Small Wars and Insurgencies in Theory and Practice, 1500-1850

Beatrice Heuser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138941670
• eBook ISBN: 9781317376576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In early modern times, warfare in Europe took on many diverse and overlapping forms. Our modern notions of 'regular' and 'irregular' warfare, of 'major war' and 'small war', have their roots in much greater diversity than such binary notions allow for. While insurgencies go back to time immemorial, they have become conceptually fused with 'small wars'. This is a term first used to denote special operations, often carried out by military companies formed from special ethnic groups and then recruited into larger armies. In its Spanish form, guerrilla, the term 'small war' came to stand for an ideologically-motivated insurgency against the state authorities or occupying forces of another power.

There is much overlap between the phenomena of irregular warfare in the sense of special operations alongside regular operations, and irregular warfare of insurgents against the regular forces of a state. This book demonstrates how long the two phenomena were in flux and fed on each other, from the raiding operations of the 16th century to the 'small wars' or special operations conducted by special units in the 19th century, which existed alongside and could merge with a popular insurgency.

This book is based on a special issue of the journal Small Wars & Insurgencies.

The sixteenth-century antecedents of special operations ‘small war’

Benjamin Deruelle

Institut de Recherche Historique du Septentrion, University of Lille, France

The first conceptual, theoretical treatises about small war (la petite guerre) as special operations appeared only from the middle of the seventeenth century. The term is not used in the eighteenth-century sense of ‘special operations’ in older sources. The supposed absence of any treatment of the subject is surprising considering the obsession with the ‘art of war’ in the Renaissance, but other authors attribute it to a supposed antinomy between chivalric ideals and irregular warfare. But the absence of explicit manuals on the subject is not evidence of absence of advanced reflection on this kind of operations in the Middle Ages and in Early Modern times. We should thus look elsewhere, in other genres, for writings that contain and pass on military knowledge. Epics, romances, educational and military treatises, and memoirs in fact contain elements of a theory of special operations, even though these genres differ from our conception of rationality inherited from the Enlightenment.

The sixteenth-century roots of special operations ‘small war’

The eighteenth-century strategist Capitaine Thomas-Antoine le Roy Grandmaison in his famous treaty about ‘small war’ (petite guerre) defined the objectives of ‘parties’ (special units) in such operations to include intelligence, small harassment operations, and attacks on small enemy units not least to extract booty, to find food and fodder, and to exact war subsidies from the local populations.¹ On the basis of other works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we might add to this any operations on the fringes of battles and sieges to assure the main army’s security by closely observing enemy movements, to provide it with food and fodder while – if the opportunity arose – depriving the enemy of it, to harass the enemy, and to launch small attacks on small enemy contingents.² In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, small war consisted of skirmishes and limited operations of small detachments of regulars or irregulars that were members of a garrison or a field army, who could not decide wars by themselves, but made their contribution to the final outcome of a campaign.³ This overlaps with what today one might call special operations, to distinguish it from small war (Spanish guerrilla) in the later sense of ideologically motivated popular insurgency or ‘people’s war’ (in the language of the Prussians Heinrich von Brandt and Carl von Clausewitz, both writing in the 1820s⁴). This article deals with the question of whether ‘small war’ in the modern sense of ‘special operations’ existed before the term ‘petite guerre’ began to be used in this seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sense.⁵

In the sixteenth century, troop contingents were generally smaller, even in battle. The difference between these special operations and ‘regular warfare’ (battles, sieges) lay neither in numbers nor the specialisation of soldiers, but in missions characterised by limited aims, surprise, tricks, stratagems, initiative taken at low levels of command, and constant adaptation.

Although these kinds of operations can be traced back to Antiquity, the first theoretical or conceptual works about them appear only from the Thirty Years War.⁶ Yet military memoirs of the sixteenth century are replete with stories about them.⁷ Moreover, the early modern period is driven by the obsession of the ‘art of war’⁸ born from the influence of Antiquity and a growing tendency to conceptualise the world in mathematical terms⁹ that resulted in a rich harvest of theoretical works about warfare. In addition, France seems to have been the precursor in this domain with the manuals of Antoine de Ville, the Duke of Rohan, Maurice de Saxe, and Grandmaison in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹⁰ The late arrival of works on the ‘petite guerre’ is often attributed to the supposed antinomy between the ‘petite guerre’ and earlier ideals of chivalry.¹¹ So was there no earlier general reflection on the conduct of these special operations? Perhaps scholars have looked in the wrong places.

This essay will turn to other genres or literature, namely epics such as Galien Rhétoré (1500), educational treatises such as Le Jouvencel (c.1460), general military treatises such as Raimond de Fourquevaux’s Instructions on the Feats of War (1548), and military memoirs such as Blaise de Montluc’s in the quest for such reflections and generalisations.

