1What is the relationship between military culture—or “ways of war”, to use a term that first appeared in a 1943 article in Harper’s Magazine and has become common in scholarly work since—and the group of people who embrace a particular way of war1? Many historians suggest an implicit answer to this question by associating different military cultures with particular national communities; hence discussions of “Russian”, “British” or, more recently, “Afghan” ways of war2. In other instances scholars have attributed cultures and methods of war to larger geographic or cultural entities, as in the case of Victor Davis Hanson’s Western Way of War3. Yet, however broadly or narrowly one defines the constituency of a particular way of war, the notion that specific groups of people embrace certain ways of war suggests that the political circumstances or cultural identities of those people determine how societies think about and wage war. In other words, scholars have tended to conceptualize war cultures as reflections and products of broader determining factors that have their roots outside of the military realm. Thus Russell Frank Weigley, for example, has considered how the limited material resources of the nascent United States determined the military culture of its armies, while Hanson has argued that the preponderance of decisive ancient infantry battles, which grew out of the political culture of the Greek city-states, exerted a profound and long-lasting impact on the way Occidental societies ever since have approached warfare4.

2To be sure, politics, culture and a range of other factors play a vital role in determining the way that any soldier, army or nation wages war. Yet in portraying ways of war as an outgrowth of non-military factors, discussions of war cultures fail to appreciate how the experience of war, and military service more generally, can help to shape society itself through a process of cultural hybridization. That phenomenon is the focus of this essay.

3In particular, the following pages examine the context of the eighteenth century French military, in which large numbers of soldiers and officers of diverse cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds served alongside one another. The experiences of these troops, who hailed collectively not only from France’s many disparate regions but also from throughout Europe and across the globe, underscored the ways in which the eighteenth century military served as a vehicle for amalgamating a range of different peoples. As a result, it facilitated interactions and cultural hybridizations that, far from merely constituting a singular “French” way of war, deeply nuanced the character of France itself, introducing within its borders a range of racial identities, religions, languages and cultures.

The Origins of France’s Soldiers

4To appreciate the role of the eighteenth-century French army as an incubator of cultural hybridization, it is necessary first to outline the diverse origins of the military’s personnel. That diversity stemmed from two major factors: first, the lack of uniformity and absence of a strong sense of national identity among the native-born subjects of the French king during the eighteenth century; and second, the presence of tens of thousands of foreign troops—representing not only other parts of Europe, but many overseas territories—in the French army of the Old Regime.

5Although a certain amount of “national sentiment” existed among French subjects under the Old Regime, feelings of devotion to king and country for the kingdom’s native-born soldiers were bound up with religious devotions that spanned beyond the country’s borders. They never compared to the powerful sense of national identity that the state began inculcating during the Revolution5. It was not until much later, during the nineteenth century, that most of France’s non-elites gradually came to embrace the idea of the nation, which slowly supplanted the local pays as the basis for an individual’s identity, and that they abandoned their localized dialects in favor of standardized French6. For these reasons, it is not possible to identify a single “France” during the eighteenth century, let alone a uniform French way of war. Moreover, the marked heterogeneity of French society itself during the eighteenth century meant that any military culture that developed within the French armed forces was the product of interaction between soldiers of an array of different geographic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds who served alongside one another, and for whom the idea of a unified French nation or culture was quite foreign.

6If the lack of uniformity within French society ensured a great deal of diversity among France’s native-born military personnel, foreign recruits extended the heterogeneity of the armed forces further still. Recruited not only from nearly every corner of Europe, but also from places as distant as North America and Madagascar, foreign soldiers in French service accounted for between fifteen and twenty percent of the army’s total strength prior to 17897. Most of these men served in foreign regiments that the state began raising in 1616 for the express purpose of recruiting foreigners. By the end of the Old Regime each of the foreign regiments was nominally composed of one of five distinct national groups—Swiss, German, Irish, Liégeois and Hungarian—but in practice these units, which remained in French service until the revolutionaries abolished them in the early 1790s, enlisted soldiers of a much wider range of national backgrounds than the five official designations implied8. Thus a sizable contingent of troops native to the Low Countries served in the Irish regiments, for instance, while the German corps comprised a melange of Italian, Polish, Dutch and French soldiers serving alongside natives of the German states. A smaller number of foreigners belonged to regiments of the French military that were nominally not foreign, but which accepted foreign recruits under particular circumstances9.

