The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon . By Christy Pichichero. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2017. XI + 301 pp. £41. ISBN: 978-1-5017-0929-6.
Fadi El Hage
French History, July 2019

"Christy Pichichero’s book, taken from her PhD, appears in the wake of recent French works like Arnaud Guinier’s L’Honneur du soldat. Her book deals with the French ‘Military Enlightenment’ and aims to study military and cultural questions wondered in France from Louis XIV to Napoleon....The theoretical approach chosen by Christy Pichichero, essentially based on eighteenth-century books, is sometimes problematic. In places, she neglects to interpret some historical sources and makes mistakes on military grades and names (the author of the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène is Las Cases, not Las Casas). At times, it appears that some references are included merely in order to justify Pichichero’s positions, without given enough attention to the real context. Pichichero sees a ‘maréchal de camp’ as a field marshal. However, a field marshal is the equal of a marshal of France....Despite these reservations, Pichichero’s work includes some high-quality historical research, such as the fourth chapter about ‘the democratization of Heroism’, maybe the best of the book. Christy Pichichero insists on the capacity of heroism to transcend social orders...."

https://academic.oup.com/fh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/fh/crz048/5529766