Consequently it was from books rather than from actual experience in the field that Napoleon initially drew his major military ideas. It is true that these convictions were often altered subsequently in the light of acquired experience, but beneath them all lay Napoleon’s belief that “In the Art of War—as in Nature—nothing is lost, nothing is created.”8 He was clear in his own mind that this early period of his life was the vital formative experience. “I have fought sixty battles,” he asserted years later; “and I have learned nothing which I did not know at the beginning.”9 This statement is hardly true, and even if it had been it would have formed the most devastating indictment of Napoleon as a general. Military doctrine must be a growing science, ceaselessly developing and improving, for once it degenerates into mere dogma (as happened to the Prussian army in the 1800s) disaster invariably looms close ahead. On the other hand few contemporary soldiers ever packed into a lifetime so much military experience as Napoleon during the eleven years between his commissioning in 1785 and his first appointment to the command of an army.
The young Bonaparte was extremely fortunate in the contacts he was able to make during his fifteen-month stay at Auxonne. As already mentioned, the commandant of the artillery school at that time was the celebrated artillerist, Baron du Teil, one of the first men to realize the potential ability of the nineteen-year-old Corsican. Under du Teil’s guidance and encouragement, Bonaparte was induced to undertake deep studies of the military art as a whole, as well as of those subjects specially relevant to his own particular arm of the service. The old man lent his protégé books—including his brother’s celebrated volume on gunnery*—and was always prepared to discuss with him the finer points of the art of war. Du Teil had himself been a disciple of the great Gribeauval,† and there can be no doubt that he was an important influence in moulding Bonaparte’s early ideas.
The library at Auxonne provided a wealth of fare for our Corsican. It is interesting to conjecture the names of the chief authors he consulted and the main subjects tackled. First on his reading list came works on military history. “Read and meditate upon the wars of the greatest captains,” he later wrote. “This is the only means of rightly learning the science of war.”10 Avidly he read everything he could lay his hands on—particularly the histories written by Vegécé, Folard and Grimoard—concerning the campaigns of Cyrus and Alexander the Great, of Caesar, Turenne, Luxemburg, Prince Eugene, Marshal de Saxe, and, above all, Frederick the Great. These heroic figures of the distant or more recent past fired his imagination and became his constant mental companions, and, as will be seen below, he drew much of his inspiration from their great achievements. But he read critically as well as keenly, and learned as much from the errors and shortcomings he could detect in his heroes as from their successes.
Next, he probably passed on to study the writings of contemporary and near-contemporary commentators on the military art. Once again Frederick the Great topped the list; and his famous “Secret Instruction” to the Prussian generals earned Bonaparte’s warm approval and admiration for its clear and realistic strategical approach. He also may have tackled the writings of the Welshman Lloyd, who had served in the Austrian, Prussian and Russian armies successively in the middle of the eighteenth-century, and studied the analytical works of Turpin de Crissé, Grimoard and Bosroger. But above all, he read and reread the famous Essai général de Tactique by Jacques Antoine Hypolite, Comte de Guibert (1743-90), which first appeared in 1772 when the author was only twenty-nine, and also his subsequent work, Defense du systeme de guerre moderne published seven years later. Bonaparte was also strongly influenced by Pierre de Bourcet’s Principes de la guerre des montagnes, written between 1764 and 1771, and this work underlay many of the schemes of campaign put into operation in both 1794 and 1796. As for the study of his parent arm. Napoleon could turn to the du Teil brothers and the other disciples of the great Gribeauval.
To the end of his life, Napoleon paid respect to these authors who between them inspired and conditioned his military thought. What precisely did he learn at their hands? It would be possible to quote a great many passages from these books and then set beside them passages from Napoleon’s papers reflecting the same convictions and sentiments, but in the limited space available it will prove more convenient to describe the Emperor’s philosophy of war, the significant factors he recognized and his systems of maneuver and of giving battle, adding notes on the sources which influenced the formation of his ideas at each relevant stage. However, a few important passages from Guibert merit inclusion at this point, for they contain the celebrated prophecy of the coming of both the French Revolution and of a great leader; it is quite possible that these words fired the ambitions and dreams of the nineteen-year-old artillery lieutenant at Auxonne, and they consequently form a suitable starting place for our study of the Napoleonic art of war.
