séminaire de gens dont quelques-uns demanderont probablement un jour à M. Laurent des bras et des jambes. La noblesse française aime fort à se les faire casser pour son maître’. Correspondance Générale in Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1821), vol. 50, 135.

  4. 4.

    Voltaire , ‘Education’, Dictionnaire philosophie in Œuvres complètes (Paris 1818), vol. 24, 445–446. The duc de la Rochefoucault-Liancourt’s Ecole d’instruction dans les arts et métiers was a charitable initiative established on his lands for the orphaned children of soldiers. It is often mentioned in conjunction with the chevalier de Pawlet’s [or Paulet] Ecole des orphelins militaires, which was partly funded by the Ecole militaire’s lottery.

  5. 5.

    This claim was made in the anonymous Etude sur l’instruction scientifique et littéraire dans l’armée française in 1870. Jean-François Chanet, ‘“Schools Are Society’s Salvation”: The State and Mass Education in France, 1870–1930’ in Mass Education and the Limits of State Building, c. 1870–1930, eds Laurence Brockliss and Nicola Sheldon (London, 2012), 119–120.

  6. 6.

    An example of an Ecole militaire alumnus being sent to the Ecole d’équitation is given in a letter by the sous-lieutenant Du Tertre from Saumur requesting an advance on his pension. AN MM 668, Conseil de Police 5 June 1769, 51.

  7. 7.

    Edoardo Piccoli. ‘“Never a more favourable reception than in the present juncture”: British Residents and Travellers in and about Turin, 1747–1748’ in Turin and the British in the Age of the Grand Tour, Paola Bianchi and Karin Wolfe eds (Cambridge, 2017), 116.

  8. 8.

    Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford, 2001), 61.

  9. 9.

    Christopher M. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Fall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge, Mass, 2006), 137. This of course is an idealised account of the Cadet Corps’ purpose. One scholar has dismissed it as ‘little better than holding pens, providing neither education nor training of any consequence’. Dennis E. Showalter, ‘“No Officer Rather Than a Bad Officer”: Officer Selection and Education in the Prussian/German Army, 1715–1945’ in Military Education: Past, Present, and Future, Gregory C. Kennedy & Keith Neilson eds (London & Westport, Conn., 2002), 35. A different assessment is that although ‘[l]ife at a Prussian cadet school probably compared unfavourably even with life at English boarding schools … it did have its compensations, including … a good education.…’ Tim Blanning, Frederick the Great: King of Prussia (New York, 2016), 9. One of Frederick the Great’s generals, Prince Moritz of Anhalt-Dessau, was infamous for being virtually illiterate.

  10. 10.

    Münnich’s encounter with Fénelon occurred as a result of his being wounded and captured at Denain and then held in Cambrai, then in Fénelon’s diocese. They would also maintain a correspondence. Igor Fedyukin, The Enterprisers: The Politics of School in Early Modern Russia (Oxford, 2019), 135.

  11. 11.

    Michael Hochedlinger, ‘Mars Ennobles the Ascent of the Military and the Creation of a Military Nobility in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Austria’, German History 17/2 (1999), 166. Hochedlinger’s focus is not the shape of Enlightenment currents; this is touched on in Teodora Shek Brnardić, ‘The Upbringing of Competent and Patriotic Officers: Military Education at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt (1752–1805)’, Povijesni prilozi 36/53 (2017), 114.

  12. 12.

    Andrew Moore, ‘Thomas Coke in Turin and the Turin Royal Academy’ in Bianchi and Wolfe, Turin, 101. Other notable institutes include the late seventeenth-century Fürstliche Akademie in Wolfenbüttel and the Stuttgart Militärakademie created by Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg in 1773.

  13. 13.

    It should be borne in mind that certain collèges experienced a decline in enrolment in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: ‘A la Flèche, “il y a eu autrefois deux mil écoliers, mais le nombre est beaucoup diminué à cause de la guerre”’ (emphasis original). AN H 158812 fo 11 in François de Dainville, ‘Collèges et fréquentation au XVIIe siècle’, Population 12/3 (1957), 492.

