Firearms and subjects. The military power

Abstract

The article intends to study the military organizations charged with rendering free services and to which all subjects able to bear arms were compulsorily engaged: the ordinance and auxiliary armies. Our aim is to demonstrate that the importance of such military organizations throughout the second half of the eighteenth century was due not only to their function of defense and maintenance of territorial possession, but also to their role and the relevance assumed in its symbolic potential to express and represent a social order they were intent on building.