![]() ![]() ![]() Thanks to generals such as Turenne, Condé and Vendôme, they were overall also the most successful. ![]() Thanks to the King and Louvois, France’s soldiers were the best trained, the best equipped and the best supplied in Europe. During the War of the Spanish Succession, eight large French armies, each commanded by a marshal of France, campaigned simultaneously in the Low Countries, on the Rhine, in Italy and in Spain. In peacetime, it kept a standing army of 150,000, and expanded this to 400,000 in time of war. Its forces were overwhelmingly the largest on the continent. ![]() They go directly to the goal and they are not corruptible.”įor fifty years, through the second half of the seventeenth century, the armies of France were the most powerful and most admired in Europe. The axiom was succinctly put by one of Louis XIV’s young officers: “There is no judge more equitable than cannon. Dynastic rivalries, the drawing of frontiers, possession of cities, fortresses, trade routes and colonies, and ultimately the destinies of kingdoms and empires all were decided by war. War was the final arbiter between nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as, indeed, it has been in the twentieth. Peter of Russia and Charles of Sweden, Frederick of Denmark, Augustus of Poland, Louis of France, William of England, Leopold of Austria and most of the other kings and princes of the era eventually submitted their differences to the decision of war. ![]()
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