Early Modern dynastic states have been evocatively called ‘machines built … for the battlefield’. What does this mean in practice? While some have seen the build-up of war-making capacity as a prolongation of the ‘feudal’ nature of the French absolute monarchy, the all-embracing impact of war on French politics, society and culture in the Renaissance was shaped by the nature of international relations and the ferocious competition for power and resources that accompanied the consolidation of monarchical states in the period. However, it is highly unlikely that such a concept could have been at the forefront of decisions, simply because the necessary political vocabulary was scarcely available in the courts of kings and princes.

There used to be a common view that the Italian wars and their prolongation into the Habsburg-Valois Wars expressed the aggression of a French kingdom undergoing consolidation into a modern state. Michelet in 1860 linked the French ‘discovery’ of Italy to the formation of the nation, but Francis I, he thought, had lost the initiative for France in pursuing chimerical objectives. Mignet, in the 1880s, saw France as a kingdom that was becoming highly centralised and for which external aggression was the logical next step at the end of the 15th century. That aggression, though, he saw as diverted from its ‘natural channels’ into the conquest of Italy by the wayward ambition of its kings. He thought the war between Francis I and Charles V was in some senses inevitable given the situations of their countries, their conflicting interests, not to speak of rival ambitions. Calmette, in summing up the genesis of the Italian Wars, criticised Charles VIII for diverting French energies into a project that provoked an unnecessary quarrel with Spain and neglected the crucial need to ensure the Burgundian inheritance. For Lemonnier, the Habsburg-Valois wars were the inevitable result of a struggle for supremacy, but the Italian dimension proved sterile. The northern and eastern theatres of conflict were more crucial and it was there, with the thrust towards ‘natural frontiers’ and the conquest of Metz, Toul and Verdun, that the future lay. This, though, had been unplanned and Lemonnier could dismiss the kings of the period as ‘inexperienced’ (Charles VIII, Louis XII) or ‘lacking consistency’ (Francis I) and, as for Henri II, describe his intentions as obscure, since he had ‘no organised military conceptions, shaped by a will.’