Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), commonly known as Marshal Vauban, was Louis XIV’s fortifications commissioner. He systematised military architecture as science of vision control, designing fortresses as sophisticated instruments for seeing whilst remaining unseen.
Vauban’s repetitive inspection journeys across France created proto-cinematic vision. The kingdom paraded before his inspection like unwinding film. His statistical thinking about populations and territories prefigured how cinema and administrative power would later operate through aggregating mass phenomena.
Related: camera-obscura-military, logistics-of-perception, Paul-Virilio