Napoleonic Wars

12 Key excerpts on "Napoleonic Wars"

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  Early Modern Military History, 1450-1815

  • G. Mortimer(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  196 11 The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars Alan Forrest If the years from 1740 had seen repeated trials of strength between the armies of the European powers, these were dwarfed by the Wars of the French Revolution and Empire. Between 1792 and 1815 France was almost constantly in a state of war with coalitions of European states, and from 1803 – after the collapse of the truce signed at Amiens – there was no peace across the greater part of the conti- nent until Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo. Napoleon himself moved rest- lessly from one campaign to another, fighting some sixty battles in all and winning the great majority of them (Gates, 1997, p. 5). Indeed, the sheer scale of warfare made it difficult for contemporaries to regard the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as simply the continuation of the traditional struggles between states that had characterized the eighteenth century. They distorted trade pat- terns and consumed an unprecedented proportion of the country’s economic wealth. And French objectives were not limited to the customary aims of tradi- tional European wars, be they the acquisition of granaries, of neighbouring terri- tories or of overseas colonies, dynastic successions, or (as with Louis XIV) dreams of attaining natural frontiers. France, it appeared, now thought on an altogether more ambitious scale, attempting to impose its new polity on much of continen- tal Europe during the revolutionary years, before aspiring to create a new Carolingian empire under Napoleon. French troops fanned out across Europe as far as the Peninsula and Russia, they crossed the Mediterranean to Egypt and North Africa, and in a moment of misguided over-ambition they attempted to overturn the new black government in Haiti. They did not hesitate to open up several fronts at once or to take on powerful coalitions of states.

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  The Causes of War

  Volume V: 1800-1850

  • Alexander Gillespie(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  II

  The Napoleonic Wars

  I F THERE WAS a single historical force which moulded the shape of Europe from the end of the eighteenth century, it was the French Revolution. This cataclysmic event changed everything. This change accelerated when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power, directing the French efforts from 1800 to 1815. He was, arguably, the most successful ruler in the long history of France. This man of military, not political, fame with obscure Corsican origins triumphed gloriously abroad advancing the Tricoloure in all directions. He had a unique talent for both government in France, diplomacy and war. Although there were many twists and turns during this period, the one constant was Napoleon. His imprint within France and upon the alliances he built and the enemies he fought, was exceptional. The killing in the Napoleonic Wars had a final tally of, perhaps, 4 million deaths as made up of 3 million soldiers and 1 million civilians.

  This chapter discusses the way that the Napoleonic Wars were justified and how peace agreements were secured, broken and finally settled. The context to these achievements is the warfare that burned and spread around them in Europe. The global implications of these wars is discussed in chapters VIII , IX , X and XI . The question of the political values that Napoleon supported and nurtured and how these were different to those of his opposition, is discussed in chapter III .

  Napoleon was very nearly successful as the ultimate victor a number of times. He beat Prussia, Russia and Austria repeatedly. The German and Italian areas were split off and consumed, while Spain and Portugal became bloody messes, as northern Europe too, was splintered. Only Britain was never beaten. Their survival can be put down to skill, determination and at times, good luck. Britain was consistently anti-French Revolution and anti-Napoleon. Despite a brief peace in 1803, they fought for the entire time. Russia was intermittently anti-French, as was Austria. Prussia, occasionally so. All three of these countries allied with Napoleon at one point or another. Victory was only possible at the end because war broke out with Russia. After Napoleon was pushed out of Russia, Austria and Prussia turned on the French Emperor. It was only then, when an overwhelming and unified force came together with the formation of the Grand Alliance, that a military opposition was created which was impossible for Napoleon to defeat. This defeated Napoleon twice. The peace treaties that followed in 1814 and 1815 aimed to reset the clock and create counter-weights to ensure that the catalysts that allowed the French Revolution and ultimately Napoleon to rise could not be repeated. The challenge was that Napoleon had broken the models of the Old World, geographically, politically and philosophically.

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  War, Peace and International Relations

  An introduction to strategic history

  • Colin S. Gray(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3    From limited war to national war

  The French Revolution and theNapoleonic way of war

  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.

