[6] Like his brothers, Folard was educated by the Jesuits but ran away to join the French Royal Army at the age of 16, an action allegedly inspired by reading Caesar's "Commentaries".

[9] The campaign largely consisted of siege and positional warfare, which allowed Folard to display his engineering skills, and by the end of 1704 he was acting as technical advisor to the Grand Prior.

[17] Sponsored by Georg Heinrich von Görtz, in 1716 he entered the service of Charles XII of Sweden, then engaged in the latter stages of the Great Northern War, and whom Folard considered the most talented general of his time.

[18] While in Stockholm, he set out his tactical ideas in the form of a commentary on the works of the Greek historian Polybius; he left Sweden on the grounds of ill-health in November 1717 and was shipwrecked on the voyage home, losing all his papers and baggage.

Declared heretical by the Catholic church and viewed with suspicion by the French state, his biographer suggests Folard's involvement was driven not by depth of religious feeling but antipathy towards Cardinal de Fleury, the government chief minister who was a leading opponent of Jansenism and had rejected his pleas for an increased pension.

[26] Maurice de Saxe, often quoted as a supporter, respected his opinions but strongly criticised many of his conclusions,[1] while Frederick the Great argued his work contained some good ideas, but overall consisted of "diamonds buried in a dung heap".

[27] [a] Folard's system contained two key elements, the first being a preference for columns or Ordre profond rather than line formations, which he argued were too thin and unwieldy to be effective in offence and lacked solidity in defence.

Based on an analysis of Greek battles as described by Polybius and the use of the Phalanx by generals like Epaminondas, he claimed a deep mass of troops allowed sufficient shock to attack and break enemy lines while also providing defensive stability.

Although easier and faster to manoeuvre than line formations, once in motion columns proved almost impossible to control, particularly if repulsed, a criticism Folard sidestepped by claiming their attacks never failed.

[31] Nevertheless, although his specific system was generally dismissed, his ideas and concepts retained considerable influence and gained renewed attention in the debate over tactics that followed French defeat in the 1756 to 1763 Seven Years' War,[32] with François-Jean de Mesnil-Durand (1736–1799) being a leading advocate of his theories.

[33] His belief that the bayonet charge was particularly suited to the French "offensive spirit" resurfaced immediately before World War I in the tactics advocated by Louis Loyzeau de Grandmaison.

[34] Widely accepted, these formed the basis of Plan XVII, the French masterplan for the beginning of the war which led to enormous casualties when faced with the reality of machine guns and modern artillery.