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 Using the Gun: Manual Drill and the
Proliferation of Portable Firearms

Harald Kleinschmidt

XXThY did portable firearms proliferate in early modern European

VV armies? On the face of it, the answer is that they did so because
they became the weapon of the common soldier in the course of the
eighteenth century. But this answer raises further questions. Which fac-
tors and conditions permitted and made possible the use of firearms as
the weapon of the common soldier? Why did this occur in Europe, and
why in the eighteenth century? These questions direct the focus of this
study to the complex interdependence of war, the "state" and "society."
This interdependence touches upon a variety of substantive issues,
among them military-civilian relations in the towns and the countryside;
structures of military leadership; strategy; military politics; develop-
ments in military technology; and the financing of war. These issues
have been dealt with in a large and growing body of scholarly studies.1
But one issue has usually been overlooked and that concerns the simple
question of the conditions under which infantrymen in post-fifteenth-
century armies could have been drilled to handle their guns. The ques-

1. See Matthew S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime,
1618-1789 (London: Macmillan, 1988); John Brewer's The Sinews of Power: War,
Money, and the English State, 1688-1783 (London: Century Ilutchinson, 1988); the
volume of critical studies on the thesis of Brewer's book edited by Lawrence Stone,
An Imperial State at War:Britainfrom 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1994); and
Peter II. Wilson' s War, State, and Society in Wurttemberg, 1677-1793 (Cambridge:
CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995). For older titles, see Geoffrey Best, Warand Soci-
ety in Revolutionary Europe, 1770-1870 (London:Macmillan, 1982); George Norman
Clark, War and Society in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: CambridgeUniver-
sity Press, 1958); Philippe Contamine, Guerre, etat et societe e la fin du Moyen Age
(Paris:Mouton, 1972); Andre Corvisier,Arm6es et societes en Europe de 1494 &1789
(Paris: Presses universaitaires de France, 1976); J. V. Polisensky and Frederick
Snider, War and Society in Europe, 1618-1648 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1978).

The Journal of Military fistory 63 (.July 1999): 601-30 ? Society for Military Hlistory * 601
 IIARALD KLEINSCIIMIDT

tion is crucial because it brings to the fore the very factors which shaped
the attitudes and patterns of behaviour of infantrymen who, more than
anyone, made possible the interdependence of the "state," "society" and
war. This subject has usually been omitted from the research agenda of
students of military history because most of them have shared the eigh-
teenth- and nineteenth-century view that training and drilling infantry-
men was part and parcel of essentially unchanging lower tactics,2 or have
taken Marcel Mauss's and William McNeill's position that manual drill
was the training of certain basic techniques du corps common to all
mankind.3 As long as these views prevailed, researching the details of the
history of manual drill was both an uninteresting and an unnecessary
enterprise, since it seemed to have little bearing on larger questions.
The truth of these views is far from obvious, however. First, if man-
ual drill were totally dependent on arms technology, it remains unclear
how certain forms of military drill could be borrowed from ancient
Greek and Byzantine drill books by the armies of early modern Europe.
Second, if manual drill was no more than a basic and ubiquitous tech-
nique du corps, it is difficult to account for the simultaneous changes
from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century in specific rules governing
military movements on the one hand and, on the other, bodily move-
ments related to such activities as dancing and fencing. Third, if manual
drill were bereft of any real significance beyond lower tactics, it is diffi-
cult to understand why, around A.D. 1600, certain territorial rulers-
among them the earls of Nassau, the Count of the Palatinate, and the
Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel-took a personal interest in reforms of man-
ual drill; why they plunged into comparative studies of drill books and
other sources on the manual drill of various ages for the purpose of com-
posing new drill manuals themselves; or why they would invest consid-
erable funds and effort in the organisation and promotion of manual drill
among the resident population of their territories.
Questions of this kind seem to support the assumption that manual
drill has a history of its own. In the following presentation, I shall his-
toricize manual drill and argue that the history of manual drill contains

2. See, among others, Franz Georg Anton Miller, Reine Taktik der Infanterie,
Cavallerie und Artillerie, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Rosch, 1787-88); Ileinrich Adam Diet-
rich von Biulow,Geist des neuen Kriegssystems, 3d ed. (Ilamburg:Campe, 1835);
Ilans Delbriick, Die Perserkriege und die Burgunderkriege (Berlin: Walther &
Apolant, 1887).
3. Marcel Mauss, "Die Techniken des Korpers,"in Mauss, Soziologie und Anthro-
pologie, vol. 2 (Munich: flanser, 1975), 199-220 (first published in the Journal de
psychologie normale 32 119351:271-93); WilliamMcNeill,Keeping Togetherin Time:
Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, Mass.: Ilarvard University Press,
1995).

602 * THE JOURNAL OF

 --Using the Gun

important clues to an understanding of the complex interdependence

between war, the "state" and "society." I shall do so by first categorising
manual drill as a trained, patterned behaviour of soldiers, and then com-
pare the rules underlying military patterns with the rules governing
other groups' behavioural patterns between the sixteenth and eighteenth
centuries. My second point will be that patterns of military behaviour
corresponded closely with other behavioural patterns in early modern
Europe, namely those current in dancing. Finally, I will suggest that
these correlations greatly facilitated the proliferation of portable
firearms in the European armies, and I will support this proposition by
comparing European and non-European conditions for the proliferation
of portable firearms. The comparison will highlight the culturally specific
conditions of the European uses of the gun.

Behavior Patterns in European Manual Drill

Towards the end of the sixteenth century, principles of manual drill
in the European armies of Latin Christendom were derived from three
sources. First, there was the legacy of ancient Greek and Roman military
art; second, there was the lansquenet mode of fighting; and third, the
various insular traditions of military exercise which had come into prac-
tice together with the use of the longbow. In this section, I will discuss
each of these three types of sources before turning to the correlations
between manual drill and battle tactics, and then describe the changes
which affected the practice of manual drill between the late sixteenth
and the eighteenth century.
The military art of antiquity was transmitted through two separate
channels of written tradition, one represented by the second-century
A.D. Greek writer Ailianos4 and the sixth-century Byzantine writer Mau-
rikios,5 the other canonised in the military writings of Flavius Vegetius
Renatus,6 probably at the end of the fourth century A.D. With regard to
manual drill, the two traditions differed fundamentally. On the one hand,
Ailianos and Maurikios provided details on manual and battalion drill,
including words of command, as well as theoretical descriptions of bat-

4. Ailianos, Aelianus tacticus, "De instruendis aciebus," in Griechische Kriegs-

schriftsteller, ed. II. Kochly and W. Ruistow,vol. 2 (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1855),
201-471. An English edition appeared under the title, The Tacticks of Aelian, ed.
John Bingham (1616; reprint, New York:DaCapo Press, 1968).
5. Maurikios,Das Strategikon des Maurikios, ed. George T. Dennis (Vienna: Ver-
lag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1981).
6. Flavius Vegetius Renatus, De re militari, ed. Carl Lang (1885; reprint,
Stuttgart:B. G. Teubner, 1967). New edition by Alf Onnerfors (Stuttgart: B. G. Teub-
ner, 1995). Vegetius himself was not an original writer; his major known source was
Frontinus, Stratagemata, ed. R. I. Ireland (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1990).

MILITARY IIISTORY * 603

 IIARALD KLEINSCIIMIDT-

tle tactics. On the other hand, Vegetius focused on the organisation of

the armed forces, battle tactics, fortifications, and siege warfare; with
regard to manual drill, he confined himself to some rather sketchy
remarks about the principles to be used for the instruction of soldiers.
Specifically, Vegetius presented advice on how individual infantrymen
should train themselves in order to increase the physical strength of
their bodies and, to that end, he suggested a number of physical exer-
cises, among them swimming, digging, throwing the javelin, and jump-
ing. One major difference between the two traditions of manual drill was
that, within the Greek tradition, manual drill was centrally organised
and performed regularly according to precise rules, including prescribed
words of command, while the Vegetian tradition left the organisation of
manual drill to the individual infantrymen. Another crucial difference
was that, within the Greek tradition, manual drill was directly connected
with the handling of weapons whereas the Roman tradition regarded
manual drill as a physiological instrument to increase infantrymen's
physical fighting power.
In the Occident, these two traditions of manual drill were featured
mainly in the works of intellectuals up to the end of the sixteenth cen-
tury.7 Ailianos's work was translated into Latin at the end of the fifteenth
century but received no attention from practitioners of the military art
until more than a century later. Likewise, even though Vegetius's work
was known and transcribed throughout the Middle Ages, only select
parts of it, and manual drill was not one of them, had any influence upon
military practice. Even the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century vernacular
versions of Vegetius's work had little or no impact on military practice.9

7. Editio princeps of Ailianos in 1487, together with the work of Vegetius (see
note 6 above).
8. Foster Ilallberg Sherwood, "Studies in Medieval Uses of Vegetius' Epitoma rei
militaris" (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1980); Charles R.
Shrader, "The Ownership and Distribution of Manuscripts of the De re militari of
Flavius Vegetius Renatus before the Year 1300" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University,
1976); Charles R. Shrader, "A I-landlist of Extant Manuscripts Containing the De Re
Militari of Flavius Vegetius Renatus," Scriptorium 33 (1979): 280-305.
9. Among others, see Ludwig von Ilohenwang, trans., Von der Ritterschaft (1475;
reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952); Jean de
Mehun, Li abregenenz noble homme Vegesce Flavie Rene des establissmenz aparte-
nanz a chevalerie, ed. Leena Lofstedt (Ilelsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakakatemia,
1977); Christine de Pizan, L'art de chevalerie selon Vegece suivi du livre des faits
d'armes et de chevalerie (Paris: n.p., 1488) [translated in 1490 by William Caxton as
The Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyvalrye, ed. A. T. P. Byles (London: Early Eng-
lish Text Society, 1932)1; Geoffrey Lester, ed., The Earliest English Translation of
Vegetius' De Re Militari, ed. from Oxford Ms. Bodl. Douce 21 (IIeidelberg: C. Winter
Universitatsverlag, 1988).

