Topic summary
Staff corps
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Staff (military).
France
Despite a short lived permanent staff under St-Cyr (1783–90), the French reverted to the old system in 1790, when the Revolutionary Government abolished the staff corps. When GeneralLouis Alexandre Berthier was appointed Chief of Staff to the FrenchArmy of Italy in 1795, his was the old administrative role, accurately described by Jomini and Vachee as "the chief clerk" and "of limited competence". His manual is merely a reporting system as a kind of office manual. Staff officers were rotated out of the line on the Austrian model, but received no training and merely became efficient in the administrative tasks, especially the rapid issuance of orders. It suited Napoleon Bonaparte from the moment he took over the army the following year and he would use Berthier's system throughout his wars. Crucially, Napoleon remained his own intelligence chief and operational planner, a workload which, ultimately, not even he could cope with.