Nervous States by William Davies

Author:William Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

Mobilizing the masses

Between 1792 and 1815, Europe experienced virtually uninterrupted warfare, the longest period of conflict since the Thirty Years War which had ended in 1648. The catalyst for this protracted conflict was the French Revolution and the figure at its heart was Napoleon. By more recent standards, or even by those of the Thirty Years War, these wars were not unusually bloody.1 But their legacy forever altered the nature of warfare, leadership, nationhood, and government. Just as the protracted conflicts of the seventeenth century set the stage for a whole new type of political power—centralized and technocratic, based around the collection of facts and figures—so the Napoleonic Wars ushered in a new era, with its own distinctive approach to knowledge and expertise.

One thing that gave the French an advantage over this period was the ability to convert the popular revolutionary spirit into military fervor. Up until this point, many European armies consisted of aging noblemen supported by a band of “undesirables”—low-level criminals and foreign mercenaries trained and paid to obey the officers in charge. Armies were comparatively small, and conflicts took place in confined spaces for short periods of time. Achieving discipline was a constant struggle for the nobility in charge, and the threat of desertion was high. In comparison to what followed, the stakes and aims were low, often reducible to squabbles between rulers, none of whom could afford to run the risk of serious losses. But in 1793, the new French republic introduced a measure that changed all this forever: conscription. A year later, the French army numbered 800,000, more than three times the size of Louis XIV’s largest army.

Conscription vastly increases the potential size of an army, but it also transforms its nature. In place of specialist training or a talent for fighting, conscription channels the public’s national sentiment and enthusiasm. It places a new emphasis on shared cultural identity and the feelings of ordinary people. As more men are drafted into the army, women and children become mobilized toward economic production. Once the entire population becomes a potential military resource, each and every member of society is invested with value. In contrast to the view of mortality presented by demographers such as John Graunt, in which death is treated as an object of probabilistic calculation, civilian mobilization grants a purpose to life and a potential meaning for each death. The demographer records your death as a statistic; the military commander will engrave your name on a monument. A grim tragedy of this revolutionary ideal is that, for most combatants, warfare became progressively less heroic as technology advanced thereafter.

Possessing Europe’s only conscripted army, the French were able to adopt a new set of tactics for which their opponents were utterly unprepared. In contrast to the rigid, predictable, and small-scale style of eighteenth-century battle, Napoleon’s forces advanced as a mass swarm, unleashing small acts of sabotage and engaging in skirmishes from multiple directions. The amateur nature of this new military force was an advantage, especially when confronting

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