Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (32 page)
Just as Napoleon generalized to battle and then to the campaign itself the lessons of an artillery siege, so he generalized to the prevailing European political system the mentality of the siege commander who plays upon the morale of the defenders to give him victory at a reasonable cost. This strategy nicely suited Napoleon's tactical sense: he was uninterested in the capture of fortresses or the occupation of terrain, because these could not force the collapse of will that the destruction of the enemy's army accomplished. A dramatic defeat not only led to further reversals and withdrawals, but eventually had the effect of forcing the opposing government to withdraw its support from the multistate coalition. To achieve such a defeat, Napoleon had to entice the enemy into committing his main force in battle. This could only be accomplished through deep penetrations of enemy territory with the greatest force possible, often leaving his own communications and rear completely exposed. One example of this can be
found in the Austerlitz campaign of 1805. Napoleon induced the main Austro-Russian army to launch a premature offensive, not waiting for Russian and Austrian reinforcements, by playing on the Austrian desire to reoccupy Vienna. Another example can be found in the 1806 campaign against Prussia, in which Napoleon advanced toward Berlin, creating a threat to which the Prussians had to respond, in a tactical context in which they were diverted by their anxiety about their capital. In both these cases, he did not aim at mere territory, but instead struck at the state: the state was forced to fight, for essentially political reasons, and inevitably found Napoleon well-prepared militarily for the confrontation that he alone truly sought.
Indeed Napoleon's defeat in Russia came about when he was unable to force the Russians to commit their main army to a climactic battle to save Moscow. To the contrary, the Russians burned their own capital and left Napoleon's army to starve in it. Although Russia was very much a member of the European society of powers, she was not a territorial state and thus the legitimacy of her dynasty did not depend, conditionally, on the support of the nobility. Russia was perfectly capable of a defense in depth because she was not defined, constitutionally, by her territorial extent. Because she faced a French army that was hopelessly overextended while she herself had all of Russia to withdraw into, she did so, laying waste to her own territory as Russian forces retreated.
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When on September 14, 1812, Napoleon entered an undefended Moscow, and it was set ablaze that night by the Russians, the tsar astonishingly refused to negotiate a peace. As French communications and supply links collapsed, Napoleon abandoned Moscow on October 19, but heavy snowfalls transformed the retreat into a catastrophe: the French suffered more than 300,000 casualties from exposure, starvation, and the harrying fire of Russian forces.
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Napoleon thus was defeated in Russia not because the territorial state had found a successful strategy to parry his innovative techniques. Nor were territorial states eager to adopt Napoleonic methods. Indeed the states who opposed France well realized that a fundamental shift in the nature of the state was a prerequisite to fielding a nation in arms by mass conscription, whose officers had been given open access to commissions, and which often was fed by requisition—although it gradually did appear that this could be done without the revolutionary upheavals that took place in France. When these changes did come, they spread to other states the state-nation model of government of which the Napoleonic state was an early example.
The new monarchies who came to power, after the Revolution of 1830, Louis Philippe and Leopold I, sought the sanction of “the people” as king “of the French” and “of the Belgians,” rather than of France or Belgium. Even the reactionary Tsar Nicholas I, three years after crushing the Polish uprising of 1830 – 1831, proclaimed that his own authority was based on nationality (as well as autocracy and Orthodoxy)—and his word
narodnost
, also meaning “spirit of the people,” was copied from the Polish
narodowosc
.