7The majority of France’s foreign troops hailed from other parts of Europe. However, those who came from distant overseas territories to serve in metropolitan France illuminate particularly well the enormous degree of demographic diversity that characterized the eighteenth-century French military, in contrast to civilian society. These troops included, first, black men who served in several units in Europe during the eighteenth century. The identification of black soldiers can be difficult because contemporary documents most often described them only with the adjective “nègre”, an ambiguous term (and a highly pejorative one in modern usage) that the sources rarely clarified10. As a result, it is often impossible to know whether a particular “black” soldier was of African, Amerindian or Asian descent; nor is it usually clear to what extent he was the product of miscegenation between the indigenous populations of overseas territories and European colonists.

8There is nonetheless no doubt that some dark-skinned natives of Africa, Asia and the Americas served in the royal army. The most significant example was those in the Regiment of the Volontaires de Saxe, which the marshal of France and German native Maurice de Saxe levied during the War of the Austrian Succession. Saxe intended for the regiment to recruit mainly from among the Polish and Tartar populations of eastern Europe, but its first company, numbering approximately one hundred men, was comprised almost entirely of black cavalrymen born in Africa, the Caribbean, South America and India11. At the same time, small numbers of soldiers whom the recruitment registers described as “nègre” were scattered across various royal regiments in the European metropole during the eighteenth century. For example, Nicolas Palio, a native of Saint-Domingue, served as a drummer in the German Regiment of La Marck from April 1775 to September 177912. Another black North American, François Baptiste, from “Lusignain [Louisiana] en Amérique”, enlisted in the Regiment of Bouillon, also nominally a German corps, in 176813. He narrowly missed serving alongside Philippe Mudras, a native of Senegal who enrolled in Bouillon around the same date but died in Lorraine in 176714. Of yet more distant origin were Frantz Balthazard, a native of the Mughal Empire who enlisted in Bouillon as well in 1766 as a drummer, but later passed to the elite grenadier company of that regiment; Mathieu Bartholome, from Madagascar, who joined the Regiment of Dillon of the Irish Brigades as early as 1728; and François Indien, a native of India who served in the La Marck Regiment for about a month before deserting in 178415.

9Because the contemporary documentation available on black men such as these serving with French regiments on European soil is sparse, it is difficult to ascertain the circumstances that brought them from their places of birth to the French metropole in an era when the state theoretically prohibited the emigration of blacks to France, and when blacks residing within the kingdom’s metropolitan borders numbered no more than 10 000 individuals alongside at least twenty million whites16. Since a majority of the black troops were natives of France’s Caribbean colonies, however, and others originated near the French foothold of Pondicherry on the Indian subcontinent, circumstantial evidence suggests that the French colonial empire facilitated the travel of these soldiers to Europe. This is particularly true of the black troops who enlisted during the period of French intervention in the War of American Independence, which provided ample opportunities for French officers stationed in the Caribbean to enroll local recruits; nonetheless, the examples cited above indicate that a small number of blacks found their way into French regiments in Europe beginning many decades before French expeditionary forces sailed for North America in 177917. Whatever their origins, the presence of black soldiers within the line regiments of the royal army in Europe highlighted the truly global scope of France’s political and military reach during the eighteenth century – a characteristic that historians have typically neglected despite a vibrant literature on the “cosmopolitan” British empire during the same period18.

