Impact of Political and Industrial Revolutions 221
followed the peace. Russia, for example, scarcely demobilized at all,
maintaining an army of about 600,000 men ten years after the end of
hostilities against France.^66 Technically improved field artillery also
had become standard in every European army.
But after 1815 it seemed self-evident to those in charge of public
policy that the fierce energy of the French conscripts in 1793–95, and
the nationalistic fervor of some German citizen-soldiers in 1813–14,
could challenge constituted authority as readily as it could confirm and
strengthen it. Like the warheads of Congreve’s rockets, armed man
ifestations of popular will were hard to control. The people in arms
might turn against any ruler so incautious as to summon help from the
depths of society, just as an experimental firing of Congreve’s rockets,
put on for Wellington’s benefit in 1810, had in fact endangered the
men who launched them, thus discrediting the new weapon in the
duke’s eyes forever after.
Not without reason, therefore, Europe’s rulers agreed that further
military experimentation was unwise. Armies and navies, disciplined
and equipped in the style of the Old Regime, were what they wanted
and what they got. If, thereby, they refrained from tapping depths of
national energies that the revolutionary years had unveiled, what
matter, so long as the victors could agree among themselves and keep
the specter of revolutionary disorder at bay?
For a quarter of a century after 1815, therefore, it seemed that Old
Regime patterns of military management had survived the untoward
combination of crowd violence and political idealism that had
triggered the revolution in France. To be sure, the restored Bourbon
kings faced a few sporadic manifestations of political disaffection on
the part of French soldiers. Drab routine and low pay were a poor
substitute for the excitement of a career open to talent that had pre
vailed in Napoleon’s day. But campaigning in Algeria, begun in 1830,
opened a safety valve for such discontents, and thereafter memories of
republican and Napoleonic glories faded fast. In the 1840s an apoliti
cal army, ready to obey constituted public authority, whether royalist,
republican, or Napoleonic, took form on French soil; and with that
- The Russian tsar, in effect, sought to match the British “two power” naval stan
dard by maintaining an army equal in size to the forces of any two other European
powers. To lessen the cost, Alexander resorted to so-called military colonies which put
about a third of his peacetime army on a life-routine close to that of the peasantry. On
the Russian military colonies see Alan Palmer, Alexander: Tsar of War and Peace (New
York, 1974), pp. 344–48.