Writing in 1772, the last heyday of the Ancien Régime, the great philosopher produced what amounted to a crushing indictment of eighteenth-century Europe (and of Napoleon’s future foes) by criticizing the economic, political and social systems as well as the current doctrines of war, besides foreseeing both the concept of the nation-in-arms and the advent of a leader like Napoleon.
“What can be the result today of our wars?” Guibert asked his readers.
The states have neither treasures nor a superfluous population. Their expenditure even in peace is in excess of their revenues. None the less they declare war. They take the field with armies which they can neither recruit nor pay. Victors and vanquished are alike exhausted. The mass of the national debt increases. Credit falls. Money grows scarce. Fleets are at a loss for sailors and armies for soldiers. The ministers on both sides feel that it is time to negotiate. Peace is made. A few colonies or provinces change masters. Often the source of the quarrels is not dried up, and each side sits on its shattered remains while it tries to pay its debts and to sharpen its weapons.
But suppose there should arise in Europe a people endowed with energy, with genius, with resources, with government; a people which combined the virtues of austerity with a national militia and which added to them a fixed plan of aggrandizement; which never lost sight of this system; which, as it would know how to make war at small cost and subsist on its victories, would not be compelled by calculations of finance to lay down its arms. We should see that people subdue its neighbors and upset our feeble constitutions as the north wind bends the slender reed.11
The governments of his day, Guibert goes on to say in another part of his work, prefer to entrust their armies to mediocrities “incapable of forming them, passive, docile to everyone’s whims, instead of to a superior man who might gain too much credit, might resist the opinions in vogue, might become the channel of the military favors of the sovereign and in the end the soldier’s man—the born general.”12 Later he goes on to say (with reference to the reduction of superfluous amounts of baggage trains): “Such a revolution can be brought about only by a change in the spirit and manners that now prevail. But to change the spirit and manners of a nation cannot be the work of a writer, whoever he may be. It can be that only of a sovereign or of a man of genius, into whose hands great misfortunes and the public voice, stronger than cabals, will place for a series of years the helm of the machine.” Guibert concludes: “Among men like these let there arise—there cannot but arise—some vast genius. He will lay hands, as it were, on the knowledge of all the community, will create the political system, put himself at the head of the machine and give the impulse of its movement.”
As the notable British historian, Spencer-Wilkinson comments, “Here was a picture to stimulate the intelligence, the imagination and the ambition of a young officer.”13
Napoleon’s general philosophy of war was basically simple and to the point. Once a state of hostilities existed between France and another power—whether war was formally declared or not was a matter of minor significance—the Emperor set out without delay or hesitation to destroy the enemy’s
field forces by all available means and thus break the national will to resist (or so he hoped). The means to the end were to be the shortest and sharpest methods available; all other considerations were to be considered secondary. “There are in Europe many good generals,” he declared in 1797, “but they see too many things at once. I see only one thing, namely the enemy’s main body. I try to crush it, confident that secondary matters will then settle themselves.”14 Here lies the kernel, the central theme, of Napoleon’s concept of warfare: the blitzkrieg attack aimed at the main repository of the enemy’s military power—his army.
