Violence and the state

Matt Killingsworth, Matthew Sussex, Jan Pakulski

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781784996543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In providing a counterweight to the notion that political violence has irrevocably changed in a globalised world, Violence and the state offers an original and innovative way in which to understand political violence across a range of discipline areas. It explores the complex relationship between the state and its continued use of violence through a variety of historical and contemporary case studies, including the Napoleonic Wars, Nazi and Soviet 'eliticide', the consolidation of authority in modern China, post-Soviet Russia, and international criminal tribunals. It also looks at humanitarian intervention in cases of organised violence, and the willingness of elites to alter their attitude to violence if it is an instrument to achieve their own ends.The interdisciplinary approach, which spans history, sociology, international law and International Relations, ensures that this book will be invaluable to a broad cross-section of scholars and politically engaged readers alike.

1

War in the Revolutionary-Napoleonic Age: the French experience, 1792–1815

Gavin Daly

ON 20 APRIL 1792, after months of intense debate, the deputies of the French National Assembly declared war on Austria. Over twenty-three years later, the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 finally brought an end to the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars. Between these two dates lay over two decades of almost constant warfare, with Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France pitted against shifting coalitions of Europe’s Great Powers – seven coalitions in all – broken only by the brief peace of Amiens (March 1802–May 1803) and the lull between Napoleon’s first abdication in early 1814 and his return from exile on Elba in March 1815. For the British, until 1914, these wars were known simply as the ‘Great War’.¹

In recent decades, these wars have increasingly assumed a prominent and highly contested place in historical understandings of the development of European war. As Roger Chickering has identified, the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars have been caught up in two ‘master narratives’, with each staking claims over the epoch.² On the one hand, the wars have fallen within the tail end of the narrative of the Early Modern European ‘Military Revolution’, a concept pioneered by Michael Howard and later modified and developed by Geoffrey Parker.³ This holds that technological and tactical changes – gunpowder, musketry and artillery – lead to the creation of large standing armies and the growth of fiscal-military states over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars are seen as a continuation and intensification of these early transformative changes in military affairs. On the other hand, the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars have been seen as the crucial formative phase in a narrative of ‘modern’ or indeed ‘total war’. Here, the epoch represents a fundamental break with the past: the ‘limited’ and ‘restrained’ dynastic or cabinet wars of eighteenth-century Europe giving way to an era of patriotic and ideologically charged nations-in-arms and ‘peoples wars’ that prefigured the greater transformative world wars of the twentieth century. The French Revolution is held as the crucible of this change, with its political, ideological and cultural dynamism transforming the nature of war, and the relationship between war, state and society.

The case for seeing in the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic epoch the seeds of modern ‘total war’ has recently been restated and refashioned by David A. Bell, who argues that the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment on matters of war and peace, when combined with the radical politics of the early French Revolution, gave rise to a new ‘culture of war’; one that ‘drove the participants relentlessly towards a condition of total engagement and the abandonment of restraints’.⁴ Bell’s thesis has sparked considerable debate amongst historians about ‘total war’ and its appropriateness as a descriptor of war for this era.⁵ The origins of the term ‘total war’ lie within this period, with Carl von Clausewitz’s ideal of ‘absolute war’; but ‘total war’ (la guerre totale) was first coined only in 1917 in the context of World War I.

There is no precise agreement on a definition of ‘total war’, but Peter H. Wilson’s identification of three classic characteristics is as good a starting point as any: ‘total mobilisation, the objective of the enemy’s total destruction and the alleged fusion of soldiers and civilians’.⁶ But as Wilson, among other historians, has pointed out, the term, concept and historical value of ‘total war’ remain problematic. In particular, there is the relationship between total war and modernity; dealing with a concept of ‘totality’; and establishing ‘thresholds’ or ‘tipping points’ along a continuum from limited to total war.⁷ In all of this, eighteenth-century specialists increasingly reject the claims of ‘limited’ war for their own epoch, with claims for total war in the Revolutionary-Napoleonic era predicated on establishing its limited nature beforehand. Twentieth-century specialists, on the other hand, remain largely sceptical of the appropriateness of labelling the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars as an example of ‘total war’, arguing that the scale of mobilisation, battlefield destruction, and the impact of war on civilians is not meaningfully comparable to the twentieth-century world wars between modern industrial nations.⁸

In all of this, however, what is generally accepted within the scholarship is that war undoubtedly changed during the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic era. But what is at issue, as Chickering notes, is the ‘nature, dimensions, and causes of the transformation’.⁹ This chapter explores these broad issues by focusing on four interrelated themes, progressing from the origins of the wars to the battlefield itself. The focus is on France, as the epicentre of change, but also the impact of France across Europe. It begins with the role of ideology as a causal dynamic in the wars; it then addresses the role of the French state in mobilising a nation-in-arms; moves on to discuss the political and professional nature of the French armies; and finishes by examining the conduct of war and fighting. The conclusion is that the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars were indeed a watershed in both French and European history. Notwithstanding continuities, there were both fundamental quantitative and qualitative changes in the nature of war. And the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic state was at the heart of this transformation.

Ideology and the origins of the wars

In January 1791, Edmund Burke wrote: ‘no Monarchy limited or unlimited, nor any of the Old Republics, can possibly be safe as long as this strange, nameless, wild, enthusiastic thing is established in the Centre of Europe’.¹⁰ The thing was the French Revolution, and Burke was the first contemporary to warn that the very existence of Revolutionary France was incompatible with international peace; that the Revolution would bring a war of ideas: ‘It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war’.¹¹The vexing issue of ideology remains central to debates over the nature of the Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars and the extent to which they represented ‘old’ or ‘new’ wars within the broad currents of European history. Ideational factors are consistently addressed throughout this chapter, but firstly, from a French perspective, what role did ideology play in the origins of the Revolutionary Wars and as a contributing driver thereafter?

