The Royal Italien Regiment and Du Maine: Europeans for American Independence (EVM0015)

Two French regiments, and one of them is Italian

The plate shows the uniforms of Du Maine and Royal Italien, two line regiments of the King of France in the years of the American Revolutionary War. The second name is the interesting one. The Royal Italien regiment was Italian — not by tradition or by nickname, but by recruitment: its men came from Italy and Piedmont, and it kept that identity for more than a century inside a French army.

Raised in Italy for Louis XIV, in 1671

The regiment was raised on 27 March 1671 by Bardo Bardi Magalotti, a Florentine officer who had been a captain in the Gardes Françaises. He recruited in Italy and Piedmont and put together twenty-seven companies of over two hundred men each. Louis XIV reviewed it, was pleased with what he saw, and gave it the name it would keep: Royal-Italien.

The brown coat, and the reason for it

There is a story attached to that review which uniform historians repeat because it is documented. The regiment was dressed in brown — the colour of the justaucorps the King happened to be wearing that day. It kept brown until 1750, an oddity in an army of white and grey-white coats, then took a grey-white coat with light blue collar, cuffs and breeches. In 1775, a few years before America, it changed again: turquoise blue, with jonquil-yellow lapels and cuffs and a pink collar — one of the most recognisable combinations of the late Ancien Régime.

Why a French army contained an Italian regiment

This was not an exception. The army of the Ancien Régime was built out of foreign regiments on purpose: Swiss, German, Irish, Italian, Corsican. They were raised abroad, kept their own recruitment pools and often their own languages of command, and they were considered reliable precisely because their loyalty ran to the King who paid them rather than to a province. When France entered the American war, that structure went with it — the Royal Deux-Ponts was German, Dillon and Walsh were Irish, Royal Italien was Italian.

The consequence for how the war is remembered

It is convenient to describe 1778–1783 as a war between Britain and America with French help. The uniforms say something less tidy: a monarchy financed a republican revolt on the far side of the Atlantic, using soldiers recruited across half of Europe, for reasons that had nothing to do with liberty and everything to do with the balance of naval power. The men in these two coats were not fighting for a constitution. They were the instrument of a calculation — and the calculation worked, at a cost that helped bankrupt the French crown within six years.

What the illustrator has to get right here

Late Ancien Régime uniforms are unforgiving to paint. Lapel shape, cuff pattern, button spacing and the exact shade of a facing colour are what identify a regiment — get them wrong and you have painted a different unit, or none. The 1775 regulation is the reference for both figures. The army that Rochambeau took to America is in EVM0016 and EVM0014, seen from the other side.