Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/October 2015/Review essay


 * By Auntieruth

The world travels of several regular Bugle editors created a gap in offerings for the October issue, so I offered to step up to write something. My friends and family often ask me why I'm so obsessed with the French Revolutionary Wars. Most of my teaching involves courses in the time period between 1780 and 1914, with particular focus on 1790–1815. The sheer number of books I have on European warfare (generally) and this period (specifically) might eventually cause my house to collapse under their weight. Fortunately, there is now Kindle, which allows me to collect additional titles and store them electronically. The French Revolution is when everything changed. Yes, I know that's the line (and title) of the first episode of Torchwood, and indeed in the 21st century, everything changes (again), but this is the nature of history, and in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a lot of things changed.

French Revolutionary Wars in Germany
Military histories, or studies that look at a particular problem or event via the military lens, frequently overlook the complications associated with conducting a war when the political culture did not support the operational objectives. The problems experienced by the Coalition, and the subsequent Coalitions, were less commensurate with their armies and their armies’ training, and more related to goals of the diverse Coalition members. The First Coalition included the Holy Roman Empire, Great Britain, Spain (until 1795), Portugal, Sardinia (until 1797), Naples, and Sicily, plus other Italian states, the Ottoman Empire, the Dutch Republic (until 1795), and the French Royalists. Members left the coalition because of a separate peace struck between themselves and the French; they were added to the French allies, which included Spain from 1796 on, the Batavian Republic from 1795 on, and several of the Polish Legions from 1795 on. Prussia withdrew from the Coalition in 1795, but did not ally itself with France. The Second Coalition (1798–1802) included, again, the Holy Roman Empire, Great Britain (the United Kingdom after 1801), Russia (until 1799), French Royalists, Portugal, the Kingdom of Naples, and the Ottoman Empire. Again, as the French directed their attention at individual members, they were able to separate some of them from the coalition by giving them all or part of what the individual members wanted. In addition, the Coalition's members never articulated a unified goal; instead, they famously divided the spoils before they won the war, and the articulation of their strategic goals did not mesh with their operational capacities.

Campaign or Operational histories
Despite the relative importance of the outcomes of the southwestern German campaigns of 1796–1800, military histories have problematically ignored the activity in the southwest by focusing on the larger states, the larger militaries, or the actions of famous men. Even the new military histories of the French Revolutionary Wars (and to some degree, the Napoleonic Wars), which focus on war and everyday life, have missed this central geographic space of the timeline. Furthermore, modern studies of the First and Second Coalitions generally ignore not only operations in southwestern Germany, but also the experience of the Germans in the southwest with the militaries of other states. Even studies that focus on the southwestern quadrant of modern Germany tend to ignore the larger picture. For example, in Roland Kessinger’s excellent study of the combat in the vicinity of Stockach and Engen, there is minimal integration of this material with other material on the Bodensee; fundamentally, though, it is a study of the military activity in the Hegau, with little analysis of its impact on the population or the military. As other studies of the impact of this war in other areas have shown, the changing nature of warfare had far-reaching consequences for civil society as well as for those directly engaged in fighting.

Some studies of the French Revolutionary Wars examine elements of the Coalition wars when specific campaigns offer examples of a new tactic, or an exemplar of maneuver. Military historians have focused on battles such as Neerwinden, campaigns in the lower Rhine (1793–94), or campaigns that involved the Holy Roman Empire in Italy. Of the campaigns in the German southwest, which in 1796 led to an unprecedented imperial crisis, there is little.

The campaigns of the First and Second Coalitions appear in the literature if they involved the great man himself and these analyses are abundant. Indeed, new studies appear regularly. The absence of studies on the impact of the Coalition wars on the southwestern German states may not be due to its political fragmentation, although this may indeed contribute to the difficulty in its analysis. The campaigns in the northern Italian states were certainly complicated by political fragmentation, yet there is no dearth of such studies. Comprehensive studies have examined the wars’ impact on the fragmented Iberian Peninsula, and thorough investigation has been done of such multi-lateral actions as Salamanca.

There were other "great men" who shaped the campaigns of the Wars of the Coalitions and other multi-lateral actions in the French Revolutionary Wars. The most comprehensive study of these, with some focus on the wars of the First and Second Coalitions in the southwest, appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, written by Ramsey Weston Phipps. He called these revolutionary armies the "School for Marshals" and understood that the experience of Francois Joseph Lefebvre, Jean Baptiste Drouet, Joseph Mortier, Laurent Gouvion Saint Cyr, and Andre Massena came during campaigns in 1796–1800 in the southwest and Switzerland. Others such as Michel Ney participated in the southwestern campaigns beneath staff level. Ney, and others like him, were colonels or lieutenant colonels during the First Coalition; he was only appointed general de brigade in August 1796. Jean Victor Tharreau was a brigade commander in the Army of the Danube (1796). For Phipps, though, these campaigns were of importance because they were the training ground for the men who gathered around Napoleon. Other studies of these men individually and collectively have ignored or minimized the experience of the wars of the Coalitions, choosing to focus instead on their careers under the command of Napoleon. Arguably their experience shaped their attitudes and expectations of future behavior.