10Indeed, the international reach of French military recruitment in the eighteenth century penetrated even into Britain’s overseas colonies themselves. The Irish Regiment of Clare during the era of the War of Austrian Succession included three infantrymen born in New England19. All of them enlisted on separate dates and in different companies, suggesting that their enrollments occurred independently of one another. One of these men, Jean Newton, a native of New York who enlisted in November 1744 at the age of twenty-seven, was killed several months later at the battle of Fontenoy. His two American-born comrades in the regiment survived that battle but deserted the French army in early 1747—a fortuitous decision given the staggering casualties that the regiment suffered shortly thereafter at the battle of Lauffeld20. The Dillon Regiment enlisted several natives of Britain’s North American colonies during the closing decades of the Old Regime as well, including men not only from the mainland but also several from Barbados. The Anglo-Saxon names of all of these individuals, and the absence of descriptions of any of them as black, suggest that they were of European descent21.

11As with black troops, there is little evidence to explain what motivated or compelled residents of British North America to enroll in the French army. Some may have been prisoners of war whom the French captured and impressed into service; others possibly enlisted by traveling to France’s colonies or through contact with French regiments present in North America during the American Revolution. In addition, the fact that the Irish regiments of the French army appear to have been the only units in which non-black North Americans enrolled during the eighteenth century suggests that Irish expatriate networks, as well as commonalities of language, may have played a role in their recruitment22. In any case, the service of these men provides further evidence of the interaction between peoples of markedly distant geographic origins that the French army helped to facilitate during the eighteenth century.

12The varied backgrounds of France’s military personnel, both native-born and foreign, transformed the military into a vehicle of cultural amalgamation and hybridization that adds new color to the way historians think about a number of aspects of eighteenth-century France. The remainder of this essay will survey these phenomena, underscoring how the army, rather than functioning as an outgrowth of a determinate civilian culture, instead helped to fuse hybrid cultural identities and practices by mixing together men of widely divergent religions, ethnicities, languages and cultures.

Religious Diversity in the Army

13Officially, Bourbon France was a deeply Catholic country. The theoretical underpinnings of Bourbon absolutism lay, in large part, in the monarchy’s commitment to the Catholic church, and the Crown did not officially recognize Protestants—to say nothing of Jews and Muslims— living within its realm until 1787, when it granted Protestants civil status23. Yet the religious uniformity that the absolutist state prescribed for civilian society hardly applied to the armed forces, where most non-Catholic Christians in the foreign regiments benefited from special privileges that allowed them to practice their faith freely throughout the eighteenth century. The capitulations of the Swiss regiments explicitly guaranteed freedom of religion to their personnel, and the monarchy granted similar dispensations to Protestant generals who entered French service24. In some instances French authorities even emphasized the religious liberties afforded to soldiers in the French army as one of the chief means of attracting foreign military volunteers of non-Catholic faith to France; such was the case, for example, for the author of a proposal for levying a corps of Greek Orthodox Christian troops that appeared around 178025.

14The promise to foreign soldiers of the right to practice their religion freely did not amount to total equality with Catholics, however. In most cases the state denied Protestants admission into the Hôtel des Invalides, the institution that Louis XIV established for retired or wounded soldiers in Paris26. Non-Catholics also faced exclusion from the Order of Saint-Louis, an honorary society in which the state conferred membership beginning in 1693 to reward officers who completed long tours of duty in the French army. In addition, while the Crown provided Catholic chaplains for certain regiments of the army, it did not supply Protestant pastors for units with large numbers of Calvinist or Lutheran troops. Many Swiss officers instead grudgingly hired the pastors with their own funds, a practice that the count of Guibert decried as unfair in 178927.

15Gradually, however, the situation of non-Catholics in the military improved. Louis XIV lifted the ban on admission to the Invalides for Swiss Protestants late in his reign, and in 1759, Louis XV established the Order of Military Merit, an honorary society that was similar to the Order of Saint-Louis but in which only Protestant veterans could enlist. It existed until the revolutionaries abolished it in 1791 as part of broader reforms to promote religious equality28. By the 1770s the monarchy even permitted within the kingdom a military academy in which only Protestant pupils could enroll29. Reforms such as these, even if they reflected a separate-but-equal approach to providing parity between soldiers of different religions rather than a commitment to actual equality, meant that for much of the eighteenth century, a career in the French army posed few obstacles to foreigners who were not Catholic, highlighting the ways in which the military functioned as a space of religious tolerance within a country where state policy for civilian society was quite different.

