The pursuit of glory, p.82
The Pursuit of Glory, page 82
At about the same time, Choiseul encouraged his commander in Germany, the marshal de Broglie, to experiment with more flexible troop formations to allow greater speed and mobility. Broglie broke up his army into more manageable columns or divisions, not exceeding sixteen battalions each, reinforced with their own artillery, covered by their own cavalry and preceded by their own light troops. When one of these rapidly moving columns made contact with the enemy, it was expected to hold on until the others could arrive on either flank and intervene as appropriate. This decentralization gave divisional commanders greater opportunity for initiative and allowed quicker redeployment from column into line of battle.
The Austrians and Prussians went to war with revolutionary France in 1792 confident of a quick and easy victory: ‘a promenade to Paris’, as one émigré put it. In the event, twenty-two years were to pass before the allies could hold their victory parade down the Champs Élysées. What had gone wrong? In his treatise On war against the new Franks, published in 1795, a bewildered Archduke Charles asked: ‘How was it possible that a well equipped, balanced, disciplined army had been defeated by an enemy with raw troops, lacking cavalry, and with inexperienced generals?’ His answer at least identified part of the problem: the Austrians had failed, he believed, because they had conducted a defensive war, because they had been too concerned with protecting their lines of communication, and because their use of an extended but thin defensive cordon system had allowed the French to concentrate superior forces at the critical point.
This belief that it was not so much that the French had got it right, rather that the allies had got it wrong, was widespread. It was reassuring but dangerous, because it was an explanation which encouraged a continuing underestimate of revolutionary power and a consequent conviction that tinkering with the old system would be enough to bring eventual victory. The observer who got closest to the truth was rewarded for his insight by repeatedly being passed over for promotion. This was the Hanoverian artillery officer Gerhard Scharnhorst, who also in 1795 published in an obscure military periodical an essay entitled A discussion of the general reasons for the success of the French in the Revolutionary wars. He singled out for special mention the revolutionaries’ intrinsically superior strategic position, which allowed them to operate on interior lines; their superior numbers; their use of light troops; their unified political and military command; their adoption of a coherent, aggressive strategy in the service of national not dynastic interests; their greater speed and energy; their ruthless acceptance of unlimited casualties; and their nihilistic do-or-die, all-or-nothing approach–‘the struggle was indeed too unequal: one side had everything to lose, the other little’. Paradoxically, it was the allies who had done most to mobilize French resources: ‘The terrible position the French found themselves in, surrounded by several armies which sought (or so they believed) to enslave them and condemn to eternal misery, inspired the soldier with courage, induced the citizen to make voluntary sacrifices, gathered supplies for the army and attracted the civilian population to the colours.’ Scharnhorst also appreciated how important a part traditional French pride in their allegedly superior civilization fired their indignant rejection of foreign interference: ‘The French nation has always deemed itself to be the only people which is enlightened, intelligent, free and happy, despising all other nations as uncultured, bestial and wretched.’ More radical was his recognition that a free society could generate more strength because it could call on the enthusiasm of the individual citizen-soldier. So, Scharnhorst concluded, the French victories had been no fluke or a temporary aberration: ‘the reasons for the defeat of the allied powers must be deeply enmeshed in their internal conditions and in those of the French nation’.
This is an attractive and popular notion, especially when applied to the pre-nuclear period, but it cannot be accepted as an explanation for the military success of the French Revolution without some qualification. It was certainly the case that many soldiers did see themselves as citizens in uniform, fighting for the Republic and liberty with a fervour born of ideological conviction. Representative of the rhetoric this inspired were the words of twenty-five-year-old Joachim Murat as he set off for war in 1792: ‘Do not weep, my father, if you learn of my death. Without a doubt, the most glorious sacrifice I could make of my life would be to die with my comrades in the defence of the Republic’; or the comment of an anonymous soldier making light of the loss of an arm: ‘It doesn’t matter. I still have one left for the service of the Republic and the extermination of its enemies.’
