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masts than any opponent had yet managed to inflict upon it.”32 Realistically
speaking, however, the chance that Versailles, even leagued with Madrid,
could match London’s forces upon the high seas was fading steadily in the
1780s.
And, just as the projection of British power increasingly foiled French
ambitions at sea, so the enormous growth of Russian and Prussian power
constrained and humiliated the French in the continental theater of politics.
In the marches of eastern Europe as in the British Isles, the achievement of
Great Power status rested upon a pragmatic self-restraint in foreign policy
and an integration of governmental policy with domestic-elite values and
aspirations that forever eluded ancien régime France.
Until Peter the Great’s accession in the late seventeenth century, the
Muscovite state, viewed in the west as semicivilized at best, had received
most European influences only as filtered through Sweden, Poland, and
Turkey. All this was fated to change, however, with the arrival on the scene
of the amazingly “driven” Peter. The new tsar imposed upon his subjects the
most updated techniques of maritime and continental warfare, of economic
and bureaucratic organization – all borrowed from the West. Lacking in
his empire the slow, organic evolution of society from below that had long
characterized countries in the West, the tireless Peter sought through his
own dynamic initiative to nullify in a brief span of years the other powers’
30 On these various trade issues in the 1780s, see Fox, “Negotiating with the Russians,” p. 52; J. F. Bosher,
The Single Duty Project: A Study of the Movement for a French Customs Union
in the Eighteenth Century
(London: Athlone, 1964), pp. 82–83; and Murphy,
Charles
Gravier, Comte de Vergennes
, pp. 443–46.
31 Dull,
The French Navy
, pp. 340–44; and Kennedy,
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
, p. 99.
32 Franklin L. Ford,
Europe 1780–1830
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 63.
The ancien régime
27
daunting lead in military and bureaucratic innovation.33 Introducing his
noted Table of Ranks in 1722, with its parallel ladders of promotion through
military and civilian-bureaucratic ranks, this Romanov modernizer insti-
tutionalized compulsory state service for his serf-owning nobility. Under
Peter, service to the government began at the age of fifteen and was for
life. With little of the urbane clergy and educated middle class of Western
societies to mobilize, how could the tsar have proceeded otherwise? It
is true that several of Peter’s successors found it politically expedient to
lighten the burden of state-service requirements. Still, Russian historians
insist that, even in the closing years of the eighteenth century, the
nobles fulfilling military and/or civilian duties for the tsarist regime were
no less characteristic of their class than had been Peter’s nobles a century
before.34
Thus did the Romanovs infuse Russian geopolitics with the skills and
energy of the only elite in this crude, rural, and underdeveloped society.
And one very tangible measure of their success in doing so was the explosive
growth of this Eurasian state’s military capacity. The Russian soldiery, it
has been estimated, numbered only 170,000 as of 1690, but had increased to
220,000 by 1710, to 330,000 by 1756–60, and had stabilized at about 300,000
in 1789.35 The Russians also conjured up a navy boasting as many as sixty-
seven ships of the line by 1789; nevertheless, the tsarist state focused pri-
marily on the possibilities inherent in land warfare. Although the Romanov
land forces at this time could not vaunt the fearsome discipline or the strate-
gic and tactical generalship of Prussia’s army, they gradually gained esteem
for their tenacity and bravery. “Experience has proved,” one writer would
even allege during the Seven Years’ War, “that the Russian infantry is by
far superior to any in Europe, in so much that I question whether it can be
defeated by any other infantry whatever.”36 That the tsars also developed a
diplomatic service whose personnel abroad compared favorably to diplo-
matic counterparts from all other states of the time further ensured that,
in the eighteenth century, Russia’s influence would soar in much of what
Louis XIV had once pompously called “French Europe.”37
But Russia would have to share the limelight of revolutionized east
European geopolitics with Prussia. What Peter and his Romanov de-
scendants did for Russia, Frederick William I and his son Frederick II
(“the Great”) did, over a much smaller area, for Hohenzollern Prussia.
33 Ludwig Dehio,
The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the European Power Struggle
, trans. Charles Fullman (New York: Knopf, 1982), pp. 94–96, 99–100.
34 Max Beloff, “Russia,” in A. N. Goodwin, ed.,
The European Nobility in the Eighteenth
Century
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), pp. 175–76, 181, 189.
35 Kennedy,
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
, p. 99.
36 Cited in M. S. Anderson,
Europe in the Eighteenth Century 1713–1783
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p. 182.
