The Napoleonic Wars: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra
""‘What was it about the French military that made it able to defeat so many European rivals?’
‘Well, first of all, the armies of the French Revolution Napoleon inherited a wealth of a really innovative ideas from French Ancien Régime military reformers, old regime military reformers and theorists, about for example, artillery, the use of artillery, the the movement of infantry, infantry tactics on the battlefield, about mobilizing the resources of a country, and so on, the use of skirmishers, logistics, all these things and a lot of these ideas came in response to the catastrophic defeat that France suffered during the Seven Years War, which ended in 1763… the Revolution gave the French military the opportunity, and gave the revolutionaries themselves the opportunity to actually completely overhaul the army, and to introduce these ideas with a vengeance.
And one of the most important of these was the idea of the Citizen Army, if you like, the idea of the nation in arms, the idea that every citizen should be a soldier, and every soldier, a citizen. And in 1793 this was imposed, or if you like, inflicted on French society with something called the levée en masse, the mass levy, which was the mobilization not only of all men into the French army, those who could fight, but also the mobilization of French society itself for the war effort. That carried a great deal of cost, and it came during the Terror and that's how it was achieved was through terror. But Napoleon inherits this mass mobilization, and he inherited a system of conscription which dated to 1798, which was incredibly, I would say hideously effective. Every year, people were recruited drawn into the army, they're called classes each year.
And the more wasteful of human life that his campaigns became, and they became increasingly wasteful as the Napoleonic Wars ground on one after the other. He would call up earlier, earlier classes and younger and younger soldiers so that as he began to lose his seasoned veterans, as they began to die, you know, get too old even, that you ended up having much, an army which was much less well trained, like much less experienced, and so his battles became, the carnage increased. He began, they became real slogging matches, I mean, absolutely hideous.
The other reason was logistics and organization. The French Revolution experimented with creating, breaking armies down into self sustaining units, which included artillery, cavalry, and infantry, which could sustain an engagement on the road for some time, while the rest of the army converged on the point of contact with the enemy. Napoleon enlarged this and made this really big, with his core system, each of them commanded by a marshal. That allowed them to move across the countryside, the massive theatre, campaign theatre, keeping in touch with each other, which also depended on very good communications with staff officers carrying dispatches. So that when a corps met the main body of the enemy army, it could sustain a battle in theory for 24 hours by its own, while the rest of the Corps converged on that point, relieved it, and then hopefully, from the French point of view, defeated that army. So, and this this organization, the army also allowed the French army to rely less on supply trains and supply depots, which was the Ancien Régime way, the old regime way and to live off the land. The problem of living off the land was while it allowed you to move fast, and to move in this dispersed way. What it also did was it also provoked a great deal of hatred and a great deal of resistance. And so there was a cost to the way Napoleon waged war, but in terms of actually defeating enemies, your opponents, it was very, very effective...
What was different perhaps was the way in which the existing technology was used, whether it was musketry, artillery, and so on and so forth, and used on the battlefield on a much larger scale in a much more standardized way and in a much more flexible way. And I think that's what also makes the French so formidable as adversaries, at least in the earlier part of the wars...
[On 1812 and the Russians pushing on past their borders] The crucial thing about the unraveling of the Empire, the rolling back of the Napoleonic presence in Europe, was that the French, both the armies of the French Revolution, but also the armies of Napoleon, all began to rely quite heavily on recruiting allied forces, whether it's the sister republics in the armies of the French Revolution, or whether it's the satellite states and annexed annexed annexed parts of Europe, in the case of Napoleon. And by losing this territory, he lost those sources of manpower and those sources of taxation. So increasingly, more and more of the burden of fighting the war was placed on France itself. And Napoleon's fatal miscalculation was that, ah I can, you know, I can't make peace with with Europe unless I win, because if I, if I don't win, I will somehow be overthrown in France. And there's maybe some truth in that, but what we know from prief, the reports of his prefects, were his boots on the ground, and France itself, is that most French people just wanted peace’...
‘Who was the better general Wellington or Napoleon?’...
‘They were probably evenly matched. Both were good at logistics, which is absolutely key in any war. Both were excellent strategists and tacticians. For me, Wellington has the edge in one sense, because he was I'm sure he was less likely to sacrifice men lives on the scale that Napoleon did, especially towards the end. I find it very hard to imagine Wellington saying something like Napoleon said, which was, after that carnage at the Battle of yellow in in 1807, that nevermind, one night in Paris will replace this. In other words, one night of further human reproduction and I can get more soldiers. I can't imagine Wellington saying that. And Napoleon probably has the edge in the sense or in another sense in that he probably inspired more personal devotion amongst his men, especially his old guard, especially, you know, the people who, who, who who'd fought along with him for quite a long time.