The belief that it was revolutionary élan which brought victory seems problematic when one considers the inconsistent pattern of success. The essential characteristics of the citizen-soldier–his commitment to the Revolution, identification with the nation and willing obedience–were constants and therefore should have had constant results. Yet in fact the campaigns of 1792, 1793 and 1794 (and those which followed) were anything but constant, being rather a bewildering zigzag of success and failure and close-run things. The revolutionaries won at Valmy in September 1792 but lost at Neerwinden the following March, won at Jemappes in November 1792 but lost at Mainz the following July, won at Fleurus in June 1794 but lost at Kaiserslautern (three times in 1794). It would be absurd to suppose that when the citizen-soldiers were defeated they were somehow having an off-day and were not feeling very revolutionary. This may seem facetious, but it does show that arguments based on motivation are both impossible to prove and tautological. On the other hand, examination of the battles fought during the 1790s shows that the Austrians and Prussians too were capable of feats of heroism, both individual and collective, which cannot be explained simply in terms of iron discipline making the soldiers fear their officers more than the enemy. Two awful possibilities loom: either that ideological commitment had little to do with fighting effectiveness or that the values of the old regime were just as powerful motivators as the ideals of the Revolution.
This difficult question will never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, if only because it involves motivation. A more concrete, and to my mind more convincing, explanation for the French victory in the west can be found in the numbers of soldiers mobilized by the two sides. The table of major battles during this period, together with the troop strengths of the two sides involved, printed as an appendix to Gunther Rothenberg’s The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon, reveals that whenever the allies were able to assemble even roughly the same number of troops as the French, they won. It seems difficult to avoid the conclusion of Gilbert Bodinier: ‘All the victories achieved by the republican armies were due to their numbers…On every occasion that their numerical superiority was slight…or when they were numerically inferior to the enemy, the French were defeated.’
Yet undoubtedly there was also a qualitative element involved. Nothing distinguished the revolutionary army from its predecessor–and all the other armed forces of Europe, for that matter–than its meritocracy. The declaration of the National Assembly on 28 February 1790 that henceforth ‘every citizen has the right to be admitted to every rank’ began a rapid transformation of the officer corps. Away went the courtiers and the parvenus who had bought their commissions for social prestige. Away went the die-hard supporters of the old regime. Into the positions they vacated came those whose careers had been blighted in the past by the need to be noble–the ‘officers of fortune’, commoners who had won their commissions by exceptional service but remained anchored to the lowest ranks; those confined by lowly birth or lack of funds to such unfashionable branches as the artillery and the engineers; and, above all, the non-commissioned officers. So the armies which conquered western Europe for the Revolution were commanded by men who had acquired their military training under the old regime but had enjoyed rapid promotion after 1789. The great majority (87.3 per cent) of the generals of 1793–4 came from a professional military background, indeed the majority (67 per cent) had completed thirteen years of service or more by 1789. Brigade and battalion commanders enjoyed similar degrees of experience, 86.9 per cent and 73.1 per cent respectively having been professional soldiers at the outbreak of the Revolution. Yet this was also a young army, with more than a third of its colonels under thirty-five years of age and nearly two-thirds under forty-five.
Doing well was not just a question of showing gratitude to the Revolution. It was a matter of life and death. Following the defections of General Lafayette in 1792 and General Dumouriez in 1793, the regime in Paris was hypersensitive to anything which smacked of treason, including failure. No general had been cashiered before 10 August 1792, but 20 had gone by the end of year, 275 in 1793 and 77 in 1794. Mere dismissal was often not thought to be enough. No fewer than seventeen generals were guillotined in 1793 and sixty-seven more in the following year, making the execution of Admiral Byng by the British in 1757 seem positively slack by comparison. Nothing illustrated better the violence of the French Revolution than the fact that its generals were more likely to die at the hands of their own government than as a result of enemy action. Not that the latter was a negligible risk, for the regime was insistent that its generals should lead from the front, with the result that eighty were killed in action during the 1790s. When one also takes into account the generals lynched by their own men (such as Dillon in 1792), one must concede that the revolutionary generals earned every last morsel of the fame and fortune lavished on them.
