The issue of morale is crucial. Some historians have overdone this and
painted a picture of a citizens' army, fuelled by revolutionary elan,
sweeping away the corrupt and demoralized armies of the rotten ancien
regime. But the old cliche contains some truth. It has to be conceded that
social mobility, such an important feature of the Revolutionary years,
dried up under Napoleon. Under the Republic there had been 170 new
appointments as general in a single year, but under Napoleon the highest
number was thirty-seven. On the other hand, among those who would
have blushed unseen in the pre-q8g system were Napoleon himself,
eighteen of his marshals and generals like Junot, Friant, Vandamme,
Montbrun and Delaborde. Half the generals in r8os had been
commissioned since q8g though, as we have conceded, this hardly
redounds to Napoleon's credit.
The impact of the French Revolution on the level of skills and talents
in the Grand Army can scarcely be denied. Importantly, French generals
were usually much younger than their enemy counterparts: in r8os the
average age of generals in the Austrian army was 63 and, in the war
against Prussia in r8o6, out of 142 Prussian generals 79 were over sixty
and only thirteen under fifty. Moreover, French officers were there on
merit, whereas enemy officers were often elderly, impoverished and
lieutenants who had clawed their way up from the ranks or were 'silly ass'
young noblemen. The contrast continued into the ranks. Most of the
Grande Armee's soldiers had at least a year's service to their credit; they
were brilliant at living off the land; their morale was high as they thought
themselves invincible and even, imbued as they were with the ideology of
the French Revolution, superior to the benighted infantry of the ancien
regime armies.
Another aspect of the Grand Army's success was its use of skirmishers,
who were highly trained and invulnerable to all but other skirmishers.
Although these were shock troops and did great damage in the 'softening
up' phase of a battle, ancien regime armies were chary of using them, as
they were thought too independent, too free-thinking and therefore
prejudicial to discipline and a standing invitation to desert. Until the
Spanish experience in r8o8, aristocratic regimes feared to arm the masses
for a popular war against Napoleon, lest the selfsame people turn their
guns first against the native oligarchy.
Napoleon's military machine has provoked more argument, with some
regarding it as a model of how army staffwork should be conducted and
others finding it defective, overelaborate, needlessly complex and
productive of errors, oversights, omissions and excessive duplication. As
with all Napoleon's civil and military hierarchies, the devil was in the
marcin
(Marcin)
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