The development of the French army after 1661, whether during conflicts or in the interludes of peace, was not driven forward simply by experience and by the lessons of immediate past performance in war in the years 1635–59, 1667–8, 1672–8, 1683–4 and 1688–97. The nostrum that conscious, willed change was brought about in a reactive and proportional manner by rational statesmen infused nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing on the war machines of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. It is a view which has some merit, but it is only part of the story. The French army was also heavily shaped by immediate political and personal concerns, whether those of the monarch or of his subjects. The king of France's standing army in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries developed on the rock of private – and essentially dynastic – interest. I do not intend to advance a monocausal explanation of the way the army developed; indeed the book has gone to great lengths to show the other pressures making for change. Dynasticism does, however, provide the crucial prism through which change must ultimately be viewed.

private interest and the standing army

At the apex of the dynastic society stood Louis XIV, who was as captivated by concern for ghosts, kin and progeny as any of his noble contemporaries.