244 Chapter Seven
pitched battles, though not without heavy losses. In the political reor
ganization that followed, all of Italy except Venetia and the Papal
States united with Piedmont to form the kingdom of Italy.
The War of 1859 was less important in itself than for the lessons the
participants drew from it. Austrian troops had been partially re
equipped with new, muzzle-loading rifles, yet the French attacked in
columns and broke the Austrian line. This seemed to prove that well-
drilled troops could advance through rifle fire and win victory in the
good old Napoleonic way.^33 Having defeated first the Russians and
then the Austrians, the French army seemed to have shown itself, as
in the great Napoleon’s day, to be the best in Europe. It was an army
that held fast to Napoleonic models, believing that the key to victory
lay in élan and courage rather than in staff work or any other form of
cerebration. Promotion from the ranks was far more frequent than in
other European armies and gave the French officer corps a hard
bitten, professional character that aristocratic officers of other armies
often lacked.^34 As for the rank and file, it came only from the lower
classes of French society, for the law allowed anyone who drew a “bad
number” in the conscription lottery to pay someone else to serve as a
substitute. Time-expired veterans made the best and most available
substitutes. Conscription therefore did not prevent the French army
from relying on long-term service troops, whose professionalism
complemented that of the officer corps.
Minié rifles and the muzzle-loading rifled field artillery, upon which
Napoleon III lavished personal attention, demonstrated that the
French army was not indifferent to improvement of materiel. Use of
newly built railroads to get to Italy in 1859 showed a similar spirit
of technical venturesomeness. Yet experience in Algeria, Mexico, and
Asia against poorly armed opponents, and the glorious tradition of
Napoleonic battles, kept the French army loyal to tactics that took no
account of the enhanced firepower of the newer weapons with which
European armies were beginning to equip themselves. These tactics,
nevertheless, brought victory over the Austrians, whose political will
to resist the new ideas of nationalism, liberalism, and progress—which
the French claimed to represent—was somewhat shaky.
- The Austrians, eager to exploit the power of their new rifles, fired at extreme
range, with little effect. Their subsequent volleys mostly passed over the heads of the
charging French, owing to inadequate instruction in aiming. Even so, French losses at
Solferino and Magenta were heavy; and Napoleon’s taste for war was permanently
dampened by his personal inspection of the two battlefields. On the Austrian army in
1859, see Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph, pp. 43–84.
- Pierre Chalmin, L’officier français de 1815 à 1870 (Paris, 1957).