Special operations in the sixteenth century

The expression ‘petite guerre’ was used in the sixteenth century, but we cannot find any dictionary entry for it before the second half of the seventeenth century,¹² nor can we find ‘guerre de partisans’, ‘guerre de parti’, ‘aller en parti’, or ‘aller à la découverte’. In the French dictionary of Robert Estienne and Jean Nicot dating from 1549 we find the term ‘faire des courses’¹³ to mean to go out ‘to the enemies, and plunder what one find on fields’.¹⁴ And if we find the words ‘parti(s)’ or ‘partisan(s)’, it is only in 1680 that we find it related to special forces (in the entry ‘guerre’) in the dictionary of Pierre Richelet, for whom a ‘party’ is ‘a unit of soldiers that one sends to plunder, or to reconnoitre and ravage the enemy country’.¹⁵ Gilles Ménage seems to be the first to use term ‘petite guerre’ in this kind of literature in 1650.¹⁶ However, it does not appear at the item ‘guerre’ but ‘picorée’:¹⁷ ‘Going to the picorée, is going to the petite guerre; to rob enemy of cattle, horses, sheep: what soldiers call a cow-run’ (‘courre la vache’).¹⁸

Definitions matching the eighteenth-century idea of the small war appear only in the second half or the last third of the seventeenth century, as in the preview published of the Académie française dictionary in 1687: ‘to go to the war. That is to go in a party against the enemies’.¹⁹ At this time, the expression ‘petite guerre’ merits its own subentry under ‘guerre’ besides others such as ‘just and unjust war’, ‘civil war’, and ‘holy war’. Antoine de Furetière lists ‘guerre’ and ‘parti’, and here we can find a definition that foreshadows Grandmaison’s:²⁰ a detachment is a recognised ‘parti’ if it has a ‘written order from the commander, and if counts at least than twenty foot soldiers or fifteen horsemen, or else they are considered brigands’.²¹ This reflects French government efforts to regulate ‘petite guerre’ by positive legislation, such as in 1675.

Its absence from dictionaries does not mean that this form of warfare was unknown in the sixteenth century. In the late seventeenth century Gilles Ménage claims that Gilles Pasquier before him mentioned the expression ‘petite guerre’ as a neologism of his times.²² In the late nineteenth century, in efforts to trace obsolete words of the French language, Frédéric Godefroy and Edmond Huguet identify several synonyms or related terms, such as ‘estradiotz’, ‘movant’, ‘paleter’, and ‘argoulet’.²³ Before the seventeenth century, the term was frequently used in a different sense, however. Philippe de Commynes, in his Chronicle of Louis XI’s Reign, denounces those who make a ‘petite guerre’ to ‘levy money’, that is to say to tax people.²⁴ By implication this means a conflict begun for little reasons, vengeance or reprisals, and for small objectives.²⁵ In the Middle Ages, the term was used to denote private warfare, feuds between families or neighbours characterised by short, seasonal campaigns, skirmishes, and looting. These were campaigns limited in time and space, carried out by fighters who might be acting on some lawful authority, but not necessarily the central power (king or emperor). The term is used in this sense even at the end of the sixteenth century, as we can see in the translation of the Claude de Seyssel’s Peloponnese War in 1527, or the Political and Military Discourses of François de la Noue in 1587.²⁶ It corresponds to the Spanish definition of the word ‘guerrilla’ in the 1611 dictionary of Sebastián de Covarrubias.²⁷

We also find the terms ‘petite guerre’ used to denote behaviour that is not only undisciplined but immoral. In his correspondence, Agrippa d’Aubigné uses it for the behaviour of bad sol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface: ‘The Origins of Small Wars from Special Operations to Ideological Insurgencies’: A National Army Museum response
• Introduction: Exploring the jungle of terminology
• 1. The sixteenth-century antecedents of special operations ‘small war’
• 2. The essence of war: French armies and small war in the Low Countries (1672–1697)
• 3. Initiating insurgencies abroad: French plans to ‘chouannise’ Britain and Ireland, 1793–1798
• 4. The insurgency of the Vendée
• 5. Guerrillas and bandits in the Serranía de Ronda, 1810–1812
• 6. The German wars of liberation 1807–1815: The restrained insurgency
• 7. Poachers turned gamekeepers: A study of the guerrilla phenomenon in Spain, 1808–1840
• 8. Small Wars in the Age of Clausewitz: The Watershed Between Partisan War and People’s War
• 9. Atrocities in Theory and Practice
• 10. Lessons learnt? Cultural transfer and revolutionary wars, 1775–1831
• Bibliography
• Index