Abstract
Reviewed by: Bruno Coulson, University of Namur, Belgium
At the École Militaire in Paris, the French Army War College devoutly guards some of the papers of General Jacques de Guibert in its Honour Room, among selected items from great military thinkers and war leaders such as Napoleon, Marshal Foch and General de Gaulle. Jonathan Abel’s book is not only the first English-language biography of Guibert: it is better than the existing equivalents in French, which are either outdated or not military enough.
The French felt the need of better battle tactics after their defeats in the Seven Years’ War. The young Guibert was an aide to his father Charles, who was taken prisoner by the Prussians at the battle of Rossbach. Charles had imparted to his son a love for military science and he ‘utilized his inactivity to closely observe the internal working of the Prussian army’ (36). After the release of his father, Jacques took part in the battle of Minden, where he witnessed the ineffectiveness of French tactics. He then read several memoranda drafted by his father explaining the Prussian system; these are still held at the French military archive in Vincennes. After the war he followed his father, now a maréchal de camp (brigadier general), who was transferred to a position in the Ministry of War in Paris. Under the Count of Choiseul, father and son devised a new training method for light troops (1769), which allowed for quicker deployments and movements thanks to small columns of troops. After having served in the pacification of Corsica, recently bought by France from the Republic of Genoa, Jacques de Guibert published his Essai général de tactique in 1772. In the preamble, he demanded a unitary state grounded in virtue, reason and discipline, hoping for the emergence in France of a ‘vigorous people’ but not calling for a revolution. The population could participate in the militia but the line army ‘was to remain the province of disciplined professionals’ (59). For him, either column or line formations could be used, as circumstances dictated. Combined-arms divisions would serve as the basic operational units of his army, marching to within support distance of each other.
Guibert rose to fame and entered the Council of the Ministry of War in late 1775. He then penned his second work, Défense du système de guerre moderne, in which he criticized the fanatics of the attack in column. Promoted to brigadier in December 1781, he was given complete control of the military reform process after the Prussian invasion of the Dutch Republic in 1787. A year later provisional regulations implemented his desire to professionalize the army, including the creation of permanent divisions on a territorial basis. Following the start of the Revolution in Versailles, Guibert argued for a constitutional monarchy in his next book, De la force publique (1790). He always rejected a citizen-soldiers army, but as he died from fever in May of that year, the new political forces soon forgot his warnings and expanded his reformed army with massive levies in order to wage war on a more intensive scale. In the end, the Règlement of 1791 on the infantry gave military commanders the tactical and organizational flexibility championed by Guibert throughout his career.
Jonathan Abel vividly and clearly presents all the above and cannot be challenged until Chapter 9, ‘The Father of the Grande Armée’. T. C. W. Blanning is not the only historian to argue that the French victories during the Revolutionary period were mainly due to a manpower superiority (179). This factor is now widely recognized, but of course, it is not the only one and the implementation of Guibert’s system benefited the French, who also enjoyed another tremendous advantage: unity of command. Although the expression was not used at that time (something he could have said), Abel can effectively see in Guibert the father of a ‘tactical doctrine’ and also the predictor of army operations on multiple axes like Napoleon’s famous 1805 campaign (180–2). More could have been said, however, about Napoleon’s reading of Guibert’s works and his opinion about them (200). Although the Emperor obviously learned from him, all his comments about him on the island of Saint Helena are curiously negative. Of course one can never take Napoleon’s words at face value, but Abel could have given more evidence to support Guibert’s legacy in the Grande Armée. Is Guibert mentioned or quoted in memoirs, correspondence or military treatises? This, of course, does not take away any of the merits of Abel’s book. His mastery of French sources, history and literature is impressive and this biography will undoubtedly stand the test of time.