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This model was very different from that of the nation-state, and Napoleon himself, as well as the architects of the Vienna state system that institutionalized his defeat, were careful not to nurture such states. For a time Napoleon enjoyed a reputation as a liberator, arising from his 1796 campaign in Italy,
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in which, as a general of the Revolution, he prised Lombardy from the Austrians and established the Cisalpine Republic, whose capital was in Milan. But in the beginning of 1799, having annexed Tuscany and Piedmont, and having established republics in Rome and Naples, the Directory studiedly refused to assemble an Italian nation-state. Once Napoleon seized power he annexed Piedmont directly to France in 1802, and the Ligurian Republic, whose capital was Genoa, in 1805; in 1801 he had decreed a constitution for the Cisalpine Republic and was named president of what he agreed to call the Italian Republic. Belgium— the Austrian Netherlands—had been occupied in 1795 and formally annexed to France in 1797. The left bank of the Rhine had been annexed by France in 1797 and by 1803 all but three of the ecclesiastical princes had lost their sovereignty, as had all but six of the fifty-one imperial towns and cities. Several south German states were carved out or enlarged, but there was never any question of creating a new German state.
The kingdoms of Westphalia and Bavaria and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw were all French satellites. For a time Holland was made a kingdom under Napoleon's brother Louis, but when this monarch showed too much independence, the Dutch state was annexed directly to the French Empire. Joseph Bonaparte was first King of Naples, and was then replaced by the French marshal Murat when Joseph became king of Spain. In all of these states, important reforms were accomplished: serfdom was abolished (in varying practical degrees), French-style prefectures were set up in some of the German states, a civil code was introduced, and new written constitutions were promulgated. But at no time was there any contemplation of creating actual states whose legitimacy derived either from the fact that their institutions were expressions of national will or that they sought responsibility for the welfare of the nation. Napoleon's remark regarding the Polish Sejm (parliament) is instructive: “As for their deliberating
assemblies, their
liberum veto
, their diets on horseback with drawn swords, I want nothing of that…. I want Poland only as a disciplined force, to furnish a battlefield.”
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Nor did the Peace Settlement of 1814 – 1815, following Napoleon's defeat, seek to create national states: quite the opposite. The claims of Hol-and were extended to include Belgium; Piedmont was enlarged to include Genoa and Nice, then handed over to the House of Savoy; Austria annexed Lombardy as well as Venice; Pius VII recovered the Papal States; and Poland was reorganized into little more than a province of Russia, three-quarters of the size of the Duchy of Warsaw, while most Poles lived elsewhere under Prussian, Austrian or Russian rule. The Federal Diet in Frankfurt was not to be a popularly elected parliament; on the contrary, it was to be a body of state representatives of thirty-nine different German governments, including Austria and Prussia, both of which lay partly outside the German Confederation. Sweden and Norway were joined in a forced marriage. And, interestingly for our study, England secured to herself the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Malta, and the Ionian Islands. Insofar as the wishes of the national peoples involved were contemplated at all, they were calculatedly frustrated.
Despite Napoleon's loss, however, the state-nation had triumphed and its imperatives were to govern not only the Peace Settlement but the peace itself. The myth that united strategy and law in every period became now a national myth, epitomized by the merging of the State into the personal and quasi-religious roles once occupied by princes.
National history was depicted by writers both of school textbooks and of popular works as the history of the Nation's military triumphs. Other Nations were defined by these authors in terms of military relations. Foreigners were people with whom one went to war and usually defeated, and if one had not done so the last time, one certainly would the next. [O]ne found personal fulfillment in making “the supreme sacrifice” so that the national cause might triumph…
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It is important to appreciate the characteristics of such a state in order to understand the nature of the international society composed of such states. Napoleon had forced every territorial state eventually to conform itself to the state-nation model if it was to compete militarily. Armies of conscripts, meritocratic and bourgeois ministries, broad-based taxation without exemptions for the nobility, all spread across Europe, just as mercenary and nonstate elements vanished from the forces of the great powers.
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Most importantly for our purposes, the triumph of the state-nation meant that the legitimacy of this constitutional form was recognized by the congress of
states that wrote the peace. The creation of this congress we owe to one remarkable figure more than to any other, and it is perhaps only from the present perspective that we can truly appreciate his achievement.
