Miquelets, Royal Hussars and Dragoons: the Sun King’s Army Where There Were No Battles (EVM0061)

Snow, a rope bridge, and three men who are not there to fight a battle

The setting does the explaining. Snow-covered peaks, a gorge, a rope bridge, and three soldiers of Louis XIV who have stopped to talk: a miquelet on foot, a royal hussar and a dragoon of the king, both mounted. There is no enemy line and no field. These are the troops the Sun King used for the kind of war that never appears in a battle painting — frontier control, smuggling, mountain passes, and the suppression of his own subjects.

The man on foot is worth more here than the two on horseback

Miquelets were irregular light infantry from Catalonia, Valencia and Roussillon, specialists in mountain warfare — hired men, not conscripts, who knew the paths. On this terrain that knowledge outranks a horse. Louis XIV took them into French service, and their duties say exactly what they were for: guarding the Roussillon frontier against desertion and smuggling, and reinforcing the line army for particular tasks. They were regularised in stages, becoming the Arquebusiers of Roussillon and later the fusiliers de montagne.

An army that hired what it could not train

The state that fielded the most regular army in Europe paid irregulars because some ground cannot be held by regulars. It is the same reasoning that put foreign regiments into the French line — Swiss, German, Irish, Italian — applied to terrain instead of manpower. The hussar beside him makes the point twice over: hussars entered French service as a Hungarian import, a foreign way of fighting bought wholesale because nobody at home did it as well.

The dragoon carried out the orders nobody else would

Dragoons were mounted infantry, and in France they became something else as well: the instrument of internal coercion. In the 1680s the crown quartered dragoons on Protestant households to force conversions — the dragonnades — a policy of billeting as punishment that preceded the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. It is why a dragoon of this period is not simply a soldier in the eyes of the population he rides through.

And the three met again, on the same job

The connection is not theoretical. When the Camisard revolt broke out in the Cévennes, some three thousand miquelets were deployed in January 1703 alongside regular troops against Protestant insurgents in broken country. Mountain irregulars, mounted infantry and light horse, used together against a population rather than an army — which is the situation this plate is quietly describing.

Why the composition puts them at a standstill

Nothing is happening, and that is accurate. The petite guerre was mostly waiting, watching a pass and talking to the man who came the other way: an economy of information more than of combat. Painting these three in a charge would have been the easier picture and the wrong one. The British equivalents from the same wars are in EVM0060, and the foreign regiments of the French line are in EVM0015.