Piquet (military)

With Piquet of was in the French army Ancien Régime a temporary designated unit consisting of the 50 best (usually) Grenadiers was an infantry regiment and the precarious if necessary to rectify situations was used. The method was mainly used during the Seven Years' War in Europe and New France . The hunters on foot also used such tactics.

Origins

The small groups of soldiers who fought on the battlefields away from or in front of the line of the established infantry regiments were initially called tirailleurs (snipers). This tactic has been used more and more since the Régence .

The 50-strong piquets were also used as a raid troop when it came to attacking an entrenched forest edge, a village or a fortified structure.

The improvement in armament made it possible for an experienced shooter to fire up to two shots per minute. Piquets training camps were set up until 1727 in order to guarantee the required number of capable soldiers. During the Austrian War of Succession , the system of piquets was almost perfected, especially by the Maréchal de Saxe . In the Seven Years' War the tactics were fully developed and proved their worth, among other things, in the fighting in North America, where the inaccessibility of the terrain often did not allow battles like the one at Monongahela to be carried out, but where one relied on the activities of small warfare.

Examples

During the Battle of Lake George in September 1755, Jean-Armand Dieskau commanded two piquets of the grenadiers and several other Franco-American fighters.
Two years later, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm trained five piquets of 50 men each, commanded by François-Médard de Poularies during the siege of Fort William Henry in the winter of 1757 (a piquet grenadiere, a piquet from the Régiment de La Sarre , a piquet the Régiment Royal-Roussillon , a piquet from the Régiment de Languedoc and a piquet from the Régiment de Béarn ). The Piquets fought alongside the Marines, the Canadian militia, and the allied Indian tribes.

literature

Pierre Pouchot: Mémoires sur la dernière guerre de l'Amérique septentrionale. Yverdon 1781 ( limited preview of volume 1 in Google Books ; full text of volume 2 in the Internet Archive ). New, explained and expanded edition: Septentrion, Québec 2003, ISBN 978-2-89448-303-9 , p. 40 ( limited preview in Google book search). Review: Thomas Vienna: Pouchot, Pierre, Mémoires sur la dernière guerre de l'Amérique septentrionale. In: Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française. Volume 58, No. 2, autumn 2004 (PDF; 160 kB).
Infantry au 18 ^ème siècle: la tactique. Chapters I – IV: Piquets et tirailleurs (1715–1753). P. 12.

Individual evidence

^ Ian Castle; Graham Turner (Ill.): Fort William Henry 1755–57: A battle, two sieges and bloody massacre. Osprey Publishing, Oxford 2013, ISBN 978-1-78200-274-1 , p. 42 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).

[1] Ian Castle; Graham Turner (Ill.): Fort William Henry 1755–57: A battle, two sieges and bloody massacre. Osprey Publishing, Oxford 2013, ISBN 978-1-78200-274-1 , p. 42 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).