Civilization: The West and the Rest (29 page)

At the Battle of Austerlitz,
^†
on 2 December 1805, some 73,200 French troops defeated 85,700 Russians and Austrians. These figures should be compared with the forces at Yorktown in 1781, where Washington’s 17,600 men defeated Cornwallis’s 8,300 Redcoats. The casualties inflicted by the later battle exceeded all the participants in the earlier battle by more than 12,000. At Austerlitz more than a third of the Russian army was killed, wounded or captured. Yet the weaponry used there was not significantly different from that used by Frederick the Great’s army at Leuthen nearly half a century before. Mobile artillery inflicted most of the casualties. What was new was the scale of Napoleonic warfare, not the technology. By 1812 the French army numbered 700,000. In all, 1.3 million Frenchmen were conscripted between 1800 and that fateful year. Around 2 million men lost their lives in all the wars waged by Bonaparte; close to half of them were French – approximately one in five of all those born
between 1790 and 1795. In more ways than one did this revolution devour its own children.

Was there something distinctive about American civil society that gave democracy a better chance than in France, as Tocqueville argued? Was the already centralized French state more likely to produce a Napoleon than the decentralized United States? We cannot be sure. But it is not unreasonable to ask how long the US constitution would have lasted if the United States had suffered the same military and economic strains that swept away the French constitution of 1791.

The Revolution devoured not only its own children. Many of those who fought against it literally were children. Carl von Clausewitz was twelve years old, and already a lance corporal in the Prussian army, when he first saw action against the French. A true warrior-scholar, Clausewitz survived the shattering Prussian defeat at Jena in 1806, refused to fight with the French against the Russians in 1812, and also saw action at Ligny in 1815. It was he who, better than anyone (including Napoleon himself), understood the way the French Revolution had transformed the dark art of war. His posthumously published masterpiece
On War
(1832) remains the single most important work on the subject to have been produced by a Western author. Though in many ways a timeless work,
On War
is also the indispensable commentary on the Napoleonic era, for it explains
why
war had changed in its scale, and what that implied for its conduct.

‘
War
’, Clausewitz declares, ‘
is … an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will …
[It is]
not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means
.’ These are perhaps his most famous – and also most mistranslated and misunderstood – words. But they are not his most important. Clausewitz’s insight was that in the wake of the French Revolution a new passion had arrived on the field of battle. ‘Even the most civilized of peoples’, he noted, clearly alluding to the French, ‘can be fired with passionate hatred for each other … ’ After 1793 ‘war again became the business of the people’, as opposed to the
hobby of kings; it became a ‘juggernaut’ driven by the ‘temper of a nation’. Clausewitz acknowledged Bonaparte’s genius as the driver of this new military juggernaut. His ‘audacity and luck’ had ‘cast the old accepted practices to the winds’. Under Napoleon, warfare had ‘achieve[d] [the] state of absolute perfection’. Indeed, the Corsican upstart was nothing less than ‘the God of War himself … [whose] superiority has consistently led to the enemy’s collapse’. Yet his exceptional generalship was less significant than the new popular spirit that propelled his army.

War, Clausewitz wrote, in what deserves to be his best-known formulation, was now ‘a paradoxical trinity – composed of primordial violence, hatred and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability … and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone’. True, the ‘wish to annihilate the enemy’s forces’ is a very powerful urge – the ‘first-born son’ of this new war of the nations. But, Clausewitz warned, defence is always ‘a stronger form of fighting than attack’, for ‘the force of an attack gradually diminishes … ’ Even in defence there is an inherent difficulty: ‘Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult … a kind of friction … lower[s] the general level of performance.’ For these reasons, an effective commander must always remember four things. First, ‘assess probabilities’.
^*
Second, ‘act with the utmost concentration’. Third, ‘act with the utmost speed’:

The whole of military activity must therefore relate directly or indirectly to the engagement. The end for which the soldier is recruited, clothed, armed and trained …
is simply that he should fight at the right place and the right time
.

