The surviving administrative documents, correspondence, and memoirs from the reign of Charles IX suggest many different images of the royal army — as an institution, in action, and as a specialized type of human community — images that are reflected through the various historical prisms that have been used to construct the chapters of this book. One such image is the grand review, the public inspection of the army's various contingents ranged for battle, such as Henry II's review of the royal army at Pierrepont in 1557, which was earlier used to portray the army on the eve of the civil wars.

Such staged and orderly events continued to be held, periodically, at important campaign junctures throughout the wars of religion. The units of the army, horse, foot, and artillery were led out of camp and arranged en bataille, that is, each individual contingent according to its tactical fighting formation, and all the units collectively as a continuous battle line of the type into which the leaders planned to deploy them when combat was in the offing. Part ritual, part psychology, part calculated public relations, the reviews also had a practical side. Marching the units to the reviewing ground and ordering them into their tactical formations gave the marshals-of-camp and the sergeant-majors an opportunity to verify visually the army's strength and to study the spatial and temporal dimensions of its full deployment, and sometimes to try out different formations.