604 * THE JOURNAL OF

 Using the Gun

By contrast, beginning with the 1590s, the Greek tradition emerged

as a core element of military practice, and both of its distinguishing char-
acteristics-namely use of words of command and the close interrelat-
edness between manual drill and the handling of weapons-became the
dominant features of the organisation of manual drill up to the end of the
eighteenth century. The option in favour of the Greek tradition of man-
ual drill was greatly eased by the modes of fighting which had evolved
among the lansquenets since the end of the fifteenth century. Already at
the turn of the sixteenth century, written and pictorial descriptions of
their ways of fighting displayed features which were similar to some
aspects of the Greek tradition. Fixed words of command were recorded
by 1488 for the lansquenets, 10and they were shown to have used a for-
mal drill method which was referred to in contemporary sources as the
"snail formation."11By that was meant a movement of a band of pikemen
who, upon the command of their leader, would form a circle and march
by cadenced step in such a way that the ranks drifted gradually to the
outside of the circle. From a bird's eye perspective, the movement
resembled a snail shell.12 At one point, the group leader would command
the pikemen to stop their movement and to point their pikes in one
direction, all at the same time. In the course of the sixteenth century,
the " snail formation" became the hallmark of the lansquenets and was
frequently practiced as a demonstration and training formation.13

10. Jean Molinet, Chroniques, ed. Jean Alexandre Buchon, vol. 2 (Paris: Verdiere,
1828), 207-8.
11. Ibid. See also, Willibald Pirckheimer, Bellum Suitense sive Helvetic-um
(Zurich: Orell, 1737), 16-19, and the 1529 painting in Munich's Alte Pinakothek by
Albrecht Altdorferrepresenting a battle of Alexander the Great. flarald Kleinschmidt,
"An Early Case of Social Disciplining: The Lansquenet Mode of Fighting,"Historia
juris 4 (1995): i-xxix.
12. The Latin word used for the "snail formation"was testudo. It was more often
used in the fifteenth century as a word for siege machines used against the walls of
castles and towns. For a picture of such a machine, see Vegetius, De rei militari,
reprinted in WilliamAnderson, Castles of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Renais-
sance (London: Elek, 1970), 22. Likewise, Leonardo da Vinci designed a testudo
which was equipped with a little tower and a revolving looking glass. This equipment
allowed the crew to see where they were directing their vehicle.
13. Sources are found in Ilarald Kleinschmidt, Tyrocinium militare (Stuttgart:
Autorenverlag,1989), 59-63; I-laraldKleinschmidt, "Die Schneckenformation und die
Entwicklung der Feuerwaffentaktikvon Maximilian I bis zu Elisabeth I,"Publication
du Centre Europeen d'Etudes Bourguignonnes 26 (1985): 105-12. The lansquenet
mode of fighting was developed under the influence of the Swiss style as it was prac-
ticed during the second half of the fifteenth century. But the adaptation by the lan-
squenets was rather free-form, and the Swiss never developed a fully fledged training
formation nor became accustomed to the use of fixed words of command. See Rein-
hard Baumann'sGeorg von Frundsberg, 2d ed. (Munich:Stiddeutscher Verlag, 1991),
and Landsknechte: Ihre Geschichte und Kultur vom spdten Mittelalter bis zum

MILITARY HISTORY * 605

 IIARALD KLEINSCIIMIDT-

The "snail formation," together with the words of command, also

surfaced in Elizabethan England where it was fused with the medieval
English tradition of manual drill in the use of the longbow. Such drill had
been stipulated since the time of Edward III, and legislation to that effect
had continued well into the time of I-lenry VIII.14 Thus, since the four-
teenth century, drill in the use of the longbow had been centrally organ-
ised, had been closely intertwined with the use of a weapon, and had
subjected the longbowmen to rigorous disciplinary codes.15 This implies
that, like the training formation of the lansquenets, English longbow drill
had close parallels to the Greek tradition of manual drill although, in nei-
ther case, can the Greek tradition be shown to have had an influence on
its medieval equivalents.
In sum, during the sixteenth century, the three traditions from
which principles of manual drill were drawn, namely the legacy of
ancient Greek military art, the lansquenet mode of fighting, and the
medieval English practice of longbow drills, converged to the extent that
they allowed the conceptualisation of manual drill as an activity through
which bodily behaviour, modes of fighting, and the martial attitudes of
individual soldiers could be subjected to institutional control. Hence-
forth it became possible to define principles of manual drill in accor-
dance with the wishes and desires of government officials. Initially,
manual drill was most elaborate and most frequently practiced in Eng-
land. 16Early in the Eighty Years' War, it spread to the Netherlands under
the auspices of the Earl of Leicester,17 where it was eagerly taken up by

DreiBigj&hrigen Krieg (Munich: C. I-I.Beck, 1994); Peter Burschel, Soldner im Nord-

westdeutschland des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1994); Bert S. Ilall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe (Balti-
more: Johns Ilopkins University Press, 1997); MartinNell, Die Landsknechte (1914;
reprinted, Vaduz: Kraus, 1965); and Ernst Schubert, Fahrendes Volk im Mittelalter
(Bielefeld: Verlagfur Regionalgeschichte, 1995), 415-27.
14. Sources are found in Kleinschmidt, Tyrocinium militare, 75-82, 128-29; and
Kleinschmidt, "'Tragt die Spief3auf Englisch': Quellen zu den Ileeresreformen der
Oranier,"Nassauische Annalen 102 (1991): 67-85.
15. Beyond that, English longbowmen were unique in Europe as a tactical forma-
tion whose structure emerged from the fact that as a lightly armed force they needed
the protection of cavalrymen. Throughout the MiddleAges, this interplay between the
two arms was difficult to replicate elsewhere in Europe, much to the advantage of
English mercenary forces which operated in Italy, and during the initial phases of the
IhundredYears'War,much to the disadvantage of the French side, which had trained
in vain to adopt English principles of tactical organisation. See Geoffrey Trease, The
Condottieri: Soldiers of Fortune (London: Thames and Iludson, 1970).
16. Recorded by, among others, John Smythe, Instructions, Observations, and
Orders Mylitarie (London: R. lohanes, 1595).
17. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Lawe and Ordinances (London: Barker,
1586), in Charles Grieg Cruikshank, ed., Elizabeth's Army, 2d ed. (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1966), 298.

606 * TIIE JOURNAL OF

 Using the Gun

reform-minded members of the [louse of Orange together with a number

of their German relatives and Calvinist allies."'
The Maurician reforms (so-called because of the patronage of Mau-
rice of Orange) brought forth a redefinition of the principles of manual
drill. Specifically, armies were organised either as militia forces or as
professional forces under the command of a territorial ruler; the armed
forces were joined together into relatively small tactical formations into
which pikemen and halbardiers, musketeers, and horsemen were even-
tually integrated. The distribution of these tactical formations on the
battlefield followed regular geometrical patterns which were to be
retained in battle action as long as possible. Individual infantrymen were
subjected to regularised drill through which they were taught to enact
prescribed bodily movements with their arms whenever fixed words of
command were issued. They had to handle their weapons according to
detailed prescriptions and fixed sequences of actions, with precision,
speed, and in strict coordination with other soldiers in the same tactical
formation. Infantrymen were trained to coordinate their movements
with the other members of the tactical formation to the end that it was
made mobile and flexible and could enact directed movements as a
whole. Finally, soldiers were trained to execute commands literally,
without reflecting upon or attempting to understand their purpose.'9
In the long run, enforcing such patterns of well-ordered and self-
constrained behavior required, first, the willingness of the members of

18. The Mauricianreforms have received some attention in the debates over the
so-called "military revolution." Since the invention of this term by Michael Roberts
in 1956, most participants in the debate have focused on matters of strategy and
higher tactics, whereas manual drill has not been studied in detail in this context. See
Andrew Ayton and J. L. Price, eds., The Medieval Military Revolution (London: I. B.
Tauris, 1995); Jeremy Black, A Military Revolution? (Atlantic Ilighlands, N.J.:
Ilumanities Press, 1991); David Eltis, The Military Revolution of the Sixteenth Cen-
tury (London: TaurisAcademic Studies, 1995); Michael Duffy, ed., The Military Rev-
olution and the State (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1981); Geoffrey Parker,The
Military Revolution, 2d ed. (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996); Michael
Roberts, "The Military Revolution," in Roberts, Essays in Swedish History (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), 195-225; Roberts, The Swedish Imperial Experience
(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1979); and CliffordJ. Rogers, ed., The Mil-
itary Revolution Debate (Boulder, Colo.: Westwood Press, 1995).
19. Johann von Nassau-Siegen, Kriegsbuch, in Werner Ilahlweg, ed., Die Heeres-
reform der Oranier (Wiesbaden: Selbstverlag der Ilistorischen Kommission fur lies-
sen und Nassau, 1973); Johann Jacobi von Wallhausen, Kriegskunst zu Fu13
(Oppenheim: Galler, 1615); idem, Aul3BfhrlicheBeschreibung und Rettung zu Siegen
der in der Grafschafft Nassau unlangst angefangenen unnd bestellten loblichen
Kriegs- und Ritterschulen (1-lanau:n.p., 1616); idem, Manuale militare (Frankfurt:
n.p., 1616); idem, Programma scholae militaris (Siegen: n.p., 1616); idem, Defensio
patriae oder Landtrettung (Frankfurt:Daniel & David Aubrij & Clement Schleichen,
1621).

MILITARY HISTORY * 607

 IIARALD KLEINSCIIMIDT

the lansquenet-type professional warrior bands to subject themselves to

some degree of government control and, second, the readiness of the res-
ident population of nonmilitary professionals to undergo regular military
training and to do so under government supervision as well. The Mauri-
cian reforms thus transformed armed forces into regularized, disciplined
organizations which required choreographies for battle action. Conse-
quently, warfare was turned into a planned, well-ordered activity. Admit-
tedly, the Maurician principles failed to sink roots outside the United
Netherlands in the early seventeenth century because the well-ordered
militia forces collapsed under the blows of the autonomous, professional,
and less disciplined soldiery during the latter part of the Eighty Years'
War, which overlapped with the Thirty Years' War. The enforcement of
the principles of the Maurician reforms was a protracted and difficult
process. Nevertheless, the seventeenth century did witness the estab-
lishment of militia forces and the gradual transformation of the
autonomous professional warrior bands into standing armies and their
subjection to the authority of territorial rulers.20 Throughout the seven-
teenth and much of the eighteenth century, a word frequently used to
describe such patterns of constrained behavior was "well-ordered," a
term which had variants and derivatives in the several European lan-
guages.21These processes were accompanied by the adoption of the Eng-
lish and Maurician principles of manual drill in virtually all European
armies from Russia to Spain and from Sweden to the Italian peninsula.

20. This had already begun in the 1610s. See Louys de Montgomery,Seigneur de
Courbouson, La milice fran9oise (Paris: Fran9ois Ronsselet, 1610); Gervase
Markham,The Souldiers Accidence (London: n.p., 1625); Valentin Friderich, Kriegs
Kunst zu FuB und eigentlicher Underricht mit sonderbarer Behendigkeit und
geschwinden Vortheil allerhand eydgenoBischer Schlachtordnungen zu machen
(Bern: n.p., 1619); Kurtzer Begriff und Anleitung des Krieges Exercitij und Ubung
(1615; reprinted, Bern: n.p., 1978). Cf. Joel Cornette, Le roi de guerre (Paris: Editions
Payot & Rivages, 1993); Andr6 Corvisier, Louvois (Paris: Fayard, 1983), 77-118;
idem, Arme6eset societes en Europe, 119-20; Werner fIahlweg, Die Heeresreform der
Oranier und die Antike (1941; reprinted, Osnabruck: Biblio-Verlag, 1987); Klein-
schmidt, lTyrociniummilitare, 96-149; John A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siecle: The
French Army, 1610-1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Parker,
Military Revolution, 6-44; I-lideo Shimpo, "Zur verfassungsgeschichtlichen Bedeu-
tung des Landesdefensionswesens," Zeitschriftfiir historische Forschung 19 (1992):
341-58; Winfried Schulze, Landesdefension und Staatenbildung (Vienna: Bohaus,
1973); idem, "Die deutschen Landesdefensionen im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert," in
Johannes Kunisch and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, eds., Staatsverfassung und
Heeresverfassung in der europaischen Geschichte der fruihen Neuzeit (Berlin:
Duncker & Ilumblot, 1986), 129-49.
21. Johann, Kriegsbuch, 614-15. See also Julius Bernhard von Rohr, Einleitung
zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft der Privat-Personen (1782), ed. Gotthardt Fruhsorge
(Weinheim: VCII, 1989), 198.

608 * THE JOURNAL OF

 l:J_sing the Gun

The Maurician reformers and their early seventeenth-century part-

ners consciously took up the three practical European traditions of man-
ual drill and integrated them into a novel framework for the subjection
to government controlled manual drill of professional soldiers as well as
the resident population of nonmilitary professionals. They relied on the
writings of the Greek tactical authors, and on the lansquenet "snail for-
mation," as well as the English practice of centralized drill.22They began
to make their principles explicit in formal drill books. These manuals
spelled out in pictorial and written form rules for the movements mainly
of infantrymen and for the handling of their weapons. They were largely
devoted to the handling of pikes and portable firearms. These descrip-
tions attained a uniform structure in most European armies, with words
of command presented as a headline, subsequent written descriptions of
the commanded movements and stances and, in many cases, pictures.
More frequently in the seventeenth than in the eighteenth century, the
pictures supplied additional information about details of the movements
and postures to be assumed. The manuals were usually printed and
devised for the use of captains who were to employ them to drill their
battalions.23
The Maurician reformers also insisted that manual drill should pre-
pare infantrymen in peacetime for eventual battle action.24 To that end,
they composed elaborate choreographies of precisely defined move-
ments and postures with and without arms. Throughout the seventeenth
century, four basic sequences were emphasized: first, the movements
which individual soldiers had to carry out without arms; second, move-
ments for the handling of portable firearms, mainly in loading and firing;
third, movements for the handling of pikes, specifically while charging;
and, fourth, movements to be carried out by the entire battalion. It was
expected that the infantrymen would enact these choreographies as fre-
quently as possible in battle in exactly the same way as they had prac-
ticed them during drills. Hence seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
manual drill was innately practical in the sense that the sequences of
drill were held to be repeatable in battle.

22. Justus Lipsius, De milicia Romana liber quintus (Antwerp:Moretus, 1595);

Franceso Patrizi, La militia Romana (Ferrara: n.p., 1583); Maurice of Orange,
"Exercitie op de volgende woorden van commandmenten bij t'voetvolck gebruycke-
lick" (1610), in llahlweg, Heeresreform, 287-91; Jakob de Gheyn, Wapenhandel-
inghe van roers, musketen ende spiessen (1607), ed. J. B. Kist (Lochem: De
Tijdstroom, 1971); Johann of Nassau, Kriegsbuch; Moritz of Ilesse-Kassel,Was sich
unsere bestellte Kriegsrathe und Diener verhalten sollen, Ms. hass. qu. 73,
Muhrhard'scheBibliothek der Stadt Kassel und Landesbibliothek-Gesamthochschul-
bibliothek, Kassel (printed in Kassel, 1600), partly transcribed in Cod. Mil. fol. 65,
WVurttembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart.
23. Wallhausen,Scola militaris, 17-24.
24. Johann, Kriegsbuch, 575-76.

MILITARY HISTORY * 609

 IIARALDKLEINSCIIMIDT

Such beliefs rested on the assumption that soldiers could be

minutely trained to execute their tasks and commands. They had to con-
strain their movements, to refrain from "reasoning" about given com-
mands, and to confine themselves to the actions that had been
commanded. The drill manuals depicted soldiers as well-ordered
infantrymen who constrained their actions.25 Moreover, the use of the
word "well-ordered" was an innovation which was closely intertwined
with the Maurician reforms. This can be demonstrated from the follow-
ing three pictures. Figure 1 features an advertising broadsheet used to
attract volunteers into lansquenet bands. It shows the captain in the
foreground and a "snail formation" marching in the background. Thus,
an image of a lansquenet fighting force is conveyed which depicts its sol-
diers as members of an autonomously organized group which is subject
to its own rules of patterned behavior.

Fig. 1: A lansquenet captain,

from a 1587 broadsheet
-' w D = -i_printed in the Ilague by Ilen-
drik Goltzius and Jacques de
- Gheyn.

Exactly twenty years later, the same workshop issued a drill manual
at the request of Maurice of Orange. The manual made explicit the prin-

25. Cf. Kleinschmidt, Il7rocinium militare, 68, 145.

610 * THE JOURNAL OF

 ______________ ____________________ _ T- Using the Gun

ciples of Maurician manual drill. Among others, it contained a picture of

a pikeman at parade rest (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: Pikeman from the drill

manual by Jakob de Geyn,
Wapenhandelinghe van roers,
musketen ende spiessen (The
Ilague:n.p., 1607).

The pikeman is shown holding his pike with his right hand and with
his left arm akimbo. He looks straight ahead, holds his body upright and
spreads his legs about two feet apart with his toes pointing in opposite
directions. The man is thus depicted as obeying orders, subjecting his
bodily behavior to the rules which had been prescribed for the drill.
Little more than ten years later, Figure 3, showing a pikeman in
action appeared in another Dutch drill manual. Here, the thrusting pike-
man is shown leaning slightly forward with his feet wide apart. Again, his
toes point in opposite directions. He grabs the end of the pike with his
right hand stretched out to the back while he supports the shaft of the
pike with his left hand immediately below his chin. Like the pikeman in
Gheyn's picture of 1607, Adam van Breen's pikeman of 1618 is shown
executing commands through his bodily behavior. No particular effort
was made to demonstrate in the picture that the pikeman uses bodily
energy for the purpose of executing the commanded movement. Instead,
the picture highlights the rules which the pikeman is made to follow.
Thus, the pictures in the early seventeenth-century drill manuals dis-

MILITARY HISTORY * 611

 IIARALD KLEINSCIIMIDT -_=

Fig. 3: Pikemanfrom the drill

manual by Adam van Breen,
De nassauische wapen-han-
delinge van schilt, spies, par-
rier ende targe (The Ilague:
AD i 1618).
~~~~~~~n.p.,

played infantrymen as well-ordered men capable of subjecting their

movements and stances to patterns of constrained behavior.
Thus, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, manual drill was
represented as a well-ordered pattern of constrained behavior in which
the infantrymen were drilled to handle their arms, to enact commanded
movements with precision by themselves and as part of a battalion, and
to do so under the control of central institutions of government. Even-
tually, these patterns of constrained behavior evolved into the system of
linear tactics of the eighteenth century in which commanders were
expected to execute minutely the general rules of the war game in detail
and into which the common soldiers were to be integrated as if they were
parts of a neatly composed machine.2 The machine was regarded as a

26. Frederick II, Kingof Prussia, "Das Politische Testament von 1752," in Richard
Dietrich, ed., Politische Testamente der Hohenzollern (Munich: Deutscher Taschen-
buch Verlag, 1981), 229. Cf. llenning Eichberg, Festung, Zentralmacht und Sozial-
geometrie. Kriegsingenieurwesen in den Herzogtumern Bremen und Verden
(Cologne: Bohlau, 1989). Johannes Kunisch, "Das Puppenwerk der stehenden
Ileere," Zeitschriftftir historische Forschung 17 (1990): 49-50.

612 * THE JOURNAL OF

 - Using the Gun

well-organized man-made assembly of smoothly cohering parts, whose

order was perfectly in line with the principles of organization followed by
"nature."27 In this respect, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
machines differed fundamentally from the steam engine technology of
the Industrial Revolution.
A typical eighteenth-century drill command read as follows:
It must be the first goal of the exercise to drill the man and to give
him the air of a soldier, so that the peasant in him is removed. To
that end, the man has to be taught,first, how to keep his head erect,
and not to one side and not to close his eyes; instead, when under
arms, the man must look to the right hand with his head erect and,
when parading,he must look straight into one's eyes. Second, the
man must march stiff-leggedand not with bent knees, with his toes
pointed outward.Third,he shall keep his body upright,neither lean-
ing backwardsnor with his belly stuck out to the front; instead, he
shall push out his breast and arch his back."28
Similar rules were prescribed for marching in rank and file and for
strolling out on liberty. A Saxon drill manual of 1776 stated that: "In all
circumstances a man must be required to walk with decency in the
streets, without swinging his arms, walking erect and stiff-legged with his
toes pointed outwards."29
Several other eighteenth-century drill manuals confirm that the
overall goal was that peasants ought to be drilled to accept and perform
specific military stances and movements and that it was the goal of mil-
itary drill to "transform" peasants into "blindly obedient soldiers" who
were capable of displaying a distinctly military behavior as the ruler's
men.3" It was also understood that this goal was to be accomplished by

27. See, for example, Rene Descartes, "The Passions of the Soul" (1649), in
Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 539-40; Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of
Men, vol. 1, Sensus communis (1723) (Stuttgart: Frommann-Iloleboog, 1992),
40-44, 48, 74-76; Johann Amos Comenius, "Didactica magna," in Comenius, Opera
didactica omnia (Amsterdam: n.p., 1657), 5: 15.
28. Exercir-Reglementftir die Koniglich PreuBische Infanterie (1743; reprinted,
Osnabruiek:Biblio-Verlag,1976), section II: 2, 7.
29. Exercir-Reglement fair die Churftirstlich sachBische Infanterie (Dresden:
Walther,1776), section IV: 2, 13.
30. Reglement vor die Koniglich Preufische Infanterie (1726; reprint, Osna-
bruck: Biblio-Verlag,1969), sections 11/1,1112,4-6, 1112-13,1118-19, IV/4, 2; Militia
Discipline (1733; reprinted, East Winthrop:n.p., 1975), 1; Regulament und Ord-
nung, nach welchem sich gesambte unmittelbare Infanterie in den Hand-Griffen
und Kriegs-Exercitien sowohl als in denen Kriegsgebrauchen gleichformig zu
achten haben (Vienna: n.p., 1737), 13; Regulament und Ordnung, nach welchen
sich gesammtes Kaiserlich-Konigliches FuB-Volckin denen Hand-Grieffen und allen
anderen Kriegs-Exercitien .. . gleichf6rmig zu achten haben (Vienna: n.p., 1749),
15, 89, 92 (reprinted, Osnabriick:Biblio-Verlag,1969), 229.

MILITARY HISTORY * 613

 IIARALD KLEINSCIIMIDT

means of training and that, through the specificity of these stances and
movements, infantrymen were to acquire a distinguished "bon air,"
namely the "air of a soldier."31 The term "air" then had a technical
meaning which was different from the meanings of the related French
terms "mine" and "port." "Air"was defined as a "facial expression which
one chooses on particular occasions in order to display a particular pas-
sion and of which, consequently, there are as many as there are pas-
sions." That the air was taken to be changeable made it different from
the "mine," understood as a permanent "facial expression," and the
"port" as bodily comportment.32 Hence the term "air" allowed the
change of facial expressions to fit a variety of passions and was thus suit-
able to a practice according to which persons were requested to change
behavioral patterns upon their entry into the armed forces. Manual drill
was the first means to organize this change under government control,
and reviews were held for the purpose of demonstrating the result. This
practice was a Europe-wide phenomenon in the eighteenth century, one
which was not only followed in the armies of the larger territorial states,
but also in those of the many lesser courts.
During the 115 years between the end of the Thirty Years' War and
the end of the Seven Years' War, the taming of Bellona in Europe was a
frequent, though hardly successful, undertaking for military theorists
and organizers alike. At the theoretical level, jurists and philosophers
strove to devise rules for war and to establish the conditions for a lasting
peace,33 while critics observed that wars continued to be waged and to
require unjustifiable sacrifices.34 Compilers of statistical handbooks
made efforts to collect data on the size and equipment of the armed
forces of territorial rulers as well as on militarily relevant general fea-
tures, such as population size, economic achievements, and available
natural resources.35 These data were considered to be permanent and
subject to alteration only through exchange of territory as a result of
warfare or hereditary succession. Consequently, an elaborate debate was
conducted among eighteenth-century scholars about whether it was just

31. Exercir-Reglement ftir die Kiniglich Preu13ische Infanterie, section 1112,1;

Reglement vor die Koniglich Preuf3ische Infanterie, sections 1112,1. 1112,15.
32. Rohr, Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft der Privat-Personen, 184.
33. Among others, see Charles Irenee Castel Abbe de St-Pierre, Project pour ren-
dre la paix perpetuelle en Europe (1713), ed. Simone Goyard-Fabre (Paris: Fayard,
1986); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Political Writings, ed. C. E. Vaughan, vol. 1
(1915; reprinted, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 364-96; Emer de Vattel, Le droit
des gens (1758), ed. Charles G. Fenwick (1916; reprinted, Geneva: Slatkine, 1983).
34. See, for example, Fran9ois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, "Guerre," Dictionnaire
philosophique, vol. 3 (1764), in Oeuvres completes, ed. Louis Moland, vol. 19 (1879;
reprinted, Vaduz: Kraus, 1967), 318-22.
35. Cf. Mohammed Rassem and Justin Stagl, eds., Statistik und Staatsbeschrei-
bung in der Neuzeit (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1980).

614 * THE JOURNAL OF

 Using the Gun

to declare a preventive war if a neighboring ruler suddenly and without

recognizable threats increased the size of the armed forces under his
control.36 A closely knit network of aristocratic military officers existed
who changed service freely and with ease among the major armies, and
thereby prevented the existence of military secrets of any significance.
Likewise, organizers and decision makers in the military and in pol-
itics employed a mechanistic imagery which described their doings in
terms of the smooth operation of a machine.37 In consequence, acting in
accordance with the rules of the war game became ever more important
in warfare and the rigidity of manual drill increased. Infantrymen were
forced to enact ever more lengthy sequences of movements and stances,
in some cases over two hundred movements just for the stance without
arms or for the loading and firing of portable firearms.38 In many cases,
the enactment of each movement was segmented into several parts
which were usually referred to as tempi. Regulations for the enactment
of each tempo were minutely described. Drilled infantrymen thus
became too costly to serve only as cannon fodder, for drill was a time-
consuming process, a well-drilled infantryman was difficult to replace,
and even various systems of supernumeraries could not provide an end-
less reservoir of easily replaceable infantrymen. Therefore, it was desir-
able that the numbers of military war casualties should be reduced. In

36. Nicolaus Ilieronymus Gundling, "Erorterung der Frage, ob wegen der

anwachsenden Macht der Nachbarn man den Degen entbl6ten k6nne," Gundlin-
giana, Stiick 5 (1716; re-edited, Frankfurt:n.p., 1757); RHflexionstouchant l'equili-
bre (N.p.: n.p., 1741), 10-15; Ludwig Martin Kahle, La Balance de l'Europe
conside'ree comme la regle de la paix et de la guerre (Berlin: n.p., 1744); Christian
Friedrich Stisser, Freymiithige und bescheidene Erinnerungen wider des beriuhmten
Gottingischen Professors, Herrn Doctor Kahle, Abhandlung von der Balance
Europens als der vornehmsten Richtschnur des Krieges und Friedens. Fortsetzung
(Leipzig: n.p., 1746), 29-34; David Georg Strube, "Eine Prufungder ans Licht getrete-
nen Reflexions touchant 1'Europe,"in Strube, Nebenstunden, vol. 2 (IIanover:
Ritscher, 1747), 281-284; Vattel, Le droit des gens, 2: 41-43.
37. Raimondo Montecuccoli, Kriegsbuch, 1670 x 1680, Cod. S. n. 12033, Austrian
National Library, Vienna; Wenzel Anton Kaunitz-Rietberg, "Vortragdes Staatskan-
zlers Kaunitzin der Conferenzsitzung vom August 1755," in Gustav Berthold Volz and
Georg Kiintzel, eds., PreuBische und Osterreichische Akten zur Vorgeschichte des
Siebenjahrigen Krieges (1899; reprinted, Osnabruiek:Biblio-Verlag, 1965), 145,
148-49, 154-56; Frederick II, "Anti-Machiavell"(1739), in Werke,vol. 7 (Berlin: n.p.,
1913), 110.
38. Erneuertes Reglement, Wornach es bey Unser ... in Unserm Furstenthum
und Landen regulirten Land-Militzkunfftig hin gehalten werden solle, 30 December
1712, E 8 B, 138-1, Ilessisches Staatsarchiv, Darmstadt. The number of commands
for stances, loading, and charging increased during the seventeenth and the early
eighteenth centuries and then declined drastically throughout the rest of the eigh-
teenth century; see Kleinschmidt, 7'yrocinium militare, 203-11. Rules for battalion
drill contained additional sequences.

MILITARY HISTORY * 615

 IIARALD KLEINSCIIMIDT _

fact, a decline occurred during the eighteenth century. Whereas it was

common during the sixteenth century that almost 50 percent of the reg-
ular combatants would die in battle, that number plummeted to less than
10 percent in the eighteenth century (not counting irregular, specifically
guerrilla, troops).39 This decrease was mainly a consequence of the elab-
orate manoeuvres and evolutions which were designed for the avoidance
of regular battle and the reduction of casualties when regular battles
were fought.
The Seven Years' War constitutes the point at which the principles
informing linear tactics and the manual drill related to them began to be
called into question. During the war, reform-minded theorists began to
claim that conventional practices of manual drill were outmoded. One of
their arguments was that the "stiffness" required for movement and pos-
tures was counterproductive because it prevented infantrymen from
moving quickly and firing rapidly. During the 1770s, such arguments
were broadened into a fundamental criticism of the mechanistic princi-
ples informing linear tactics and the belief in the calculability of the war
game. Critics insisted that manual drill should train infantrymen to act
flexibly in the course of battle. Jacques Antoine Hippolyte de Guibert, for
one, began to revise rules for movements without arms and demanded
that soldiers "shall not stand like a lifeless machine, but shall rather
resemble an animated picture which can begin to work and to move at
any moment."41 Through the use of such phrases, Guibert explicitly
associated the machine with motionlessness, which he no longer con-
sidered a positive value. Instead, he believed that it was "natural" to cre-
ate a tension between stances and the movements which were to follow
them. In this way, Guibert called into question the hitherto ubiquitous
belief that stiff and constrained movements were "natural," and he
demanded that tensions that were to result in movements be recognized
as "natural." In sum, by the 1770s, the machine and "nature" had been
placed in opposition to each other. Late eighteenth-century critics of lin-
ear tactics called into question the previous belief that the patterns of

39. Cf. Frederick, "Das Politische Testament von 1752," 230-31. See Christopher
Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1987), 11-18; Charles Ingrao, "Kameralismusund Militarismus im deutschen
Polizeistaat. Der hessische Soldnerstaat," in Georg Schmidt, ed., Stande und
Gesellschaft im Alten Reich (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1989); Theodore K. Rabb, The
Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York:Oxford University Press,
1975), 122-23. On guerrilla warfare, see Jeremy Black, European Warfare,
1660-1815 (New Ilaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 237-39; Johannes
Kunisch, Der kleine Krieg (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1973).
40. Campbell Dalrymple,A Military Essay (London: D. Wilson, 1761), 67.
41. Jacques Antoine Ilippolyte de Guibert, Essai gene'ral de tactique (London:
n.p., 1772), 55.

616 * THE JOURNAL OF

 Using the Gun

constrained behavior which had hitherto informed manual drill would

allow the pursuit of planned war sequences, and they further raised the
fundamental question of whether it made sense at all to compose elabo-
rate military choreographies for drill. Instead, the critics demanded that
warfare should be recognized as an antagonistic, incalculable, and
dynamic activity as opposed to a smoothly operating static machine.
In order to implement their demands, the aristocratic reformers
requested that the fixed sequences of movements and stances be
replaced by movements with and without arms which could be enacted
at the discretion of the commanding officer at any time. Infantrymen
were henceforth expected to stand poised to undertake dynamic action.42
These requests implied that the previously close interconnectedness
between manual drill and battle action was severed. New goals were
assigned which focused on physical and moral education rather than on
direct preparation for battle.
During the 1770s, the first drill manuals containing provisions for
implementing the reformers' demands appeared.43 In 1791, a new drill
manual was introduced in the French army in which the new rules of
and goals for manual drill were enforced with support by the mainly aris-
tocratic officer corps. The results were that infantrymen became flexible
and dynamic actors, that manual drill began to follow the general prin-
ciples of bodily behavior which were observed in humankind as a whole
and thereby paved the way for the socialization of war.44 During the
French Revolution, reforms were thus promoted which had been on
their way for more than ten years before the revolution broke out.
In this section, it has been my goal to historicize manual drill.
Within the legacy of antiquity and the Middle Ages, I have isolated four
traditions of manual drill; the Vegetian practice of strengthening the bod-
ies of infantrymen; the ancient Greek and Byzantine manual and battal-
ion drill; the self-controlled drill of the lansquenets as autonomous

42. Reglement concernant l'exercice et les maneouvres de l'infanterie (Paris:

n.p., 1791). Cf. Samuel Anderson Covington, "The 'Comite Militaire'and the Leg-
islative Reform of the French Army"(Ph.D. diss., University of Arkansas, 1976); John
A. Lynn, Bayonets of the Republic (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996); Claudia
Opitz, Militarreform zwischen Biirokratisierung und Adelsreaktion. Dasfranzesis-
che Kriegsministerium und seine Reformen im Offizierskorps, 1760-1790 (Sig-
maringen: Torbecke, 1994).
43. Ordonnance du Roi pour regler l'exercice de ses troupes d'infanterie (Paris:
Planches, 1776).
44. Carl von Clausewitz, VomKriege (1832; re-edited, Frankfurt:Ullstein, 1980),
Book I. Cf. Jean-Paul Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1988); Robert Sherman Quimby, The Background of
Napoleonic Warfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957); Gunther E.
Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1977).

MILITARY HISTORY * 617

 IIARALD KLEINSCIIMIDT

warrior bands; and the government-controlled exercises of the English

longbowmen who were trained for battle. I have tried to show that the
three latter traditions were tied together into a new framework for the
organization of manual drill in the context of the Maurician reforms,
whereas the Vegetian tradition lingered on in a variety of theoretical aca-
demic discourses. By way of the gradual implementation of the Mauri-
cian reform and on the basis of the English longbow exercises, manual
drill became a means for the direct preparation for battle through the
enactment of choreographies of stances and movements. These
sequences were to be practiced in peacetime in order to be repeated in
battle, specifically for loading weapons and charging. Infantrymen were
expected to execute given commands literally and without "reasoning."
They had to confine their actions to what they had been ordered to do
and they were to follow patterns of constrained behavior in their pos-
tures and movements. These reforms occurred in the context of the con-
ceptualization of war as a planned and calculated, well-ordered sequence
of actions in which infantrymen were to serve as parts of a smoothly
operating machine. This mechanistic view of warfare informed the linear
tactics which dominated in the eighteenth century up to the Seven
Years' War. During the concluding decades of the century manual drill
was reorganized in such a way that fixed sequences of action were no
longer practiced and that infantrymen were expected to execute
dynamic movements. In consequence, manual drill was transformed into
an instrument for moral and physical education.
In the following section, I will undertake to investigate the origin of
the patterns of constrained behavior by means of a comparison between
patterned military behavior and other patterns of behavior, specifically
in dancing.

Comparative Nonmilitary Patterns of Ordered Behavior

Parallels between patterns of behavior in dancing and manual drill
were first investigated by Marcel Mauss45and have recently been revis-
ited in the work of August Nitschke and William McNeill.46
Sources for patterns of dancing behavior are the dance manuals
which were popular at the courts by the fifteenth century. At the end of

45. Mauss, "Die Techniken des Korpers."

46. August Nitschke, Bewegungen in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Dusseldorf:
Schwann, 1987); idem, Kdrper in Bewegung (Stuttgart: Kreuz, 1989); idem, "Der
Beitrag einzelner Personen zu einem naturwissenschaftlich erkliirbaren sozialen
Wandel,"Saeculum 46 (1995): 312-13; McNeill, Keeping Together in Time. See also
Ilarald Kleinschmidt, "The Military and Dancing,"Ethnologia Europea 25 (1995):
157-76; Volker Saftien, Ars saltandi (Ilildesheim: G. Olms, 1994).

618 * THE JOURNAL OF

 Using the Gun

the following century, dance manuals began to make explicit certain

rules for patterns of behavior, specifically for movements.47 The fif-
teenth- and sixteenth-century court dances differed fundamentally from
the dances which were then popular in the countryside. The latter
allowed a large variety of movements and were regarded with contempt
by aristocrats at the court and people living in towns and cities.48
Dancers in the ballrooms of courts and in towns were credited with
a specific "air" if they controlled their movements and subjected them-
selves to patterns of constrained behavior. In many dance manuals of the
later seventeenth and the eighteenth century, one finds definitions of the
" air" of dancers. Thus, a dancer exhibits a decent "air"
if he conducts his steps in accordance with the rules, accompanies
his steps with movements of the hands, the body and the head in
accordance with the rules, if the momentum for all his steps comes
from within, that is from the emotions which come from his nature
or his preferences, his status or family background,rank or profes-
sion, and if he adaptsand colors them and applies to them their bril-
liance and ultimate polish with good grace and appropriatedecency
in a naturalor trainedmanner.49
Dancing as a well-ordered activity is best represented in the minuet.
The very name of this dance expressed the concept of well-ordered
precision. Like trained infantrymen, dancers were to keep their bodies
straight and upright while they were moving; they were to stiffen

47. Antonio Cornazzano, "Libro dell'arte del danzare" (1455), ed. C. Mazzi, La
Bibliofilia 17 (1916): 1-30 (English version, The Book of the Art of Dancing [London:
Dance Books, 19811). Cf. Otto Kinkeldey, A Jewish Dancing Master of the Renais-
sance (re-edited, Brooklyn, N.Y.: Dance Ilorizons, 1966); Marco Fabritio Caroso da
Sermoneta, Nobiltti di dame (1605; reprinted, Bologna:Sala Bolognese, 1980), 13-14.
Cf. Mark Franko, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography (Birmingham,
Ala.: Summa, 1986); Gabriele Klein, Frauen K6rper Tanz (Weinheim: Belz/Quadriga,
1992), 98.
48. See Albrecht Diirer'sprint of dancing peasants, printed in: Fedja Anzelewsky,
Durer (Erlangen: Mueller, 1988). Ilans Sachs expressed urban contempt for peasant
dancers in his satirical song "Der pawern-tantz"(Peasant dance), in Sachs, Fabel und
gut Schwenck, ed. Adelbert von Keller,in HlansSachs, Werke,vol. 5 (1870; reprinted,
Ilildesheim: Olms, 1964), 279-81. Sebastian Brant, in his Das Narrenschiff (1494),
ed. Elvira Pradel (Frankfurtam Main: Roderberg, 1980), 170-71, criticized dancing
conventionally on the grounds that it was sexually lascivious and corrupted morals.
On the continuity of these perceptions of peasant dance in the seventeenth century,
see Renate Ilaftlmeier-Seiffert,Bauerndarstellungen auf deutschen Flugblattern des
17. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurtam Main: Lang, 1991).
49. Johann Pasch, Beschreibung wahrer Tanzkunst (1707), ed. Kurt Petermann
(Leipzig: Zentralantiquariatder DDR, 1978), 42. Pasch recognized three grades of the
"air" of the dancer: the "air of quality," the "mediocre air,"and the "common air."
See Karl Ileinz Taubert,Hofische Tanze (Mainz: Schott, 1968), 271-93.

MILITARY HISTORY * 619

 IIARALD KLEINSCIIMIDT

their knees and to avoid "affected and unbecoming movements and

gestures."51(In 1717, the following meticulous rule for the enactment of
dancing steps was published:
When, in any step, the dancer wishes to move his foot forward,he
must, first, keep the body on the front leg well-balanced without
motion as if stiff on a pillar;second, he must raise the heel of the
back foot from the floor with a slightly bent knee; third, he must
raise the foot completely and bend it; fourth, he must stretch this
foot out to the front just above the floor at a distance of about one
foot and point the toes to the outside while keeping the knee stiff;
fifth, he must place the foot on the floor in the same way;and, sixth,
he must move the entire body onto it.51
According to this rule, steps were to be carried out in such a way that
only those parts of the body were moved which were essential for the
enactment of the steps, while all other parts of the body were to be kept
stiff and upright. Thus, dancers were to move in a way which was simi-
lar to the marching of infantrymen.
Beyond the courtly ceremonies and festivals, dancing masters were
employed for training aristocrats and members of the upper bourgeoisie
of all ages in the art of proper conduct.52 They received support from
political philosophers, such as Justus Lipsius, who advocated an ethics
of self-constraint,53 and also from philosophers of education, such as
John Locke, along with writers on ceremonies, such as Johann Bernhard
von Rohr. Both agreed that dancing served a didactic purpose when
young men and women were trained in it under the control of a dancing
master.54 Dancing was also considered to be a valuable preparation for
manual drill.55Such an aesthetic of well-ordered and constrained behav-
ior has to be understood against the background of the mechanistic phi-

50. Gottfried Taubert,Rechtschaffener Tanzmeister (1717), ed. KurtPetermann

(Leipzig: Zentralantiquariatder DDR, 1976), 1: 411-12, 421.
51. Ibid., 422-23.
52. Pasch, Beschreibung wahrer Tanzkunst, 93-110, especially 107.
53. Justus Lipsius, Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex (1594; reprinted,
Amsterdam: Da Capo Press, 1970), 1-15. Cf. Gerhard Oestreich, "The Main Political
Work of Lipsius," in Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. lIelmut
G. Koenigsberger and Brigitta Oestreich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 39-56; Oestreich, Antiker Geist und moderner Stat bei Justus Lipsius, ed.
II. E. II. N. Mout (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989).
54. John Locke, "On Education," in Locke, Works, vol. 9. (1822; reprinted,
Aalen: Scientia, 1963), 50; Johann Friedrich May, Die Kunst der verninftigen
Kinderzucht, vol. 1 (Ilelmstedt: n.p., 1757), 34-35.
55. Pasch, Beschreibung wahrer Tanzkunst, 101; O' Cahill, Der vollkommene
Officier (Frankenthal: n.p., 1787), 44-46; Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, "Von
der Tanzkunst oder Pantomime," in Schubart, Vorlesungen uber Mahlerey, Kupfer-
stecherkunst, Bildhauerkunst, Steinschneidekunst und Tanzkunst (Munich: Per-
renon, 1777), 37-43.

620 * THE JOURNAL OF

 the Gun
_ITUsing

losophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which described

the human body and the entire world through the static metaphor of the
machine.56
Among the peasant population, however, the dancing styles of the
early sixteenth century remained popular well into the eighteenth cen-
tury. These dances employed lavish and even ecstatic movements with
rapid swings and high jumps. Although such country dances continued
to be commented on with contempt by the court aristocracy as well as
the upper bourgeoisie,57 no effort appears to have been made at that time
to subject peasant dancers to the effective control of central govern-
ments.
The patterns of behavior which were imposed upon infantrymen by
way of military drill thus had their origin in the aristocratic world of the
courts and in the cities. They remained uncommon among the peasant
farming population. Hence, on the one hand, the armies served as the
vehicles for the superimposition of aristocratic, well-ordered and
mechanical patterns of behavior upon peasants in the form of the "bon
air of the soldier" during the time they spent in garrison and at war. On
the other hand, armies also became instruments of administrative cen-
tralization in the hands of the more powerful territorial rulers on the
Continent. When recruited for service, peasants were, at least temporar-
ily, removed from the supervision and control of the seigneurial lords in
the countryside, as they were garrisoned in or near towns and cities or
served in the field. For one, King Frederick William I in Prussia ignored
most complaints which were filed by Prussian seigneurial lords against
the practice of recruiting peasants for service and, instead, insisted that
cantonment rules were properly executed.58
However, the persistence throughout the seventeenth and much of
the eighteenth century of the difference in behavioral patterns between
the courts and the cities on the one hand and the countryside on the
other, also made possible other types of interaction. Beginning in the
1760s, country dances like the waltz became popular in the cities, soft-

56. Descartes, "Passions of the Soul"; Thomas Ilobbes, Leviathan (London:

Andrew Cooke, 1651), 1; Bernard Lamy, "Art of Speaking" (1676), in The Rhetorics
of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy, ed. John T. Ilarwood (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1986), 362; Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men.
57. Johann Khevenhiiller-Metsch, Theater, Feste und Feiern zur Zeit Maria
Theresias, 1742-1776 (Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie des Wis-
senschaften, 1987). Khevenhiiller-Metsch was master of ceremonies under Maria
Theresa and noted his experiences in a diary. William Ilogarth, The Analysis of
Beauty (1754), ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), plate II.
58. See Otto Busch, Militarsystem und Sozialleben im alten Preu$en (Frankfurt:
Ullstein, 1981). Cf. I-lansBleckwenn, "Bauernfreiheit durch Wehrpflicht-ein neues
Bild der altpreufSische Armee?" in Die Bewaffnung und Ausriustung der Armee
F,riedrichs des GroLen (Rastatt: Ileeresgeschichtliches Museum, 1986), 1-14.

MILITARY IIISTORY * 621

 IIARALD KLEINSCIIMIDT

ened the rules informing the minuet, and introduced elements of flexi-
bility and increased mobility. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who wrote
in praise of the waltz in 1774, remarked that it was a pleasure to dance
because of the stimulating tensions that it created.59 Ballet masters fol-
lowed suit. Not unlike Guibert, Jean-Jacques Noverre, who was
employed as a ballet master at various courts at the end of the eighteenth
century, described the bodies of dancers as being "in a continuous vibra-
tion."60 Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century, a sense of
