Military effectiveness and the rise of military professionalism under Louis XIV the Artillery -- Cutting Edge or Laggard? with guest speaker Guy Rowlands

Few historians bandying around the terms ‘military professional' and ‘military professionalism' have given much space to explaining what they mean. And military sociologists and political scientists writing since the 1950s have overwhelmingly skewed discussion on this to considerations of the political neutrality of armed forces, especially in the USA, the UK, France, Germany and states like Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey. In the process, ideas about ‘military professionalism' as it pertained to the conduct, motivations and rewarding of officers in their duties and service, what is meant by professionalism in every other profession, were oversimplified, ossified and rendered normative. Writers slipped into condescending superficial anachronism, rejecting the possibility that military professionalism could exist before the age of Clausewitz in the 1820s.

What seemed ‘professional' around 1960, notably in the United States, was the standard by which every state's armed forces and officers should be judged and, at most, these ideals had their origin in Prussia after Napoleon. Yet this is grossly ahistorical as an approach. Even if people in the age of Louis XIV and the Enlightenment only had the word ‘profession', rather than ‘professional' and ‘professionalism', at their disposal governments were exceedingly concerned with the need to secure disciplined and effective performance from army and navy officers, and they faced the challenge of how and whether to work within the grain of elite culture and social structure.

Military professionalism is not a prescriptive set of norms that can only be rooted in the modern age, but is highly contingent upon culture. This is true for our own day as much as the age of Louis XIV. As standing armies emerged in Europe in the later seventeenth century, occasional occupational activity gave way to much more regular continuous military service and military literature became more
important. Governments made efforts to ensure their standing forces were sustainable and to cement good practice in officer corps that were increasingly being seen as a profession. But there were significant obstacles to the realisation of the ideals.

This talk, after castigating the way ‘military professionalism' has been approached by historians and social scientists in the last 70 years, will explore the struggle for military professionalism in a force that is usually seen as a pathfinder of modernisation: Louis XIV's artillery. This investigation, which is the subject of my current book project, reveals a great deal a