Young, talented and insecure, the commanders of 1793–4 broke the mould of European warfare. The generals of Louis XIV and Louis XV had pottered around for years in the Low Countries without ever achieving a decisive result. In 1793–4 the names of the fortresses and even of the battlefields were the same, but the attitude was quite different, with the result that the war left ‘the cockpit of Europe’ for more than twenty years, returning only for a brief flurry in 1815. Of all the statistics with which the period bristles, perhaps the most revealing is that which tells us that there were 713 battles between 1792 and 1815, but only 2,659 during the previous three hundred years. This was partly due to the remorseless insistence by the Committee of Public Safety that the armies must attack, attack, attack, until the enemy was totally defeated: ‘shock like lightning and strike like a thunderbolt’ was the pithy instruction of 21 August. The ruthlessness bred by this absolute attitude led the National Convention to decree on 26 May 1794 that no British or Hanoverian prisoners should be taken alive. Fortunately, only one French sea-captain ever obeyed this murderous command and, although he was promoted, his example was not followed.
The naval supremacy established by the British in the course of the eighteenth century, and at an ever-accelerating pace after 1793, was to last until the twentieth century. Yet nothing had seemed less likely in 1783, or even 1793, when there were twelve European states with a good claim to be naval powers: four major powers (Great Britain, France, Spain and Russia), five notable powers (Sweden, Denmark, Naples, the United Provinces and Turkey) and three small but not negligible powers (Portugal, the Knights of St John of Malta and Venice). By 1815 there was one superpower (Great Britain) and–a very long way behind–one secondary power (France). All the others had been eliminated. This shift was all the more remarkable in that France had used her land power to capture the navies of four of these (the United Provinces, Spain, the Knights of St John and Venice). Well might a disconsolate General Bonaparte lament in the wake of the defeat at Aboukir Bay that fate seemed to have decided that Britannia should rule the waves.
Two kinds of shortages fatally handicapped the French naval effort. The first was human. When the Revolutionary Wars began, the population was probably about 28,000,000, whereas the total for England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland was less than half that. As we have seen, by means of strenuous overexertion, the revolutionaries were able to mobilize the largest land army ever seen in Europe, yet they could never repeat this feat for the benefit of the navy. There was a deep structural reason for this, deriving ultimately from the relatively small part played by deep-sea fishing and seaborne commerce in the French economy. This confined the pool of skilled seamen on which a navy might draw in time of war to about 50,000. That was why defeats such as the Glorious First of June (1794) or the Nile (1798) were so serious, for just two such bloody encounters could cost the French navy 10 per cent of its effectives in dead and prisoners of war. By 1802 there were 70,000 French sailors held captive in British prisoners or hulks and 80,000 by 1814. A comparison of French and British losses in the period is revealing.
Table 12. French and British naval casualties during the Revolutionary–Napoleonic Wars
Source: Michael Lewis, A Social History of the Navy 1793–1815 (London, 1960), p. 362
Moreover, with long-range fishing and trade virtually closed down by British command of the high seas, these terrible losses could not be made good. It was a problem exacerbated by a lack of interest and understanding on the part of the Revolution’s legislators, very few of whom had ever seen the sea: two-thirds of the deputies of the revolutionary assemblies came from rural communities with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. This indifference contrasted sharply with attitudes in England, where nothing less than a myth of naval power dated back at least to the wars of Elizabeth I, which had provided a stock of Protestant sea-dog heroes to complement Foxe’s Martyrs. Seen as inseparable from national liberty and commercial prosperity, ‘it made English sea power the ideal expression of the nation in arms’ (Nicholas Rodger).
