Mes rêveries, ouvrage posthume

The 1757 edition, the finest early edition of Mes Rêveries, the only substantial work left by Maurice, Comte de Saxe. The first edition, published at The Hague the previous year by Zacharie de Pazzi de Bonneville from a defective copy of the manuscript, contained only 40 plates. Prepared by the Abbé Gabriel-Louis Pérau, the present edition includes 84 plates, 61 of them folding, drawn by Pierre Patte from the Marshal’s designs and sketches and engraved by Moitte, Tardieu, and Patte. They depict military dress and equipment, troop dispositions, and plans and profiles of fortifications. Pérau also added a 134-page abridged life of the Marshal together with several supplementary documents, giving the text a fuller and more coherent form.

Contemporary full polished and mottled calf, spines with raised bands and gilt decoration, gilt rolls at head and foot, red morocco lettering- and numbering-pieces, covers framed with double gilt fillets. A small tear at the foot; one lower corner trimmed in volume I; small loss at the head and one corner worn in volume II; a scrape to the upper cover of the same volume. One plate in volume I and two in volume II project slightly from the text block owing to imperfect folding. Despite these minor defects, a handsome copy, complete with all 84 plates, in its contemporary binding.

The Rêveries were conceived under remarkable circumstances. Confined by fever in December 1732, Maurice de Saxe later claimed to have written the first version of the work over thirteen nights; he returned to and expanded it in a second manuscript around 1740. This was no treatise slowly composed in the quiet of a study: the book arose from an already extensive experience of warfare, suddenly condensed into a highly personal reflection on the recruitment, training, movement, and command of men.

The natural son of Augustus II, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, and Maria Aurora von Königsmarck, Maurice de Saxe (1696-1750) pursued an exceptional military career. Elected Duke of Courland and Semigallia in 1726 before being forced out under pressure from neighbouring powers, he entered French service, where his military gifts soon found their true field. His victory at Fontenoy in 1745 established his reputation; two years later Louis XV conferred upon him the exceptional dignity of Marshal General of the Camps and Armies of the King. Chambord was granted to him as a residence, and he died there in 1750.

The Rêveries reveal the full range of this practical intelligence. Saxe examines recruitment, maintenance and training of troops, weapons, discipline, army movements, fortification, and the qualities required of a commander. Alongside strategic considerations are highly concrete and sometimes unexpected proposals, extending even to the cut of uniforms and soldiers’ equipment, all directed towards increasing speed, endurance, and effectiveness in the field.

This freedom of thought continues into the final section, the Réflexions sur la propagation de l’espèce humaine. Having considered the art of directing and destroying men, Maurice de Saxe turns to the means of increasing population, marriage, and the conditions governing the fertility of societies. This abrupt movement from military tactics to demography gives the work a singular character, revealing a mind unwilling to separate warfare from the human resources upon which it ultimately depends.

The present edition gave this posthumous text its most accomplished 18th-century form. A man of letters and prior at the Sorbonne, already experienced in biographical writing, Pérau corrected the defective arrangement of the 1756 edition, supplemented it with a substantial life of the Marshal, and greatly expanded its illustration. Pierre Patte, then thirty-four and still at the beginning of the career as an architectural theorist that would later establish his reputation, gave graphic form to a number of Maurice de Saxe’s tactical ideas.

Born from thirteen nights of fever and later reconsidered in the light of years of military experience, the Rêveries offer less the doctrine of an academic theorist than the thought in motion of a great practitioner of war; in this 1757 edition, enlarged with 84 plates and Pérau’s biography, the experience of the victor of Fontenoy receives its fullest and most readable early form.