I think where Wellington was actually vastly superior to Napoleon was less perhaps on the battlefield than as a diplomat. I've already kind of intimated that Napoleon tended to impose truly draconian punitive treaties on his defeated allies. And this actually has, creates a backlash, ultimately, it doesn't actually win the peace. It doesn't, you know, it creates resentment. It means that there are people out for revenge and all that and want to want to resurge. Wellington actually was one of the negotiator, British negotiators in Congress of Vienna. And, you know, the Congress of Vienna had its faults, you know, it wasn't liberal, it doesn't create a liberal European order. It doesn't make Europe safe for democracy, or for constitutional reform or national sovereignty or anything like that. What it did do though was maintain the general European peace for a very long time. One of the reasons it did that was not just Wellington but also Tsar Alexander I understood that if you create the conditions in which France is permanently punished, and crushed and humiliated, the harsh peace imposed on France wouldn't last. You know, the French would find ways for revenge. And to come out of this, and the main treaty was the Treaty of Paris. But Vienna created the kind of wider security architecture and Wellington I think understood this.’...
‘What were the lasting ramifications of the Napoleonic Wars?’
‘Lots. First of all, I said it earlier that Napoleon wasn't Hitler. While a lot of European states you know, when the monarchies came back, and all that, after Napoleon was defeated, did undo everything the French had introduced. Not all states did, and some then backpedaled on that and one of the most important legacies for some parts of Europe such as Belgium, the Rhineland in Western Germany. And Northern Italy as well, was the Civil Code, the Napoleonic Code, where it was allowed, where the French regime was allowed to put down roots. So not like in places like Spain, where it was just all hell broke loose for the French there. It was allowed to put down roots, the Civil Code in particular and the Concordat, the religious pluralism allowed in the Concordat, the agreement with the Catholic Church, where they were put down roots, that you had a fairly liberal, legal system, a system of laws that were actually fairly popular, at least amongst the middle classes. So that's one of the kind of strange legacies of this otherwise horrible conflict. But the question is, was this worth the cost? Absolutely not. I don't think it was. But but you know, that's one of the legacies.
You get the breaking of empires, especially the Spanish, you get the making of others, especially the British who ended up being the dominant maritime and commercial and imperial power in the world. The emergence of Russia as today, we would call it a superpower, the two great hegemonic powers, either end of Europe, in 1815, were the British and the Russians, this was a new strategic reality here. And the key thing was is from that point on, although the French and the British often came very close to conflict, throughout the 19th century, you know, right up to the 1900s, they never quite did so. And this is because both the French and the British understood that the new strategic reality had emerged. Russia was now perhaps more of a greater threat to their strategic interest than vice versa. And the Russians felt the same way about Britain and France.
What you also get is domestically, a lot of European states, including Britain, is demands for greater citizenship. In response to Alice's question, you know, I said that women mobilized for the war effort. But that also allowed a lot of women to start thinking in terms of greater access to citizenship, not necessarily the right to vote, but greater legal rights, and so on and so forth. A lot of more working class people who had sacrificed so much in the war began to think in terms of, well, what's our due? What is this new political order, where we're getting, we're getting having defeated Napoleon, the tyranny of Napoleon, if you like, and a lot of governments themselves have promised constitutions. The Prussian king, in order to mobilize his population has said, I promise you that at the end of the war, you'll get a constitution. He didn't deliver on that promise. And of course, that leaves a lot of festering resentment, you know, what was the sacrifice all for? In Britain, you know, you get revival of the radical movement demanding parliamentary reform, so widening of the suffrage. In Spain, you have a let-, a constitutional legacy, the the parliament, the Cortes of Cádiz passed a constitution, quite a radical constitution in 1812. And that became a liberal blueprint for liberal movements, not just in Spain, but for other parts of Europe. So there's constitutional legacy as well.
But I think the most important thing now is historical memory. And people still remember, you might remember the the commemorations of Waterloo which is an important aspect of British identity. But other European countries can look to their own conflicts. Russia, the Patriotic War of 1812 against Napoleon was evoked by Stalin when he confronted the Nazi invasion and and the Soviets when they confronted the Nazi invasion in 1941. The war of liberation in Germany in 1813, where the iconic battle is Leipzig, the Battle of Nations, a great defeat for the French, where they, not just fought by Germans, the Prussians and Austrians and others but but by others, but for 1813. The battle of Leipzig is a key moment. For Spain is the constitution of 1812. And the Cortes of Cádiz, is the resistance to the French you know the symbol of the guerilla. Now, which is a bit of a myth, to some extent, as a lot of research by for example, Charles Eastdale, has shown. So this but also leaves a legacy of political symbols. Some modern day flags, the flag of Germany, the the the the black, red, gold came from the insignia of a volunteer militia, whose support who fought against Napoleon and they were kind of liberal intelligentsia. The flag of Italy, the tricolor, was given, was created by Napoleon when he created the Cispadane Republic in the 1790s’"
