In La guerre du roi aux portes de l'Italie, Julian Guinand analyzes the French military machine in a single theater of operations over nearly half a century. French armies operated in Italy almost continuously between Charles VIII's campaign of 1494 and the 1559 Treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis. This entailed the creation of an equally long-term military establishment to conduct those operations and to defend Italian territory, particularly after the 1536 conquest of the Savoyard lands in the Alps and Piedmont. Although French armies periodically moved south, Guinand concerns himself essentially with that area, stretching from rear bases in the Rhône valley, through the Alpine passes and into the upper valley of the Po. Here we encounter a complex force adapted to the terrain on administrative, tactical, and logistical levels, recruited from near and far to fight for a usually absent king. On the whole, this was a functional and successful organization; Guinand's portrait shows us something close to an ideal type of the early sixteenth-century military, albeit one that was ultimately a strategic sideshow.
The study is organized topically, moving from geography through the broad organization and support of the forces to the experience of troops on the ground. At the accession of François I, the French military had already mastered the transit of the Alpine passes, which thenceforth proved highly permeable both to periodic transfers of large forces and the smaller-scale movements of reinforcements and rotated units. Neither the command structure nor the recruitment of troops broke new ground, with the latter mixing the noble cavalry of the compaignies d'ordonnance and foreign mercenaries with, after 1536, the beginnings of a permanent French and Italian infantry; experienced commanders depended not only on royal favor but also on the decisions of a distant military council.
One of the most interesting chapters details the logistical arrangements for supplying troops in their challenging transit, which depended on an established system of staging posts supported from much of France but largely organized by the regional governments of the Rhône/Alpine territories in a consultative though far from voluntary process. Once in theater, the French fought a war that differed conceptually from its late medieval predecessors, mainly in its increasing reliance on sophisticated—and expensive—systems of fortification. Otherwise, individual valor and chivalry (which still provided its survivors with their best chance of career advancement) did not clash with a cautious, professional war of position focused on cutting enemy lines of supply, isolating their positions, and creating or expanding defensible front lines. Only once (at Cérisoles in 1544) did circumstances conspire to produce a pitched battle, which the French won through successful maneuver, adequate infantry, superior cavalry, and good luck. Ultimately, however, the collapse of royal finances after the failure of the Grand Parti de Lyon, the defeat at St. Quentin in the north in 1557, and the threat of Protestantism rendered the successful Piedmont front moot.
This is a work of regional history on a relatively grand scale, which allows Guinand to go into considerable depth while retaining a broader perspective. His command of the sources is impressive, from the royal council to local archives to personal documents; a set of appendixes provides some detail on personnel and expenditures at various moments of the war. He is particularly good at conveying the experience of individual actors, civilians as well as soldiers, with their experiences and motivations among his major concerns.
His overall thesis—that whatever innovations there may have been in the technology and organization of war did little to modify older military identities and ways of war—is convincing, as far as it goes. Still, distant command, professional native-born infantry, networks of bastion fortification, a quasi-permanent logistical network that foreshadowed the Spanish Road slightly to its east, and innovative (if not particularly successful) financial expedients all point to a degree of novelty that might have been explored more systematically. But in a broader sense, this book's carefully calibrated scope reveals what has always been the logistical heart of war: the ability to mobilize diverse resources to control what in this case was a spectacular and challenging territory.
