THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (37 page)

Piedmont annexed the Duchies and the Legations and promptly organized a plebiscite, based on universal suffrage, held in March 1860. The Piedmontese king, Victor Emmanuel, took over the new territories by decree. Elections to a single Italian parliament were held in Piedmont-Sardinia, Lombardy, the Duchies, and the Legations. The first task of this legislature was to ratify the annexations to Piedmont as well as those to France. The French annexations of Nice and Savoy had been similarly endorsed by local plebiscites.

The French annexations, however, had enraged the Italian partisan leader Garibaldi (a native of Nice) and other Italian revolutionaries, and he mounted an insurrection in Sicily in April. The success of this insurrection, which was quickly joined by discontented peasants recruited by promises of land reform, prompted Cavour to dispatch officials to prepare plebiscites for annexation in the newly liberated areas. These officials Garibaldi expelled or avoided. When Garibaldi marched on Naples, Cavour planned a pre-emptive coup, but this failed, and Garibaldi entered Naples in September.

Fearful of losing the leadership of the emerging unification movement to Garibaldi's partisans, Piedmont sent forces into the Papal States and defeated a Catholic army at Castelfidardo in mid-September. When Bourbon forces in the south began to gain ground against Garibaldi, the latter called on Piedmont for assistance. This permitted Cavour to announce to the parliament on October 2, 1860, that the revolution was at an end. Sicily and Naples were annexed after a plebiscite by universal suffrage on October 21.

Italian unification was not quite complete. French troops remained in Rome, kept there by conservative pressure on Napoleon III, and it was not until the German victory at Sedan in 1870 that they were finally withdrawn. Nevertheless, without French determination to drive Austria from Italy, unification would not have happened at this time. Whether it was wise of Napoleon III to accomplish this is open to question; by weakening Austria, he removed the strongest check on Prussian ambitions to unify Germany, a development that could only threaten France in the long run. Moreover, France—with the enthusiastic if passive collaboration of the British—had dealt a severe blow to the Vienna system. By relying on a
national insurrection to destroy the forces of a great power, these states had ignored the ominous predictions of Castlereagh about a general war. In so doing, these state-nations, and the society of such states, had begun to give way to the nation-state. There is some evidence that the leadership in these states perhaps believed they had found in the ideology of popular sovereignty and national aspirations a way of preserving their own states from revolt. After 1870 the greatest of the nation-state builders, Bismarck, made clear to all what had happened. As Michael Doyle has insightfully observed:

But in 1860, at the conclusion of the Italian wars, this was not obvious to all observers. The most that could be said was that the rules of the Concert had been tested in the Crimea—an “out-of-area” problem, so to speak, as the Concert did not strictly apply beyond Europe or include the Ottoman Empire—and had been abandoned in the Italian peninsula apparently without the dire consequences of which Castlereagh had warned. The Crimean War alone, however, caused more deaths than any other European conflict between 1815 and 1914. Moreover, within eleven years of the conclusion of the Italian War, three major wars were fought in Europe: the war between Denmark and the German states in 1864; the Austro-Prussian war of 1866; and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. As a consequence a new nation-state was forged and a new society of states eventually came into being, with a new sort of question at the center of every member state: which political system best improved the welfare of the national people?

The construction of the new nation-state of Germany occurred when Prussia was able to conquer and annex the other members of the German federation, excluding Austria. Although it is commonly said, by Kissinger
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among others, that the peace of Vienna lasted until 1914 because no general war broke out until then, the wars by which Germany was unified virtually destroyed the Vienna System and with it the system of consensus as to the legitimacy of the state-nations that were its constituents. German unification was made possible, first, by the reform of the Prussian military that moved Prussia from a territorial state to a state-nation. This was primarily
accomplished under the leadership of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Second, this state-nation was made the political and diplomatic leader of a national movement to unite the German people, ultimately transforming its constitutional basis and its strategic objectives into those of a nation-state. This effort was led by Otto von Bismarck and Helmuth von Moltke.

The transformation of warfare by Napoleon I and the state-nation had been fully appreciated by Prussian analysts, who were well aware that new methods of war and the preparation for war would have a profound social and political impact on Prussian society. The army of Frederick the Great had been a force of professionals isolated from the rest of society, ruled by iron discipline, and led by officers drawn solely from the nobility. To transform this army into that of a state-nation, Prussia undertook universal conscription of a more radical type than had previously been attempted anywhere.

Conscription had been adopted in most of the other countries in Europe as each transformed itself into a state-nation, and put its nation in arms. In every country outside Prussia, however, this amounted to the drafting of the poor because substitutes for service could be hired. In Prussia, however, all groups in the population were required actually to serve. This provided enormous manpower; it made the army into a true citizens' armed force; it made possible the strategic and tactical innovations urged by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and their successor, Moltke. Most importantly, it set up a constitutional conflict between liberal, decentralizing parliamentary elements that wished to maintain the voluntary militia and Prussian royalist military groups that intended to use the new standing army to create a pan-Germany in the image of Prussia.

