French Infantry
During the wars of Louis XIV., in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the development of Infantry was advanced by the reduction of the number of pikes to one-third of the Battalion, and then to a quarter and a fifth, till at last they were only found in a central group in each Company, so small as to be called a Picquet, or “little body of pikes,” whence the word Picket, meaning the Support of the Outposts, probably because the musketeers furnished the sentries and the pikes the Support.
The pike was replaced in France about 1670 by the bayonet, named after the city of Bayonne, and probably suggested by the habit of the Basques of fixing the wooden handles of their long knives into the muzzles of their guns when smuggling in the Pyrenees. As the musket could not be fired with the bayonet fixed, its use was inconvenient, till the idea occurred about 1700 of attaching it by a ring clasping the muzzle. The British Army adopted the bayonet by 1688. The musketeer had become virtually a pikeman too. The pike, now unnecessary, was abolished in all armies about 1700, but in England it survived for a century in the spontoon, a short pike carried by junior Officers, just as the halberd had survived for Sergeants.
In the French Army, under Louis XIV., we find the Brigade an important unit in the organization of Infantry. Colonels were selected for this Command, which gave an opportunity for promoting the best men, without infringing the vested right of the Colonel to his own Regiment.
One of the early Brigadiers so selected was the famous Martinet, whose discipline has become proverbial. He was Colonel of the Model Regiment formed in 1668, and afterwards Inspector-General of Infantry.