An "invisible giant" according to John Lynn, the seventeenth-century French army was the largest and hungriest institution of the Bourbon monarchy, then the most powerful state in Europe, yet it has received incomplete treatment and is only partly understood. Combining the social and cultural emphases of the "new" military history with the more traditional institutional and operational concerns, this book examines the army in depth.

The portrait that emerges differs from what current scholarship might have predicted. Instead of claiming that a "military revolution" transformed warfare, Lynn stresses evolutionary change. This work also offers surprising insights into absolutism and the relationship between the monarchy and aristocracy. Questioning widely held assumptions about state formation and coercion, this book argues that this standing army was primarily devoted to border defense, and only rarely to internal repression.