This realistic, brutal and calculating approach to warfare was a rude break from the more gentlemanly military conventions of the eighteenth-century, but it is revealing that Napoleon drew much of his philosophy from the precepts of Frederick the Great, the famed eighteenth-century ruler and general. In the “Secret Instruction” issued to his field commanders in 1748, the great Prussian war leader advocated the type of warfare that his even greater military successor was to perfect: “Our wars,” wrote Frederick, “should be short and lively, for it is not in our interest to protract matters; for a long struggle little by little wears down our admirable discipline, and only results in the depopulation of our country and the exhaustion of our resources.”15 Frederick also outlined the best means of achieving a quick, decisive outcome. “You will compel the enemy to fight you on your approach; by means of a forced march, you will place yourself in his rear and cut his communications, or, alternatively, you will menace a town whose preservation is vital to him….”16 These concepts all feature prominently in Napoleon’s strategical system, as we shall see. “However,” Frederick continues, “you will take good care, in making this type of maneuver, to avoid being placed in the same inconvenient situation.” Again and again the King of Prussia is adamant that “the bloody decision” (as von Clausewitz later described it) was the sine qua non of successful war. “It is battles that decide the fate of a state.” Frederick unhesitatingly condemns the “wars of position” and of territorial aggrandisement which were commonly indulged in during his own day. A contestant must seize the initiative and keep it at all costs; the temptation to divide one’s army must be resisted; any means to the end—guile, treachery, the destruction of the enemy countryside (or even one’s own)—must be fearlessly resorted to. Above all, the enemy must be caught off balance: “Generally speaking, all enterprises for which the enemy is unprepared will derange him and compel him to abandon his position.” “The best battles are those where we force an unwilling foe to accept them.”
Time and again we find Napoleon echoing these general sentiments. “It is upon the field of battle that the fate of fortresses and empires is decided.”17 The Emperor approved the combination of force and guile advocated by Frederick: “In war all that is useful is legitimate” was his ruthless, opportunist conclusion. However, he was not uncritical of his great predecessor; although he constantly reiterated that Frederick’s basic ideals were the correct ones, Napoleon was equally certain that Frederick did not possess an instrument capable of realizing them in his own time.
There were other sources from which Bonaparte drew the inspiration for his philosophy of war. Guibert made a definite, though somewhat indirect contribution, by ceaselessly criticizing the contemporary practice of the seventies. “We have forgotten the art of maneuvering armies,” he asserts at one point. “We can win outpost actions but we do not know how to win great battles,”18 he states at another. Referring to the mediocre generals who followed Turenne, Guibert wrote an indictment of the “phoney” aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century warfare. “This policy of never making war en masse, that is to say never maneuvering with an entire army at one time or daring to fight battles, but instead adopting a policy of disintegration—of moves by small numbers which result in the ceaseless compromising of isolated corps—this is totally opposed to the principles of modern grand tactics. In fact it amounts to a degradation of the art….”19 These criticisms the youthful Bonaparte may well have taken to heart.
In point of time, the advice of Lazare Carnot—the revolutionary “Organizer of Victory” and another student of Guibert—was even more topical. In most ways Carnot was an administrator rather than a man of action;* his greatest contribution to Napoleonic warfare lay in the creation of an effective weapon out of the chaos and enthusiasm of the Revolutionary volunteer armies. But some parts of his military doctrine were undoubtedly relevant: “L’Audace, l’Audace—toujours l’Audace” was Carnot’s constant command to his generals, reitterating the words of the great Danton. In many ideas he closely followed Guibert’s doctrines, and he approached the secret of successful war when he wrote that “The art of the general is to achieve superiority whenever the foe presents himself.”20 However, Carnot had not the ability or character to force the full adoption of his convictions, and it was left to one far greater than he to pursue these ideas to their logical and practical conclusion.
Following the defeats sustained in the Seven Years’ War, French military experts sought a new tactical doctrine for the infantry. The relative advantages of fighting in line or column were carefully weighed. Each formation had its champions, and the result was what were known as les grandes querelles. Guibert—on balance—came out in favor of linear formations, but acknowledged the value of columns for moving into action, especially over broken ground. The protagonists of the column, most particularly Folard and Mesnil-Durand, discounted the effects of infantry fire power, and preached the allimportance of shock and weight. The Due de Broglie experimented with the latter suggestions at the Camp of Vassieux in 1778, and found them largely impracticable; the eventual outcome was a compromise, embodied in the Provisional Drill-Book of 1788, which refused to be dogmatic on the matter but taught the advantages conferred in many situations by adoption of “l’ordre mixte”—a combination of line and column. This Drill-Book was reissued in an edited form in 1791, and formed the theoretical basis for the infantry tactics employed throughout the Revolution, Consulate and First Empire. (See Part Six, Ch. 32.)
