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

Impact of Political and Industrial Revolutions 215

after Napoleon s defeat in Russia. For however unpopular British

financial and commercial superiority became among the peoples of the

European continent, it was resented far less sharply than French mili­

tary superiority and economic exploitation were by those compelled

to support and obey French armies of occupation. When British sub­

sidies and British arms became available to supply shortfalls in the

equipment of Prussian, Russian, and Austrian armies in 1813, there­

fore, the material means and the will to overthrow Napoleon came

together. The combination proved overwhelming. Napoleon’s pre­

fects performed prodigies in raising new armies to meet the enemy,

and the emperors battles and maneuvers against the advancing allied

forces have won the admiration of military historians. But French re­

sources were inadequate and much of the élan of the first revolutionary

days had long since evaporated from the army and from French civil

society as well. Once Napoleon was out of the way, therefore, a nego­

tiated peace, in which traditional calculations of balance of power

played the decisive role, proved possible, and France was able to rejoin

the concert of Europe in a remarkably short time.

Postwar Settlement, 1815–40

Yet the marks of the revolution could not be erased from the face of
Europe, and even the most reactionary of the restored regimes
scarcely made the attempt. In military matters, changes pregnant for
the future concentrated chiefly in Prussia. The British and Russian
armies remained entirely of the Old Regime, despite the wartime
increases in their size. Elsewhere, the effort of rulers and aristocrats to
summon the people to arms against the French was very much muted
by traditional social hierarchies and residual distrust between noble
and commoner, rich and poor, ruler and subject. Austrian action
against the French was qualified by the fact that Napoleon was, after
all, the emperor’s son-in-law; and after 1812, Prince Klemens von
Metternich, the architect of Hapsburg foreign policy, recognized that
if France were eliminated as a military power, the Russian tsar would
be able to dominate all of the continent, eclipsing Hapsburg preten­
sions to primacy within Latin Christendom and undermining Austria’s
headship of the Germanies by throwing tidbits to his Prussian jackal.
Metternich’s style of diplomacy and war thus conformed to Old Re­
gime standards as completely as the British and Russian armies did.
But in Prussia, the very unexpectedness and completeness of the
military collapse in 1806 opened the way for energetic reform of