  14. 14.

    In the sparse mentions he does make of La Flèche, moreover, it is entirely in the period before Saint-Germain’s reform; he never considers its status after 1778. Charles R. Bailey, ‘French Secondary Education, 1763–1790: The Secularization of Ex-Jesuit Collèges’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 68/6 (1978), 14.

  15. 15.

    Founded by Henry IV in 1604 and led by the Jesuits until 1762, it was a preparatory école royale militaire for the Paris Ecole militaire from 1764 until 1776. Thereafter, it reverted to its status as a collège for the preparation of magistrates and ecclesiastics. Lacking a doctoral-level analysis, most scholarly studies deal with aspects of its existence under the Jesuits, for instance, F. de Dainville, ‘L’enseignement des mathématiques dans les collèges jésuites de France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications 7 (1954), 6–21. A major contribution to studies of Le Flèche is the publication of the transactions of a colloquium on La Flèche in 2004, with chapters on ‘L’éducation militaire en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’ by Jean-Pierre Bois, 61–78, ‘L’échec du collège de La Flèche comme Ecole préparatoire à l’Ecole militaire de Paris, à travers le Journal de Stanislas Dupont de La Motte (1771–1776)’ by Didier Boisson, 143–160, and ‘Le recrutement nobiliaire au collège de La Flèche, Ecole militaire préparatoire (1764–1776)’ by Laurent Bourquin, 163–175, in La Flèche, Quatre siècles d’éducation sous le regard de l’Etat: Actes du colloque universitaire organisé les vendredi 2 et samedi 3 avril 2004 à La Flèche (La Flèche, 2004).

  16. 16.

    These were established in collèges in Auxerre, Beaumont-en-Auge, Brienne-le-Château, Dole, Effiat, Pont-Mousson, Pontlevoy, Rebais, Sorèze, Thiron, Tournon, and Vendôme. Concerning Dole, I’ve found no reference to it in either archival documents or the secondary literature.

    The theses are by Olivier Paradis, ‘L’Ecole royale militaire d’Effiat et ses élèves’ thèse de doctorat en Histoire (Université Clermont-Ferrand II), 1998; Jean-Christophe Blanchard, ‘Le Collège et Ecole Militaire d’Auxerre’, mémoire de maîtrise d’histoire (Université de Bourgogne), 2003 and Daniel Porquet, ‘L’Ecole royale militaire de Pontlevoy: Bénédictins de Saint-Maur et boursiers du roi, 1776–1793’, thèse de doctorat d’histoire moderne (Université Paris IV-Sorbonne), 2011. A work that mentions eight of these schools (omitting Auxerre, Brienne, Dole, and Pont-à-Mousson) as well as La Flèche and other noble schools such as Juilly and the hôtel des gentilshommes in Rennes is Marie-Madeleine Compère and Dominique Julia’s three-volume Les Collèges Français, 16e–18e siècles (Paris, 1984/1988/ 2002). The third volume has entries on Louis-le-Grand and Mazarin.

  17. 17.

    His major contributions include a monograph on the construction of the school, L’Ecole militaire de Paris: Le Monument, 1751–1788 (Paris, 1950), and articles such as ‘La fondation de l’Ecole militaire et Madame de Pompadour’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 21 (1974), 284–299. He also wrote about daily life in the school, its religious organisation, discipline, instruction, finances, and more.

  18. 18.

    As a product of the University of Paris before its 1968-inspired reforms, this thesis is today held by the Bibliothèque Cujas, the principal library for the study of law in France. D. Schalck-Pommellet, ‘L’Ecole Royale Militaire de Paris et la Révolution du comte de Saint-Germain, 1751–1776–1793’, thèse pour le doctorat d’état (Université de Paris, 1968). No articles resulted from this thesis either.

  19. 19.

    For instance, despite the putative lens of Schalck-Pommellet’s study being the effect of Saint-Germain’s reforms, the extent of commentary on disciplinary reforms in the chapter on discipline in the Ecole militaire amounts to little more than the phrase ‘Saint-Germain did not modify the disciplinary practices which were applied to the cadets’. Ibid., 455.