The Chevalier Jean du Teil (1733-1820): De L’usage de l’artillerie nouvelle dans la guerre de campagne …” Paris (1778).
Jean Baptiste Vacquette de Gribeauval (1715-89)—the protégé of the controversial Due de Choiseul—introduced far-reaching reforms into the French artillery. In so doing he was partially continuing the work of earlier experts, but his influence was fundamentally important. Although the effectiveness of much of his work was interrupted by periods of official disfavor and the ruthless opposition of the reactionary “Reds” (led by la Vallière the Younger), the ideas of Gribeauval and his supporters (collectively known as “the Blues”) eventually triumphed in 1774, when King Louis XVI ordered the full implementation of his systems.
Gribeauval’s reforms touched almost every aspect of French gunnery, Types of field artillery were standardized into three main categories (12-, 8- and 4-pounders), supplemented by a fixed proportion of 6″ howitzers and mortars. Cannon were lightened by shortening the barrels, improved casting methods were introduced, and trails, carriages and caissons were redesigned. Thus the new-type 8-pounder, including trail and carriage, weighed 1,600 Kgs.—as compared to 3,200 Kgs. of the older cannon it replaced. Stronger, larger wheels and better harnessing arrangements improved mobility, whilst the improvement of sights, the introduction of inclination-markers and the issue of gunnery tables improved performance in action. The introduction of prepackaged rounds (serge bags containing shot and charge) speeded the rate of fire, and a new type of case shot was made available. In the realm of organization, Gribeauval made the 8-gun battery the standard unit throughout the service, and advised the attachment of at least one to each infantry division. During his period, the Artillery was organized into 7 regiments, each with its own depot and training school. A regiment consisted of 20 “companies,” namely 12 of gunners, 4 of bombardiers and as many of engineers. Uniforms were also standardized. Thus Napoleon inherit
ed a reorganized and generally very effective artillery service.
Lazare Carnot was head of the “War Section” of the Committee of Public Safety. An engineer officer, whose capacity for sustained hard work rivaled even Napoleon’s, Carnot did much to reorganize the chaotic armies of the First Republic. To direct the efforts of the various armies, he created le Bureau Topographique (an embryonic General Staff). Through the medium of the all-powerful représentants du peuple he imposed at least a measure of discipline, using rewards as well as severity to improve morale. He was instrumental in implementing the Amalgames of 1794 and 1796, stopped the election of officers, disbanded the mass of “provisional” volunteer formations and in their place created a total of 198 “line” demi-brigades and a further 15 “light,” supporting them by 213 battalions of reserves. The cavalry army was similarly reorganized into demi-brigades of four squadrons apiece.
As for the artillery, Carnot encouraged the retention of the Gribeauval system (see footnote, p. 138) and vastly increased the number of Horse Artillery batteries. He also continued the work of Dubois-Crancé, organizing the battalions, batteries and squadrons into all-arm divisions. Five or six of these were gathered to form a field army, and by 1795 there were officially 13 Armies of the First Republic, each with a paper strength of 100,000 men. Such a strength was never in fact obtained, however, and it is estimated that in 1795 there were 323,000 line infantry, 97,000 light infantry, 59,000 cavalry, 29,000 artillerymen and 20,000 sappers—or 528,000 front-line troops; additionally there were probably as many more men of the National Guard held in reserve. Carnot further devised army and divisional staffs on a regular pattern, allocating varying numbers of Adjudants-Général (staff officers) to commanders according to their grade and size of their armies. A divisional general, for example, was customarily allotted five Adjudants-Général and four assistants.
The Campaigns of Napoleon Page 21