(^146) Chapter Five
activities, whether such predators were licensed by public authority as
privateers or enlisted as soldiers, or acted without public legitimation as
highwaymen, brigands, or ordinary urban thieves.
In eastern Europe, as men became more abundant, soldiers became
easier for the Prussian, Russian, and Austrian governments to recruit.
Armies increased in size, especially the Russian; but like the multi
plying villages from whence the soldiers came, such increases in size
did not involve change in structure. In western Europe, however, the
mounting intensity of warfare that set in with the Seven Years War
(1756–63) and rose to a crescendo in the years of the French Revolu
tion and Napoleon (1792–1815) registered the new pressures that
population growth put on older social, economic, and political institu
tions in far more revolutionary fashion. Divine right monarchy went
down, never to be fully resurrected; but Old Regime military institu
tions continued to regulate even the French levée en masse of 1793. As a
result, Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 allowed the victorious powers to
restore a plausible simulacrum of the Old Regime. The traditional
military order did not begin to break up irretrievably until the 1840s,
when new industrial techniques began to affect naval and military
weaponry and organization in radical and fundamental ways. Until that
time, despite the revolutionary aspiration and achievements of the
French and despite technical advances in British manufactures (which
we are also accustomed to call revolutionary) the organization and
equipment of European armed forces remained fundamentally con
servative, even when, as in France after 1792, the command structure
of the army was harnessed to the accomplishment of revolutionary
political purposes.
Yet even if the long-range result can be described as conservative, a
closer examination of the challenges to European military establish
ments between 1700 and 1789 will show how the management of
armed force remained persistently precarious, even when the Old
Regime was apparently most secure. These challenges were of two
sorts. One recurrent challenge arose from geographical expansion of
the territories organized for the support of European-style armed es
tablishments, thereby altering power balances among the European
states. A second kind of challenge stemmed from technical and or
ganizational innovations within the system itself, characteristically pro
voked by failure in war on the part of one or another of the European
great powers. Each of these challenges requires somewhat closer con
sideration, as preface to a discussion of what did and did not happen to
the organization and management of European armed forces during
the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.
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