Keep right on to the end of the road: the stamina of the French army in the War of the Spanish Succession

This article makes a major contribution to understanding why Louis XIV was able to keep military forces in the field against the Grand Alliance of Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, the Holy Roman Empire, Portugal and Savoy throughout the War of the Spanish Succession despite the financial meltdown France suffered. It looks first at the degeneration of the French state's financial system, before considering the expedients used to maintain the flow of funds to regiments and companies, especially in the field armies. It suggests patterns of state prioritisation between different field armies as well as different military zones, and points to a number of ways in which army officers - who ran their units as franchises in a semi-entrepreneurial fashion - kept their troops together, through banal corruption as well as naked criminality. It argues that the armies remained in existence not only because of a developing sense of honour and duty on the part of the officers but also thanks to extensive corner-cutting and dubious expedients.