Industrialization of War, 1840–84 245
Napoleon Ill’s powerful, “progressive” ideology combined with a
fully professional army and an innovative technology of war made a
formidable combination indeed. For all these reasons, the French ap
peared in I860 to be the greatest power of the European continent, in
their own eyes and in those of expert foreign observers.^35
The Austrians, for their part, concluded from their defeat in Italy
that they needed to emulate French infantry tactics and invest in rifled
field artillery. By 1866 new field guns did, in fact, give the Austrian
artillery a distinct edge over the Prussians;^36 but the emphasis they put
on retraining their infantry to charge the foe in dense columnar for
mations cost them the Battle of Kôniggràtz.
The reason was that the Prussian army had taken a different path
from its rivals in trying to keep up with technological changes, opting,
as we saw above, for a rifled breech-loader as its fundamental infantry
weapon. The great advantage of breech-loading was that a soldier
could shoot crouching or lying down, taking cover wherever it was to
be found. This tactic made troops far less of a target for enemy fire
than when they had to stand erect for muzzle-loading. A second ad
vantage of breech-loaders was a far higher rate of fire.^37
Yet there were drawbacks that persuaded other European armies to
look askance at the Prussian army and its equipment. The breech of
the Dreyse gun was not perfectly tight and its firing pin was liable to
break. It also had a shorter range and less accuracy than Minié rifles.
These technical weaknesses were matched by problems of control and
tactical mobility that seemed implicit in any shift away from the an
cient patterns of drill built around the motions needed to load infantry
weapons from the muzzle. Lining men up and teaching them to load,
aim, and fire “by the numbers” had proved its value since the time of
- For the French army under Napoleon III see Ludovic Jablonsky, L’armée française à
travers les âges (Paris, n.d.), vols. 4, 5; Chalmin, L’officier français de 1815 à 1870; David B.
Ralston, The Army of the Republic: The Place of the Military in the Political Evolution of
France, 1871–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), chap. 1; Alphonse Favé, The Emperor
Napoleon's New System of Field Artillery, trans. William H. Cox (London, 1854); Raoul
Girardet, La société militaire dans la France contemporaine, 1815–1939 (Paris 1953); and
Joseph Montheilhet, Les institutions militaires de la France, 1814–1924 (Paris, 1932).
- The Austrians had 736 new rifled cannon and 58 old smooth-bores to the Prus
sian 492 rifled and 306 smoothbores, according to Gordon A. Craig, The Battle of
Koniggratz (Philadelphia, 1964), p. 8.
- The Dreyse needle gun could be fired five to seven times a minute, more than
twice as rapidly as the Minié rifle. This was because the needle gun relied on “bolt
action” to open the breech, allowing ball and cartridge to be inserted, after which the
reverse motion closed the breech and locked the bolt into firing position. The firing pin
was automatically drawn back and cocked by the movement of the bolt. Cf. Peter
Young, The Machinery of War (New York, 1973), pp. 73–76.