Above all, however, the juggernaut must be kept under control. What Clausewitz calls ‘absolute’ war therefore ‘
requires
[the]
primacy of politics
’ – in other words, the subordination of the means of warfare to the ends of foreign policy. That is the real message of
On War
.
²²

So what were Napoleon’s policy aims? In some respects, it is true,
they acquired a reactionary patina: contrast Jacques-Louis David’s
Consecration of Napoleon I
(1804), swathed in imperial ermine in Notre Dame, with the romantic hero of the same artist’s
Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass
(1801), every inch the revolutionary
Zeitgeist
on horseback (in the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s phrase). This was the metamorphosis so repellent to Ludwig van Beethoven, the musical spirit of the age, that he angrily scratched out the original title of his Third Symphony – ‘Buonaparte’ – and changed it to ‘Sinfonia eroica’. Having crowned himself emperor in December 1804, Napoleon obliged the Austrian Emperor Francis II to renounce the title of holy Roman emperor and then married his daughter. With the Concordat of 1801, meanwhile, Napoleon made France’s peace with the Pope, sweeping away the remnants of the Jacobin Cult of Reason.

Yet there was little else that was backward-looking about the empire Napoleon sought to build in Europe. It was truly revolutionary. Not only did he enlarge France to its ‘natural frontiers’ and shrink Prussia. He also created a new Swiss confederation; a new forty-state western German Confederation of the Rhine, stretching from the Baltic to the Alps; a new kingdom of (North) Italy; and a new Duchy of Warsaw. True, these new states were to be French vassals; he even installed his spendthrift youngest brother Jérôme as the titular ruler of the new Kingdom of Westphalia and his dandy of a brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, as the equivalent in Naples. True, too, the vanquished paid a heavy tribute to the French victors. Altogether between 1795 and 1804 the Dutch gave 229 million guilders to the French, more than a year’s national income. Napoleon’s campaigns of 1806–7 were not only self-financing, but covered at least a third of ordinary French government expenditure. And in Italy between 1805 and 1812 fully half of all the taxes raised went to the French treasury. Nevertheless, the European map as redrawn by Napoleon transformed the old patchwork of hereditary territories into a new grid of nation-states. Moreover, French rule was accompanied by a fundamental change to the legal order with the introduction of the new civil law code he had sponsored – a change that was later to have lasting and positive effects on the economies of the countries concerned. French rule swept away the various privileges that had protected the nobility, clergy, guilds and urban oligarchies and established the principle of equality before
the law.
²³
When Napoleon later said that he had ‘wished to found a European system, a European Code of Laws, a European judiciary’ so that ‘there would be but one people in Europe’, he was not entirely making it up.
²⁴
Simply because his empire did not endure does not mean he lacked a political vision. For Napoleon, war was not an end in itself. It was, as Clausewitz understood, the armed pursuit of a policy.

It was not Bonaparte’s goal that was at fault; it was the fact that sooner or later his enemies’ forces were bound to outnumber his, even if their commanders could never match his skill. Ravaged not so much by the Russian winter as by the Russian strategy of deep retreat and attrition (not to mention rampant typhus), the Grande Armée succumbed to superior numbers – in particular superior numbers of horses – at Leipzig in 1813.
²⁵
It was much the same story when the Prussians tipped the balance at Waterloo in 1815. Long before then, however, France had already lost the war at sea. At Aboukir Bay (the Battle of the Nile) in 1798, Sir Horatio Nelson won his ennoblement by craftily attacking the French fleet from both sides, dealing a death-blow to Napoleon’s dream of conquering Egypt. Seven years later, at Trafalgar, Nelson’s force of twenty-seven ships outmanoeuvred a larger Franco-Spanish flotilla by employing the ‘Nelson touch’ – the tactic of sailing at high speed through the enemy line, firing broadsides to the starboard side of one ship, the rear of another and then the second ship’s port side.