16Such religious toleration for soldiers notwithstanding, some foreigners converted to Catholicism during their military service in France. Louis-Frédéric Arbonnier de Disy, a Swiss native who enlisted in French service in 1716 and eventually became a colonel, renounced Protestantism eight years later, a decision that made it possible for him to join the Order of Saint-Louis in 174030. Geoffrey O’Connell, a Protestant Irish soldier, converted to Catholicism at Angers around the same time as Disy31. In a similar vein, it was not uncommon for Swiss soldiers garrisoned in villages outside of Paris to abjure Protestantism in the days before their deaths, and a smaller number converted to Catholicism at the time of their marriages to local French women32. Given not only the spiritual but also the worldly ramifications that such conversions could present for the men who undertook them, they were not choices to be taken lightly; for example, Daniel Humbert Droz, a Swiss soldier in the Courten Regiment who in 1776 “abjured the Calvinist heresy in which he had been raised” and became a Catholic, claimed during the Revolution that his conversion had made it impossible ever to return again to his home in Switzerland33. The motives behind Droz’s conversion were not clear; nonetheless, the decisions by soldiers like him to forswear the confessions of their countries of birth highlighted the role that military service played in diffusing different spiritual values among the men of diverse backgrounds who bore arms for the French king.

17There is no evidence, moreover, of the segregation of Protestant from Catholic soldiers within individual corps, or of the barring of entry of any individual to a foreign regiment because of his religion. In most cases Catholics represented a majority of the personnel of the Swiss and German units, but the Protestants serving alongside them constituted substantial minorities. The Royal-Deux-Ponts Regiment, among whose personnel only 50.1 percent were Catholic at the end of the Seven Years’ War, contained perhaps the highest proportion of Protestant soldiers34. The number of Protestants in other units was lower; of 127 troops who served in the German Regiment of La Marck between 1776 and 1786 and whose religious affiliations were noted in the unit’s roster, only 19.6 percent were Protestant. These included sixteen Lutherans, of whom five were French subjects from Alsace, and nine Calvinists, all of them of German or Austrian origin. The rest of the troops in La Marck, including nine Germans, six Austrians and a number of Alsatians and Lorrainians, were Catholic35. Statistics were similar in the German cavalry Regiment of Royal-Nassau, where a survey of ninety-three men serving between 1763 and 1765 found that Protestants comprised 26.9 percent of the unit36. These proportions held true among officers within the foreign regiments as well; in the German Regiment of Bentheim (known as Salm-Salm by the time of the Revolution), twenty-four officers were Catholic, eight Lutheran and one Calvinist in 175437. The situation was no different in the Swiss regiments, which readily amalgamated Catholics and Protestants38.

18If Protestants comprised a significant minority among the troops of the Swiss and German regiments, they were less prevalent within the Irish Brigades39. This trend is unsurprising, since Irish Protestants, unlike their Catholic counterparts, were not subject to the British Empire’s harsh Penal Laws, which motivated many young Catholic men to leave the island40. Indeed, France’s role as a refuge for Catholic clerics from Ireland dated to the earliest years of the Protestant Reformation and Elizabethan persecutions in Ireland, and sympathy for the oppression that Irish refugees had suffered because of their religion facilitated their gradual acceptance by French natives41. It was thus natural for Irish soldiers to forge strong conceptual associations between Catholicism and their military service in France. One Irish officer went so far as to complain that the willingness of the Irish regiments’ officers to enlist non-Irish recruits during the decades preceding the Revolution corrupted the Catholic principles which had previously predominated within the Irish Brigades42. Even after the Revolution, an Irish veteran of the French army responded to an attempt by a Spanish priest to compare the history of France with that of Spain by declaring that “there could be no comparison, as in [Spain], at that moment the inhabitants were not persecuted and deprived of their civil rights on account of the religion they professed... whilst in poor Ireland the millions of unemancipated catholic serfs were kept in bondage by a protestant ascendency of a few hundred thousand individuals”43. Thus even after the British government began easing the Penal Laws in the late eighteenth century, Catholic identity remained paramount for many Irish military emigrants to France.

