Ardant du Picq Charles Jean Jacques Joseph Ardant du Picq ( 19 October 1821 – 18 August 1870 ) was a French Army officer and military theorist of the mid - nineteenth century whose writings , as they were later interpreted by other theorists , had a great effect on French military theory and doctrine . Life and career . Ardant du Picq was born at Périgueux in the Dordogne on 19 October 1821 . On 1 October 1844 , upon graduation from the École spéciale militaire de Saint - Cyr , he was commissioned a sublieutenant in the 67th . As a captain , he saw action in the French expedition to Varna ( April – June 1853 ) during the Crimean War , but he fell ill and was shipped home . Upon recovery , he rejoined his regiment in front of Sevastopol ( September ) . Transferred to the 9th Chasseurs a Pied battalion December 1854 , he was captured during the storming of the central bastion of Sevastopol in September 1855 . He was released in December 1855 and returned to active duty . As a major with the 16th Chasseur Battalion , Ardant du Picq served in Syria from August 1860 to June 1861 during the French intervention to restore order during Maronite - Druze sectarian violence . Like virtually all his peers , he also saw extensive service in Algeria ( 1864 – 66 ) , and in February 1869 was appointed colonel of the 10th Line Infantry Regiment . He was in France at the outbreak of war with Prussia on 15 July 1870 and took command of his regiment , the Tenth Regiment of the Line . He died August 18 , 1870 at the military hospital in Metz , from wounds received at the Battle of Borny - Colombey . " Battle Studies " : du Picq as Military theorist . Background . Although comparatively little is known of his life , Ardant du Picq ' s small corpus of writings has earned him a place in the ranks of great military theorists . Before du Picq began his famous manuscripts , the French military relied heavily upon the writings of former Chief of Staff Baron Antoine - Henri Jomini when it came to warfare . Before his death , du Picq had already published Combat antique ( ancient battle ) , which was later expanded from his manuscripts into the classic Etudes sur les combat : Combat antique et moderne , often referred to by its common English title as Battle Studies . This work was published in part in 1880 posthumously , and the complete text did not appear until 1902 . The difficulties surrounding reform of the French military and its organization were widely discussed and his work referenced , and it was a very popular work among the army during World War I . Inspirations of " Battle Studies " . As a primary inspiration to du Picq , fellow Périgueux native Marshal Thomas Bugeaud was responsible for supporting him in his calculating and objective view of military operations . Bugeaud ' s experiences with Marshal Suchet , a highly regarded former general of Napoleon ' s , left an indelible impression upon the Marshal that were handed down to du Picq . Marshal Bugeaud ' s aide de camp , Louis Jules Trochu , provided another inspiration with his work " L ' Armée Française en 1867 " , in which Trochu emphasized psychological difficulties in warfare . Military theories . His principal interest was in the moral and psychological aspects of battle ; as he himself wrote of the battlefields of his day : " The soldier is unknown often to his closest companions . He loses them in the disorienting smoke and confusion of a battle which he is fighting , so to speak , on his own . Cohesion is no longer ensured by mutual observation . " Nor did Ardant du Picq neglect the decisive importance of modern firepower , noting that it was necessary for the attacker to " employ fire up till the last possible moment ; otherwise , given modern rates of fire , no attack will reach its objective . " Despite these words , much of his work was later used to help justify the doctrine of the " offensive à outrance " , resting somewhat on his statement that " he will win who has the resolution to advance . " What separated du Picq ' s belief from this new idea was that while du Picq accounted for differences in enemy positions and circumstances in the art of maneuver , the " offensive à outrance " made no such distinction , making the offensive victorious no matter how it is employed . This stark difference from du Picq ' s theory was put forward principally by Colonel de Grandmaison . Assessment . In sum , Ardant du Picq was a talented analyst and , had he lived , would have gained a fine reputation as a military historian . His analyses stressed the vital importance , especially in contemporary warfare , of discipline and unit cohesion . Along with Carl von Clausewitz , he was a major influence in France after the defeat of the French army in the Franco - Prussian War , and their attention to psychological and behavioral factors in combat was judged to be supremely important . The moral aspect of warfare that du Picq encouraged was propagated later by the writings of Marshal Ferdinand Foch , in which he also concluded that technological advances could not change the human condition and how men react to warfare .