Did strategy drive war or did war drive strategy in early modern and modern France - Essay Example

ue Protestants in France while helping Protestant organizations abroad— so as well did strategy turned out to be restrained.iii The bloodbath of the Thirty Years’ War gave way to wars fought for ‘reason’, to enlarge the ruler’s interests and through him the entire stateiv: hence the birth of strategy in early modern and modern France. While scholars analyzed old Roman literatures to unearth the element that made the legion indestructible mechanisms of strategy, so too did strategy practitioners revisit the Classical period where in the premise of foreign policy influenced the waging of war.

v For some time, the growth of the newly centralized government and the creation of gunpowder seemed to destroy the formidability of fortifications: medieval defenses failed to endure the thrashing of late 15th- or early 16th-century weaponry.vi However, the creation of thoroughly devised geometric buttresses brought back a great deal of the balance. A well-defended kingdom was yet again a strong barrier to attacks, one that would entail a considerable amount of time and energy to weaken. The building of series of fortified towns along an empire’s border was the major peacetime ideas of strategists.

vii Strategy started to look more like science than ability, method rather than art. Practitioners, like Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban, a 17th-century French engineer, and baron de Jomini, an 18th-century French military historian and general, pioneered in making war a business of principles, guidelines, and laws.viii Expectedly, these developments overlapped with the construction of military academies and an ever more reforming and scientific inclination--- officers took lessons in military engineering and artillerists took lessons in trigonometry.

ix Literature on military strategy mushroomed. Jacques Antoine Hippolyte’s Essai general de tactique, was one of the most insightful works that organized military philosophy, even though Guibert had inclinations of bigger