The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

Strains on Europe’s Bureaucratization of Violence 175

Nevertheless, though the development of an efficient field artillery

was certainly significant for the future of European warfare, it re­

mained true that siege guns, fortress guns, and naval guns consumed

far more metal and were numerically far more important than newfan­

gled and, to begin with, quite untested field artillery.^37 Yet here, too,

the French began to probe hitherto established limits on the eve of the

Revolution. The problem, from a French point of view, was that new

and superior techniques for smelting iron developed in Great Britain

during the 1780s. The key change was Henry Cort’s invention in 1783

of what was known as “puddling.” This referred to the possibility of

melting pig iron inside a coke-fired reverberatory furnace that re­

flected heat from its roof in such a way that the iron need not be in

direct contact with the fuel at the bottom. By stirring the molten metal

while it was in the furnace, various contaminants could be vaporized

and thus removed from the iron. Then when the metal had been

allowed to cool to red-hot viscosity, British ironmasters discovered

that they could pass the metal through heavy rollers and thereby

extrude additional impurities by mechanical force while shaping the

metal to any desired thickness by adjusting the space between rollers.

The end product was cheaply made, conveniently shaped wrought

iron that was suitable for use in cannon, as well as for innumerable

other purposes. But it took some twenty years of trial and error (i.e.,

until the first decade of the nineteenth century) to overcome all the

difficulties in designing suitable furnaces and getting rid of damaging

contaminants.^38

Long before then, French entrepreneurs and officials recognized the

potential value of the new method of iron manufacture for armaments

production. By using coke, a relatively cheap and potentially abundant

fuel, costs could be sharply reduced; by using rollers, relatively vast

amounts of iron could be wrought without the expensive hammering

which had previously been necessary. Accordingly, French promoters

hatched a grand scheme for building a smelting plant at Le Creusot in

eastern France, where the latest British technology for coke firing

would be used. This was to be linked by canal and navigable rivers to a

29–36. For details see Jean Baptiste Brunet, L'artillerie française au XVIIIe siècle (Paris,
1906); and for the internal struggle in the army, Chalmin, “La querelle des Bleus et des
Rouges,” pp. 490–505.

37. In 1791 the French held artillery totaled only 1,300 guns according to Gunther
    Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (Bloomington, Ind., 1978),
    p. 122.


38. Charles K. Hyde, Technological Change and the British Iron Industry, 1700– 1870
    (Princeton, 1977), pp. 194–96.