Gentlemen,
I’m not sure if this is old news to everyone, but I came across something interesting this weekend. It’s an account of the campaigns of the French armies between 1672 and 1700, 400 odd pages long, written in 1894 and called “Battailes Francais v Louis XIV: 1672 à 1700”, available for free on the internet.
It’s written in French, by General Hardÿ de Périni, and although my French is pretty useless the good General’s style seems fairly easy to follow with mostly short sentences and paragraphs. For someone like me who struggled with “O level” French it’s quite a challenge, but for anyone more fluent I’m sure it would be no problem.
The real reward is that the book seems to offer fairly comprehensive accounts of the French campaigns in Europe between 1672 and 1700, including quite a few engagements which are not well known. It seems quite difficult to find out material for the French wars against the Dutch between 1672 and 1678. This book might help. I have no idea how accurate the account is. It seems to belong to an age when writing military history just as an account of engagements was a very respectable thing for a military man to do. (Is it any co-incidence it was printed in the same year as Colonel Walton’s "History of the British Standing Army"?)
There seems to be a fairly full description of the various campaigns and battles, separated into a number of chapters: The Great Condé, Turenne’s Last Campaigns, Le Roi Soleil, Luxembourg and Catinat, to mention a few. For the record, the list of engagements (according to page 3, and typed as shown on the page) is as follows:
Passage du Rhin 1672, Woerden 1672, Boodegraven 1672, Sinsheim 1674, Seneffe 1674, Entzheim 1674, Mulhouse 1674, Turckheim 1675, Wagshutt 1675, Altenheim 1675, Conz-Sarbruch 1675, Cassel 167, Espolla 1677, Willstett 1677, Rheinfelden 1678, Saint Denis 1687, Minden 1679, Walcourt 1689, Fleurus 1690, Staffarde 1690, Leure 1691, Steenkerque 1691, Pforzheim 1692, Neerwinden 1693, Marsaglia 1693, Torroella 1694, Cornella 1697.
There are certainly a few in there which are not too familiar, as well as some better known ones.
A final snag is that you have to download each page at a time, but the site is free and the printed pages are fairly clear when printed. You can also make a guess at where the page for the battle/ campaign you are looking for is in the book as the chapters are listed in a side-bar on the web-page. The URL is:
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k750505/f1.table
Happy downloading/ translating...
Adam
Great source, the accounts on battles I read so far are consistent with the Dutch accounts.