37 Ibid., p. 153.
28
Reinterpreting the French Revolution
Careful analyses of the Prussian institutions of that era underscore how suc-
cessfully the Hohenzollern monarchs integrated the country’s landowning
nobles, or Junkers, into the structures of state power. The crux of the matter
seems to have been that the Prussian nobility received a novel and, in the
end, ineffaceable sense of identity in the professional service echelons of
this monarchy. These nobles served, in other words, as the indispensable
army officers and administrators of the rising Prussian state. A symbiotic,
triangular arrangement developed, involving the royal autocrat, those of
his nobles serving for life or at least for many years in army officer ranks
and top-level administrative posts, and those of his nobles dominating
social and economic life on the village and county district level. Under
Frederick II even more than under his father, the Junkers monopolized
officer positions in the army and the more responsible and permanent posts
in the civilian bureaucracy. At the same time, the local squirearchy tight-
ened its grip upon the hapless peasantry and on most fiscal and policing
activities.38
Moreover, in Prussia even more than in Russia, geostrategic vulnerability
dictated a heavy reliance on the military. Indeed, for the Prussians, with
their country cut out in morsels of land extending from the Rhineland in
the west to the borders of Russia in the east, sheer survival more or less
required a policy of calculated, preemptive aggression against neighboring
states. Hence the devotion lavished by the Hohenzollern rulers on their
army – on its discipline, its fighting morale, its commissariat, its equipment,
and its strategic and tactical mobility. And, as these rulers forged their
compromises with the Junker squirearchy, impressed Junker sons (and the
ever-expendable peasantry) into military service and toughened the sinews
of a war-making capacity, the Prussian army (like its Russian counterpart)
exploded in size. It grew from barely 30,000 men in 1690 to nearly 200,000
by the time of the Seven Years’ War and still counted about that many in its
ranks in 1789.39 True, Prussia lacked the Eurasian hugeness that endowed
the tsarist regime with its vast swath of influence from the northern Baltic
shores down to the troubled regions of the Balkans. Still, with its domestic
resources harnessed tightly to its geopolitical will, Prussia became in this
era a factor to be reckoned with – as the French would learn to their cost.
The addition of Romanov Russia and Hohenzollern Prussia to the sys-
tem of competing European states led almost unavoidably to a waning of
France’s continental influence. The entire strategic calculus of Versailles,
positing Austria as the principal and permanent antagonist in central
Europe, and relying upon large eastern states like Sweden, Poland, and
38 Hans Rosenberg,
Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience,
1680–1815
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 150.
39 Kennedy,
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
, p. 99.
The ancien régime
29
Turkey to counterbalance the Habsburgs, was rendered obsolete by devel-
opments at St. Petersburg and Berlin. And of course French difficulties on
land could only be aggravated by tendencies at sea, where in the long run
Britain was able to mobilize statist resources dwarfing those previously
deployed against the French by the Spanish and the Dutch.
The Russians never actually fought against the French in this period –
indeed, Versailles and St. Petersburg were both linked to Vienna in the
bloody campaigns of the Seven Years’ War. Russia nonetheless undermined
France’s influence in more insidious ways. It did so, for instance, by
encroaching relentlessly upon those three eastern outposts of French con-
tinental influence, Sweden, Poland, and Turkey. In 1763, the indomitable
and ruthless empress Catherine the Great imposed her own ex-lover
Stanislaus Poniatowski as king upon the Poles; nine years later, her state’s
growing influence was reflected in the First Polish Partition, in which
Russia, Prussia, and Austria stripped away about 30 percent of Polish
territory.40 The Russians also scored spectacular gains against Ottoman
Turkey during these years, extending their influence on the Black Sea and
its surrounding territories, striking into the Caucasus, and – even more
ominously – acquiring the right (behind a fac¸ade of concern for Orthodox
Christians at Constantinople) to interest themselves in Turkish domestic
affairs. Soon, Catherine and her Austrian counterpart would be medi-
tating a partition of Ottoman holdings in the Balkans.41 As for Sweden,
it experienced a French-supported coup that brought Gustavus III to
power in August 1772; but this drew from St. Petersburg threats of
Russian military intervention. Catherine was too profitably engaged at the
time in Polish and Turkish affairs to follow through on her threat, but she
continued in subsequent years to evince a disconcerting interest in Swedish
affairs.42
What was more, the growing influence of the Russians could no longer
be confined to regions adjacent to Romanov territories; it extended in the
1770s and 1780s to German affairs in the heart of Europe. Franco-Russian
mediation of an Austro-Prussian quarrel over the Bavarian succession pro-
cured for Russia “a formal
locus standi
in German affairs,” and led the
French representative to the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire to com-
plain in December 1778, with considerable justice, that Catherine’s state
now wielded the kind of influence in German politics previously enjoyed
40 On these developments, see, in particular, M. S. Anderson, “European Diplomatic Relations, 1763–90,” in
The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 8: The American and French
Revolutions 1763–1793
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 258–59, 262.
41 On these issues, consult Karl A. Roider, Jr.,
Austria’s Eastern Question 1700–1790
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982).
42 See, on Catherine’s policies: Isabel de Madariaga,
Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).
30
Reinterpreting the French Revolution
almost exclusively by France.43 Indeed, the tsarina created a special depart-
ment for German affairs in her foreign ministry and was eager at all times
to act as “honest” broker in German disputes.
This fundamental turn of events may have occasioned some anxiety at
Berlin, where Romanov arbitration in Prusso-Austrian altercations always
generated distrust; but at least Frederick II could derive satisfaction from
the drubbing his armies had administered to French forces in the Seven
Years’ War. Louis XV’s ministers, eager to chastise their erstwhile ally
Frederick for his frequent betrayal of French strategic interests in the
prior conflict over the Austrian Succession, had instead found their army
mortifyingly routed by a Prussian force half its size at Rossbach, on
5 November 1757. Historians would be hard-pressed to cite any single
event more emblematic of France’s strategic decline in the eighteenth
century.44 Certainly, military disasters such as that at Rossbach engendered
widespread anger and frustration in French ruling circles. “Never has there
been such a defective army,” wrote the comte de Saint-Germain to a friend,
adding that “the first cannon-shot determined our rout and humiliation.”45
In retrospect, the cardinal de Bernis would concur: “the troops were totally
undisciplined. Treachery and incompetence were the orders of the day.
Generals and nation were completely demoralised.”46
Modern military specialists have generally endorsed these conclusions.47