Long standing Republican and Marxist scholarly traditions in France have seen the Revolutionary Wars as an inevitable clash between two diametrically opposed ideological systems: in short, Revolutionary and Republican France versus Old Regime Europe.¹² These were not the traditional wars of European kings, it is argued, with limited royal armies and limited objectives, but rather wars fought by rival political and social systems, between popular sovereignty and royal absolutism, between the values of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the feudal Society of Orders. What was at stake for the French was the very existence of the Revolution and the Republic itself. War was a means to both defend the Revolution from internal and external threats, and to export revolutionary principles and reforms throughout Europe. The converse was European powers fighting for the restoration of the Bourbons and the Old Regime to France, and defending themselves against the contagion of revolution.

Since the 1980s, this interpretation has come under increasing scrutiny. In his study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European international relations, Paul Schroeder argues that the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars were not a ‘contest between the French Revolution and the old regime’ but rather a ‘conflict between three hegemonic powers [Britain, France and Russia] as to which or which combination of them would control and exploit the countries in between’.¹³ In his now classic analysis of the origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, Tim Blanning put the case for realpolitik prevailing over ideological considerations, with the wars driven largely by traditional rivalries and power interests.¹⁴ Blanning concedes that ideals certainly weighed more heavily with the French than with the Austrians, Prussians or British, but argues that the Girondin deputies ultimately pushed France to war in 1792 ‘chiefly for the purpose of obtaining political power’.¹⁵

Notwithstanding the continuation of eighteenth-century state rivalries based on power and security, the case for ideological factors as playing a key causal role in the Revolutionary Wars is unquestionably strongest for the case of France, and specifically between the years 1792 and 1794. This was both the most radical and ideologically fervent era of the French Revolution, culminating in the Jacobin dictatorship and Terror (1793–94); and the period when France was most vulnerable to foreign invasion and military defeat. While the French court and other French revolutionary leaders pursued war for their own reasons, it was the Girondin deputies led by Brissot who were ultimately responsible for winning over the French National Assembly between late 1791 and April 1792. Notwithstanding political self-interest, ideology mattered in this debate, and not simply as an emotive rhetorical device to close out the argument for war. As Alan Forrest has remarked of the Jacobin language of war in this era: ‘there is no reason to doubt the reality of their underlying fear or the genuineness of their commitment to what they saw as a better society’.¹⁶

The French debates over war in 1791–92 arose amidst a mounting domestic crisis over the revolutionary settlement.¹⁷ Amongst revolutionaries there were growing fears over the loyalty and designs of the French royal family, over domestic ‘aristocratic plots’, over the émigré army in Koblenz, and over the intentions of foreign powers, especially Austria. In the radical revolutionary mind-set, there was simply no distinction between domestic and international threats to the Revolution, both perceived as part of a broad counterrevolutionary concert. Girondin fears about foreign intervention in the internal political affairs of France certainly had a real basis: in the Declaration of Pillnitz (27 August 1791), the Holy Roman Emperor and the Prussian King appealed for a united front of Europe’s sovereigns to ensure the liberty of the French royal family and the restoration of their political authority. Yet for the Girondins, this was a war not only of national survival and defence, but as Brissot declared to the Jacobin club: ‘It will be a crusade for universal liberty’.¹⁸ The French National Assembly had earlier, in May 1790, famously renounced wars of conquest. Now, the Girondins wanted a war of universal liberation, with war serving as a means to reshape Europe in the image of Revolutionary France. Yet further, in a point stressed by Bell, war was conceived here as something exceptional, not simply as part of Europe’s recurring and natural cycle of war and peace, but a war that would bring about a final perpetual peace. As the Girondin general, Dumouriez, told the French Convention on 12 October 1792: ‘This war will be the last war’.¹⁹ Moreover, it is important not to forget that the calls for an ideological war against the enemies of the Revolution came not just from within the French National Assembly, but increasingly from the radical popular movement in Paris.²⁰ Against this seemingly inevitable tide of war, Robespierre was a voice in the wilderness, uttering his famous riposte to war as a revolutionary crusade: ‘No one likes armed missionaries’.²¹

So the French went to war against Austria and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: understanding violence and the state:Matthew Sussex and Matt Killingsworth
• 1 War in the Revolutionary-Napoleonic Age: the French experience, 1792–1815:Gavin Daly
• 2 State violence and the eliticide in Poland, 1935–49:Jan Pakulski
• 3 State violence and China’s unfinished national unification: conflict with minorities:Terry Narramore
• 4 Instruments of state violence in hybridising regimes: the case of post-communist Russia:Matthew Sussex
• 5 Crimea as a Eurasian pivot in ‘Arc of Conflict’: managing the great power relations trilemma:Graeme P. Herd
• 6 Violence and the contestation of the state after civil wars:Jasmine-Kim Westendorf
• 7 Humanitarian intervention and the moral dimension of violence:Jannika Brostrom
• 8 Limiting the use of force: the ICTY, ICTR and ICC:Matt Killingsworth
• Conclusions: violence and the state – past, present and future:Matt Killingsworth, Matthew Sussex and Gavin Daly
• Index