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Reviews
| Conserving the Enlightenment: French Military Engineering from Vauban to the Revolution. By Janis Langins. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. xiv+532 pp., illus., diags., notes, bibl., index. $55 hb (ISBN 0-262-12258-8).
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The most lasting physical legacy of Old Regime France is its buildings, and most imposing among these are the many fortresses that dot France's frontier. The men who built those structures belonged to an organization that helped establish modern Western engineering practices, and it is through such men that Janis Langins seeks insight into the fundamental nature of engineering as a profession. His book is an institutional history that tells the tale of how the French engineering corps, defending the design principles of their founder Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, successfully fought off a late-18th-century challenge mounted by a prolific interloper, Marc-René, marquis de Montalembert.
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Langins's work contributes to three different historiographical schools. As a historian of technology, he is most interested in the evolution of the military engineers into a professional corps, how they reacted to the engineering "crisis" set off by the cavalryman Montalembert's new perpendicular style of fortification, and what this process says about engineering as a whole. He uses their defense of Vauban's 70-year-old architectural ideas to highlight the way in which military architect-engineers embodied technological inertia, a philosophical conservatism reinforced by their administrative functions that rejected radical change and refused to consider fortifications in isolation from their strategic context. The metaphor of "conservative" engineers works very well in describing their political, social, military, and technological views, and he suggests that such progressive conservatism (for example, accepting only incremental improvement) is likely inherent in preindustrial technological systems, even engineering more generally. Langins also contrasts the conservatism of his architect-engineers with the findings from a second historiography, that of the French Revolution. Here he contests Ken Alder's study of the French artillery-engineers and particularly its conclusion that engineers were inherently revolutionary and focused on tearing down the past. His architect-engineers resisted an outsider's revolutionary assault on their expertise, and while they eventually won, they lost their larger relevance in an era of warfare dominated by Napoleon and field battles. Finally, his work addresses the small but growing literature related to the military Enlightenment, a subfield of intellectual history still in need of detailed analysis that expands beyond Azar Gat's survey of military theoretical literature.
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Langins's explanation that the military engineering system could repulse attacks by individual outsiders is well served by the rich chronological context of how this system of defensive fortifications developed over several centuries. His discussion of 16th-century Italian and 17th-century French military engineering up through Vauban ranges to almost 100 pages, and while he relies only on published primary and secondary sources here, this wide-ranging literature provides adequate support for his discussion of these early military engineers. Similarly, his comparison of Montalembert's attempted reform with two other successful 18th-century military reforms (Guibert for infantry tactical reform and Gribeauval's artillery reforms), while much more brief, is also useful and merits further examination.
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There is one context, however, on which Langins does not provide the last word, for he might have written a somewhat different narrative of French military engineering if he had placed his work more fully within an early modern military context. Perhaps his failure to do so comes from his rejection of a "simplistic" challenge-response model between defensive architecture and offensive tactics. Langins's attention is clearly focused on the internal dynamics of engineering and not on external factors that may have shaped the corps' development. What motivated Montalembert to develop new fortifications in the late-18th century is quite similar to what numerous engineers described in the early- to mid-18th century and even in the early-17th century: a "crisis" in defensive architecture caused by seemingly unstoppable offensive tactics. Dating the crisis in military engineering to the revolutionary 1770s thus appears a bit late, given these earlier admissions of a systemic tactical problem; at the least, his argument needed to be reconciled with the calls for reform (many from outside the French Corps) heard decades before the mature Enlightenment.
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This chronological quandary is seen too in the question that provided the genesis for his book: "How could such a polemic have been sustained for so long with the disciples and devotees of Vauban who was a veritable cult figure, not only among engineers but also among an overwhelming majority of Frenchmen?" (pp. ix–x). This query is unfortunately based on the questionable assumption that a majority of French generals indeed saw Vauban and his engineers as authority figures. On a few occasions, Langins mentions the contempt military officers held for the engineering cult of efficiency, for example, when he discusses Guibert and Le Bègue du Portail in chapter 8, but these exceptions do not impinge upon his larger thesis. Even within his focus on the less-martial period of the later 18th century, he focuses on the "paper war" between the corps and Montalembert over fortification design. Not only was this largely a debate over theory, but defensive architecture was also a domain in which the corps suffered much less interference from military officers than in the conduct of sieges, the other major task of military engineers. Generals judged engineers first and foremost on their experience with siegecraft, and in the 17th and 18th centuries, they frequently declared their engineers incompetent, including the master Vauban himself, a tension Langins mentions in chapter 8 only in a late Enlightenment context.
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Langins's discussion of the military engineers' slow retreat from center stage assumes, like most published historical literature on the subject, a prior idealized period of control over the attack that even the great Vauban was hard pressed to maintain. Future research will likely illustrate how engineers were pushed out of the limelight by impatient commanders seeking military revolution, rather than conservation; my own research has shown this to be the case in the first decades around 1700. Refusing to consider challenges to traditional military architecture as a function of a tactical challenge-response model blinds one to alternative explanations for why Montalembert had the traction he did, and how the engineers could win the battle but lose the war. This external challenge to the engineers undoubtedly reinforced the internal divisions and doubts Langins discusses, as well as making Montalembert's criticisms more viable to outsiders than would have been the case if the French corps had truly enjoyed the trust of non-engineers. This does not invalidate his main conclusion, however, for Langins is undoubtedly correct that the French corps only seriously addressed this threat when faced with the unavoidable challenges of a politically powerfully Montalembert in the 1770s. This seems yet another indication of the corps' conservatism, in the sense of refusal to rethink fundamentals while the world around them was changing—failing to foresee the presumptive anomaly, if you will, of artillery firepower and operational mobility that many others had been noting for some time.
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This leads to the second problem Langins must address: how to reconcile the engineering victory over Montalembert with the corps' broader failure to influence revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare. By the end of the book, the technical corps wins the debate with Montalembert, yet at the same time it has paradoxically lost its centrality in warfare, a point Langins discusses to varying degrees in chapters 4 and 8. This paradox between the corps' "tactical" victory in fortification design and their "strategic" defeat vis-à-vis the new reigning paradigm of field warfare suggests that the Montalembert debate lens is not a sufficient one with which to explain the evolution of the military engineers over the course of the 18th century. In this context, spending less than one-sixth of the book discussing the various changes in combat the military engineers faced seems insufficient. Almost no mention is made of how this rationalizing process affected their presumed raison-d'être in the Seven Years' War, or even how their radically altered corps performed in the defense of la patrie after the alterations of the Enlightenment. His engineering subjects would see greater attention to this martial aspect as only logical, since, as Langins emphasizes, military engineers strove to distinguish themselves from their increasingly prominent civil counterparts and keep up with their fellow artillery technicians by emphasizing combat service. More military detail would serve Langins's thesis as well, since it would bolster his conclusion that changes in warfare ultimately marginalized and circumscribed their profession in both wartime and peacetime. The book's title implies that the engineers were striving to conserve the Enlightenment, but one wonders whether conservative military engineers would protest that their duty was, first and foremost, to protect France from very tangible military threats, not to defend an intellectual construct.
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| Overall, Langins's excellent description of the development of French military engineering as a profession and its inherently conservative nature remains convincing, and the work fills a critical gap in understanding the most important military engineering corps of the 18th century. He is less successful in his second goal of illuminating the often-bumpy relationships among the engineers and the other branches of the military, as well as how this dialectic influenced the corps' development. Langins does a good job of showing how engineers won the tactical victory over Montalembert's perpendicular fortifications. He is less effective in explaining why the 18th-century engineers lost their larger fight for conservative warfare. |
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