Helmuth von Moltke, like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, was not a Prussian by birth. His father had been an officer of the king of Denmark.
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Moltke was educated as a Danish cadet, but his experiences at school had been unhappy and his relations with his father were distant, so in 1822 he applied for a commission in the Prussian army. In 1823 he passed the entrance examination to the War College, which was at that time directed by Clausewitz. In 1826 he returned to his regiment but was soon assigned to the Prussian general staff, where he remained for more than sixty years. In order to buy and maintain horses, without which he could not serve on the general staff, Moltke earned money by translating six volumes of Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. Financial need had earlier compelled him to write short novels, and his letters from Turkey, where he had served as a military advisor, are still read as classics of German literature.

With the exception of those few years in Turkey, Moltke never saw action, indeed never commanded a company or any larger unit, until, at the age of sixty-five, he took command of the Prussian armies in the war against Austria in 1866. If it was said of Bismarck that he was a “kind of Minister-President with a uniform hidden under his suit,”
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the very opposite might have been said of the highly reserved and rather sensitive Moltke.

Prussian mobilization for the Italian wars had been a fiasco. In the ensuing years until 1866, Moltke devoted himself entirely to preparations for future military operations and remained aloof from the political scene. In 1860 the Prussian king William I, and the minister of war, von Roon, had proposed a thoroughgoing reorganization of the Prussian military. This plan envisioned increasing the standing army by raising the length of military service from two years to three, while converting the militia to a reserve force, which in turn meant the abolition of those militia-like sections of the armed forces, the territorial army, in which liberal politics had generally prevailed. In May the Prussian parliament agreed to vote additional military credits on the understanding that the government was withdrawing the reorganization plan and would use the money only to strengthen existing units. New units had already been formed, however. Further military credits were then denied; a parliamentary dissolution followed and a new election was held in December 1861. This and another election in May 1862 only reinforced the parliamentary opposition to military reform. In September 1862 Otto von Bismarck was called in by the crown to break the deadlock, a “
konfliktminister
” who, it was assumed, was willing to violate constitutional rules in order to quell the opposition. It was at this time that he made his famous statement directly attacking the prevailing constitutional order in Europe:

He followed this in January by saying menacingly that if the Parliament refused to agree, conflict would follow, and “conflicts become questions of power. He who has the power in his hands goes forward, because the life of the State cannot stand still even for one moment.”
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When new elections in October 1863 strengthened the Opposition in Parliament, Bismarck simply ruled without an approved budget. This period of nonparliamentary rule allowed the army to institute its reforms and, ultimately, to implement its innovative strategy. Holborn concludes:

Prussian innovations in strategy were well designed to serve both these purposes, and indeed could not have succeeded without the new constitutional structure because they depended upon a highly motivated, highly disciplined force of immense size under a central command with spaciously delegated constitutional authority.

The Napoleonic strategic revolution had been carefully studied by all the armies of Europe. As early as 1815 it had become the new dogma, and its imperatives were in part responsible for the development of the state-nation that it called into being. Napoleon Bonaparte had stood the strategic ideas of the eighteenth century on their head. These ideas held that, as territorial gain was the object of warfare and war was prosecuted by expensive, professional armies, battles were to be avoided. Wars became intricate ballets of position, each army maneuvering to force the other from one less favorable territorial position to another, occupying the ceded ground. This was the strategic paradigm of the territorial state. The Napoleonic campaign denied all these principles. Instead of avoiding actual clashes, such campaigns sought battle, and the larger and more destructive the better, because it was by battle that the forces of the enemy could be destroyed. Only this would cause the collapse of morale that would force the enemy government to sue for peace and put that government at the mercy of French terms. It was not territory that Napoleon I sought, but the political and economic resources of the conquered nation, so these could be exploited by the French state. This was the strategic paradigm of the state-nation.

A liturgy of Napoleonic principles soon replaced the study of the campaigns of Frederick the Great. In the widely read writings of the Swiss theoretician Jomini, Napoleon's ideas were reduced to a set of rational rules
and geometric axioms. The Prussian school of strategy, however, drew a different conclusion from Napoleon's campaigns. The most important lesson for the Prussians was the link drawn between the political objectives of war and its strategic prosecution, a connection summed up in the concept of the “moral” element in warfare. Napoleon's Prussian students stressed the role of spontaneity in his decisions and the ineluctable nature of the unpredictable. To these theoretical insights, they added the tactical possibilities opened up by the technology of the Industrial Revolution. This technology included techniques for manufacturing armaments that greatly increased the lethality of fire; the telegraph, which expanded the immediacy and range of communications; and, perhaps most significantly, the railroad, which promised to transform logistics.

In the Italian wars of 1859, a French force of 120,000 reached the theater of operations in eleven days by rail; had they marched, it would have taken two months. Generally it was calculated that troops could be transported by railway six times as fast as the armies of Napoleon I had marched. In addition to the railroad, there was now in place a dense road system that had come into being in the course of the explosive development of European industrial trade. Not only the movement of men, but also their resupply with matériel was affected by the railroad and road network. Forces arrived in good shape; they could be maintained for months on end by their home economies; the injured could be evacuated; home leaves and furloughs became possible, with all the consequences for morale in the field and politics in civil society.
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