dynamism and flexibility began to pervade aesthetics, which abolished
previously important behavioral distinctions and social barriers between
the courts, the towns and the countryside. In their place, a demand for
"national" styles was heard.61 The newly acquired sense of dynamism
influenced and greatly eased the military reforms which were going on at
the same time. That such dynamism provided not only for the socializa-
tion of war, but also for the militarization of " national" societies
became explicit in the draft French constitution of 1793 which con-
tained an article according to which every citizen had to undergo man-
ual drill.62

Proliferation of Portable Firearms

It remains to be shown concretely how the aesthetics of well-ordered
and constrained behavior influenced the military. To that end, this sec-
tion is devoted to a cross-cultural comparison of the conditions under
which portable firearms were used, and it will be argued that the aes-
thetics of well-ordered and constrained behavior eased the deployment
of portable firearms in Europe while it impeded their proliferation else-
where.
As far as Europe is concerned, it is well known that the proliferation
of portable firearms was slow during the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies, despite the massive growth in the numbers of combatants, and
that portable firearms remained secondary in importance to such offen-
sive weapons as the pike and the longbow throughout this period. It is
equally well recorded that the users of portable firearms as well as cross-

59. Johann Wolfgangvon Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774), Insel-
Ausgabe (Frankfurt, s.a.), 22-25. Cf. Gerhard Anton Ulrich Vieth, Versuch einer
Enzyklopadie derLeibesubungen, vol. 2 (1795; reprinted, Frankfurt:Limpert, 1970),
181.
60. Jean-Georges Noverre, Briefe uber die Tanzkunst und uber die Ballette
(1769), ed. Kurt Petermann (Leipzig: Zentralantiquariatder DDR, 1981), 226.
61. Ilenri Abbe Gregoire, "Address to the National Assembly," in Michel de
Certeau, Une politique de la langue (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 300-317.
62. French constitution of 1793, in Les constitutions de la France depuis 1789,
ed. Jacques Godechot (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion,1970).

622 * THE JOURNAL OF

 Using the Gun

bowmen were not initially regarded as infantrymen, but as members of

the artillery, that they were integrated into tactical formations with pike-
men and halbardiers only in the course of the sixteenth century, and
that those artillery forces which handled cannon remained autonomous
units of specialist artisans who were not integrated into tactical forma-
tions until the end of the seventeenth century. Thus the lansquenet
mode of fighting in autonomous units with patterns of constrained
behavior was established in contexts where the pike and similar offen-
sive weapons far outnumbered handguns and other portable firearms
and spread mainly in those sixteenth-century armies in which pikes and
longbows continued to be in use. That is to say that the period of
retarded proliferation of portable firearms overlapped with the time
when, except in England, manual drill was practiced only in the
autonomous forces which followed the lansquenet mode of fighting. It is
well known, finally, that during the seventeenth century portable
firearms began to outnumber pikes, which were ultimately abandoned at
the turn of the eighteenth century together with the ubiquitousness of
manual drill. Hence the latter was contemporaneous with the widening
use of portable firearms in European armies.
Outside Europe, firearms had been in use in the Muslim world and
in India as well as in China, Korea, and Japan since the Middle Ages.
However, remarkably little strategic use was made of them beyond siege
warfare at that time and even after the beginning of the European expan-
sion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.63 One factor in the slow
increase in the use of portable firearms outside Europe was technical
and initially related to difficulties in obtaining supplies from Europe,
problems with the use of firearms in bad weather, and the lack of trained
specialists for the handling of cannon and portable firearms.64

63. For a description, see Georg von Ehingen, Des Schwabischen Ritters Georg
von Ehingen Reisen nach der Ritterschaft (Stuttgart: Litterarischer Verein in
Stuttgart, 1842), 22-23, 24.
64. These problems were spelled out by IIernan Cort6s, Letters from Mexico
(New Ilaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 53, 59-60, 131-36, 156-57, 166,
181, 186, 195-96, 199, 206, 214, 242, 256, 262, Ilernando Alvarado Tezozomoc,
Cr6nica mexicana y codie Ramirez (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de
Mexico, 1975), cap. 28, p. 310; Juan de Torquemada, Monarquia indiana, vol. 1
(Mexico: Porr6a, 1975), Lib. II, cap. 85, p. 309; Peter Martyrd'Anghiera,The Decades
of the Newe Worldor West India (1555; reprinted, Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 1966), fol. 4r-v. Cf. Urs Bitterli, Alte Welt-neue Welt (Munich: C. II. Beck,
1992), 77-96; Ross Ilassig, Aztec Warfare:Imperial Expansion and Political Control
(Norman:University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 105-9, 207-11; idem, Warand Soci-
ety in Ancient Mesoamerica (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1992); David E. Stannard, American IIolocaust: The Conquest of the New
World (New York:Oxford University Press, 1992), 75-81.

MILITARY HtlSTORY * 623

 IIARALD KLEINSCIIMIDT

Another retarding factor was cost. This cost factor began to matter
most when and in areas where European penetration was undertaken
mainly by private chartered trading companies. Since members of and
investors in these companies were determined to make profits from
trade, the provision of firearms together with the keeping and manning
of fortresses was burdensome because it obliged the trading companies
to invest in military personnel and equipment. Moreover, it became clear
by the end of the seventeenth century that the maintenance of military
strongholds could impede trade, because it provoked resentments
among the natives of the surrounding areas. According to one critic of
Josiah Child, who was governor of the English East India Company from
1684 to 1686 and from 1688 to 1690, fortresses and the use of firearms
frightened off the people with whom traders had to do business.65 He
concluded that trading companies would do better without fortresses
and even predicted, correctly, though somewhat prematurely, that the
Dutch East India Company would go bankrupt if they continued to keep
their strongholds. The weight of such conclusions was strong enough to
provoke, as late as the 1740s, the defensive statement that the mainte-
nance of fortresses in Africa was necessary for securing continuous ben-
efits for British trade, particularly the trans-Atlantic slave trade.66
The third factor emerged from social costs, that is the nonmaterial
expenses which result, among others, from changes of patterns of behav-
ior among the soldiers who were commanded or expected to use
firearms. This factor was most relevant in areas where firearms were
deployed in local armies. In sixteenth-century Southeast and East Asia,
the local use of firearms is attested by the fact that such arms were man-
ufactured there.67 In Japan, the use of firearms grew out of archery war-

65. [Comment on] Josiah Child, "A Discourse concerning the East-India Trade,"
in A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on the Most Interesting and Enter-
taining Subjects ... Selectedfrom ... the Libraries ... of the Late Lord John Somers,
ed. Walter Scott, vol. 10 (1813; reprinted, New York: AMS Press, 1965), 636-39.
66. The Importance of Effectually Supporting the Royal Afican Company of
England Impartially Consider'd (London: M. Cooper, 1744), 2.
67. The Portuguese kings were keen to receive information about arms and war-
fare in Asia; in 1508, Manuel I instructed Diogo Lopes de Sequeira to report on the
kinds of "artillery" which were known in Malacca. See Donald Ferguson, "Letters
from Portuguese Captives in Canton, Written in 1534 and 1536," Indian Antiquary,
2d ser., 30 (1901): 421. When Portuguese seafarers were imprisoned in Canton and
recommended to their government various schemes for the bombarding of the city,
the Portuguese government did not respond, even after one of its subjects, Tomas
Pires, had died. See Ferguson, ibid., 31 (1902): 23, 29-30, 34, 56-57 (1536). Tomas
Pires, Summa Oriental 1512-1515, ed. Armando Cortesao, vol. 1 (London: Ilakluyt
Society, 1944), 123.

624 * THE JOURNAL OF

 U-- sing the Gun

fare.68Archers were highly mobile individual fighters, usually mounted,

and it was their principal purpose to hit a target with the greatest possi-
ble precision and at the longest possible distance.69 Unlike cannon,
which came to be used in Japan against fortresses, portable firearms
were expected to accomplish the same goals as bows. Late sixteenth-cen-
tury Japanese manuscript drill manuals laid down rules for the handling
of portable firearms, which were employed for military use and for hunt-
ing. Descriptions showed
individual arquebusiers
who were expected to
shoot with the same degree
of precision as archers and
who had to be able to fire
from a variety of standing,
jz</ j sitting, crouching and lying
I"{/9/ipositions. (See Figure 4.)
<'< or I/ / These positions were pre-
scribed without concern
,* e 1 ll ,for technical features, such
as the "kick" of the weapon,
V ' ,I
,_ / \ which might have injured
the men or at least would
< have made it difficult for
^ - them to shoot accurately.
Likewise, men were expected
Fig.4: An exercisingarquebusier,targeting.From to have ample time for
the Inatomi-ryu teppo densho. 1595. loading and adjusting the
firearms.
The use of firearms in the open field required different measures.
Usually time was lacking for circumstantial adjustment and targeting
procedures, and individual arquebusiers had neither the possibility of
making their own decisions about the best position to adopt nor were
they always able to find appropriate protective walls. Instead, they had
to load and target swiftly, as they had to subject themselves to the orders
given out by their commanders, to coordinate their actions with those of

68. William Wayne Farris, Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan' s Mili-
tary, 500-1300 (Cambridge, Mass.: Council of East Asian Studies, Ilarvard University,
1992), 53-54; Yu Ilashimoto, Ritsuryo gundan-sei no kenkyu (Osaka: The Author,
