War, Peace, and International Relations. An Introduction to Strategic History

3 From limited war to national war

The French Revolution and the

Napoleonic way of war

Introduction: two transformations

In its contribution to strategic history, the era of the wars launched by, and against,
revolutionary and Napoleonic France witnessed two profound transformations, at least
so it is argued by many. First, the political context of international relations, its norms,
rules and procedures, allegedly was transformed from its condition of near-permanent
great power hostilities in the eighteenth century to a very different milieu, with radically
distinctive, more benign modalities governing great power behaviour in the nineteenth
(Schroeder, 1994). Second, the wars of the period 1792–1 8 15 revealed the actuality of a
strategic transformation, because French armies were wielded as would-be agents of
radical political change. Warfare in pre-revolutionary Europe had not had implications
for the structure of the political context. It was paradoxical, though probably predictable,
that the extraordinary violence of the Napoleonic Wars should trigger political innovation
in the approach of the great powers to the maintenance of order and the management of
their differences.
One can argue that the relative lack of great power conflict in the nineteenth century
was in part a consequence of lessons learnt from the wars against France. This is not
entirely convincing. Nevertheless, there is no doubt both that the scale and aims of
warfare were transformed between 1792 and 1 8 15, and that the statecraft of international
order in the nineteenth century was markedly different in character from that of the
eighteenth. As was emphasized in Chapter 1, continuity and change is a major theme in
this exploration of modern strategic history. The relationship between the two repeatedly
comes to the boil over claims, contemporary and subsequent, for and against transfor-
mation. Each of these historical chapters presents evidence for political and strategic
transformation, typically, though not invariably, keyed to allegedly transformative
technologies, civil and military. It so happens that in this, the first of the historical

Reader’s guide: Eighteenth-century wars contrasted with the wars of the French

Revolution and Napoleon. The transformation of war in the 1790s. The

Napoleonic art of war and its problems. The strategic and political failure of

Napoleonic France.