Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
Napoleon inherited the strategic problems created by the French Revolution. It is true that a revolution in war had been underway for some time, but it would be a mistake to conclude that the strategic innovations of this era would have occurred quite as they did without Napoleon's leadership, or that the state-nation he brought into being was simply the result of revo-utionary ideology. As the Duke of Wellington put it,
[Napoleon] was the Sovereign of the country as well as the military chief of the army. That country was constituted upon a military basis. All its institutions were framed for the purpose of forming and maintaining its armies with a view to conquest. All the offices and rewards of the State were reserved in the first instance exclusively for the army.
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It is important to understand precisely what strategic innovations Napoleon relied upon, and then to briefly chronicle his experience with them. That will lead us to an understanding of the state-nation form he created.
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The most important of these military innovations was the adoption by the Convention of something approaching universal conscription—the
levée en masse
—which produced an enormous increase in the number of soldiers. This changed the type of soldier available to French commanders, but it also enabled them to fight a different sort of campaign, and to fight more campaigns.
Describing the posture of Austria and Prussia at the outset of the French Revolution, Clausewitz noted that the two countries resorted to the kind of limited war that the previous century had made familiar in Europe. People at first expected to deal only with a seriously weakened French army; but in 1793 a force appeared that beggared all imagination.
Suddenly war again became the business of the people—a people of thirty millions, all of whom considered themselves to be citizens… and consequently the opponents of France faced the utmost peril.
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This political and social change led to far larger armies and thus to important developments in strategy and tactics. After 1800 Napoleon normally fought his campaigns with more than 250,000 troops, in contrast to the 75,000-man armies of the early and middle eighteenth century.
Second, the reform of the artillery arm by Gribeauval
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and du Teil—whose brother was one of Napoleon's patrons and instructors—had created the most efficient and mobile artillery in Europe. Third, the separation of armies into autonomous and self-sufficient divisions that could proceed along several different roads simultaneously gave greater speed and flexibility to strategic movement. Fourth, the use of light skirmishers, who were detached from the line and could be shifted to harass, mask, or exploit, operated to confuse an enemy accustomed to fixed formations in which an encounter implied contact with an element of the main force. Fifth, the change from the line, which had emphasized defensive fire, to the attacking column, which emphasized shock—that is, the change from
l'ordre mince
to
l'ordre profond
—increased the sheer violence of battle as well as making use of less trained soldiers whose enthusiasm could compensate for their understandable reluctance to stand mutely while absorbing fire. The column could deploy large numbers of raw recruits, whereas the firing line required a steadiness and discipline that only highly trained troops could muster. Altogether, there was a “revolution in war” composed of the great increase in the number of soldiers, far larger and more sophisticated administrative services, innovative infantry tactics and technical improvements in artillery that “for the first time made possible the close co-ordination of infantry, cavalry and artillery in all phases of combat.”
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Such armies awaited a commander who could disperse them along many routes, bringing them together at a decisive moment to crush the enemy in one state-shattering battle. Paret has speculated about the effect of these innovations had there been no Napoleon, that is, how they might have been used to create a French territorial state:
All that we know… suggests that had Napoleon been killed before Toulon… France would have ceased or at least slowed its efforts to destroy the European balance of power. Without his insistence on the immense exertions demanded by Europe-wide wars, the government would probably have been content with securing France's “natural” frontiers… Had further wars been waged, [the] Revolution and the transformation of war would still have left France the most powerful country in Europe but a country integrated in the political community, rather than dominating and indeed almost abolishing it.
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This strikes me as exactly right: but for Napoleon, France would have joined the society of territorial states instead of attempting to supplant it. And this speculation is important for our wider study, because it suggests that a revolution in military affairs is not sufficient, without further human agency, to bring a new constitutional order into being.
The French entered warfare in 1792 to defend their Revolution against invading reactionary forces; they continued these wars to spread the gospel of revolution to other states; and finally France pursued war to aggrandize the French state, which was represented as the embodiment of the Revolu-tion. It is usually said that this progression represents a complete shift—from missionary crusade to imperial engorgement—but this fails to appreciate the constitutional outcome of the Revolution, the new state-nation. For such a state, the expansion of the State—the state that represents the nation—is not at all incompatible with popular sovereignty, nor is the state-nation's subjection of other states, either as satellites or as colonies. All energies are bent to the triumph of the state as apotheosis of the nation, and thus the champion of the people.
That the armies of France, which had once been welcomed by nationalists in Germany and elsewhere, were to become the target of local patriotic hostility tends to obscure this point, but that is only because we see this from the perspective of the nation-state and of national liberation movements. The nationalism of the state-nation, which created the imperial state, focused the will of the nation in serving the state, building in a kind of paradox at the inception: the great state-nations existed to promote liberty and equality, constitutionalism, and the rule of law; and yet in order to aggrandize the State, which was the deliverer of national identity and political liberty, other nations were subjugated and alien institutions superimposed upon them.
