Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David 1801 (public domain image)

(4) FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY & NAPOLEONIC WARS (1792-1815)

Cue the La Marseillaise!

The wars that made the modern world – and the modern world wars. Indeed, I’ve seen it persuasively argued that the Napoleonic Wars should outrank the First World War as the more genuinely global conflict. And the French Revolution – along with its subsequent wars – are generally regarded as the landmark of modern political history, hence the god-tier special mention entry.

Napoleon needs little introduction – the Corsican artillery officer who commandeered the French Revolution and crowned himself Emperor of France to dominate Europe.

Napoleon distinguished himself as one of the most brilliant military commanders of history. Under his leadership, the French armies repeatedly defeated numerically superior Austrian, Prussian and Russian armies – outfighting coalition after coalition led and financed by Britain.

The French in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were not the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of the modern joke – a somewhat unhistorical slur in any event given France’s military history, although the Book of Lists did rank France among its Top 10 Most Defeated Nations in Modern History – but the armies that forged a French empire across Europe from Spain to Russia and from Italy to Denmark.

But in the end Napoleon lost his Napoleonic wars – his empire dismantled, France completely defeated (once and for all in a battle subsequently commemorated by Abba) and Napoleon himself exiled to progressively more pathetic islands.

Despite his strategic and tactical brilliance, Napoleon was undermined by his own flaws. One basic flaw was his nepotism in handing out kingdoms or nations as prizes to his relatives – most critically in giving the kingdom of Spain to his brother Joseph, which prompted Spain to rise up against France in the Peninsular War, the running sore or “Spanish Ulcer” of Napoleon’s empire

Of course, it didn’t help that Napoleon was relentlessly opposed by the British, who were unparalleled in magnificent bastardry – with their most cunning aspect to pose as being nice, as if they were just going about playing cricket rather than taking out almost every country on earth in the name of empire.

In fighting the world’s greatest maritime power, Napoleon was handicapped by his lack of understanding of naval strategy (or his navy’s lack of ability) as well as geopolitics. It was trying to fight outside Europe (and on the seas) that Napoleon met with his earliest (and most consistent) defeats.

For all his romping around Europe, he effectively was bottled up in Europe by the British navy, unable to project his power into the world. All his victories in Europe did not change the basic fact that true world power had moved from the center of Europe to its edges – to the maritime empire of Britain and the continent-spanning empire of Russia, which ultimately crushed him between them. And in the end, all Napoleon’s wars achieved was handing world empire over not to himself, but to two successive Anglo-Saxon powers, Britain and the United States (the latter not least through the Louisiana Purchase) – the real winners of the Napoleonic Wars.

The Napoleonic Wars also initiated the rise of Germany under Prussia – with Prussia reforming itself militarily, and then, as part of the Congress of Vienna seeking to beef it up for a better balance of power, acquiring industrial regions in Germany that transformed agrarian Prussia into an industrial leader in the nineteenth century.

Of course, Germany was to have the same fatal flaw as that of Napoleon before them, bottled up between Britain and Russia as well as misjudging the extent to which world power had moved beyond Europe. Actually, their situation was even worse, as world power to their west had moved across the Atlantic to the United States, well beyond their reach. Indeed, only twenty years after Waterloo, another Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville predicted Russia and the United States as the two global powers – a process that visibly took shape during the Napoleonic Wars.

The French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars saw the transformation of Europe and the world – spreading revolutionary principles over much of Europe (then identified as liberal with the same distaste as a subsequent era was to identify socialist or communist).

Those principles saw the transformation of formerly aristocratic armies into the beginnings of modern warfare, not least the levee en masse or mass conscription of armies – which saw the French revolutionary army achieve objectives that had eluded the French monarchy for centuries

It also saw the beginnings of total war – with the dawn of industrial warfare (with the Industrial Revolution lending Britain the ability to punch above its demographic weight) and the dawn of ideological warfare, as well as the emergence of nationalism (or “people’s wars”) and militarism in the culture of war

“The wars had profound consequences on global history, including the spread of nationalism and liberalism, the rise of Britain as the world’s foremost naval and economic power, the appearance of independence movements in Latin America and subsequent decline of the Spanish Empire and Portuguese Empire, the fundamental reorganization of German and Italian territories into larger states, and the introduction of radically new methods of conducting warfare.”

To which might have been added other things, such as the relative peace in continental Europe during the nineteenth century, and the territorial expansion of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase. And my own pet theory that the destruction of indigenous nations or peoples in the Americas and Australasia can be traced to Napoleon. Not directly, of course, but indirectly through the Louisiana Purchase, consolidation of British “settlement” in Australia and Latin American revolution or independence, which accelerated the impending destruction of indigenous peoples or nations.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)