Experiences of War in Europe and the Americas, 1792–1815

Soldiers, Slaves, and Civilians

Mark Lawrence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000412130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea

This work seeks to offer a new way of viewing the French Wars of 1792–1815. Most studies of this period offer international, political, and military analyses using the French Revolution and Napoleon as the prime mover. But this book focuses on military and civilian responses to French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, throughout the rest of Europe and the Americas. It shows how the unprecedented mobilization of this era forged a generation of soldiers and civilians sharing a common experience of suffering, bequeathing the West with a new veteran sensibility. Using a range of sources, especially memoirs, this book reveals the adventure and suffering confronting ordinary soldiers campaigning in Europe and the Americas, and the burdens imposed on civilians enduring rising and falling empires across the West. It also reveals how the wars liberated slaves, serfs, and common people through revolutions and insurgencies.

1 Introduction

Europe and the Americas are the centre of the West, with all its geostrategic, political, and economic connotations. Even though commentators use the term ‘the West’ either casually or as a point of political reflection, historians are circumspect in its historical meaning.¹ In recent years, studies of the western world have been overshadowed by studies of global history. But the ‘global turn’ has been criticized for its patronizing attitude towards studies of history which are firmly rooted ‘somewhere’.² It also tends to promise more than it delivers, as several purportedly global histories have continued to relegate the non-European world to the periphery.³

The Americas were certainly less populated, and led by men who themselves could not agree exactly what relations they possessed with the European side of the Atlantic, or even with their own hemisphere. ‘Latin America’ originated as a term in the 1850s, when the French empire of Napoleon III tried to confront the US expansionism, and is now generally considered to comprise all of the mainland Americas south of the United States of America.⁴ But the boundaries of America were as disputed in 1800 as the boundaries of Europe are today. John Quincy Adams, son of the Founding Father John Adams, considered ‘America’ to comprise the United States of America, certainly not the strange lands to the south; Henry Clay, by contrast, was a pan-American who thought in terms of a ‘western hemisphere’. The South American revolutionary, Simón Bolívar, thought that all of Spanish America should be united against Spain. But he was ambivalent about the United States of America, and did not invite the empire of Brazil to the pan-American Congress of Panama in 1826. The Brazilians, who peacefully hosted the Portuguese Braganza royal family from 1807, considered themselves civilized and the insurgent Spanish-Americans barbaric, even though Brazil would not end its slavery empire until 1888. Even though the definition of the West remains fuzzy, what is undisputed is that both Europe and the Americas were engulfed in conflict unleashed either directly or indirectly by the French Revolution.

A better historical term could be ‘Atlantic History’. Atlantic History is usually relegated to the eighteenth century, or to the time of Revolutions, perhaps ending with the French Revolution or the Haitian Revolution. Its breakthrough study in the mid-twentieth century was R.R. Palmer's Age of Democratic Revolution.⁵ The American Revolution and French Revolution certainly transformed the term ‘democracy’ from a debating point for scholars of Ancient Greece into a relevant option for modern politics. But neither Revolution was launched with the intention of establishing ‘democracy’. Still less could either metropole, neither the wealthy seaboard of the Thirteen Colonies nor the might of Bourbon France, be accepted as a proxy for ‘Atlantic’ history. In fact this field of history has been criticized for focusing on emerging or declining great powers and on imperial, political, and diplomatic history. It has tended to mean ‘imperial’ history when addressing Europe, and ‘colonial’ history when addressing the Americas.⁶ It also tends to remain eighteenth century in focus and is not known for adopting new military history approaches. ‘Atlantic’ understates the vastness of the Americas. Terminologically it either excludes or subordinates significant areas like Peru and the Baltic and Mediterranean tributaries. Thus this volume hopes to extend our usual idea of Atlantic history well into the early nineteenth century, especially considering the war of 1812 and the continued war in Haiti, which tied the Americas and Europe together in terms of experience even as they grew apart as nations. Around 1800, Europe's population was probably about 170 million, whereas the Americas, despite their vaster landmass, contained only about 45 million souls.⁷ I thus lean more on experiences in Europe, and more on populous and contested parts of the Americas (more, for example, on central America, and less on underpopulated Canada or the Pacific littoral).

Thus our title remains ‘Europe and the Americas’, even though a case can be made for a more emphatic ‘War of the West’, given the developments of the preceding 150 years. The horrors of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) had toppled ‘Christendom’ from the discourse, as the Muslim Ottoman empire began its long retreat from Europe, and European powers no longer made the imposition of a true Christianity an objective in their wars with their neighbours. Wars continued, and some of them, especially the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), had global repercussions. But war was an accepted method of diplomacy, as one royal dynasty protesting the advance of a rival would secure concessions as part of a peace treaty, and a power losing territory in one part of its realm would gain new territory somewhere else. The subjects lost and gained in these so-called cabinet wars did not seem to matter. Nations barely existed, and even a defeated power could hope to regain territory at the next round of conflict, and no defeat threatened to overturn the political and social order. Frederick the Great of Prussia, for example, made the holding of Austrian Silesia the cornerstone of Prussian military expansionism. Yet he saw no business in conquering Hungary or toppling the Habsburgs.⁸ War was a regular recourse for defending dynastic interests. As historian Jeremy Black observed, warfare before the French Revolution was ‘litigation by other means’.⁹