Napoleon transformed strategy on the basis of two strategic insights that he ultimately also used to create a new constitutional vision of the State. The first of these insights had been prefigured by du Teil, who, in his work
De l'usage de l'artillerie nouvelle dans la guerre de campagne
(1778), had argued that concepts familiar in siege warfare could be employed on the battlefield, especially the way in which artillery fire could be concentrated to exploit a breach in the enemy's line of battle. Napoleon expanded this idea to an entire battle, and then, in his greatest innovation, to the enemy state itself. “Strategic plans are like sieges,” he wrote; “concentrate your fire against a single point. Once the breach is made, the balance is shattered and all the rest becomes useless.” Napoleon argued for the greatest concentration of force possible at a single point because this compelled the other side to give battle with armies sufficiently strong that their destruction would mean
political
collapse, threatening the very State itself. His strategy called for deep salients into enemy territory with large numbers of French troops. These penetrating maneuvers were managed by bringing autonomous divisions along many differ-ent routes to converge at a single point. As Sir Michael Howard has vividly described it,
[t]his decisive concentration arose from an initial dispersal of forces, a deployment so wide that it was impossible to discern in advance where Napoleon intended to strike. In 1805 these corps were quartered all over western Europe—northern France, the Netherlands, Hanover—and were brought together with perfect timing to surround the Austrian army at Ulm. Then they dispersed, to converge on the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz. The following year they advanced northward, spread out like beaters, to destroy the Prussians at Jena.
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Because they were autonomous and relatively smaller, these corps could be expected to live off the land, and travel on roads that could not otherwise accommodate armies of the size that would achieve Napoleon's goal.
The result was a new mobility, which made possible the concentration of superior force at the decisive point. Against a greater enemy force, Napoleon sought the point at which their forces were divided. Typically, in the coalitions of territorial states, it was a point between different national forces—and defeated each in detail, as happened in Italy in 1796 and almost again at Waterloo. Against an inferior force, Napoleon sought the point at which the enemy's communications were most vulnerable, so that either the opposing commander was forced to fight at a disadvantage or capitulate, as happened at Ulm in 1805.
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Napoleon himself, like all great innovators perhaps, doesn't seem to have appreciated the strategic and political reasons why the armies of the territorial states had ever bothered to use the old tactics before he arrived to teach them new ones. In exile, Napoleon criticized the dispersal of forces
by a French general in the 1799 campaign as a vicious habit that made it impossible to achieve important results. “But that was the fashion in those days,” he said sarcastically, “always to fight in little packets.”
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Fighting with much smaller armies within a system that permitted only minor gains and penalized risk, the territorial state performed according to a completely different strategic agenda. Napoleon freed French strategy from these restraints by adopting a different constitutional role for the French state that shattered the system that had imposed these restraints in the first place. This set the stage for Napoleon's second insight.
The strategic aim of preserving a balance of power, which is associated with the society of territorial states, reflected a quite different underlying political culture from one that sought collective security. Although we often think of maintaining the balance of power in a negative sense— states coalescing to defeat any attempt at hegemony—it also has an aspect of adjustment, in that whenever a member state is enlarged by gain, the others are given compensation to maintain the balance. This was the case, for example, in the partitions of Poland in 1772 and 1793. Thus the system is relatively tolerant of violence, so long as it is limited both as to means and ends. A collective security system, by contrast, is wholly intolerant of interstate violence and calls on all members to check an attack from any source. It is perfectly conceivable that the latter should have developed after the continental struggles to contain Charles V, and later Louis XIV, but this did not happen, partly no doubt because the leader of the coalition against the hegemony of the Habsburgs then became the state that drove for hegemony itself, and partly because the new society of states in Europe was still too fragile to evoke so strong a collective commitment from its members. Yet only such a system could have contained a state-nation of such dynamism as France under Napoleon's leadership.
In Napoleon history found an extremely aggressive and warlike personality mixed with an extraordinary talent for improvisation. He did not “regard war as an emergency measure, a measure of the last resort with which to repair the failures of diplomacy; instead it was the central element of his foreign policy.”
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He was thus able to turn the system he found in Europe against itself by playing on the competition among states inherent in the territorial system. Paret describes this well:
Nowhere was Napoleon's integration of diplomacy and violence more effective than in the manner in which he pursued the traditional goal of politically isolating a prospective opponent…. In December of [1805,] having seduced Prussia into neutrality, he defeated the Austrians and Russians. In 1806, England and Russia watched as the Prussian army was destroyed. The following spring he defeated the Prussian remnants and their Russian allies while Austria was still arming; and in 1809 Austria was once more defeated while potential supporters were still debating whether to come to its aid.
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Of course such a strategy depended on Napoleon first establishing his credibility—that he could, and would, actually put at risk stakes of his own such that battle would be on a scale and of such a ferocity as would jeopardize the survival of the state—and second, on molding a state that would permit such vast investments as to make these threats credible (as no territorial state could do).
There is a story told of the young Napoleon Bonaparte that is instructive in this respect. While a lieutenant in the artillery, he was present at the siege of Toulon, which he visited during a furlough. This city, then the center of resistance to the Revolution, sits at the midpoint of a bay forming a natural harbor and partly enclosed by heights at the harbor entrance. Napoleon is alleged to have advised the besieging revolutionary commander to move his artillery batteries from their position overlooking the city to the distant point that commanded the entrance to the bay. When this apparently counterintuitive advice—moving the besieging artillery beyond a range where it could shell the city—was taken, it had the effect of creating anxiety in the commander of the British fleet that lay in the harbor. He feared that French guns might cut off his means of exit. Accordingly he withdrew the fleet to a point beyond the mouth of the bay. When the British ships withdrew, however, morale among the citizens of Toulon collapsed, for they too had counted on an escape by sea should that prove necessary, and the city quickly surrendered. The remark attributed to Napoleon, as he pointed on the map to the remote edge of the harbor precipice, is “
There
lies Toulon.”
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