Comment by Tuna-Fish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tuna-Fish | Hacker News Reader

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The original novel is set in 1625-1628. At that point, firearms are well and truly established, having proven themselves to be the war-winning weapon in the Italian Wars more than a century ago. They are not new and unproven technology; they are the weapon that the great grandparents of the main characters fought and won with.

But they are a symbol of the wrong social class. A musket is something that a peasant or a burgher can use to kill a noble. All the main characters in the three musketeers are nobility, and their social class has suffered greatly from the "democratization" of war. They, like almost everyone like them historically, much prefer the old ways from when they were more pre-eminent, and look down their noses at firearms. They spend very little time at war, and a lot more time duelling and participating in schemes.

The high-tech of the early 17th century wasn't even matchlocks anymore, it was flintlocks. Those took another ~50 or so years to become general issue, but at the time of the novels upper class people who can afford modern weapons wouldn't have been fumbling with matches anymore.

Even though firearms were well and truly established by the 17th Century, blade weapons remained important right on through to the mid-1800s.

Bayonet charges were a major aspect of Napoleonic warfare, and only really went away with the development of firearms that had higher rates of fire and were accurate out to larger ranges. In the Napoleonic era, soldiers would close to within 50-100 meters, fire off a few volleys, and then charge in with the bayonet.

By the time armies were equipped with breech-loading rifles that could fire half a dozen accurate shots a minute at a distance of a few hundred meters, the volume and accuracy of fire made the bayonet charge obsolete. But that was rather late (the 1860s or so).

Bayonet charges were not obsolete, but the killing in war was done by fire.

See, for example: https://journals.gold.ac.uk/index.php/bjmh/article/download/...

By the Napoleonic Wars, something below 10% of casualties were caused by melee weapons. And even that was mostly cavalry, bayonets account for ~2%. The purpose of the bayonet charge was not to kill your enemy, it was to convince your weakened enemy to cede his position after you had already done the killing. The forces rarely fought hand-to-hand and when they did it was notable, usually one side was so weakened and shocked that they fled or refused to charge.

Thanks for the interesting article.

Even though most of the casualties were caused by musket and artillery fire, the bayonet was tactically very important in Napoleonic warfare. A bayonet charge is absolutely terrifying, and the reason why there were relatively few casualties from them is likely because soldiers would break rank and flee in the face of one. If soldiers had stood their ground and fought, casualties would have been much higher, and with their low rate of fire, muskets would have been of little use in hand-to-hand combat.

They key change that happened in the mid-1800s is that firearms finally achieved ranges and rates of fire that made closing with a massed enemy nearly impossible.

I suspect running into grapeshot was a tad more terrifying than a bayonet charge.

Not until they first fire, though.

Charing into a solid wall of pointy bits is something you understand in your gut to be a bad idea.

I dunno, you see the cannons, you probably know what’s coming.

Also it would be pretty hard for officers to make soldiers do bayonet attack if it weren't known they'd probably face little or no resistance. People tend to value their lives.

IIRC, the British Army employed bayonet charges in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s.

https://www.military.com/history/british-soldiers-afghanista...

Bayonets have been used recently in Afghanistan.

I suppose you are right about the history of firearms. However, the novel was written in 1844, more than 200 years after the time in which it is set. Which makes me wonder if the author (Alexandre Dumas) knew and cared about the historic facts.

Dumas was meticulously accurate, not to the world as it historically existed, but to how the French upper classes felt and wrote about. He was extremely well read in people's memoirs and diaries, and wrote his stories set in the world as the French aristocracy imagined it existed.

I believe he got this detail right in both ways; in that firearms were the most important weapons, and also the main characters would have done their very best to ignore that fact.

One thing that always bothered me was his use of currency. In the French original he mentions at least 5-6 types of currency and it seems they all have common sub-divisions, despite some of them being Spanish or even Italian.

Was France using other people's currrncy back then ?

The nation of France as we know it did not exist at that time and there was no standardized currency among the kingdoms that made up the crown. Livres, sous, and deniers were the standard unit of accounting but each major polity produced their own coinage. Kings also sometimes devalued their currencies to help pay for wars so traders preferred to use more stable currencies like Spanish and Dutch coins (Louis XIII did a major devaluation about a decade after the time period of the book, which colored perceptions of the time).

It was very common before nationalism and the standardization of currencies. I read primary sources about conquistadors and the contracts financing and supplying the expedition might involve a dozen currencies because each trader supplying the wood, food, animals, etc would work in their own preferred/local currency.

One niggle: France was mostly made up of duchies, not kingdoms. The King of France had allegiance from some of the duchies making up modern France, but notably Burgundy was the one who captured Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) and turned her over to the English - so clearly not all.

Not sure about the Occitan; IIRC Eleanor was considered a queen in her own right as rule of Aquitaine, not a duchess.

I'm no historian, but back then, coins were literally worth their weight in gold (or silver, copper, bronze, whatever), so it was probably easier to pay with foreign currency than we might assume...

It’s more that there was a standard unit of accounting (livres, sous, and deniers) and everyone could convert from one currency to that standard and back to another currency. It moved a lot slower than modern foreign exchange so except for local fluctuations, it was rather predictable.

> were literally worth their weight in gold (or silver, copper, bronze, whatever), so it was probably easier to pay with foreign currency than we might assume

Are you sure you know what the coin paid you is made of? A merchant of the time wasn’t. Those who care not to be scammed have never found it simple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement

Experienced traders can make a quick estimate of the purity by rubbing it against a touchstone, which has been used since ancient times. And by treating the rubbings with mineral acids you can make even more accurate determinations, although I'm not sure if this was done in the 1620s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchstone_(assaying_tool)

You are discussing absolute certainty, but in practice a box full of Spanish dubloons was very likely to be a treasure trove, and people generally trusted coinage, even if they had doubts. A filed silver penny still often bought a penny's worth of goods.

In practice though, you only have to be as confident as the guy who will eventually sell you something for it.

Everyone used whatever currency was locally availible, with every merchant in border regions being very aware of conversion rates. Throughout history there was also a cronic shortage of smaller-denomination cash, stuff for normal people to buy normal things. Today, we see "clipped" coins as evidence of forgery when in fact much of that was likely related to a lack of loose change. Nobody in town able to break a gold crown? Well, maybe you buy a horse with a slice of gold from that crown.

Clipping and dissecting a coin into smaller pieces for down-conversion are very different things. The piece of eight wasn't haphazardly cut, but instead pre-indented for breaking cleanly.

If you want to buy something worth 6% of a gold coin, whacking off an edge of one is a weird way to do it. You'd need a scale handy.

There had to be other mechanisms, nobody was clipping coins as part of any kind of honest commerce.

For more on this, see the (sadly, hastily researched to some degree) biography of his father, _The Black Count_:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13330922-the-black-count

which arguably served as a template for a famous novel which also features a count in the title.

above all, I believe he cared about getting the next draft ready for each week / before deadline, and then about keeping the cliffhanger suspense high, to keep his fish on their hooks.

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