  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 1792–1815 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 learned 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 1815, 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 (and is the primary focus of Chapter 21

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  Handbook of First Generation Warfare

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University Publications

    (Publisher)

  Beyond minor naval actions against British imperial interests, the Napoleonic Wars were much less global in scope than preceding conflicts such as Seven Years' War which historians would term a world war. In 1806, Napoleon issued the series of Berlin Decrees, which brought into effect the Continental System. This policy aimed to eliminate the threat from Britain by closing French-controlled territory to its trade. Britain maintained a standing army of just 220,000 at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, whereas France's strength peaked at over 2,500,000, as well as several hundred thousand national guardsmen that Napoleon could draft into the military if necessary; however, British subsidies paid for a large proportion of the soldiers deployed by other coalition powers, peaking at about 450,000 in 1813. The Royal Navy effectively disrupted France's extra-continental trade—both by seizing and threatening French shipping and by seizing French colonial possessions—but could do nothing about France's trade with the major continental economies and posed little threat ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ to French territory in Europe. Also, France's population and agricultural capacity far outstripped that of Britain. However, Britain had the greatest industrial capacity in Europe, and its mastery of the seas allowed it to build up considerable economic strength through trade. That sufficed to ensure that France could never consolidate its control over Europe in peace. However, many in the French government believed that cutting Britain off from the Continent would end its economic influence over Europe and isolate it. War of the Third Coalition 1805 The British HMS Sandwich fires to the French flagship Bucentaure (completely dismasted) into battle off Trafalgar. The Bucentaure also fights HMS Victory (behind her) and HMS Temeraire (left side of the picture).

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  Nationalizing Empires

  • Stefan Berger, Alexei Miller, Stefan Berger, Alexei Miller(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Central European University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Nevertheless, the winds of change have blown through Napoleonic history, with considerable force. 1 J. Godechot, La Grande Nation , 2 vols. (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1956). 2 P. W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); D. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We N 100 Michael Broers The study of the First Napoleonic Empire has undergone a renaissance in the last quarter of a century. It was galvanized by the appearance of Stuart Woolf ’s Napoleon’s Integration of Europe in 1991. 3 The very title indicates that a major part of the revival of Napoleonic period history centered on the imperial character of Napoleon’s empire, in that its nature could no longer simply be described as an exten-sion of France: For Woolf and the majority of scholars who have followed his lead, Napoleon’s domination of Europe marks a seminal period in the development of the modern history of the continent precisely because it bore signs of being an imperialist project. There is a growing sense that there was more than crude military expansion and material exploitation to Napoleonic rule beyond France, nor was such rule a mere extension of France. Although the new Napoleonic historiography launched by Woolf, and driven forward by so many others, is now central to Napoleonic studies, it does not stand alone or remain without its detractors, just as it is not without its internal divisions. Woolf ’s decisive break with the dominant historiography was driven by the need he perceived to redirect the emphasis from “the man” to his system and the support it received from the bureaucrats and local elites needed to run the imperial edifice, together with a determination to locate the importance of Napoleonic ex-pansion in a truly European context beyond France.

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  Britain in the Middle East

  1619-1971

  • Robert T. Harrison(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  It represented a clear threat to British interests in India and the Middle East, and Britain’s efforts to checkmate the Russians became known in the nineteenth century as the “Eastern Question” and the “Great Game”. The last phase of the Napoleonic conflict saw imperial France in control of most of Europe through the Continental System, designed to keep out British trade. Britain’s counterblockade, the Orders in Council, worked to prevent war supplies or contraband from reaching Napoleon. Although the British effort had been more successful, smuggling was rife, and neither power was able to stop it. In the end, Napoleon’s tactical blunders in Spain and Russia proved his undoing. His decision to replace the Spanish king with his own brother Joseph in 1808 provoked a civil war against the French, known as the Peninsular War or the “Spanish Ulcer.” Spanish guerilla fighters now combined with British forces under the Duke of Wellington to fight a bloody and protracted campaign from 1808 to 1814. This campaign encouraged Austria’s failed attempt to break from Napoleon’s grip in 1809 as well as Alexander I’s decision to reject the Continental System and reopen Russian ports to British trade. Napoleon’s disastrous campaign to force Russia back into the system in 1812 led to the loss of his Grande Armée and subsequent defeat at Leipzig in 1813. The Duke of Wellington, meanwhile, marched his forces across the Pyrenees into France and, together with the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians, forced Napoleon’s capitulation in 1814. His escape from exile in Elba and final defeat at Waterloo on June 18, 1815, brought the war to an end and concluded a century of Anglo-French global conflicts. Although Britain was exhausted from twenty-three years of savage struggle, the termination of hostilities saw it emerge not only as Europe’s industrial, commercial, and political leader but also the world’s dominant imperial power.

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  The Handy Military History Answer Book

  • Samuel Willard Crompton(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Visible Ink Press

    (Publisher)

  There was—just the slimmest of chances. If Napoleon had realized the extent of his mistakes, and had he been willing to negotiate with his foes, he might have salvaged much of his empire. Napoleon, by now, was in the full grips of the type of delusion which takes over many great leaders, however; he had listened to no one else for so long that he could not alter his conduct. As a result, the Napoleonic Wars continued.

