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When it comes to siege warfare there’s no getting around one name. Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban. This French military engineer changed the face of siege warfare profoundly and lastingly. He designed the most resilient fortresses ever seen up to his times and developed a nearly infallible offensive siege routine. When Vauban entered the stage of history in the middle of the 17th century, France was in a predicament. Spain and the Dutch Republic had both honed their siege skills in the Eighty Years’ War, a conflict in which most military action consisted of sieges. The French, however, had been making little progress. Their style of assault “amounted to little more than an ill-prepared storming of the work targeted for attack” , as the expert for the French army of the Grand Siècle John Lynn puts it. Soon, headlong frontal assaults, often involving unnecessary losses, were known as attack "a la française”, “the French way”. Vauban was the man to bring about change. Not only did he bring France to eye level with its adversaries, but he in fact established a routine of the siege attack that was to remain unaltered for almost two centuries. Even the manual “Military Engineering (Part II) Attack and Defence of Fortresses” which the British took to France in WW1 was still largely based on his principles. Moreover, Vauban perfected the bastion fort and equipped the French border with a line of fortresses that repeatedly proved their worth up until Napoleon’s times. Vauban was the first military engineer ever to rise through the ranks, thereby paving the way for a professional class of military engineers. Without further ado, let’s look at how Vauban changed the face of European siege warfare.
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Chapters:
00:00-02:54 Intro
02:54-11:00 Chapter 1: Infallible Sieges
11:00-15:32 Chapter 2: Vauban's Three Systems
15:32-19:31 Chapter 3: The Great Fortress Called France
Bibliography
Duffy, Ch., The Fortress in the Early Modern World 1494-1660, London 1979.
Lazard, P. Vauban, 1633-1707, Paris 1934.
Lynn, J., Giant of the Grand Siecle. The French Army 1610-1715, Cambridge 1997.
Oswald, J., Vauban under Siege. Engineering Efficiency and Martial Vigor in the War of the Spanish Succession, Leiden/Boston 2007.
Parent, Michel et Jacques Verroust. Vauban, Paris 1971.
Vauban, Sebastien le Prestre de, A Manual of Siegecraft and Fortification, trans. G.A. Rothrock, Ann Arbor 1968.