ONE OF THE MORE COLOURFUL PORTRAYALS of the power of discipline in old-regime armies comes from the pen of Sir Michael Howard:

The significance of such views, presenting the eighteenth-century soldiery as a closely controlled and obedient lot, extends beyond the remit of old-regime military history. Social and cultural historians often see early-modern armies not only as disciplined but also disciplining forces which played a major role in bringing the European population under the closer and closer control of their respective states. This was a broad process which operated on a number of levels, but at its root lay the growing standardisation of social institutions and mores replacing tradition with regulation, informalities with formalities, compromise and negotiations with direct power and hierarchical dictates. Regular armies were not only the product of this development but also among its major promoters. However, the role of the military went beyond the coercion of those whose traditional lifestyle had fallen prey to the reforming zeal of the authorities. It has been argued that the disciplining of the soldiery enabled the social disciplining of the population at large. Their position as the most tightly controlled social institution in old-regime Europe allowed armies to become a testing ground for policies of social management and surveillance before they befell the rest of society, from the introduction of elementary education to a more regularised penal system.

Recent studies have usually taken a more nuanced view of social disciplining and growing state control, at least as far as civil society is concerned. Rather than being entirely coercive and imposed from above, it was largely based on negotiation and consent, often relying on intermediaries accepted by both the authorities and their subjects. The move towards greater uniformity was also a gradual one. To cite one example, contrary to the argument raised by Michel Foucault in his classic Discipline and Punish, the regularisation of the legal system in old-regime France was a slow and measured process, rather than the product of the relatively abrupt upheaval which took place in the end of the eighteenth century.