164 Chapter Five
be sure, state control and direction was far more pervasive on the
Continent than in Great Britain;^22 but even when relatively short
term economic returns were what governed private as well as official
action, transport improvements always had the further effect of
facilitating military supply. Without such improvements, and without
technical advances in road building which made possible relatively
cheap construction of roads that were passable for wheeled vehicles
even in wet and rainy weather,^23 the scale of armed enterprise the
French revolutionaries inaugurated would have been impossible.
The armies of the French Republic were also heirs of tactical and
technical advances that had been worked out in the French army after
- Professional pride had been badly stung by the failures and
defeats of the Seven Years War. Resistance to innovation was dimin
ished by a pervasive sense that something had to be done to regain the
lead France had once enjoyed over Prussia on land and over Great
Britain on the seas. But reforms inaugurated by one minister of war
created a party of aggrieved officers who sought redress each time a
new minister took office. Since no one could well defend a status quo
which had led to failure in the Seven Years War, the rival parties
instead espoused rival reforms, thus generating heated debate about
tactics and army administration.
Far-reaching changes occurred rather rapidly under these circum
stances. Recruitment ceased to be a responsibility of captains; instead,
the king’s recruiters enlisted soldiers for fixed terms of service with
fixed pay and perquisites. Purchase of commissions was phased out;
and the rules for promotion were made public and uniform. Regi
ments were made to conform to identical tables of organization; and,
as we saw, the army was reorganized into divisions. Principles of bu
reaucratic rationality, in other words, came to assert their dominion
- Baron Vom Stein as a relatively junior Prussian official canalized the Ruhr River,
for example, in the hope of expanding coal production. Cf. W. O. Henderson, The State
and the Industrial Revolution in Prussia, 1740–1870 (Liverpool, 1958), pp. 20–41.
- By using crushed stones of different sizes to form three distinct layers, a French
engineer named Pierre Trésaguet developed a relatively cheap way to build an all-
weather road. His methods were widely used in France after 1764; other European
countries followed suit as far east as Russia, where a road between Moscow and St.
Petersburg was built on Trésaguet’s principles. In Great Britain John Loudon McAdam
became interested in the problems of road building in the 1790s and developed a very
similar method for making durable road surfaces. McAdam used only one size of
crushed rock, thus simplifying procedures. Cf. Gosta E. Sandstrôm, Man the Builder
(New York, 19^7 0), pp. 200–201; Roy Devereux, The Colossus of Roads: A Life of John
Loudon McAdam (New York, 1936).