  Numerous contestants that had previously been written off now re-emerged. Prussia had nearly been carved up by Napoleon in 1806; that nation now rose against him with a fury. Austria, which was led by Napoleon’s father-in-law, was also in arms against him. The guerrilla war in Portugal and Spain continued, meaning that Napoleon’s armies were stretched to the breaking point in almost every direction. This was the time, clearly, to remove his forces from Spain and to go on the defensive. Napoleon refused to do this, however.

  THE AMERICAN WAR What did the British call the War of 1812?

  Even the Americans did not come up with that name until well after the conflict was over. For lack of a better title, the British simply labeled it the American War. To them, it was definitely a sideshow to the major Napoleonic events, but it had significance. Either the Americans would capture Canada, or the British would invade the United States.

  In June 1813, the British struck back, gaining vengeance for the loss of HMS Guerriere the previous year. HMS Shannon met and captured U.S.S. Chesapeake, outside of Boston Harbor. The armament on both sides was roughly equal, but Captain Philip Broke had specially trained his gunnery crews. Broke came aboard the American ship and was wounded. American Captain James Lawrence fell mortally wounded. Tradition has it that his last words were: “Don’t give up the ship!”

  Why was a position on the Great Lakes so critical?

  Right from the war’s beginning, the Americans had tried to conquer British Canada. This made eminent sense, because whatever success the British had elsewhere would be more than balanced if the Americans took Montreal and Quebec City. The British-Canadians fought fiercely, however; part of the Canadian national identity is still based on that nation’s resistance to the American invasions of 1813 to 1814.

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  Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War

  A Moral and Historical Inquiry

  • James Turner Johnson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  14 B. NATIONAL WAR AND RELATED CONCEPTS Compared to the century of limited war, or sovereigns' war, before it, the appearance of national war with the French Revolution and the institutionalization of this form of conflict during the Napoleonic Wars stand out starkly. The sharp and generally recognized distinction between combatants and non- combatants present throughout the sovereigns' wars tended to vanish in the presence of the Ιβυέβ en masse, which made 14 Cf. the argument for violating just war restraints in time of "supreme emergency" in Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, chapter XVI; see also above, chapter III, B. 238 RIVAL CONCEPTIONS all citizens, at least in theory, soldiers for the homeland. The mobilization of the economic resources of entire nations and the raising of armies much larger than any sovereign of the ancien regime could afford further transformed warfare. Armed forces became creatures of the entire nation, formed of persons from every class and region and supported by the populace as a whole. The goals or ambitions of individual princes pos- sessing competence de guerre ceased to be enough to warrant warfare on the new scale; only grand ambitions of a national or international character (like Napoleon's and those of the alliances formed against him) could now suffice. Yet this new form of war remained in many important re- spects like the old one. The arms, uniforms, means of trans- portation, and tactics remained the same; no revolutions were effected here, only the scale was magnified. Strategy changed; yet this may be traced simply to the creative presence of one man, Napoleon, and his strategic innovations.

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  Political and Civic Leadership

  A Reference Handbook

  • Richard A. Couto(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  By analyzing these boundaries of participation, medium, and time, one begins to recognize how the meaning of war has changed with history. Clausewitz’s analysis of the age of Napoleonic warfare serves as an appropriate place to begin an examination of modern war. Following the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and the rise of the sovereign state as the primary actor in the international environment, governments of these states acquired the monopoly for using violence as a policy option. States not only declared war, but they declared war on other states. The newly developed concept of the sovereign state established the exclusive legitimacy of the sovereigns to wage war, but the cost of maintaining and employing armies limited the scale and length of these wars. War might have been the business of the state, but its outcome was of little concern to the population—to whom it mat-tered little whether they were subjects of Austria, Poland, or Prussia. Consequently, the loyalty and reliable service of armies had to be paid for from state treasuries. The signifi-cance of Napoleon and the distinction of modern warfare had less to do with the tactics or weapons used in warfare, characteristics that remained basically unchanged for over a century. Rather, what distinguished Napoleon was his abil-ity to exploit French nationalism, a product of the revolu-tion, to draw on personnel and resources in sufficient quantity to wage extended total wars. Both the American and French Revolutions presented the benefits and consequences of citizens willing to fight 29 W AR J OHN O. H AGEN U.S. Air Command and Staff College K IMBERLY A. H UDSON Air University 249 for nationalistic ideals. Prior to this nationalistic concep-tion, citizens were either the neutral observers or unhappy victims of war, an event fought by dynasties but not by nations.

