Conscription in the Napoleonic Era

A Revolution in Military Affairs?

Donald Stoker, Frederick C. Schneid, Harold D. Blanton, Donald Stoker, Frederick C. Schneid, Harold D. Blanton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134270095
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This edited volume explores conscription in the Napoleonic era, tracing the roots of European conscription and exploring the many methods that states used to obtain the manpower they needed to prosecute their wars.

The levée-en-masse of the French Revolution has often been cited as a 'Revolution in Military Affairs', but was it truly a 'revolutionary' break with past European practices of raising armies, or an intensification of the scope and scale of practices already inherent in the European military system? This international collection of scholars demonstrate that European conscription has far deeper roots than has been previously acknowledged, and that its intensification during the Napoleonic era was more an 'evolutionary' than 'revolutionary' change.

This book will be of much interest to students of Military History, Strategic Studies, Strategic History and European History.

1 Introduction

Frederick C. Schneid

“The French Revolution,” wrote Peter Paret, “coincided with a revolution in war that had been under way through the last decades of the monarchy.”¹ Paret referred to this period as a “military revolution”; more recently, however, the term Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) has been applied to periods where social, political, and economic change altered the nature and scope of warfare. This term, while appreciated from a policy perspective, has led to intense historiographical debates, particularly revolving around the question of continuity or change to the dynamics of war. Advocates for revolution or evolution during the Napoleonic era point clearly to the introduction of national conscription in 1793, and its institutionalization in 1798, as a central part of the RMA of 1789–1815.² The creation of a “national army” in France unleashed forces that their monarchical opponents were loath to consider. Nevertheless, all parties were compelled to consider options when facing an enemy whose armies managed to achieve significant victories as early as autumn 1792.

Standing back from the narrow confines of the first years of the Revolution, viewing the progress of war in the nineteenth century would provide the onlooker with a clear understanding that the scope of warfare had increased significantly. The widespread development of standing armies meant a ready force to combat one’s foe, but in the course of extended conflict the need to replace losses strained states both great and small. Furthermore, many eighteenth-century armies found the German “soldier trade” to be a rather efficient means of renting ready-made regiments for military service in Europe or disparate parts of the colonial world.³ This tried-and-true method, used well through the Revolutionary Wars, was no longer a viable option after 1806. Napoleon’s reorganization of Germany denied the European powers, excluding France, this method of supplementing their armies. They now had to consider their domestic options. To be sure, army growth posed a gradual problem for European armies. Excepting 1793–1794, when the French army reached a height of 750,000 men, their average hovered around 380,000 men during the decade of war, not significantly more than the average size of French armies during the Wars of Louis XIV a century earlier.⁴ Combined coalition armies exceeded that number, only when they coordinated their operations and dedicated their entire military effort toward defeating France. Indeed, in 1789–1790, Austria, Prussia, the German Princes, Britain, Spain, Piedmont-Sardinia, and Holland could muster almost 800,000 men.⁵ However, France benefited from fighting alliances whose members were not equally committed to the war effort.

The remarkable increase in army size was achieved during the Napoleonic era. French armies after 1804 averaged 500,000 men, and faced coalitions whose numerical advantage was not as striking as that of 15 years earlier. The response of European armies to this massive display of manpower, and concomitantly the magnitude of field armies, was not seen until 1809 and thereafter. The battle of Wagram in 1809 witnessed the clash of 300,000 men on a single battlefield. At Borodino in 1812, and Lutzen and Bautzen in 1813, one-quarter of a million men fought, while Leipzig in 1813 saw a half million men engaged in the largest battle in European history to that date.⁶ The sheer enormity of these battles reflected the exponential increase in the size of field armies, and thus combatants engaged. Attrition through casualties, desertion, and disease necessitated the development of a system to provide replacements in equal or greater quantities in a relatively short period of time. France had already established the precedent of institutional conscription, while their enemies now contended with the question of whether to match the French system or develop their own methods of recruitment that would adequately feed their armies. Attendant with this dilemma is the level to which the respective social and political structures would accept conscription.

