"For a long time, one knew in the French Army that the bayonet was an iron stem adapted to a wood handle that one inserted in the gun of the musket. Thus modified, the musket became as inconvenient as the pike, without having any of its advantages. Also, the troops almost never made use of this weapon, which seemed only of use for parade. The invention of Vauban, consists in having substituted a bayonet having a socket that encircles the muzzle of the gun and leaving it free for shooting with the bayonet inserted on the musket. The bayonet immediately did not replace the pike, which during twelve years still appeared in our armament. Operations with the socket bayonet were not generalized and methodically applied until the Siege of Charleroi, in 1693." [View an image of this passage from Michel's book.]

Up to this time, the bayonet was thought of as a defensive weapon. Discovery of the bayonet's offensive potential changed everything.  This discovery turned the bayonet into a decisive arbiter of infantry battles for the next 150 years, when the bayonet's preeminence was finally eclipsed by the Minié rifle during the American Civil War.

It is difficult to pinpoint just when the first bayonet charge took place.  Documentation describing a bayonet charge exists as early as 1677.  However, it appears that it was not until the socket bayonet arrived in the mid-1690s that the bayonet charge became more commonplace.

In volume two of his 1862, Histoire de Louvois and of its Political and Military Administration, French historian Camille Rousset documents a March 18, 1677, letter written by Louvois when the French Army captured the town of Valenciennes. In his letter, Louvois writes:

“The cavalry which closed on the place came to the charge and pushed back our people until under the [city] gate; but the musketeers, having put their bayonets in their rifles, walked to them, and with blows of grenades and blows of bayonets, drove them out of the city. - That is known; the acts here of the primitive bayonet which they inserted in the muzzle of rifle or the musket.” [View image of this passage in Rousset’s book]

In volume four of Histoire de Louvois . . ., Rousset writes of the Battle of Marsaglia, during the Nine Years' War, where infantry were ordered to a bayonet charge on October 4, 1693.  Rousset writes:

"In the evening of October 3, within sight of positions before [Marshall Nicolas] Catinat, Victor-Amadeus [II of Savoy] undoubtedly recognized that he had been tricked and met his match, while waiting for the lesson in art of warfare which was reserved for him the following day. All of the battle [plan] was contained in this order of the Marshal: “The sergeants will have care to do a little halt while entering the plain which is in front of us, to align itself, and will observe not to overflow the line, so that when we battle them all can charge together. They will order, in their brigades, that the battalions put the bayonet at the end of musket and do not fire. All the battalion will go in at the same time to enter the line of the opposing enemy.” Thus was made. Without decreasing the role of cavalry and especially of the gendarmerie in this battle, one can say that this was done, with more of glory still than in Neerwinden and completely in plain, a battle of infantry. “I do not believe, Lord, wrote Catinat to Louis XIV, that there ever was an action where one knew better what the infantry of Your Majesty is capable of.” [View image of this passage in Rousset’s book]

In his 1895 history of early modern warfare, Gustavus Adolphus: A History of the Art of War From Its Revival After The Middle Ages to the End of the Spanish Succession War, with a Detailed Account of the Most Famous Campaigns of the Great Swede . . ., American military historian Theodore Ayrault Dodge writes of an early War of Spanish Succession bayonet charge on November 15, 1703, at the Battle of Speyerbach, (which Dodge mistakenly attributes as being the first bayonet charge):

"The operations on the Rhine, this year, were not important, nor characterized by anything out of the ordinary, except the first bayonet charge on record, not preceded by fire. The Prince of Hesse was advancing on Speyer, at the head of twenty-four thousand men, purposing to relieve Landau, when Field-Marshal Tallard, who had just blockaded the place, went out to meet him with nineteen thousand. As the Prince was crossing the Speyerbach, Tallard's column reached the stream. Seizing the instant, and without waiting to form line of battle, Tallard ployed his marching columns into column of attack, and just as they were, charged in on the enemy with the bayonet. The result was a brilliant victory. . . . . Tallard had won, and concluded his work by the capture of Landau . . . ." [View image of this passage in Dodge’s book]

Realizing the bayonet’s full potential sealed the pike’s fate.  By the middle of the first decade of the 18th Century, use of the pike had been eliminated in all of the major European armies.  In Art de la Guerre, Jacques de Chastenet wrote of the French Army’s abolishment of the pike, early in the War of Spanish Succession:

“When this war started, there was already some regiments which had quit using pikes.  The remainder always had a fifth of the soldiers armed with pikes; but by the winter of 1703–1704, they were entirely given up for muskets shortly afterwards. During this war the officers were armed with spontoons of eight feet length; sergeants of halberds of six feet & half, and all the soldiers with rifles, with bayonets with sockets, to be able to fire with the bayonet at the end of rifle.” [View image of this passage in Chastenet’s book]