peace they could not be looked on as satisfactory or hard-working
officers. Yet they and their like continued to get advancement.
Ordinances might be passed from time to time, requiring age or length of
service, but ordinances in old France did not apply to the great. The
poorer nobility might grumble, but the court families continued to get
the good places. The lieutenant-colonels and the other working officers
of the army had but little chance of rising to be general officers. Even
before the order of 1788, promotion fell to the courtier colonels. The
baton of the marshals of France was placed in the hands only of the very
highest nobility. All over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, armies were often commanded by men born to princely rank.
That this did not necessarily mean that they were ill commanded may be
shown by the names of Turenne and Conde, Maurice de Saxe and Eugene of
Savoy, Prince Henry of Prussia I and Frederick the Great.

While the higher commands were thus monopolized (or nearly so) by the
rich and powerful, the poorer nobility flocked into the army, to occupy
the subordinate ranks of commissioned officers. Sometimes they came
through the military schools. The most important of these had been
founded at Paris in 1750, by the financier Paris-Duverney. Here several
hundred young gentlemen, mostly born poor and preferably the sons of
officers, received a military education. The boys came to the school
from their homes in the country between the ages of nine and eleven,
rustic little figures sometimes, in wooden shoes and woolen caps, like
the peasant lads who had been their early playmates. They were taught
the duties of gentlemen and officers, cleanliness, an upright carriage,
the manual and tactics, and something of military science. Other
schools, kept by monks, existed in the provinces where the young
aspirants for commissions learned engineering and the theory of
artillery. But many young a noblemen entered their career by a process