In France, the radical revolution swept away those individuals and groups who would oppose any dramatic alteration of the military system. Even those senior officers who initially supported the revolution fell victim to the Jacobinization of the army during the years of the Republic. Thereafter, a professionalization occurred, and political appointees were removed in favor of performance and experience.⁷ All of this enabled the French government to retain the pre-revolutionary administrative structures of the war ministry and simply expand upon it to accommodate the demands of war. In many cases, the coalition armies opposed to France lacked an administrative structure that could rival that of France in 1792, which put them at a distinct disadvantage. Among France’s enemies the Habsburg War Ministry, for example, competed with the Hofkriegsrat, the Imperial War Council. The overlapping responsibilities of these institutions, and the constant political interference by court factions, hampered the Habsburg army. This is why the Archduke Charles, brother of Emperor Francis I (II), was given dual responsibility as Minister of War and President of the Hofkriegsrat after the War of the Second Coalition in 1801.⁸

Isser Woloch, in his history of Revolutionary and Napoleonic institutions in France, wrote that conscription was the most successful policy, despite “an endemic pattern of draft resistance.”⁹ In his analysis, Woloch presents what has become the traditional argument that conscription was unpopular, compulsory, and oppressive; that numbers tell of draft evasion and desertions, and this proves the point. Woloch was the first English-speaking historian to address the question of conscription several years earlier in his article, “Napoleonic Conscription: State Power and Civil Society,” which was followed shortly thereafter by Alan Forrest’s seminal book, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire.¹⁰ Forrest, too, presents convincing quantitative evidence of the oppressive nature of conscription policy and its increasing toll on the general French population.

The implication of the traditional argument, however, is that conscription as state policy is equivalent to state coercion. That the act of forcing an unwilling population to serve in the army was a violation of their inalienable right that the revolution had guaranteed; that it was a betrayal of that social contract particularly under the Napoleonic regime. The problem with this argument is not that a counter proposal would advocate the popularity of conscription. That is foolish. Conscription was incredibly unpopular and both Woloch and Forrest are absolutely correct. The problem, however, in studying conscription policy, is that this argument shades the understanding of the institution. It is not difficult to find an “endemic pattern of draft resistance” in any army in the midst of any war. In 1864, for instance, during the American Civil War, the absentee rate of the Army of Northern Virginia rose to 60 percent.¹¹ The worldview of Woloch, Forrest, and many others was framed within the context of the extremely unpopular Vietnam War, and the era’s virulent opposition to conscription (draft). Of course, there is also an argument to be had that conscription, by its very nature, is unpopular and a manifestation of state coercion. If a person wanted to serve, they would volunteer, hence, anyone who did not volunteer and was forced by conscription to serve was opposed to the policies or government that forced them into military service. This, however, creates more questions than answers. Using this line of logic, the millions of men and women who were drafted into the US Armed Forces during World War II were forced to do so, and were therefore coerced by an oppressive institution.

Certainly, the central point of the argument centers upon Napoleon’s use of conscription to feed his armies and ambitions, and the latter was increasingly disassociated from the general interests of Frenchmen. There are few who would dispute this point. Yet few have made similar arguments about the revolutionary levies of 1793.¹² The February levy of 300,000 and the levée en masse of August were carried out to accommodate the expanding scope of the Revolutionary War. The Convention, riding the tide of regicide and late victories in Germany, declared war on Britain, Holland, and Spain. There was no “patrie en danger” in February 1793, and that levy, therefore, was to feed the ranks of the French armies for new Jacobin objectives.¹³ The levée en masse, however, was carried out in the midst of military crisis, with allied armies in Belgium, the Spanish in Roussillion, and Toulon in Federalist and British hands. Despite the seeming necessity of guerre à outrance, the levée did not produce the vaunted million-man army, but did reach 750,000 men by the end of the year.¹⁴ France, however, could not sustain this level of manpower. Attrition, due largely to desertion, resulted in the rapid decrease of military strength to its pre-levée levels.¹⁵

One must also consider France’s enemies. The monarchies eschewed conscription during the Revolutionary wars, and as the authors in this book clearly illustrate, they only implemented certain elements of it during the Napoleonic Wars. It would be interesting, however, to compare the response of recruits, draftees, conscripts – whatever term you like – to their respective military services. It is certainly logical to assume that if the French peasant was not thoroughly imbued with the concept of “la patrie,” then peasants and serfs elsewhere in Europe were not subject to such ideological notions either.

