cavalry screens played into Napoleon's hands and proved useless against
the combination of massed artillery and highly-trained sharpshooters.
Objectively, then, the French Army of Italy, though outnumbered,
disposed of superior technology which a commander of high talents could
use to open up a decisive gap. Yet Napoleon was unimaginative when it
came to the exploration of new technologies. He showed no interest in the
use of military observation balloons, even though he had been formed in a
revolutionary culture where Danton's balloon flight was a central image.
Nor did he show any interest in inventions which had the potential for
producing a military 'quantum leap', such as Fulton's submarine and
steamboat. This is puzzling, since Napoleon prided himself on his
interest in science and was closely associated with scientists like Monge,
Laplace and Chaptal. Some historians have argued that Napoleon sensed
the contemporary limitations of technology, and it is true that the
technical breakthrough in metallurgy which would usher in railways, the
steamship and the breech-loading rifle, was a post-r8rs phenomenon.
The second great advantage Napoleon had in the Italian campaign was
that he had a relatively homogeneous army infused with the spirit of the
Revolution, whereas the Austrian army was polyglot (composed of Serbs,
Croats and Hungarians as well as Austrians), stymied by paperwork and
excessive bureaucracy, and still in thrall to the frozen hierachies of the
ancien regime. The Revolution made possible new tactics and organiza
tion, provided fresh pools of manpower and talent and provided a citizen
army with positive ideals, images and ideologies. It is not necessary to go
all the way with the theorists Clausewitz and Georges Sorel and claim
that a citizen army was a sufficient explanation for Napoleon's success in
Italy, but it was a necessary one. Military service by citizens who
genuinely felt they were participating in a state enterprise of which they
approved produced a highly motivated force of what Sorel called
'intelligent bayonets'.
The Revolution, with its 'career open to talents', produced for a while
a meritocratic gap, especially in the Army, through which proceeded
highly talented men who would have been born to blush unseen under
the ancien regime. Without the Revolution Napoleon himself could not
have had his meteoric rise, nor would he have had Lannes, Murat,
Davout, Massena, Augereau and his other favourite generals at his side.
While a hundred flowers bloomed in France, their enemies remained
petrified in the social immobility of the old regime. Napoleon's dictum,
that every soldier carried a marshal's baton in his knapsack, was
anachronistic by the time he uttered it, when most of th e avenues for
marcin
(Marcin)
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