Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval

French military leader and reformer

• Born: September 15, 1715
• Birthplace: Amiens, France
• Died: May 9, 1789
• Place of death: Paris, France

After rising through the ranks in the artillery branch of the French army and witnessing the poor performance of French arms in the Seven Years’ War, Gribeauval was placed in charge of the branch and initiated many important reforms in the design, production, and use of artillery.

Early Life

Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval (zhah bahp-teest vah-keht duh gree-boh-val) was the second child of Adrien Vaquette de Freschencourt and Catherine Romanet, both members of the lower French nobility. The family’s patent of nobility was only a dozen years old when Jean-Baptiste was born. Adrien, like generations of Vaquettes, was active in local politics, having served as mayor of Amiens in 1711 and as a magistrate on the city’s council. When his uncle, a military captain, died, Adrien assumed his title, de Gribeauval.

The younger sons of the family were destined for military careers. At age ten, Jean-Baptiste was placed with an excellent tutor, the Abbé Valart, and later with a fine teacher of mathematics and science. From this point the boy was being primed for a career with the French royal artillery, the branch most likely to advance a young man with few social connections. Adrien placed his son in the artillery school at La Fère when Gribeauval was seventeen.

There Gribeauval underwent mathematical and practical training to prepare him for a career as an engineer and artillery officer. Gribeauval completed his studies after three years and left La Fère with the rank of captain. Appointed a leader of others of his rank, Gribeauval spent the next five years in quiet garrison duty. This changed in 1740 with the onset of the War of the Austrian Succession.

Life’s Work

On April 15, 1743, Gribeauval was named commissaire extraordinaire, essentially a wartime promotion. He participated as an artillery officer in several battles of the War of the Austrian Succession, including the French loss at Dettingen in Bavaria, and later in a string of sieges in the Netherlands, including Courtrai, Ypres, Ghent, Bruges, Ostende, Berg op Zoom, and Maastricht. His outstanding military service earned him a permanent promotion (commissaire ordinaire) on February 20, 1747. Throughout this period he was in close contact with Joseph de Vallière, who succeeded his father, Jean-Florent de Vallière, to the highest position in the royal artillery corps in 1747.

Over the next few years Gribeauval was garrisoned at Cherbourg, Valognes, and Arras, where he began working on the development of light or field artillery. For nearly a century the French army had depended almost exclusively on huge, heavy, and very cumbersome cannon and mortar that were quite effective during sieges but largely useless on the battlefield. King Frederick the Great of Prussia had been a pioneer in the use of lighter, mobile guns with shorter barrels, which were employed to great effect at Fontenoy in 1745.

Approached in 1752 by two English cannon founders who had developed prototypes, Gribeauval arranged a demonstration for the king at Choisy. However, these light guns failed to match the standard larger guns for range, accuracy, or endurance. In April, 1755, Vallière sent Gribeauval to Prussia to observe Frederick’s artillery corps at work. The French officer and Prussian king got along well, and Gribeauval left firmly convinced of the possibilities of mobile field artillery.

When the Seven Years’ War broke out in May, 1757, Gribeauval was posted to semiautonomous Danzig to help strengthen its fortifications against the Prussians. Along the way he was hijacked to Vienna, however, where he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and became a close client of the French ambassador Étienne François de Choiseul. He continued to Danzig in July, but his mission failed, and he returned to Vienna.

Maria Theresa (1717-1780), archduchess of Austria and queen of Bohemia and Hungary, convinced the French king to release Gribeauval into her service, and he became an adviser to her imperial artillery service at the rank of colonel major. He participated in the Siege of Neiss and the defense of Dresden, where he proved himself a master of defensive fortification. While still in Austrian service, he was promoted to commissaire of the French Royal Artillery and Miners, with the rank of marchal-de-camp. He remained in Austria, however, where he unsuccessfully defended Schweidnitz in the late summer of 1762. His preparations and actions impressed even Frederick, who arrived to complete the operation. Frederick happily dined with Gribeauval, and Maria Theresa promoted him to lieutenant general. After a short imprisonment at Königsberg, Gribeauval returned to Vienna, and Maria Theresa offered him a position overseeing the construction of new fortresses and establishing new artillery schools. He decided to return to France, however, having been away for seven years. The king awarded him an annuity of twenty-four thousand livres and the new position of inspector general of the Royal Corps of Artillery and commander in chief of the Miners.

