Strains on Europe 's Bureaucratization of Violence 161were all connected with and sustained by a fourth limit: the sociologi
cal and psychological restraints that went along with the professional
ization of warfare. As a handful of sovereign rulers monopolized orga
nized violence and bureaucratized its management in Europe, war
became, as never before, the sport of kings. Since the sport had to be
paid for by taxation, it seemed wise to leave the productive, taxpaying
classes undisturbed. Peasants were needed to produce the food, and
townsmen were needed to provide the money that supported gov
ernments and their armed establishments. For soldiers to interfere
with their activities was to endanger the goose that laid the golden
eggs. Yet the exclusion of the great majority of the population from
any but a passive, taxpaying role set a ceiling upon the scale and
intensity of war which the French Revolution was destined to discard.
Long before that breakthrough, however, inventions of scores of
experts and technicians had prepared the way for the revolutionary
expansion in the scale of warfare. Such efforts got seriously undemay
whenever a great power met with unexpected failure in war. Thus, for
example, their lack of success first against the Turks (1736–39) and
then against the Prussians and French in the War of the Austrian
Succession (1740–48) led Austrian authorities to develop more
mobile and accurate field guns than had been known before.^17 The
improved Hapsburg artillery gave the Prussians a nasty surprise in the
Seven Years War; but after its conclusion the state that had most to
regret was France, whose former primacy on the battlefield had been
called into question by defeats at the hands of both the Prussian
(Rossbach, 1757) and English-German armies (Minden, 1759). Not
surprisingly, therefore, France became the most important seat of
military experimentation and technical innovation in the decades that
intervened between the Peace of Paris in 1763 and the outbreak of the
French Revolution in 1789.
Innovation, whether among the Austrians, French, or British (espe
cially after their defeat in 1783), pressed hard against each of the limits
to the management of war mentioned above. Thus, for example, the
limits of command based on coup d’oeil and mounted reconnaisance
were slowly overcome by the development of accurate mapping,
changes in command organization, and resort to written orders pre
pared in advance by specially trained staff officers. The French began
to compile the first accurately surveyed small-scale maps suitable for
staff use in 1750, but it took many years before all of Europe was
- I have been unable to find a copy of A. Dolleczeck, Geschichte der österreichischen
Artillerie (Vienna, 1887) for details.