The Illusion Of Victory

The True Costs of Modern War

Ian Bickerton

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780522860238
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The Illusion of Victory demonstrates that most of the rewards of victory in modern warfare are either exaggerated or false. When the ostensible benefits of victory are examined a generation after a war, it becomes inescapably evident that the defeated belligerent rarely conforms to the demands and expectations of the victor. Consequently, long-term political and military stability is denied to both the victorious power and to the defeated one. As a result, neither victory nor defeat deter further outbreaks of war. This sobering reality is increasingly the case in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ian Bickerton persuasively argues that as the rhetoric of victory becomes more hollow all countries must adopt creative new approaches to resolving disputes.

1

Victory and Defeat, 1815–1840

INTRODUCTION

The wars fought between the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in July 1792 and the defeat of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in June 1815 totally transformed Europe. They were years of almost uninterrupted war in one part of Europe or another. It is hard to think of a single aspect of life that was not affected by the changes brought about, directly or indirectly, by Napoleon and the wars he provoked. These were years of anxiety, fear and uncertainty for most, and years of excitement, challenge and fulfilment for a few.1 Yet despite the bloodshed and the glorious victories achieved, if we look at Europe twenty-five years later, we can see that the victors did not bring about their intended objectives.

The conflicts framed the experience of both combatants and non-combatants, and directly affected those who fought and who were related to those who fought. The experience of wars shaped the mental world of the next generation, those too young to have joined the battlefront. As one historian has noted, the legacies of the French Revolution and of Napoleon were imprinted on the history of the subsequent century.2 Napoleon’s imperialism was a challenge to the monarchical aristocratic order of Europe. Napoleon captivated or captured the French population and those of other countries for the next century after his defeat, including, long after he no longer ruled, 30 million French people—who as a result of his reforms saw themselves for the first times as citizens and not merely subjects. Although it is tempting to regard the wars that engulfed Europe as one long war, the reality is that the only country to be at war for most of the entire period was France. Britain (which became the United Kingdom in 1801) was at war with France for most of the time, but the other European powers managed to avoid warfare for much of the time. Prussia, for example, the kingdom that was later to become the essence of Germany, was at war only in 1792, 1806–07 and 1812–15. Russia was at war only during the years 1805–14 and Austria was at war for nine years. Hostilities encompassed areas outside Europe including European possessions in Africa, North and Latin America, South-East Asia and the Middle East, but the impact and legacies of the wars was felt mostly, naturally, in Europe.

In fact France fought six quite distinct wars in the years under discussion, and more than seventeen major treaties were signed by the various parties ending these wars. It is instructive to examine the terms of these treaties and so note how the terms were disregarded. Generally, historians have seen the Congress of Vienna, held in 1815, as ending the Napoleonic Wars and setting out the terms and conditions of the postwar settlement which, it is so often asserted, ushered in a century of peace in Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only did numerous wars take place within Europe and between the European powers outside the region in the course of the next century, but the terms of the Vienna Congress also collapsed within a decade of their signing, and it was soon virtually impossible to tell who had won and who had lost the wars. The territorial gains achieved by Napoleon’s initial military victories were short-lived, and the eventual defeat of Napoleon did not achieve the outcomes intended by the victors.

By 1810–11, the French empire stretched from one side of Europe to the other. Boundaries had been redrawn, states dismembered and new ones created. Surviving rulers who had not been defeated or replaced by Napoleon were either allies or dependent states, and his will was virtually unchallenged on the continent. Rulers, be they kings, princes, dukes or cardinals, had been deposed, exiled, replaced or—in the case of the French king and queen—executed. Aristocrats and landed gentry had been dispossessed, stripped of their rights and privileges, their lands distributed. The power of Catholic Church was diminished. Religious and ethnic prejudices were assaulted and expanding urban middle classes found new opportunities to generate and share wealth. Feudal obligations were lifted from peasants. Newly elevated public officials welcomed the chance to build new regimes free of the oppressive restrictions of the past. Napoleon had introduced the democratic principles that had driven the French Revolution in all the countries of the French Empire.

But the threat and, in millions of cases, the experience of almost constant warfare was inescapable during this pivotal quarter-century of European history. For the aristocracy the constant battles provided career opportunities as officers. They saw war as an occasion to demonstrate their leadership and courage—and in many situations, their foolishness. But hundreds of thousands of peasants, tradespeople and labourers from the dependent states were conscripted and impressed into armies and navies, armed, hastily trained and poorly fed and eventually led into battle where they were killed and maimed in their countless thousands. Massive armies, made up of Germans, Dutch, Belgians, Italians, Poles, and some Spaniards, marched (when they were not engaged in actual combat) through cities, towns, villages and countryside, plundering and foraging for food, accommodating themselves by quartering or bivouacking, and seizing anything that took their fancy. It was, as Charles Dickens said, the best of times and the worst of times.

