Civilians Under Siege from Sarajevo to Troy by Alex Dowdall & John Horne

Author:Alex Dowdall & John Horne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Gloating over his success, Feuquières himself wrote to Louvois: ‘There is hardly anything that resembles more the raids of the Tartars.’ 46 Such ‘courses’—and French ‘guerre de partis’ more generally—did indeed share several common features with war in Central and Eastern Europe, and the printed news reported both these French raids and the Turkish–Tartar raids of the ongoing Polish–Ottoman War in similar terms. This contributed to the classical depiction of the French as Turks and barbarians.

In order to achieve the complete military appropriation and exploitation of enemy territories, a secondary fortified network, made up of posts and outposts (castles, forts and small towns) covering the interstices between the main strongholds, was optimised. Raiding parties were thus in charge of taking these posts and of preventively destroying those that did not have any immediate use, such as securing communication and supply lines and above all contribution collection, so that the enemy could not use them later. Just as contribution collection was not an end in itself and was subordinated to a larger strategic goal, 47 so these operations were a parallel to the defensive improvement of the fortifications that were kept. They contributed to the same strategic goal—‘to form the frontier’. 48

The French operations must be seen from three interlinked perspectives. In the short term, the objective was to deny the enemy quarters on the Neckar as the major German princes mobilised their troops from the end of October 1688. In the medium term of the upcoming campaign of 1689, the aim was ‘to prevent the enemy from crossing the Rhine next year as high as Cologne’. 49 The long-term goal of the war was ‘to seal the frontier’ so that ‘the Rhine would be the frontier of the realm’. 50 The invasion of September 1688 was designed as a demonstration of power to compel the Emperor ‘with an absolute necessity to give into time and force’. 51 But this ideal scenario soon appeared improbable, and the defensive obsession of the Sun King led him to extend and radicalise a short-term strategy to reach the long-term purpose by progressively elaborating with his counsellors a large-scale policy of destruction. 52 The radical potential of this strategy lay in the ambiguity of the French terminology, which defined ‘to raze or to dismantle a fortress or a city’ as merely the demolition of its walls and fortifications. 53 In line with the razing operations of posts, the maximalist logic was to dismantle and entirely ruin both the walls and habitations of strategically located fortress cities and walled towns that were considered unacceptable threats for the security of the eastern frontier. Such a radical policy was elaborated on the basis of the case of Mannheim, a walled Palatine city whose fortress of Friedrichsburg commanded the confluence of the Rhine and the Neckar. 54

This policy of destruction evolved over the time that it took for it to be implemented. With the long-term goal of the war in mind, it followed the logic of unavoidable retreat to the line of French fortresses on the left bank of the Rhine (see Fig.

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