19The vast majority of non-Catholic foreign soldiers in the French army under the Old Regime, including many of the black troops from Africa, Asia and the Americas whose names occasionally appeared on regimental rosters, were Protestants44. Nonetheless, small numbers of non-Christians served as well. Among the most notable examples were the Muslim cavaliers whom Maurice de Saxe, who expressed a fascination with Islam, sought for his Volontaires de Saxe regiment45. The total number of Muslim troops whom Saxe was able to enlist was not clear, but it is certain that at least the captain of the unit’s first company practiced Islam, prompting Saxe to quip of French military forces that “the accusations made against us that we are a little Turkish are not unjust”46. The recruitment of Muslims not only contributed to the demographic diversity of the Old Regime army, but also anticipated the Muslim hussar unit that served the Napoleonic Empire47.

20Some Jews also enlisted in the royal army, despite the special tax that the Crown levied on France’s Jewish communities in exchange for exemption from compulsory military service. Names suggestive of Jewish origins occasionally appeared on contrôles de troupe during the eighteenth century, and in at least one case, in 1702, French officials attempted to conscript Jews for military service48. André Simon Moïse, a Jew who converted to Catholicism in 1689 and whose baptismal certificate described him as a “soldier in the Regiment of Champagne”, is another example of the Jewish presence in the Old Regime army49. Whether Moïse had enlisted prior to his conversion was unclear, and the number of Jews who enrolled in the army before the Revolution was by all indications very small. Yet that changed after 1789, when military service by Jews became much more widespread, and assumed enormous political importance50.

Foreign Troops and Linguistic Diversity

21Of yet greater variety than the religions practiced by soldiers within the foreign regiments were the languages they spoke. Alongside the German dialects of soldiers from eastern France, Germany and Switzerland were the Gaelic and English tongues of troops from Ireland; Dutch and Walloon among natives of the Low Countries; and variants of Italian within the Royal-Corse and Royal-Italien regiments. In addition, the languages introduced by recruits from eastern Europe and overseas, as well as the dialectic variations of French itself under the Old Regime, meant that the armed forces were home to a truly expansive medley of different tongues during the eighteenth century. And because many of the foreign regiments by the second half of the eighteenth century amalgamated soldiers from a range of national backgrounds, interactions between native speakers of different languages was likely an everyday phenomenon within those corps.

22Politically and ideologically, this linguistic diversity was of little concern to France’s rulers, who beginning in the sixteenth century had replaced Latin with Parisian French as the official language of state bureaucracy but who exhibited little concern for the languages their subjects spoke51. Within the army, however, the failure of personnel to understand orders effectively in whichever language an officer issued them could be deadly. As a result, military authorities over the course of the Old Regime period pursued various strategies for ensuring that officers and soldiers in the foreign regiments could communicate both with French speakers outside their units and with one another. In general, these solutions centered on the employment of polyglot personnel to overcome language barriers. Some of the foreign corps, beginning with the Hundred Swiss in 1626, maintained special ranks for interpreters who were fluent in both French and the language of the national group with which their regiment was nominally associated52. In addition, other polyglot officers, even those not officially employed as interpreters, helped to ensure smooth communication within the foreign regiments. Foreign-born generals such as Ulrich Frédéric Woldemar, count of Lowendal, who spoke Latin, Danish, German, English, Italian, Russian and French, went a long way toward bridging language barriers within the army53. Not all foreign officers could boast such linguistic talents, however; David Ogilvy, a Scot who commanded the regiment of his name from 1747 to 1752, was not fluent enough in French even to write simple correspondence with the war ministry after his retirement54. Meanwhile, in addition to seeking foreign officers who could speak French, the Crown sought to attract multilingual French natives to the foreign regiments, going so far as to consider granting them special exemptions from prohibitions against the recruitment of French subjects for the foreign corps55.