The significance of Napoleon’s defeat at sea was twofold. First, France was gradually cut off from its overseas possessions. Already in 1791 the hugely lucrative sugar colony of Saint-Domingue had exploded into revolution under the leadership of the freed slave François-Dominique Toussaint ‘Louverture’ (literally ‘the opening’) after the Legislative Assembly in Paris had extended the vote to free blacks and mulattos but not to slaves. The abolition of slavery by the National Convention in 1794 plunged the island into a bloody racial civil war that spilled over into neighbouring Spanish Santo Domingo and raged until Toussaint’s arrest and deportation to France in 1802, and the restoration of slavery by Napoleon. Altogether, between 160,000 and 350,000 people lost their lives in the Haitian Revolution. A year later the French opted to sell the vast North American territory then
known as Louisiana (not to be confused with the present-day state) to the United States at a bargain-basement price: 828,800 square miles for $15 million (less than 3 cents an acre). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, France lost the financial war. Despite continued sales of former Church lands, the introduction of a new currency and the squeezing of Dutch and Italian taxpayers, Napoleon could not get the cost of borrowing down below 6 per cent. Between Trafalgar and Waterloo, the average yield on French government
rentes
was two full percentage points higher than that of British consols. It was a fateful spread.

Mercantilist that he was, Bonaparte sought to weaken Britain’s economic position by banning trade between the continent and Britain. But British merchants were able quite quickly to switch to markets further overseas, secure in the Royal Navy’s dominance of the principal sea-lanes. It is sometimes mistakenly assumed that Britain’s earlier industrialization gave it an advantage over Napoleon. In fact it was commerce and finance that won the day, not iron and steam. Not only did trade hold up; crucially, Britain was able to run a current-account surplus in invisible earnings from shipping, insurance and overseas investment, plus the profits of empire (earnings from the slave trade and from the taxation of Indians by the East India Company). The UK’s services surplus amounted to £14 million a year between 1808 and 1815, far outweighing the merchandise trade deficit over the same period. This enabled Britain to make massive transfers abroad – at peak equivalent to 4.4 per cent of national income per annum – in the form of pay to its armies and subsidies to its allies. Between 1793 and 1815, the total amount Britain gave France’s continental foes was £65.8 million. The new spirit of the age, leaning against a pillar in the stock market, was a Frankfurt-born Jew named Nathan Rothschild – the
Finanzbonaparte
– who played a key role in furnishing the Duke of Wellington and his allies with the sinews of war.
²⁶

Napoleon had been defeated. France was now burdened with a huge reparations bill and the restored Bourbons in the form of the corpulent Louis XVIII. Yet neither the dream of revolution nor the dream of revolutionary empire died with Napoleon when he expired, almost certainly of stomach cancer, on the forlorn South Atlantic island of St Helena in 1821. The 1789 Revolution had given France a political
script of unequalled drama. For the better part of the following century the temptation to re-enact the play was irresistible; it happened in 1830, in 1848 and again in 1871. The critical point is that, each time the barricades went up across the streets of central Paris, a shockwave – albeit one of diminishing magnitude – swept through Europe and the European empires. The red revolutionary promise of the Declaration of the Rights of Man could not simply be wrapped up in clerical black and forgotten, a point made with the utmost force in Stendhal’s novel
The Red and the Black
(1830). Anyone, after all, could adopt both the terminology and the iconography of Revolution. The hastily armed civilians, the bare-chested warriors, the sprawling martyrs – these figures had long careers as clichés ahead of them.
^*

The revolutions of 1848 were even more widespread. People took to the streets in Berlin, Dresden, Hanover, Karlsruhe, Kassel, Munich, Stuttgart and Vienna, as well as in Milan, Naples, Turin and Venice. It was a revolution led by intellectuals disenchanted above all with the limits imposed on free expression by the royal regimes restored in 1815. Typically, the composer Richard Wagner and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin did their bit for the ‘world conflagration’ by plotting to write a blasphemous opera together.
^†
Britain was one of the few West European countries spared, not least because 35,000 soldiers, 85,000 special constables, 1,200 military pensioners and 4,000 police were on hand to make sure the Chartists – proponents of universal suffrage – behaved themselves. As a result, 1848 in London was a matter of speeches in parks, not blood in the streets.