  20. 20.

    The works which consider the school from its origin in 1750 until its end in 1788 are the following: Robert Laulan, L’Ecole militaire de Paris: Le Monument, 1751–1788 (Paris, 1950); Léon Hennet, Les Compagnies de Cadets-Gentilshommes et les Ecoles militaires (Paris, 1889). Hennet’s work is hamstrung by the fact that he provides no references despite being generally reliable. Gaëtan d’Aviau de Ternay, Les gentilshommes élèves de l’Ecole royale militaire de Louis XV (1753–1775) Dictionnaire Biographique (Paris, 2010) and Les cadets gentilshommes de l’Ecole royale militaire de Louis XVI (1778–1787) Dictionnaire Biographique (Paris, 2008). Another post-millennial publication, an edited collection which focuses principally on architecture, is L’Ecole Militaire et l’Axe Breteuil-Trocadéro, ed. Béatrice de Andia (Paris, 2002). Its arguments were rehashed in a 2015 coffee-table tome by Pierre Grandchamp Garrigou.

  21. 21.

    Other categories include general studies of education, comparative military history, political biography, and architectural studies.

  22. 22.

    Though focusing on only one cross-section of the nobility, works such as Mark Motley’s Becoming a French Aristocrat: The Education of the Court Nobility, 1580–1715 (Princeton, 1990), Jonathan Dewald’s Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley, 1993), or Pascale Mormiche’s Devenir Prince: L’école du pouvoir en France, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 2009) provide an indispensable view into the mind-set and worldview which shaped noble ambition from the earliest youth through to adulthood. On manège equitation and the shifts in noble self-identity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Treva J. Tucker, ‘From Destrier to Danseur: The Role of the Horse in Early Modern French Noble Identity’, PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles 2007.

  23. 23.

    Sandra L. Powers, ‘Studying the Art of War – Military Books Known to American Officers and their French Counterparts During the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, The Journal of Military History, 70 (2006), 781–814, addresses the first topic; Christy Pichichero’s The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Ithaca, NY, 2017) the second. See also Ira D. Gruber’s Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010). Its first chapter, the Introduction, bears the title ‘A French Connection’.

  24. 24.

    Bernard Gaborit ‘Idéologies et politiques de la formation à l’époque de Richelieu’ (forthcoming); it is mentioned by Christian Jouhaud, ‘Le territoire richelais du cardinal duc’ in Richelieu à Richelieu – Architecture et Décors d’un Château Disparu, Dario Cimorelli ed. (Milan, 2011), 27.

  25. 25.

    Saumur, l’Ecole de cavalerie: Histoire architecturale d’une cité du cheval militaire, ed. Pierre Garrigou Grandchamp (Paris, 2005).

  26. 26.

    The most notable piece of contrary opinion is by David D. Bien, who delivered a conference paper subsequently published under the title ‘Military Education in 18th Century France: Technical and Non-Technical Determinants’ in Science, Technology, and Warfare, Monte D. Wright and Lawrence J. Paszek eds (Honolulu, 1969), 51–59; Ken Alder, in turn, states that, ‘Bien expresses a certain agnosticism about the practical uses of mathematics, even for the technical officers’. Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton, 1997), 367.

    Roger Hahn in turn describes Laulan’s aggregate work as the best study of the school, ‘quoique Laulan ne s’intéresse pas spécialement à l’enseignement scientifique’. Hahn, ‘L’Enseignement scièntifique aux écoles militaires et d’artillerie’ in Ecoles techniques et militaires au XVIIIe siècle, eds Roger Hahn and René Taton (Paris, 1986), 523.

  27. 27.

    Frederick Artz, for instance, states with regard to the school’s ultimate failure: ‘dans leur gestion le gouvernement s’était efforcé de concilier deux fins incompatibles, celle d’instruire un grand nombre de jeunes nobles pauvres et celle de favoriser l’enseignement technique’. A view which did not see the Ecole militaire primarily as a technical institute would erase the dichotomy presented by this opinion, thus rejecting the idea that its ‘failure’ as a technical institute was a result of such a dichotomy. Artz, ‘L’éducation technique en France au XVIIIe siècle (1700–1789)’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 13 (1938), 392.