23This ad hoc approach to dealing with linguistic diversity by counting on officers to be fluent in the languages of the men they commanded remained the chief solution to the problem for most of the duration of the Old Regime. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, however, an initiative aimed at regulating the language of command for the French army as a whole added a new imperative to language policy within the foreign regiments. On May 6, 1755, Louis XV issued a decree establishing an official list of military commands which all officers of French-speaking regiments were to adopt, in order to improve the interchangeability of detachments from different units in the army56. Although the decree itself concerned only commands issued in French and did not mention those of the foreign regiments, officers within those units soon produced their own official translations of the French military instructions into German, Italian and English57.

24While these officers experienced little difficulty developing lists of official commands in different languages, convincing their comrades and superiors to agree upon the translations proved more problematic than many translators appeared to anticipate. It was at this juncture that the inherent difficulties of regulating commands within a multilingual military during the eighteenth century became clearest. For one, French military authorities were suspicious of many of the translations and questioned their accuracy. In many cases, such concerns apparently stemmed from a total lack of familiarity on the part of military administrators with languages other than French; thus one French officer complained after reviewing the English translations that “the word your appears to be employed indifferently in place of le la vostre [and] vos, and the is used to translate both le and la”58. The German article die perplexed another French officer because it appeared in the German translations before both singular and plural nouns, which to him seemed suspect because of the belief that all noun markers should be unambiguous with regard to number, as they are in French59.

25At the same time, several of the individuals involved in the translation project of 1755 recognized the inherent ambiguity of language itself as a factor which inevitably rendered their work imperfect. The officer who created the English translations declared to his superiors that he had undertaken every effort to ensure that as many English-speaking troops as possible would understand the orders, but he cautioned nonetheless that “a single thing can be translated from one language into another in any number of different fashions, according to the particular expressions of different individuals. An officer commanding several detachments will therefore be understood perfectly only by his own troops”. Along similar lines, major Settiers, the Swiss officer who produced the German translation of the commands for use within the Swiss regiments, suggested that some of his work might be adaptable for the German regiments as well, but warned, “I think it would be inappropriate to subject them to the same phrases because some of their words are different, as are ours”60.

26Finally, the fact that the native tongues of soldiers in the foreign units, particularly by the decades preceding the Revolution, corresponded only loosely with the nominal national designations of the units called into question the effectiveness of the entire translation initiative. Even if all officers within the Irish regiments adopted a standardized set of commands in English, for example, their usefulness for the numerous speakers of Walloon and Dutch serving under them—to say nothing of Irish recruits whose native language was not English but Irish Gaelic— would almost certainly have been limited61. Conditions may have been better in the somewhat more nationally homogeneous German and Swiss regiments, but even in those units communication remained a problem. The duke of Bouillon, colonel of the German regiment of his name, addressed a memorandum to the secretary of war in 1789 observing that as a result of the unit’s recruitment of many officers and soldiers from Flanders, the regiment’s personnel “speak the German language very poorly”. He suggested that French replace German as the official language of command of the regiment62. The war ministry never acted upon Bouillon’s pragmatic suggestion; later, however, the ideological imperatives of the Revolution resulted in radical attempts to reconfigure linguistic practices within the military.

27The Revolution introduced many other changes to the French army as well that curtailed its importance as a place for amalgamating different national and racial groups, religions and languages. By the autumn of 1792 the revolutionaries had abolished all of France’s foreign regiments and made it illegal for most foreigners to enlist in the army, a principle they encoded as a standalone article into the Constitution of 179563. In practice it took many decades to purge foreigners fully from the ranks (and in fact the existence today of the French Foreign Legion attests to the role that the army continues to play in France in bringing together people of different backgrounds), but the gradual decline in foreign enlistment, combined with growing homogenization within French society itself over the course of the nineteenth century and the increased tolerance for religious diversity that grew out of the Revolution, made cultural diversity within the army much less significant. Yet this outcome did not diminish the extent to which the Old Regime army brought into contact people of widely varying backgrounds, religions, languages and ethnicities, thereby helping to diversify the culture not only of the French army, but of French society as a whole.