By 1815 the four major powers in Europe—the UK, Austria, Prussia and Russia—had (once again) combined their resources and military forces and decisively defeated Napoleon in battle. His defeat at Waterloo by the armies of the Quadruple Alliance led by British general Duke of Wellington was Napoleon’s last hurrah. On 24 June 1815 he abdicated in favour of his infant son but, within a month, François Charles Joseph (Napoleon II) was replaced by the Bourbon monarch Louis XVIII, brother to the executed Louis XVI. Napoleon was exiled to the island of St Helena and died there in 1821. For the victorious powers the nightmare seemed over. The expectation of the victorious war-makers was that the status quo would be restored.

There are two points to be made about these wars. The first is that, although Napoleon won most of, if not all, his wars, his victories did not produce the long-term results he sought. The treaty terms and alliances he formed were short lived. The second point is that an examination of the state of Europe twenty-five years later reveals that the victorious allies had also failed to achieve a long-lasting return to the status quo. Napoleon’s defeat after twenty-three years of wars resulted in the reversal of many of the territorial realignments and regime changes he had made, but the reforms he had introduced were long lasting. Napoleon may have lost the war, but he shaped Europe for the next quarter-century and even beyond in ways none of his victors could have imagined. Twenty-five years later it was hard to distinguish who had won from who had lost the wars. It is worth examining these two apparently contradictory claims more closely.

The French Revolutionary Wars, the Napoleonic wars and their outcomes are complex. Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written describing the events and personalities that made up the French Revolution, the battles fought by and against, and the significance of that monumental figure who dominated Europe for the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century: Napoleon Bonaparte.

The central issue over which the wars from 1792 to 1815 were fought was this: would the constitutional, secular and democratic reforms inaugurated by the French Revolution and Napoleon stand, or would the forces of reaction led by the monarchies and principalities of Europe prevail? Would the people who had seen, if not actually experienced, freedom become mere subjects once again to be ruled over by royal whim or would they hold on to the new social structures? Napoleon himself, as emperor and dictator, was at times a threat to the very reforms he championed. When Napoleon was finally defeated and the Bourbon dynasty restored to the throne of France, the triumphant conservative victors who met in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna believed they had secured and guaranteed the status quo and stemmed the tide of revolution.

In this context it is worth noting that the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars might be described as the end of the Eighteenth-Century World War—the end of the first real world war.3 The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars followed almost uninterruptedly from the Seven Years War of 1756–64 and the American War of Independence, which involved the major European powers in Europe, in the Americas and in eastern and South-East Asia in a series of short but seemingly never-ending wars. The cost to France of assisting the American colonies to gain their independence from England had bankrupted the nation, and the severe steps taken to rebuild the national treasury led to such widespread hunger and hardships that the royal absolutist regime was overthrown in 1789. Faced with the loss of its American colonies, the English were determined that they would lose no others and set about consolidating and extending their colonies in Asia (and Australia). France under Napoleon represented a real threat within and outside Europe and French expansion had to be stopped. At the completion of the twenty years of almost continuous warfare that this took, the English had gained South Africa from the Netherlands (in return for the Dutch East Indies), and established Singapore as a strategic defensive outpost. These colonial transfers remained in place throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, although few of the European territorial or regime changes stipulated in Vienna in 1815 lasted twenty-five years.

What had each side sought to gain during the twenty-three years of almost continuous warfare that preceded the peace meetings of 1814–15? France had sought, initially, to prevent invasion by Prussia and Austria, then to occupy and spread democratic principles in the Netherlands and Belgium, and, later, throughout Europe. Finally, Napoleon had sought to establish French hegemony (and his family) over all of Europe. Essentially, the French emperor had sought to replace old principles of legitimacy with new ones in almost all areas of life in France and throughout Europe.

The Allies—the United Kingdom, Austria, Prussia and Russia—had sought to contain France, protect their own territories and rulers, and prevent the spread of democracy. France was eventually defeated and achieved none of its territorial goals despite winning all the wars until 1813. If the whole period is seen as one war, France lost the war and the Allies won. The peace treaties signed were designed to reconstruct Europe and to prevent France from attacking other countries. The victors allocated and distributed the territorial spoils of the wars among themselves, and restored the monarchs of Europe. They carved up continental and overseas territories to create what they regarded as a territorial equilibrium. They wanted to prevent the recurrence of revolutionary and nationalist movements that could result in the rise of another Napoleon. In so doing they ignored nationalist sentiments and principles, and the rise of nationalist feelings and movements. They disregarded the social and intellectual changes inaugurated by the French Revolution and its wars with the result that, within twenty years, the Europe they created was in chaos.

