Building la Grande Armée: The Infantry 

Your presentation confirmed what I have long believed, that the successful charge with the bayonet was made possible, most often, by the effective fire of the attacking formation, or that of the supporting infantry formations and artillery. It is in the details, as always, that one gains insight into the mechanics of a successful engagement. The information you provided about the flexibility of the French system was very enlightening, and makes absolute sense when one considers some of the spectacular moves Napoleon could rely on being made efficiently. Pratzen Heights is probably the best example of Napoleon's daring, which would not have been possible without his supreme confidence in the ability of the the French formations to execute the required movements perfectly.

The visualizations attached to these descriptions are extremely helpful.

thank you for this video on french infantry tactics because the notion we see in most napoleonic movies is french troops using nothing but columns and walk into enemy fire die in droves and then some how win or get routed

Wow everything about this was great. Fascinating subject. Excellent presentation. Nice voice. Glad I happened to stumble across this. 10/10

11:25 What made the prussian line infantry more effective was the fact that Austria opted for more quantity over quality. The Austrians believed in conscripts rather than elite guard/line infantry.

Good to see a fellow Englishman showing a sense of logic in looking at the French army instead of the commonly and repeatedly stated mistakes of the jingoistic. The same one-eyedness applies to the British view of Waterloo where a French army only slightly larger than the Anglo-Allied attacked without the normally accepted requirement of a 3 to 1 superiority and in the words of Wellington himself came very close to beating him before the Prussians came up and reduced this slight French superiority in numbers to a distinct French inferiority - which still placed him under a massive amount of pressure. Good work! You might also have used Nafziger to give a comparison between the times required by an early Prussian 1790's infantry battalion to deploy and ploy a battalion with those of the same period French. If I remember rightly it could take the Prussians - because of their then use of the fixed pivot and precessional manoeuvring - about 16 minutes compared to the French of about 2 minutes. A huge disadvantage in any rapidly developing battlefield situation which the Prussians to their merit fixed by changing their tactical system after a great deal of neccessary soul searching.

I have been starting Napoleonic wars for over a year now, and this is the most detailed video on infantry history and tactics I’ve ever seen. Thank you.

I've always wanted a video like this ever since I first began to study this period. great job!

Well! It's wonderful to hear someone speak on a subject who really knows what he's talking about! Great talk, nice production. Overall, I guess I need to watch your earlier work. Merci, Mssr Le Merechal!

Thank you for showing that the French in the Napoleonic Wars knew how to form ranks and line and not just column like most books and bias historians like to demonstrate.

Very informative, enjoyable, and easy to listen to! I would _love_ a video like this covering the development of pre-Napoleonic and Napoleonic-era light infantry. Cheers 🙂

Thanks for exploring this topic! 🇫🇷 This information is Gold 🏅

Great video, i like that it goes deep into the details of how armies of those days operated

This is so thorough and concise. I'm subscribing.

26:00 When the Swedes used charge and shock tactics during the turn of the 18th Century, they charged as a line, and it worked several times for them, such as during the battle of fraustadt.

great video!

Good stuff sir!

Great video 👍

I’ve been waiting for this video, my whole life. Bravo on the narration!

Excellent Presentation 👍👍👍

@ 9:22 In de Saxe's case, it makes sense, considering his experiences fighting the Turks. He recounts an incident in his reveries, where a couple of battalions were sabered by the Turks. They'd waited until the Turks were within 20 paces and loosed a volley. De Saxe would later count the bodies left and note that only 50 Turks had fallen in that sector of the battlefield (which the Imperials won--hence how he could count). The rest were able to make it and wreak a massacre on the soldiers. A good part of that, though, might be that musket aiming techniques were...fascinating before c. 1750--at least for soldiers. People at the time distinguished between aiming as a soldier did and aiming "as hunters do," to quote the Bavarian infantry manual of 1754 (which instructed their infantry to use the latter method). The latter method had been the norm before the wars of Louis XIV, so there was a period of less than a century where soldiers decided that aiming normally was for the birds. De Saxe would serve his entire military career in armies that only ever aimed that way, as would Folard IIRC, though the latter must have seen what British firepower could do. Armies only started teaching their men to aim in a more modern style after the War of Austrian Succession. As for those curious: you were to hold the musket so that the barrel was at breast level; it is impossible to have a cheek weld if you do it right--not unless you stoop hard. You can still use the sight and aim with this method. However, holding the musket in the manner of the day was somewhat awkward--to put it mildly.

Nice, I was hoping for something like this, especially when it comes to the column myth, which I think was popularised widely by Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe books.

Great vid keep up the good work.

Thank you for this most informative and well-researched video! Subscribed!

great analysis, you have a voice which is very easy to listen to.

Excellent job! Great presentation.

I was looking for an overview of Napoleonic warfare and was glad I found this. no reflection on your presentation but the scholarship on the pike and shot period has a lot of fallacies about tactics and effectiveness of matchlocks, mostly because it looks at Sweden in the 30 Years War and then the Dutch Revolt to the detriment of everywhere else, although this is slowly changing. In central and eastern Europe the pike was never really used in great numbers, the Ottoman Empire, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Moscovy/Russia for example mobilized mass line infantry using volley fire and just didn’t bother with pikes beginning in the later 16th century. There were probably people in Western Europe thinking about those formations too but the context there tended to favor the pike and musket formation. Not trying to make an aggressive correction just wanted to share

Fantastic, great to hear about the tabletop wargaming, primarily unknown to most people that the French used a Wargame rules written in 1698.

Really fantastic!!!!

Great presentation!

great content, keep it up!

Hey, can you talk a bit about how different nations organized their battalions (and infantry in general)? Like for example, french used 6 companies, russians used 4, british used 10...

Very thorough, quite impressive. Looking forward to more! One small note, though, from a francophone. Guibert: Gi-behr(t). Like the kimono one wears for jiu jitsu.

Great channel, super!

Thanks for the great video. Do you have a source list you can share? I wrote down Quimby's book, but would love a list to reference.

Should have more views.

I would like this twice if I could.

I love you.

Also good voice and speed

Great video, but I have to comment on the pronunciation of Maurice de Saxe. It's pronounced "Sax" - as in Sax-ophone. You don't pronounce the E at all.

Loved the video, but just a recommendation, try not to quote a lot, it kinda takes the viewer out, otherwise great stuff

Nice video. One minor quibble. If you're going to pronounce French names, please try to rehearse the pronunciation of the names beforehand. For example, you pronounced Mesnil quite literally. In French, it should sound something more like Meh-kneel.