  28. 28.

    On the salles de conférences, the lessons on theory for artillery officers instituted after 1756, see Frédéric Naulet, ‘Les Ecoles d’artillerie au XVIIIe Siècle’, thèse de maîtrise (Université Paris IV-Sorbonne), 1990, 81–83.

  29. 29.

    Alder states that ‘one cannot say that the sole knowledge of principles is sufficient to bring the [mechanical] arts to perfection. One must apply them, and this application always reveals the resistance and obstinacy … of matter.…’, later noting ‘In this period, ballistics theory… was nominally derived from the mechanics of moving bodies as laid out by Galileo. Experienced men, however, knew perfectly well that the trajectory of a cannonball could not be predicted by this sort of theory, and on the battlefield they continued to ply their trade as a craft, a skilled “art” which resembled the kind of rule-based knowledge used by artisans’. Alder, Engineering the Revolution, 13, 31

  30. 30.

    Janis Langins, Conserving the Enlightenment: French Military Engineering from Vauban to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass, 2004), 62.

    On ballistics in this period, see also Brett D. Steel, ‘Muskets and Pendulums: Benjamin Robins, Leonhard Euler, and the Ballistics Revolution’, in Technology and Culture 35 (1994), 348–382.

  31. 31.

    Gat adds that ‘What can be described as a geometrical school of operations existed, in fact, to some degree only in the Napoleonic period …’ Gat, A History, 95.

    Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass, & London, 1983), 200.

  32. 32.

    He also comments that ‘officers did not have to learn leadership, as they were members of the aristocracy, replete with every social advantage and thoroughly acquainted with the business of command’. Though perhaps applicable to a favoured element of the officer corps, it was a very different scenario for the majority who filled the subaltern ranks. John Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648–1789 (Manchester, 1982), 97.

  33. 33.

    Juan Navarro Loidi, ‘Las Matématicas en la Escuela Militar de Avila (1774)’, in La Gaceta de la RSME 14 (2011), 309; Loidi analyses mathematical instruction in the Escuela militar of Avila, founded to improve the mathematical ability of officers of the line regiments in the Spanish army. The principal basis for their instruction was the book Euclidis Elementorum libri and so on, translated from Latin by Robert Simson (professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow), and which Loidi presents as an adequate presentation of Euclid’s principles, but not the best introduction to mathematical concepts for its intended audience; in the event, the mathematical instruction there was soon simplified. The school itself shut some years later due to the opposition it encountered and its founder Alejandro O’Reilly’s fall from favour in court after the failure of his expedition against Algerian pirates; 330, 318.

  34. 34.

    Voyer was the only son of Marc-Pierre de Voyer de Paulmy , comte d’Argenson and Minister of War 1743–1757. Voyer’s comments are from a letter to the baron de Prades. Bibliothèque Universitaire de Poitiers, Fonds d’Argenson, P 173, Letter of 11 October 1763 in Nicole de Blomac, Voyer d’Argenson et le cheval des Lumières (Paris, 2004), 59–60.

  35. 35.

    SHD Ya 147, Projet d’Etablissement d’études de géométrie, dessein, fortifications, artillerie, et tactique pour le militaire, Vienne, 10 August 1777, 1. Despite its title, the author’s stance was that ‘Cet abrégé que l’on apprendrait à un enfant de six ans aussi aisément que son ABC, remis dans les mains de chaque officier serait suffisant pour l’instruction que l’on exigerait de lui en général…’, so that even ‘l’officier le moins pénétrant, pouvait avec de la mémoire, se procurer a lui-même par la simple lecture’. Ibid., 4–5.

  36. 36.

    It was described as a feeder, or ‘pépinière’, much like some corps of the Maison du Roi were, but for the military as a whole, not for any particular branch or branches.

  37. 37.

