Jacques Antoine Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert (1743–1790)
Essai général de tactique, précédé d’un discours sur l’état actuel de la politique et de la science militaire en Europe…
Tome second, Paris: Chez Barrois l’aîné, Libraire pour l’Art militaire, 1802
Acton.d.53.102, Plate XIV

The influence of eighteenth-century Prussian tactics on Guibert’s doctrines is exemplified in his treatment of ‘oblique order’, a method of concentrating the strength of an attacking force on one part of the enemy’s position so as to gain a decisive local advantage which could then be exploited more widely. Guibert identified Frederick the Great as the first modern commander to perform the tactic according to premeditated principles and to adapt it to modern warfare. Although in his correspondence Napoleon wrote disparagingly of Frederick’s use of oblique order as having been limited to parade-ground reviews at Potsdam, he attributed his own victory over the Austrians at Marengo in 1800 to the tactic.