Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (8 page)

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