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, the British foreign minister from 1812 to 1822, was born in 1769, the same year as Napoleon, his great adversary, and Wellington, his principal political and personal ally. This proud, uncharismatic
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man understood the requirements of the new society of state-nations and labored selflessly to bring about its harmony. At the time, he was little understood and greatly vilified; both Byron
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and Shelley
†
wrote remarkably cruel lines to immortalize their hatred of him, and even today he has yet to find a diplomatic biographer sufficiently attentive to his conceptions for Europe. For the most part such biographers are either apt to be defensive in tone
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or they are mesmerized by the voluptuous characters of his cynical contemporaries, Talleyrand and Metternich.
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From our current perspective, however, one can see in Castlereagh's work an achievement of such magnitude that it becomes clear how, despite the incomprehension of his successors and the hostility to his designs of his continental collaborators, it survived to give Europe peace for forty years. To appreciate this, let us revisit the endgame of the epochal French War, and its resolution at Vienna.
Having abandoned Russia, Napoleon was on the defensive in 1813. As he retreated from the Rhine late in that year, Wellington crossed the Pyrenees and successfully attacked Bayonne. Holland rose in revolt and expelled the French imperial civil and military officers. Early in November the Austrian foreign minister, Prince Metternich, made a peace overture that would have acknowledged French conquests through 1796, leaving Belgium, the German left bank, and Nice-Savoy under French rule. Napoleon rejected these terms. On December 21, the armies of the coalition crossed the Rhine, beginning the invasion of northern France. But in February, encouraged by recent victories in the field, the French emperor again rejected peace offers, this time confining France to the boundaries of 1792. Only at this juncture was Castlereagh able to secure an allied agreement, signed March 9 at Chaumont in Champagne, that the war should be fought out until a definitive victory had been won and, more importantly, that the alliance would continue after its victory. The language of the treaty is significant:
The present Treaty of Alliance having for its object the maintenance of a balance of Europe, to secure the repose and independence of the Powers, and to prevent the invasions which for so many years have devastated the world, the High Contracting Parties have agreed among themselves to extend its duration for twenty years from the date of signature.
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This treaty held the coalition together until the Peace of 1814 – 1815 was completed, providing the basis for the First and Second Treaties of Paris and for the Congress of Vienna. Chaumont is the source of “the first notable experiment in institutionalizing the principles of concert and balance in behalf of European peace,”
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where the key word is “institutionalize.” The Congress system took the wartime coalition of collective security and applied it to peacetime, in much the same way that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has operated in our own time, persisting beyond the Cold War to provide a framework for subsequent collective action in Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
It was Castlereagh's strategic innovation to use the wartime coalition to maintain the peace. To accomplish this, he undertook the following, highly difficult objectives: (i) he had to dismantle the Napoleonic superstate, while preserving the state-nation of France to such a degree that it would legitimate its new regime (rather than stigmatizing it as the collaborationist party that had sold out France to her enemies); (2) he had to persuade the allies that their cooperation in the face of tantalizing French offers and menacing French threats had ultimately been worthwhile, which meant that while British allies would receive substantial territorial gains, the British would not; (3) he had to institutionalize the directorate of the Congress so that it met regularly to continue multistate collaboration, and yet somehow keep it from turning into an instrument of internal repression when member-states felt threatened by revolutions in various European countries; (4) he had to win credible commitments of armed force of such overwhelming magnitude that no single power or coalition of two of the five great powers could be reasonably hopeful of success through war; (5) he had to do all these things while facing stiff opposition in his own party from George Canning, whose rhetorical gifts and skill at playing on public opinion he could not hope to match, and from Whigs who portrayed him as a mere henchman of the reactionary Metternich, and (6) he had to act in concert with Prussians who wanted a Carthaginian peace, Russians who were entertaining the idea of a continental hegemony at German expense, Austrians who felt threatened by the new development of the state-nation and its ability to exploit national sentiments, and the French, who saw England as their primary persecutor and the frustrator of their continental dreams.