To follow what happened later, we need to understand the background to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The outburst of revolution in April 1789, led by a rising middle class, swept away the repressive and inefficient aristocratic-based feudal old order in France in the name of the universal rights of man (other peoples and rulers of Europe were undecided about the merits of this). In France itself, a Constituent Assembly was set up in Paris espousing the principles of republicanism and democracy, and a written constitution was promulgated in September 1791, establishing a unicameral Legislative Assembly that took office in October. The king, Louis XVI—who in July had attempted to flee abroad to seek assistance to overturn the revolution from foreign rulers to whom he was related—was detained by revolutionary forces, returned to Paris, and was forced to accept a role as a constitutional monarch.

The rulers of Europe did not know how to respond to these far-reaching, dramatic, and disturbing events. Almost all of them saw the democratic ideas and egalitarian doctrines of the revolution as a threat to their own positions and the virtually unlimited powers they wielded over their subjects. Throughout Europe, peasants, artisans, workers and many in the middle classes saw in the events of France the promise of better things to come for them, and disturbances and revolts occurred all over Europe, from Ireland to Russia.

But Europe’s rulers, despite their fear and loathing of the revolutionaries in France, did not want to become involved in a costly war to restore the absolute power of the monarchy. Even the Hapsburg emperor, Leopold II, who ruled Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium and parts of Italy—and who was the brother of the queen of France, Marie Antoinette—did not at first want to get involved in the internal affairs of France. In August 1791, Leopold II met with the king of Prussia at Pillnitz in Saxony and issued a statement that has subsequently become known as the Declaration of Pillnitz. Leopold announced that he would take military action to restore order in France if all the other powers would join him. He was confident that the English prime minister, William Pitt (the younger), for once, would refuse to join him in this venture.

France itself was rent by internal political divisions and economic instability. Various factions within the bewildering changes of central government sought to gain control of direction of the revolution and enforced their will using intimidation, purges, and terror. Some factions wanted to restore the fundamental character of ancien régime, while others to push the radical egalitarian reforms even further. The struggle for supremacy within France, as well as between France and the European monarchies, was bitter, bloody and long.

For the next decade France, and much of Europe, remained in turmoil. The constantly reconstituted French revolutionary governments were threatened by invasion by monarchs fearful of change. These threats encouraged extremist elements, known as the Jacobins or Girondins, within the Legislative Assembly in Paris. They declared that the revolution would never be secure unless and until it had spread to all the world, especially Europe. Some proposed that they invade neighbouring countries, assist local revolutionaries to overthrow their established governments and set up a federation of republics. When Leopold II died in 1790 and his successor Francis II resumed discussions with Prussia over the future of France, the French Legislative Assembly declared war on ‘the king of Hungary and Bohemia’—the Austrian monarchy—on 20 April 1792. Prussia joined Austria and in July warned that Parisians would pay a high price if any harm came to the king and queen.

This first war against France produced the quite unintended and undesired consequence of radicalising the French population. In September, the Assembly was usurped and replaced by a more democratic National Convention elected by universal male suffrage. The Prussians decided not to continue their advance into France after a setback in a relatively minor artillery battle against a French army at Valmy on 20 September. Responding to requests for aid by revolutionary sympathisers, French armies soon occupied Belgium (the Austrian Netherlands), Savoy (Sardinian—which had joined Austria) and some German cities on the German western bank of the Rhine. The National Convention announced it would provide assistance to ‘all peoples wishing to recover their liberty’ and instructed its generals in occupied territories to dissolve old governments, confiscate government and church property, abolish tithes paid to the Catholic Church, hunting rights and other aristocratic dues, and set up provisional administrations.4

The English government stated that it could not accept French control of Belgium. Faced with British and Dutch military resistance, France declared war against the two powers on 1 February 1793 and within a short time had annexed Belgium, Savoy, Nice and much of the occupied German Rhineland. France was now at war with virtually all the powers of Europe but the European rulers were so preoccupied with their own territorial ambitions and jealousies and had so few land forces that they were unable to mount a serious threat to French power or to have an...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Maps
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Victory and defeat
• 2 The aftermath of the Crimean War
• 3 The legacy of the Russo-Japanese War
• 4 The elusive rewards of victory in World War I
• 5 Unconditional Surrender: The aftermath of World War II
• 6 Dimensions of victory in wars since 1945
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint