492 Ch. 13 • Napoleon and Europe
Warfare changed when armies were no longer made up of mercenaries
but rather of ‘citizen-soldiers’’ with greater commitment to their cause.
Thus, during the French Revolution, committed sans-culottes were first
mobilized as citizen-soldiers in the levee en masse proclaimed in August
- They fought to defend the nation, winning the stunning victory over
the Austrian army at Valmy (September 1 792; see Chapter 12). The Revo
lution inaugurated a period of warfare in Europe in which more soldiers
entered battle than ever before. Between 1800 and 1815, perhaps as many
as 2 million men served in or allied with Napoleon’s armies. Napoleon har
nessed French nationalism to win the commitment of his armies.
The Prussian general and military writer Karl von Clausewitz (1780
- described how warfare, which he defined as “an extension of state
policy by other means,” had changed. Whereas the wars of most of the eigh
teenth century had been those of kings and of states, not entire peoples,
now “war had again suddenly become an affair of the people, and that of a
people numbering thirty million, every one of whom regarded himself a citi
zen of the state.”
Napoleon’s genius was his ability to organize, oversee, and assure the sup
plying of and communication between larger armies than had ever before
been effectively assembled, and to move them more rapidly than anyone
before him. “Everything is in the execution,” as he put it. He built on the
French innovation in 1792—1793 of using combat divisions that combined
French citizens drawing lots to determine who would be conscripted to fight in