The scholarly debate about a metamorphosis of warfare during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods rests on two connected controversies: one concerning a ‘military revolution’ and the other, ‘total war’.
3 This study reassesses the military impact of such revolutionary transformations. 2 Historians disagree about the nature, impact, and continuity of such warfare, but few question the fact that it constituted part of a revolutionary threat to the foundations of the Continent’s anciens régimes, creating the impression or reality of rapidly changing social, economic, and political conditions, and that it menaced the very existence of states, transforming the map of Europe and – via overseas expeditions (Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, 1798–9) and the naval war with Britain (1793–1802, 1803–15) – the wider world. According to one estimate, 2,532,000 soldiers perished on the battlefield or through wounding, making up more than 5 per cent of men of fighting age.
Around 5 million Europeans, out of a total population of 190 million (1800), were killed in combat or through war-related diseases. 1 In the event, the fighting between revolutionary or Napoleonic France and the German states continued, with few interruptions, for the next 23 years.
Most Prussian and Austrian officers seem to have expected the campaign of 1792, begun by France’s declaration of war against Piedmont, Austria, and Prussia on 20 April, to be a ‘promenade to Paris’, in the words of one French émigré. This study contends that such reactions were themselves indicative of the transformation wrought by the conscription of more mobile and destructive mass armies in a seemingly unending series of wars, which ensured that military conflicts impinged more fully on civilian life. Recently, historians have argued that the geographical and political diversity of the German states, in conjunction with popular criticism of the burdens and sacrifices of conflict in southern and western Germany, militated against a broad military revolution. The scholarly debate about a metamorphosis of warfare during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods involves three connected controversies: the meaning and timing of any ‘revolution’ in the conduct of war, the existence of a ‘total war’ in or after 1792, and the continuation of ‘cabinet warfare’ by the majority of the German states. This article investigates whether a military revolution took place in the German lands during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, with the potential to transform institutions and to alter contemporaries’ attitudes not merely to war, but to politics and diplomacy.
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