The other fatal shortage suffered by the French was of materials. The navy ministers of the old regime, notably the marquis de Castries, had not only built an impressive number of warships, they had also stockpiled the huge amounts of timber, cordage and other naval stores necessary to keep a fleet seaworthy. They had done so, however, only with increasing difficulty and only by incurring enormous debts–by 1789 the navy ministry was 400,000,000 livres in debt. The final bankruptcy of the old regime and the collapse of discipline in the naval bases (in large measure due to long and lengthening arrears of pay) led to a serious deterioration in the condition of the stockpiled reserves. When war broke out with Great Britain, it became increasingly difficult to replenish them with supplies from the Baltic and the Black Sea. The brief loss of Toulon was particularly serious in this regard, for the British succeeded in burning almost all the great stocks of naval stores in the arsenal before they evacuated. By 1795 the French shipbuilders had exhausted their stocks of wood suitable for ships of the line and had to switch to building frigates. In 1793 the fleet had consisted of eighty-eight ships of the line and seventy-three frigates; by 1799 there were just forty-nine and fifty-four respectively.
British problems over both men and materials were much less acute. With a maritime base both wider and deeper than its enemies, the Admiralty experienced less difficulty in supplying the navy with skilled seamen. It was helped greatly by the apparently inexhaustible financial resources which allowed attractive bounties to be offered to recruits. Contrary to popular belief, the notorious and dreaded press-gangs were not the only means of filling the ranks. Unlike in France, the Navy had first call on the budget: ‘To its immense good fortune the Navy had enjoyed almost a golden age of public and parliamentary support in the decade preceding 1793’ (Paul Webb). That continued: Parliament voted the necessary funds for 24,000 seamen in 1793–and for 120,000 in 1797. The census of 1801 recorded 135,000 sailors in the Navy and 144,000 in the merchant marine. Moreover, the British took good care to keep their sailors healthy: ‘the great thing in all military service is health’, as Nelson observed. A French visitor to a British frigate after the American War was suitably impressed: ‘it is kept in such scrupulous cleanliness that we were astonished, I saw nothing like it on a frigate in Toulon. They blame the uncleanliness of the French, and say it causes more casualties than the English. They wash the entire ship every day.’ Under the energetic administration of Sir Charles Middleton (comptroller of the Navy from 1778–90), the naval dockyards were characterized by greater efficiency in management, economy in the use of resources and professionalism on the part of the officials–at a time when their French equivalents were being ravaged by pilfering and neglect. Command of the routes to and from the Baltic ensured an uninterrupted supply of naval stores, so the gulf between the size of the British and French navies could only grow.
The qualitative gap also widened. While the Royal Navy enjoyed the priceless advantage of being able to train its crews at sea, the French were confined to exercises inside their blockaded ports. After months at anchor, it was no wonder that skills proved rusty when eventually they had to be applied on the high seas, as was demonstrated by the chaos which often attended the sailing of a fleet from Brest. Of the 12,000 men in Admiral Martin’s squadron, which fled from the British off the Île de Hyéres in July 1795, two-thirds had never even been to sea before. There is also some doubt as to whether the much-vaunted superiority of the French vessels was really as great as some pessimistic British experts believed. As Acerra and Meyer have pointed out, much of the criticism of British boatbuilders reflected the traditional contempt felt for civilian landlubbers by aristocratic naval officers and must be taken with a large pinch of salt. The French ships were certainly sleeker and faster, but there was a price to be paid: they were also less durable, more fragile and could carry fewer guns relative to overall tonnage. Some of them were also simply too big. The three-decker 120-gun Commerce de Marseille, captured at Toulon, greatly impressed Admiralty experts, but it proved to be of little use at sea and was converted into a prison ship in 1796. When conditions were right, a brand-new French ship could go very fast indeed, but at the cost of high building and maintenance costs and a short working life. These were defects greatly exacerbated by the generations of low investment in dockyards.