This volume provides a unique opportunity to survey the response of European governments, military institutions, and societies to conscription. It is clear that the responses were varied and that this diversity of method was affected by historical, structural, and cultural factors. In some cases, traditional means were sufficient for minor powers, whereas the anchors of the coalitions against Napoleonic France needed to massage their conservative institutions to the extent that they could tolerate certain social flexibility. To this end, conscription as the centerpiece of a revolution in military affairs can be questioned. Although the French and some of their satellites introduced annual conscription, the rest of Europe resisted it, and in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and throughout the nineteenth century European armies, including the French, reverted to the smaller, professional army, whose ranks were filled largely by recruitment. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, military leaders were gravely concerned about the implications of a universal conscription policy on the nature of their respective armies. In France, the “nation in arms” could perhaps safeguard the “Third Republic” from Bonapartism, but there were prohibitive cost factors involved in maintaining large national armies, in addition to opposition from conservatives and professional officers.¹⁶ If anything, the introduction of universal conscription in Europe by the end of the century reflected more the industrialization of warfare than a Napoleonic revolution in military affairs.

Notes

1 Peter Paret, “Napoleon,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 124.

2 Andrew N. Liaropoulos, “Revolutions in Warfare: Theoretical Paradigms and Historical Evidence – the Napoleonic and First World War Revolutions in Military Affairs,” Journal of Military History 70, 2 (April 2006): 376.

3 Peter H. Wilson, German Armies: War and German Politics, 1648–1806 (London: Routledge, 1998), passim.

4 Frederick C. Schneid, ed., Warfare in Europe, 1792–1815 (London: Ashgate, 2007), pp. xv–xvi.

5 Jeremy Black, ed., European Warfare, 1453–1815 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), p. 80.

6 Schneid, Warfare in Europe, p. xviii.

7 See, particularly, Howard Brown, “Politics, Professionalism and the Fate of Army Generals after Thermidor,” French Historical Studies 19 (1995): 132–52, who addresses the purging of political appointees after the Terror.

8 Gunther E. Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversary: The Archduke Charles and the Austrian Army, 1792–1814 (New York: B.T. Batsford, 1982), pp. 87–90.

9 Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformation of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994), p. 424.

10 Isser Woloch, “Napoleonic Conscription: State Power and Civil Society,” Past and Present 111 (May 1986): 101–29; Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

11 Lynda Lasswell Crist, Mary Seaton Dix, and Kenneth H. Williams, eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis (Baton Rouge, LA and London: LSU Press, 1979), vol. 10, p. 66, fn. 18.

12 Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters, pp. 31–4, does discuss the difference between the volunteers of 1791 and 1792, and the problems with conscription in 1793.

13 See T.C.W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (New York and London: Longman, 1986), chapter 5, for a solid discussion of the expansion of the war. The new battalions arrived at the front between May and June 1793, at the moment of the crisis of civil war and the turn of the tide aga...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Conscription in France during the era of Napoleon
• 3 Meeting the French challenge: conscription in Prussia, 1807–1815
• 4 Conscription in Russia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: “for faith, Tsar and Motherland”
• 5 Conscription in the Habsburg Empire to 1815
• 6 The recruitment of seamen for the British Navy, 1793–1815: “Why don’t you raise more men?”
• 7 Conscription in Spain in the Napoleonic era
• 8 Conscription and desertion in Napoleonic Italy, 1802–1814
• 9 Recruitment and conscription in the Kingdom of Westphalia: “The Palladium of Westphalian freedom”
• 10 Filling the ranks: recruitment and conscription for the Danish–Norwegian army during the Napoleonic era
• 11 Manning the armed forces: the Swedish solution
• 12 Conscription in Mehmed Ali’s Egypt: a Napoleonic legacy
• 13 Napoleonic conscription and the militarization of Europe?
• Select bibliography