1982); Yasuo Koguchi, "Ritsuryo gundan-sei no gunji kunren seido-zoku," Shoku
Nihongi Kenkyu 22 (1982): 1-34; id., "Sekicho ni miru ritsuryo gundan heishi no
bugei kunren," ibid., 225 (1983): 25-40; Masaharu Matsumoto, "Saikaido ni okeru
shokoku kijo no seiritsu," ibid., 227 (1983): 1-19.
69. Heike monogatari: The Tale of Heike, ed. Iliroshi Kitagawa and Bruce T.
Tsuchida (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975), I: 11-15, V: 14, VI: 12.

MILITARY HISTORY * 625

 IIARALD KLEINSCIIMIDT --

their comrades, and to stand or move under the volleys of arrows or the
fire of their opponents. I-lence, warfare with portable firearms in the
open field required attitudes and actions which were fundamentally
opposed to the rules for manual drill which were prescribed in the drill
manuals.
The social cost of the deployment of portable firearms seems to have
been considered too high in Japan, for, after extensive use of portable
firearms for about two generations in the sixteenth century,70 they were
banned from the arsenals. Manual drill continued at a few places and
firearms were still used as hunting weapons as late as in the eighteenth
century.71 Likewise, cannon and mortars were still being cast in the sev-
enteenth century.72 But these continuities only confirm that patterns of
constrained behavior did not then emerge as integral parts of Japanese
ways of fighting, and thus it made little sense to keep portable firearms
in continuing use.
Similar evidence has been recorded from late sixteenth-century
China. Again, portable firearms were used together with manual drill, the
rules for which were laid down in drill manuals. But portable firearms
failed to achieve tactical significance in warfare.73
Thus, the third factor reducing the significance of portable firearms
in overseas warfare arose from the high social costs of the enforcement
of patterns of constrained behavior together with the deployment of
large numbers of portable firearms. These social costs mattered because,
up to the end of the eighteenth century, other weapons existed in East
Asia which offered tactical and strategic alternatives.

70. Some three thousand portable firearms are estimated to have been used at
Nagashino in 1575. See Sakai Teppo (Sakai: Sakaishi Ilakubutsukan, 1990), 109-14;
Koji lizuka, Toyo e no shikaku to seiyo e no shikaku (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1974), 260-87;
Stephen Morillo, "Guns and Government: A Comparative Study of Europe and
Japan," Journal of World History 6 (1995): 75-105; Noel Perrin, Giving Up the Gun:
Japan' s Reversion to the Sword (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1980). Perrin points to
cultural preferences in the use of weapons but ignores bodily behavior.
71. Fritz Opitz, "Die Lehensreform des Tokugawa Nariaki nach dem 'litachi Obi'
des Fujita Toko" (Phil. diss., Munich, 1965), 46 n.2. The drill manual by (Pseudo-)
Wilhelm Dilich, Kriegs-Schule (1689; reprinted, Magstadt: Bissinger, 1967), was used
in Mito in the eighteenth century as a means of instruction. A translation into Japan-
ese was attempted, but failed because the translators mistook the German text of the
original for Dutch.
72. See Walter Schmidlin, "Ulmer im Fernen Osten wahrend des 17. Jahrhun-
derts," Mitteilungen des Vereinsftir Kunst und Altertum in Ulm und Oberschwaben
29 (1934): 53-67.
73. Ch'i Chi-kuang, Chi-hsiao hsin-shu, ed. and trans. Kai Werhahn-Mees, Praxis
der chinesischen Kriegskunst (Munich: Bernard & Graefe, 1980), 110-74. Cf. James
Ferguson Millinger, "Ch'i Chi-kuang: A Study of Civil-Military Roles and Relations in
the Career of a Sixteenth-Century Warrior, Reformer, and Ilero" (Ph.D. diss., Yale
University, 1968).

626 * THE JOURNAL OF

 - -- Using the Gun

Conclusion
The history of manual drill in Europe underwent five fundamental
changes from the later fifteenth century on. In the first place, certain
warrior bands displayed spectacular processes of self-disciplining in that
they agreed to subject themselves to self-imposed constraints upon their
actions. These processes occurred towards the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury whence they became the hallmark of those initially exotic bands of
infantry fighters, the lansquenets. They began to compete against the
then dominant Swiss soldiery and became the most important fighting
force in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They provoked
important changes in modes of fighting and of military organization in
many European armies. It is noteworthy that this initial push towards
patterns of self-constrained behavior was carried out by infantrymen
whose major offensive weapons were pikes, not portable firearms. In the
second place, the initially idiosyncratic patterns of self-constrained
behavior were imposed mainly upon infantry forces in the context of the
seventeenth-century military reforms initiated by members of the House
of Orange. Separate drill rules were set up for pikemen and bearers of
portable firearms. In the third place, the application of these rules
became restricted to the latter and were elaborated into highly sophisti-
cated static choreographies for the handling of portable firearms on
parade and in battle. This is the story of the late seventeenth and the
first two-thirds of the eighteenth century. In the fourth place, these sta-
tic choreographies were modified through the introduction of dynamic
elements which allowed the infantrymen to increase the mobility of their
bodies, enhance the speed of their movements, and become more flexi-
ble in the execution of given orders. The consequence was that the pre-
viously strong ties between manual drill and battle were loosened. These
changes occurred between the Seven Years' War and the French Revolu-
tion. Fifth and last, the newly acquired dynamism was elaborated into a
multifaceted theory of tensions as the single most important factors of
warfare, as exemplified in the work of Carl von Clausewitz.
It has been possible to show that these changes in patterns of self-
constrained behavior in the military coincided with changes in other
patterns of bodily behavior. Parallels between manual drill and rules for
dancing have been adduced as evidence that some rules informing pat-
terns of behavior in the military were also applied elsewhere. But pat-
terns of self-constrained behavior in dancing were not generally
accepted. Instead, in dancing such patterns were characteristic of the
aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie whereas country dancers contin-
ued to follow other patterns well into the eighteenth century. The differ-
ence is crucial because it suggests that the mainly aristocratic officer
corps of the European armies superimposed their own patterns of self-

MILITARY HISTORY * 627

 IIARALD KLEINSCIIMIDT - _

constrained behavior onto the common infantrymen through regular

manual drill. In consequence, a gap occurred between, on the one side,
patterns of self-constrained behavior to which peasants had to subject
themselves in garrisons and in the field and, on the other, patterns of
fluid behavior current among the peasant population in the countryside.
When peasants were drafted into the armed forces they had to adopt the
patterns of self-constrained behavior which were prescribed for the mil-
itary, and when they returned to the countryside, they had to adapt
themselves again to the fluid patterns of behavior which were normal
there. This gulf persisted to the end of the eighteenth century.
Beginning in the 1770s, the upper bourgeoisie began to appreciate
and take over patterns of peasant behavior which were less constrained,
allowed agility, and enabled individuals to enjoy tensions between posi-
tions of rest and swift movements. Such dynamism was introduced into
military organization by the reformers who began to criticize the princi-
ples informing linear tactics during and shortly after the Seven Years'
War, and, in consequence, the previous rift between military and civilian
patterns of behavior narrowed. This process was enhanced early in the
1790s, first in France and with support from the still mainly aristocratic
officer corps, and facilitated both the socialization of war and the milita-
rization of society in the course of the nineteenth century.
The superimposition of aristocratic patterns of self-constrained
behavior onto the armed forces during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries occurred simultaneously with the formation of linear tactics
and with the more efficient use of portable firearms. The rise of portable
firearms to become the weapon of choice of the common soldier was
thus closely connected in time with the superimposition of patterns of
self-constrained behavior upon the military under government control.
Domestically, i.e., within the European polities of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the spreading of patterns of self-constrained
behavior was reflected in an ethics of self-constraint and a mechanistic
aesthetics. Internationally, i.e., in European overseas relations, the lack
of transferability of patterns of self-constrained behavior may have given
to some European governments the tactical advantage they began to
profit from towards thle end of the eighteenth century.74
The conclusions drawn here are predominantly negative. The his-
tory of manual drill calls into question the belief that the efficiency of
certain types of weapons depends mainly on factors of technology.
Hence, the decision to use or, for that matter, to give up the gun was not
solely due to the availability of technologies. Instead, it may be advanta-

74. As Adam Smith noted in his work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R. II. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, vol.
2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 699.

628 * THIE JOURNAL OF

 - using the Gun

geous to take into consideration such culturally specific social factors as

patterns of self-constrained behavior and such social costs as the sub-
jection of the common soldier to rigorous government-controlled disci-
pline, in order to disentangle the complex interrelationship between war,
the "state" and "society." Rather than to superior technological quality,
the proliferation of portable firearms in eighteenth-century European
armies was due to the lack of fundamental technological change. The
continuously poor technical quality of portable firearms had to be com-
pensated for by their deployment in large numbers, in well-ordered
armies, under an ethics of self-constraint and a mechanistic aesthetics.

MILITARY HISTORY * 629

630 *