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  Napoleon's Empire

  European Politics in Global Perspective

  • Ute Planert(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Napoleon’s Empire: European Politics in a Global Perspective Annie Jourdan 22 Annie Jourdan nationalism and for this reason scarcely visible to them. 5 Some historians in France charged their hero with betraying the Revolution and leaving their country a lesser power than it had been; others acclaimed him for having carried the French flag to the height of its glory. Foreign histo- rians, by contrast, reproached him for the humiliation, harsh treatment and economic ruin inflicted on their countries. Their reaction was to reject every part of the Napoleonic legacy, even when remnants of it were still in their possession. 6 The birth of nationalism in the nineteenth century led to the denial or omission of any contributions of foreign origin. 7 The history of a European country had to be a purely national history, wholly local in origin. Neighboring peoples and powers were not credited with playing any role, and certainly not Napoleon who, more than anybody, symbol- ized French arrogance and imperialism. This conviction was less firmly entrenched in Poland and Italy, where Napoleon had aroused high expecta- tions over national unity and independence. 8 With few exceptions political judgements on Napoleon have changed little since that time. The proponents of strong state power and l’homme providentiel have stuck to their position; so too have republicans, liberals and democrats, who refuse to accept that one man, however great, should hold undivided power and thereby threaten the liberty of all. But while those judgements on Napoleon have remained more or less the same, among most historians a clear change of approach has occurred. Increasingly, the focus of interest has shifted from the emperor to the empire he created. A major turning point in this respect was made in the early 1990s by the British historian Stuart Woolf. Looking beyond the homme exceptionnel, Woolf directed his attention to the impact of the Empire at the European level.

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  Fighting Terror after Napoleon

  How Europe Became Secure after 1815

  • Beatrice de Graaf(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 Introduction Napoleon’s Frustration What Sort of Peace? Following Napoleon’s refusal to accept the favourable conditions offered him by the Allies after his defeat at the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, Napoleon is said to have sighed: ‘I’m tired of this old Europe! I refuse to rule over a withered empire!’ 1 After 1815 the imperial dream of a united Europe under one military ruler came to an end. In its stead came something different: changes that did not revert back to the fragmented world of the ancien régime, but that expanded on a fateful sense of solidarity that the European powers nolens volens had been subjected to during the Napoleonic Wars. That over twenty-year-long period of insecurity and unstable alliances gave rise to a new community linked by the fear of terror and violence on the one hand, and the dream of peace and repose on the other. Napoleon’s reference to that ‘old, withered Europe’ expressed his lack of comprehension and frustration with the leading princes and ministers who had allowed him to play them off against each other multiple times, but who had still got the better of him. What he found even more difficult to fathom was why the victors of 1815 did not pick up where he left off and stretch their sway over Europe in their turn. He simply could not comprehend why the head of the largest and most successful contingent of allied troops in history, the Duke of Wellington, submitted himself after the glorious victory at Waterloo to the authority of a government official, the British foreign secretary Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769–1822), instead of ascending to the throne in France, or anywhere else for that matter: ‘Can it be possible that the modern Marlborough has linked himself in the train of Castlereagh, and yoked his victories to the turpitude of a political mountebank? It is inconceivable!’ 2 What were they, Wellington and Castlereagh, thinking? ‘What sort of peace has 1 According to Frances Lady Shelley, in R.

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  Nationalism in Modern Europe

  Politics, Identity, and Belonging since the French Revolution

  • Derek Hastings(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  1 When the more than 1,500 representatives from across France and its territorial possessions convened in Versailles in May 1789, they arrived with vastly divergent visions of economic policy and political representation. The stage was set for the unfolding of the foundational drama of modern European history, even if the set-designers and actors were themselves unaware of the plot twists that lay ahead. 2 2 The French Revolution and Napoleonic Era, 1789–1814 NATIONALISM IN MODERN EUROPE 22 The causes of the financial crisis stretched back decades. France’s catastrophic losses in the Seven Years’ War between 1756 and 1763 occasioned both economic pain—with the colossal expense of fighting on two continents exacerbated by France’s humiliating loss of territory and natural resources in North America—and a heightened, near-fanatical resentment of the British. When tensions between the British crown and its North American colonies boiled over into armed conflict in 1775, foreign minister Vergennes had advocated intervention on behalf of the rebellious colonists not only in pursuit of revenge against Britain but also as an opportunity to solidify the flagging geopolitical interests of France. Idealistic young nobles like the Marquis de Lafayette, who would later come to play such an important role in the early stages of the French Revolution, raised troops and gathered supplies, often at their own expense, and set sail to serve under George Washington. If the massive cost of French assistance was, in the short term, rewarded by the emotionally satisfying defeat of the British, a further series of devastating financial missteps left France’s coffers empty and the prestige of the monarchy in tatters. 3 The politics of financial scandal became a virtual spectator sport in pre-revolutionary France, enhancing the destabilizing effect.

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