Sometimes wars drummed unhappy young men into the army. But soldiers were expensive to arm and supply, so monarchies preferred to maintain a small cadre of long-serving professionals backed up by mercenaries, often foreign in origin. European generals sought wherever possible to avoid battle and to win their campaigns by manoeuvre. In the War of Spanish Succession (1700–1714), there were only about a dozen major battles. Yet 100 years later in the Napoleonic Wars, there were at least 40.¹⁰ Cabinet war strategy abhorred chance and risk-taking. As Maurice de Saxe wrote in 1732: ‘war can be made without leaving anything to chance’.¹¹ Commanders were aristocrats and often old. They did not need to make their reputations in reckless actions. Men even dreamed that wars would one day become redundant altogether. Educated men, and even a minority of educated women in their salons, drew lessons from Ancient Greece and Rome, and read the latest philosophical ideas, and monarchs liked to consider themselves ‘enlightened’. This Age of Enlightenment offered a universal frame of reference. There were hopes that progress would render wars redundant. Philosopher Immanuel Kant hoped that a confederation of republics in Europe would guarantee the end of offensive wars.¹²

But there were other visions of the future, especially in France. New ideas about artillery, light infantry, and mobilizing the population offered a dystopian contrast to Kant's utopia. In 1772, Jacques Antoine Hippolyte, Count de Guibert, published his influential Essai General de Tactique about future ‘total’ war. He prophesied ‘that a people will arise in Europe that would combine the virtues of austerity and a national militia with a fixed plan of expansion, that it would not lose sight of this system, that, knowing how to make war at little expense and to live off its victories, it would not be forced to put down arms for reason of economy. One would see it subjugate its neighbours, overthrow our weak constitutions, just as a fierce north wind bends the slender reeds’.¹³ A few years after Guibert's essay, the revolutionary potential of a national militia was displayed in the American War of Independence, even though Guibert decried the fact that the poor performance of the British forces handed victory to the Americans by default. Whereas the regular Continental Army tended to lose pitched battles, the Americans excelled against the British redcoats exploiting local militia tactics of terrain and ambush.

Scientific improvements in map-making suggested more brutally effective war in future. Eighteenth-century texts on siege warfare employed mathematical calculation, requiring armies to include engineers alongside mathematically illiterate nobles.¹⁴ Army commanders were now expected to have a perfect knowledge of the country where their army was campaigning, and to consider every possibility in their own head. This very personal concept of military knowledge reflected the continued dominance of high nobles as generals. Late-eighteenth-century thinkers also planned to move armies better. Pierre de Bourcet in his book, Principles of mountain warfare, proposed ‘divisions’ which would march divided but fight united.¹⁵ The French Revolutionary army would show the many advantages of the divisionary system.¹⁶ First, an army walking widely dispersed could more easily requisition supplies in scattered villages, and therefore rely less on slow wagons, partially breaking free from the ‘tyranny of the magazines’ to which such old regime armies as the Habsburg and Prussian were still subjected. By living off the land, the armies of the French Revolution performed what may be termed ‘the tax of violence’.¹⁷

Writing the Wars of Europe and the Americas

This book is written with the perspective of ‘new’ rather than ‘old’ military history. Old military history is concerned with campaigns, weapons, leaders, and strategy, whereas the new is concerned with the full spectrum of military experience, namely, recruitment, training, and socialization of personnel, combat motivation, the effect of service and war on the individual soldier, the veteran, the internal dynamics of military institutions, inter- and intra-service tensions, civil-military relations, and the relationship between military systems and the greater society.¹⁸ New military history has been around for some time. Historian Joanna Bourke states that the term new military history is a misnomer, considering it was birthed in the upheavals of the 1960s, making it thoroughly middle-aged.¹⁹ But studies of wars and military institutions continue to reveal new insights, so the adjective remains valuable. Historians now embrace the full spectrum of human experience in war, on soldiers and civilians alike. This new variety of history has enriched our understanding of the German Wars of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945, especially regarding the everyday lives of soldiers and civilians. The door is wide open to adapt a wider spectrum of human experience to the French Wars of 1792–1815. In Europe, the Napoleonic empire is now increasingly seen as a colonial experience, which creates opportunities to explore subaltern lives, both military and civilian. In Latin America historians have become much more interested in history ‘from below’ as a consequence of their hemisphere's democratization since the 1980s.²⁰ Yet the trend of research into the 1792–1815 war tends towards either more traditional approaches to military history, or towards elite-centred imperial, political, and biographical history.²¹ Such varieties can only be enhanced by a study of experiences. After all, Napoleon quipped how men's behaviours were shaped by how they saw the world when they were 20.²²

This book is thus an experiential history. It is concerned less with social, political, and military structures, and more with understanding individuals and groups on their own terms. Similar approaches have borne fruit elsewhere. Michael Hughes has explained how Napoleon's soldiers sustained their morale through attitudes and exploits which amounted to a form of martial masculinity.²³ Almost 20 years ago, a social history of the Spanish Civil War raised the importance of individuals to its rightful place in a historiography dominated by the study of ideologies and collectives.²⁴ Experiential history used to be rejected as a mere histoire événementielle (history of events) by the Annales School of historians who were interested in long-term social changes. But in fact studying individuals and groups immersed in wars and revolutions not of their choosing reveals, what one German anthropologist called an Eigensinn, or their ability to assert their interests and manage their survival even against the constraints of power and violence.²⁵

The sources for understanding the war of 1792–1815 are varied. They reveal that the 1792–1815 period was indeed a war of the whole west, and not just a French War, either in its Revolutionary or Napoleonic phas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Timeline of major events
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Context of the French Revolution and the Art of War
• 3 Living with Campaigning
• 4 Living with Armies
• 5 Living with Empires
• 6 Living with Insurrection
• 7 Conclusion
• Sources and bibliography
• Index