    John A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610–1715 (Cambridge, 1997), 224. The importance of family ties for recruitment is emphasised in André Corvisier, L’armée française de la fin du XVIIe siècle au ministère de Choiseul: Le soldat (Paris, 1964), vol. 1, 750 and Jean Chagniot, ‘Du Capitaine à l’Officier: 1445–1635’ in L’Officier Français des origines à nos jours, Claude Croubois ed. (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 1987), 33.

  38. 38.

    Rafe Blaufarb, The French Army, 1750–1820: Careers, Talent, Merit (Manchester, 2002), 22.

  39. 39.

    Jean Chagniot and Hervé Drévillon, ‘La vénalité des charges militaires sous l’Ancien Régime’, Revue historique de droit français et étranger 86/4 (2008), 490.

  40. 40.

    Ibid. 519; André Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe (Bloomington, Ind, 1979), 101–102.

  41. 41.

    AN MM 681, Lettre du Conseil à Mgr le Comte du Muy, 19 July 1774, 24. It’s worth mentioning that under Louis XIV ‘informal venality’ included lieutenants being bribed ‘to resign in somebody’s favour’. Guy Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661–1701 (Cambridge, 2002), 171.

  42. 42.

    Hervé Drévillon, L’Impôt de Sang: Le metier des armes sous Louis XIV (Paris, 2005), 59. The infantry regiment La Reine specifically barred any recruitment from the Ecole militaire. The reason for this was to reserve its openings for the Queen’s pages. SHD Ya 147, memorandum of 28 May 1777.

  43. 43.

    Montaigne, Les Essais, livre II, Chapter VII ‘Des récompenses d’honneur’ in Drévillon, L’Impôt, 13.

  44. 44.

    See, for instance, Yves Combeau’s surprising claim in his entry on ‘Marc-Pierre de Voyer de Paulmy, Comte d’Argenson, 1743–1757’ in Les Ministres de la Guerre: 1570–1792: Histoire et Dictionnaire Biographique, ed. Thierry Sarmant (Paris, 2007), 379 that Duverney resigned as Intendant of the Ecole militaire due to conflicts with the entity directing construction, the Bâtiments du Roi . The resignation was rejected and he remained as Intendant until his death in 1770.

    Various authors have in turn framed their presentations of the school’s development with slightly different dates; Artz’s are 1751 to 1776 for its first stage, and the ‘final decade’ 1777–1787 in ‘L’éducation technique’, 389–393; de Ternay’s dates are 1753–1775, and 1778–1787; Ralph F. Croal’s delineations are 1751–1776 and 1777–1788 in ‘The Idea of the Ecole Spéciale Militaire and the Founding of Saint-Cyr’, PhD diss. University of Arizona, 1970; Schalck-Pommellet’s are 1751 to 1776 to 1793.

  45. 45.

    Commenting on two memorialists’ opinions on the quality of life in the Ecole militaire, one before and one after Saint-Germain’s reform, he writes: ‘les deux auteurs n’évoquent pas la même école’. De Ternay, Les gentilshommes élèves, 9. The second author instead emphasises institutional unity: ‘Sa durée d’existence fut également un record. L’Ecole de Paris vécut trente-cinq ans et fut supprimée en 1787’. Schalck-Pommellet, ‘L’Ecole Royale Militaire’, 462.

  46. 46.

    ‘L’influence du ministre d’Argenson fut nulle et on ne peut noter aucune intervention de sa part pour contribuer à la réussite de l’entreprise’. Schalck-Pommellet, ‘L’Ecole Royale Militaire’, 13. ‘En revanche, c’est bien le comte d’Argenson qui créé l’école militaire en elle-même’. Combeau, Le comte d’Argenson, 1696–1764: Ministre de Louis XV (Paris, 1999), 379.

  47. 47.

    The most thorough account of Duverney’s financial, business, and political dealings is by Marc Cheynet de Beaupré in Joseph Pâris-Duverney, Financier d’Etat (1684–1770): Les sentiers du pouvoir (1684–1720) (Paris, 2012) and Joseph Pâris-Duverney, Financier d’Etat (1684–1770): La vertu des maîtresses royales (1720–1770) (Paris, 2016).

    Duverney was dubbed the ‘général des farines’ by the maréchal de Noailles. Léon Mention, Le Comte de Saint-Germain et ses réformes, 1775–1777, d’après les Archives du Dépôt de la Guerre (Paris, 1884), 55. The marquis d’Argenson, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and the comte d’Argenson’s older brother, was more bitter: ‘les financiers triomphant de tout et faisant revivre le règne des Juifs’. 3 September 1751, Journal et Mémoires du marquis d’Argenson, publiés pour la première fois d’après les manuscrits autographes de la bibliothèque du Louvre pour la société de l’histoire de France, E. J. B. Rathery ed. (Paris, 1864), vol. 4, 464.

    For a succinct analysis of how Duverney helped stave off revolution several decades before 1789, see François R. Velde, ‘French Public Finance Between 1683 and 1726’ in Government Debts and Financial Markets in Europe, ed. Fausto Piola Caselli (London, 2008), 135–166.

  48. 48.

    AN MM 656, Mémoires sur l’établissement de l’École 1750–1751.

  49. 49.

    Marie Jacob, ‘L’Ecole royale militaire – un modèle selon l’Encyclopédie?’, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie 43 (2008), 108; Jean Chagniot, Nouvelle Histoire de Paris – Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1988), 493; Croal, ‘The Idea’, 106; Combeau, Le comte d’Argenson, 329.

  50. 50.

    Hennet, Les Compagnies, 6.

  51. 51.

    He was also the surintendant général des postes, but not yet head of the department of Paris, a post he would acquire in April 1749. Combeau, Le comte, 132, 338.

  52. 52.

    Lettres de Madame la Marquise de Pompadour. Depuis 1746 jusqu’à 1752 (Paris, 1774), vol. 1, 77.

  53. 53.

    On the 1725 project, see also the mémoire held in AN K 149 no 4.

  54. 54.

    Laurens Melliet, sieur de Montessuy, Discours politiques et militaires sur Corneille Tacite, excellent historien, & grand Homme d’Estat: Contenans les fleurs des plus belles Histoires du Monde. Avec des notables advertissements concernants la conduitte des armees. Œuvre utile & nécessaire aux Princes, generaux d’armées, Conseillers d’Estat, Gentilshommes, Capitaines particuliers, & à tous Magistrats ayans le maniement de la chose publique (Lyon, 1618), 823–824.

  55. 55.

    Jay M. Smith, The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France (Ann Arbor, 1996), 19–20. Smith does not mention these appeals in relation to the requests made to the monarch.

  56. 56.

    Gazette de Renaudot, 31 December 1639, 852, in Jules Caillet, De l’administration en France sous le ministre du Cardinal de Richelieu (Paris, 1857), 376–377, in Lynn, Giant, 518.

  57. 57.

    The sources for information on these initiatives are AN K 543 (I), ‘Testament Olographe de Mademoiselle de Guise’, 6 February 1686, 14–15; Compère and Julia, Les collèges, vol. 1, 270; and Labatut, Les ducs et pairs, 317 in Motley, Becoming, 112. Another institution Motley mentions is Madame de Maintenon’s establishment of Saint-Cyr in 1686, which I discuss in Chap. 3.

  58. 58.

    Defenders of Ronceray explicitly compared its benefits to those of the Ecole militaire: John McManners, French Ecclesiastical Society in the Ancien Régime: A Study of Angers in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 1960), 90–91.

  59. 59.

    SHD 1 M 1781 Mémoires Ecoles Militaires, 1736–1784, Etablissement d’une Ecole de Mars à Paris pour l’Instruction de la Noblesse à l’hôtel d’Entragues rue de Tournon près le Luxembourg; Chagniot, Nouvelle Histoire, 5; Croal, ‘The Idea’, 106–107. The Ile de Cygnes would later be joined to the bank of the Seine by the Conseil de l’hôtel and become part of the Champs de Mars.

  60. 60.

    Blomac , Voyer, 83. De Mailly also ‘s’occupe d’y créer une Université et finance de ses deniers “…plusieurs hôpitaux et manufactures”’.

  61. 61.

    George Livet, ‘Esprit militaire et société provinciale sous l’Ancien Régime. Le cas d’une province frontière: l’Alsace’, in Le Soldat, La Stratégie, La Mort ed. Jean Pavlevski (Paris, 1989), 221–236. More examples of the Ecole militaire’s influence in the provinces are given in Pascal Roux ‘Éducation et formation des officiers militaires à Toulouse dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle’, Histoire, économie et société 20 (2001), 373, 375–377, 381, 383.

  62. 62.

    Naulet , ‘Ecoles d’artillerie’, 23. The dates for these changes are 1762, 1764, and 1767. More information on these schools is found in SHD Xd. The Jansenist Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques furiously excoriated the Clamecy école royale for its students’ violent indiscipline and the lack of an Ecole de commerce. Their assessment is dated 30 January 1767, Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, ou mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la constitution (No place, 1767), 20–24.

  63. 63.

    AN K 149 no 51 Mémoire Collège Académique 22 April 1750. He adds, almost as an aside, that theology, law, and medicine were also prohibited there. He did seem to think that Spain had provided a positive example, stating that ‘Philippe IV Roy d’Espagne à fondé une académie dans le Collège des Jésuites de Madrid’. He might have had the failed project by the conde duque de Olivares in mind. Adolfo Carrasco Martínez, ‘Olivares, la Compañía de Jesús y la educación de la nobleza. Los Estudios Reales del Colegio imperial de Madrid y otros proyectos del conde duque’ in La Construction du Militaire: Savoirs et Savoir-Faire Militaires à l’Epoque Moderne, Benjamin Deruelle and Bernard Gainot eds (Paris, 2013), 95–118.

  64. 64.

    Giovanni Drei, I Farnese: grandezza e decadenza di una dinastia italiana, Giuseppina Allegri Tassoni ed. (Rome, 1954), 196ff in Gregory Hanlon, The Twilight of A Military Tradition: Italian Aristocrats and European Conflicts, 1560–1800 (London and New York, 1998), 345.

  65. 65.

    Gian Paolo Brizzi, La formazione della classe dirigente nel sei-settecento: i seminaria nobilium nell’Italia centro-settentrionale (Bologna, 1976), 6 in Ibid.

  66. 66.

    H. C. Barnard, The French Tradition in Education: Ramus to Mme Necker de Saussure (Cambridge, 1922), 170.

  67. 67.

    Early 1750 mémoires proposed naming the new school ‘Collège Royal Académique’ before the name ‘Ecole Royale Militaire’ was adopted.

  68. 68.

    AN MM 668 14 August 1769, 68. This entry does not specify which Conseil adopted this deliberation.

  69. 69.

    Françoise Waquet, Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: From the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, John Howe trans. (London and New York, 2001), 17.

  70. 70.

    I explore the background of its ‘reactionary’ nature in Haroldo A. Guízar, ‘Entering the Ecole militaire: Proofs of nobility and the example of the girls’ school at Saint-Cyr’, Ex Historia 7 (2015), 37–60. https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history/research/publications/exhistoria/archive/volume7/.

  71. 71.

    Denis Diderot, ‘Eloge de M. Du Marsais’, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 36, 555. Diderot however does not explain how he made de Meyzieu’s acquaintance or commissioned his own Encyclopédie article ‘Ecole Militaire’.

  72. 72.

    Letter from Mlle de Lespinasse to Condorcet, 09 September 1769 in Charles Henry, Lettres inédites de mademoiselle de Lespinasse à Condorcet: à d’Alembert, à Guibert, au comte de Crillon publiés avec des Lettres de ses amis, des documents nouveaux et une étude (Paris, 1887), 52.

    Lespinasse’s celebrated lover, the comte de Guibert, vaguely alluded to some dealings with the Ecole militaire when he worked as a collaborator of the comte de Saint-Germain. See letters 222 and 237 of February and May 1776 in Correspondance entre Mlle de Lespinasse et le Comte de Guibert publiée pour la première fois d’après le texte original par le comte de Villeneuve-Guibert (Paris, 1906).

  73. 73.

    Harvey Chisick, The Limits of Reform in the Enlightenment: Attitudes toward the Education of the Lower Classes in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton, 1981), 41.

  74. 74.

    Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York & London, 1971), 30; letter by Voltaire to d’Alembert, 15 June 1774, Correspondance, vol. 18 in Oeuvres de Voltaire, vol. 68 (Paris, 1833), 502–503.

  75. 75.

    Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet and Frédéric Gaëtan, marquis de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Mémoires de Condorcet sur la Révolution Française, extraits de sa correspondance et de celle des ses amis (Paris, 1824), vol. 1, 50. D’Alembert and Condorcet both recommended professors for Frederick the Great’s military schools.

  76. 76.

    Maciej Forycki, ‘Denis Diderot et le Saint-Cyr Péterbourgeois’ in L’Education des jeunes filles nobles en Europe XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles, Chantal Grell and Arnaud Ramière de Fortanier eds (Paris, 2004), 145–147.

  77. 77.

    Renato Galliani, Rousseau, le luxe et l’idéologie nobiliaire: étude socio-historique (Oxford, 1989), 263–264 and Roger Barny, Prélude idéologique à la Révolution française: Le rousseauisme avant 1789 (Paris, 1985), 50–51.

  78. 78.

    His 1740 writings are the Projet pour l’éducation de M. de Sainte-Marie and Fragment du mémoire présenté à M. de Ste Marie pour l’éducation de son fils, discussed in Mario Einaudi, The Early Rousseau (Ithaca, NY, 1967), 66–67. Rousseau’s call ‘to substitute the actions of men and of citizens for the sterile and vain babbling of sophists, and to become one day the defenders and the fathers of the country whose children they will have been for so long’ is easily conceived of as highly appealing to most French military reformers of his day. ‘Discourse on Political Economy’ in Rousseau: The Basic Political Writings: Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Discourse on Political Economy, On the Social Contract, The State of War, Donald A. Cress ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 2011), 138–139.

  79. 79.

    Natasha Gill, Educational Philosophy in the French Enlightenment: From Nature to Second Nature (Burlington, Vermont, 2010); Adrian O’Connor, In Pursuit of Politics: Education and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Manchester, 2017).

  80. 80.

    M. Pigneron, Mémoire sur l’Ecole Royale Militaire, Nouvellement Supprimée; dans lequel on examine, 1o. si cet Etablissement étoit réellement utile : 2o. si les défauts qu’on lui reprochoit étoient inhérent à sa nature, ou purement accidentels : 3o. enfin s’il seroit réellement avantageux de le créer de nouveau, & d’en changer la forme & le régime; ensemble un précis de l’histoire de sa fondation, & de ce qui s’y est passé de plus intéressant jusqu’au moment de sa destruction en 1787 (Paris, 1789), 22–23. He dedicated the pamphlet to Gaspard Monge, then the minister of the Navy.

  81. 81.

    Abbé Charles Batteux, Cours d’Etudes à l’usage des Elèves de l’Ecole Royale Militaire, Rédigé et Imprimé par ordre du Roi (Paris, 1777), xiii. The comparison with Rollin’s work is from an unfavourable review of the 1785 book Principes généraux des belles-lettres by Louis Domairon, also a professor of the Ecole militaire, in the 15 June 1786 issue of the Luxembourg-based Journal Historique et Littéraire, 268.

  82. 82.

    Louis Cognet, ‘Les Petites-Ecoles de Port-Royal’, Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 3/5 (1953), 20. This was a sentiment echoed by Duverney and de Meyzieu.

  83. 83.

    Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals (Cambridge, 1987), 80.

  84. 84.

    Haroldo A. Guízar, ‘“Make a Hard Push For It”: The Benthams, Foucault, and the Panopticons’ roots in the Paris Ecole Militaire’, Lumen XXXVII: Selected Conference Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Secrets & Surveillance (2018), 151–173.

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Guízar, H.A. (2020). The Paris Ecole Royale Militaire: An Introduction. In: The École Royale Militaire. War, Culture and Society, 1750 –1850. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45931-4_1

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