ABSTRACT
As the introduction to this special issue has shown, in late seventeenth-century Europe, the term ‘petite guerre’ or ‘small war’ principally described a variety of actions of war that took place in conflicts between sovereign states. It turned up frequently in reports by commanders, official correspondence, and memoires. If the manoeuvres of the armies of the period were slow and ponderous, combat was nevertheless a daily event and the cumulative effect of the numerous and violent clashes of small war sometimes determined the outcome of entire campaigns. Courtilz de Sandras testified to the intensity of small war in hisHistory of the Dutch War (1689) when at the beginning of the year 1676: ‘the war blazed so much from one side to the other that winter, which is customarily a time of repose for soldiers, differed not all from the campaign, except that one sometimes returned to recover in their winter quarters. Theywere nearly alwaysmounted, they conducted sieges, and
fought in skirmishes, and thesewere particularly bloody as theywere drawn at closer quarters than most battles.’1 Yet, surprisingly, the subject of small war in the late seventeenth century has remained largely underappreciated. The classical representations of the great battles of Conde´ and Turenne and on the one hand, and Vauban-style sieges on the other, endure deeply etched on the imagination. Compared to the numerous volumes dedicated to themajor operations of the period, scholars have only recently begun to evaluate the place of small war.2