Similarly, on the opposing side of the battlefield, recent studies by Gunther E. Rothenberg and his student, Lee Eysterlid, have focused on the career of Charles, Duke of Tsechen, commander of the Austrian forces. Rothenberg’s posthumously published 2007 study of Archduke Charles and the Austrian army, Napoleon's Great Adversary, made some effort to analyze the campaigns, but exploration of his efforts at army reorganization dominated the study; Rothenberg’s earlier work focused on other elements of the Habsburg military. Eysturlid’s 2001 study of the archduke, originally his dissertation, focused on influences in Charles’ ideas of military effectiveness, and traced his efforts to reform the Habsburg military within the constraints of imperial and monarchical structures. Before these studies, Moriz von Angeli’s study of Charles as a military commander and as the architect of a new Habsburg military ignored Charles’ capabilities as a commander and the campaigns of 1793–1801, to focus on the reorganization of the military itself, a feat which Charles attempted in earnest from 1801 to 1806, and later as his health, and the arrogant Aulic Council, permitted. The Nafziger papers—an excellent resource!—offer some insight into the conduct of the war in the southwest but mostly through translations of Charles’ papers, without effort to analyze the Archduke's military strategies and ideas, or to place them in the longer continuum of military history. Such studies as Lawrence Shadwell’s Mountain Warfare are also largely translations and compilations of the writings of others into a narrative of the Swiss campaigns of 1799. The latter draws on the works of Charles, Henri Jomini, and others. Regardless, these works address Charles’ theories of warfare and military organization but, with the exception of Rothenberg’s and Eysturlid's work, downplay the conduct of the field campaigns and their broader implications for the changes in warfare, the tactical and strategic problems, and the effect on the populations of Swabia and southwestern Germany.

Other studies examine different aspects of Habsburg rule and its effect on the military. In his study of Theresian reforms, Peter George Muir Dickson examined in exhaustive detail the public finance and fiscal policies toward all aspects of Habsburg rule. Jeroen Frans Jozef Duindam compared the organization of the Bourbon and Habsburg households, which included portions of the military. The elective nature of Habsburg imperial rule formed habits at court in Vienna in appointment of officers and the role of performance in the raising of men from the minor nobility. The Habsburgs (or the one instance of a Wittelsbach emperor) had both imperial and royal options for rewarding service, and they deployed these as needed. Histories of the Ottoman military also illuminated the Habsburg approach to military organization; most Habsburg military energy went into protecting Eastern Europe from Ottoman incursion. In addition to the work by Rothenburg on the Habsburg military corridor, there are short studies of the Habsburg problems in financing the maintenance of an army in the Balkans. In addition, Andrew Wheatcroft’s The Enemy at the Gate highlights the Habsburg centuries-long contest with the Ottoman Empire.

With the exception of a few studies of Archduke Charles, studies of the Habsburg military focus on the periods before the French Revolution and after the Napoleonic Wars. Michael Hochedlinger, a senior archivist at the Austrian State Archives, addressed some of this gap. In Austria's Wars of Emergence, he examines the difficulties the Habsburgs faced while trying to maintain their position as Holy Roman Emperor and to secure the borders of what was later recognized as a multi-national empire. Joseph II, for example, walked a tightrope between his German interests as Emperor of the German Nation, and his Habsburg interests as head of state of various family territories. Hochedlinger's analysis gives battles and campaigns only brief coverage, and he opts instead for analysis of the diplomatic and economic impact of the military. Interestingly, he marks 1797 as the end of Austria’s Wars of Emergence. The gap in these histories surrounding the Wars of the First and especially the Second Coalitions makes this period one of the most understudied in a timeline otherwise saturated with coverage. A few other studies examine the fiscal issues congruent with military victory and defeat, and the shaping, or reshaping, of the Habsburg state. All in all, though, the dearth of material on the southwest campaign seems to reflect an obsession with the great man of the age (Napoleon), and his Nemesis, Wellington. Neither of them came to the southwest during the 1790s, although Napoleon did show up there after 1805.

Thinking about the past
So why should we study these seemingly minor battles and sieges: Battle of Schliengen, Siege of Kehl (1796–97), Siege of Hüningen (1796–97), Battle of Kehl (1796), and the Battle of Ostrach? Why does it matter what happened at Stockach or Winterthur in 1799? Why are such people as Friedrich Joseph, Count of Nauendorf and Karl Aloys zu Fürstenberg important? These battles and these men matter because they were part of processes and events that changed life not only in southwestern Germany, in small towns as Überlingen am Bodensee, Constance, Bregenz, but throughout the region. These were the end-days of free imperial cities and imperial abbeys, and the Holy Roman Empire. They helped to mold such political entities as the Grand Duchy of Baden and Switzerland, and became part of the process of reshaping of life in the nineteenth century.