With Choiseul in power at Versailles, Gribeauval had a true friend at court. Choiseul had already begun reforming the French artillery system. In 1758 the artillery corps had been divided into thirty companies of one hundred cannoneers each, and this group, in turn, was divided into six brigades of five companies each. In 1761, Choiseul expanded the corps to nine brigades, with the additional firepower added to coastal defense. Vallière, who held the position of director general of the artillery, refused to separate the artillery from the engineers and otherwise stood in the way of changing his father’s system.

Given French losses in men and materiel in the war, Choiseul and Gribeauval understood that this was the perfect time to overhaul the entire corps. The result would become known as the Gribeauval system. The first phase in the system was the introduction of guns made of a new metal that was 90 percent copper and 10 percent tin. The gun barrels were cast solid, without decorative casting; the solid barrels were bored with a precision that casting could not accomplish, and the lack of decoration allowed for a smooth turning for the process. The process and the machinery were made uniform across France, so that barrels and ammunition would be completely interchangeable. Gribeauval limited the number of calibers of the guns, giving them the shortest, lightest, and therefore most manageable barrels possible. He also standardized the gun carriages, maintaining the elevation screw and the prepackaged ammunition box that was fitted to the carriage itself.

Vallière and his allies opposed these changes, sparking a pamphlet war over artillery reform. Upon gaining authority in 1772, Vallière held up or rolled back many of the changes. Back in power in 1774, Gribeauval and his allies, including many forward-thinking philosophes, continued on their path. In the end, Gribeauval held the title first inspector general of the Royal Artillery Corps and served as vice president of the King’s Council of War.

Gribeauval never married, and in 1769 he bought the estate of Bovelles near Amiens. Among other distinctions, he was awarded the Austrian Grand Croix of the Order of Maria Theresa and the French Grand Croix of the Royal and Military Order of St. Louis. He died in his Paris townhouse after a four-month illness.

Significance

The Gribeauval system brought French artillery to a state of efficiency that surpassed any in Europe. It remained in place until 1827 and played a key role in the victories of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies. Gribeauval’s insistence on developing field artillery alongside siege and coastal batteries gave the French a balance that was badly needed in battle. The independence and specialization of the artillery companies—rank and file as well as officers—made them extremely effective and provided an esprit de corps. His insistence on interchangeable gun parts was extended to small arms and allowed for both mass production and the provision of standard ammunition on a scale never seen before. Through treatises written by Heinrich Otto de Scheel, a Danish author who supported Gribeauval’s reforms, and other writers, the reforms found their way across Europe and to the Americas, where they played an important role in military developments in the United States.

Bibliography

Alder, Ken. Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Presents a close study of the Gribeauvalist-Vallièrist controversy and the resulting Gribeauvalist reforms. Especially good in outlining the ways the conflict affected the French military during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period.

Jones, Colin. “The Military Revolution and the Professionalization of the French Army Under the Ancien Régime.” In The Military Revolution and the State, 1500-1800, edited by Michael Duffy. Exeter, England: Exeter Studies in History, 1980. Broad overview placing Gribeauval and his reforms in the context of the changing patterns in eighteenth century military science and training.

Kennett, Lee. The French Armies in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Military Organization and Administration. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967. Valuable for understanding the environment from which Gribeauval came just prior to his rise to authority and the blatant weaknesses in the French system.

Nardin, Pierre. Gribeauval, lieutenant général des armées du roi, 1715-1789. Paris: Fondation pour les Études de Défense National, 1982. This book is the only modern monograph dedicated to Gribeauval and the evolution of French artillery in the eighteenth century.

Scheel, Heinrich Otto de. De Scheel’s Treatise on Artillery. Translated by Jonathan Williams, edited by Donald E. Graves. Alexandria Bay, N.Y.: Museum Restoration Service, 1984. De Scheel was a Danish Gribeauvalist whose very influential treatise of 1777 encapsulated the Gribeauval system. It is thus a key primary source. Gribeauval is discussed in both the introduction and the text.