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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 8303939" data-attributes="member: 6796468">The Battle of Fontenoy was the first major engagement to use the 3-rank square you're referring to because the English had both Bayonets and Paper Cartridges to allow them to reload faster than their 5-rank, less trained, no-cartridge French adversaries. Which is cool for a 1745 military engagement that ended with the British running screaming at the French and using Bayonets to break their ranks and chase them from the field.The French Revolution happened 44 years later and this may be a shock but NOT EVERYONE HAD MUSKETS. Particularly the unemployed economically depressed revolutionaries who fought against their "Social Betters" in the Revolution. Most of them had old swords and spears or occasionally pistols when they stormed the Bastille and battled soldiers in the streets.<img src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3d/ef/27/3def275a9f387398325b9b957989c1f5.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />Look at all those Civilians with Pikes and some with Axes. Okay, they're not "Traditional" pikes from pike-squares of Swiss from the 850s, but you can blame Gustavus Adolphus of what is now Germany for changing naughty word up for Shorter Spears and Lighter Muskets in 1631.The Improvisational combat methods of the citizenry, using what they had and half-remembered descriptions of winning tactics in historical battles lead to victory. Their version of the Pike Square was particularly useful in the more crowded streets of Paris. That is to say a massive mob of people moving through the streets with pikes pointed ahead of them or turning down alleyways, again, with pikes pointed ahead, eventually running over and down any soldier dumb enough to stay and reload.[MEDIA=youtube]y_PrZ-J7D3k[/MEDIA]Yeah, it wasn't the drilled and regimented version, certainly wasn't the one used on the battlefield by the Swiss. But the formation allowed them to fight a better armed force and ultimately win.'Cause remember. I'm not referring to the big battlefield affairs of the Revolutionary Wars reaching from 1792-1802. I'm talking about the fighting in the streets of Paris during the storming of the Bastille and the 6 weeks of Head-rolling in 1793.That showed that a group of people pissed off enough can walk over the twitching and bloody bodies of their compatriots and neighbors to attack their greater enemy! Which, honestly, is what Napoleon needed more than anything.So big armies to protect his canons which did the majority of the -actual- work of laying waste to his enemies, firing bullets and closing ranks with bayonets high against anyone dumb enough to try and get to his cannons.</blockquote>

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