ABSTRACT
In its contribution to strategic history, the era of the wars launched by, and against, revolutionary and Napoleonic France witnessed two profound transformations, at least so it is argued by many. First, the political context of international relations, its norms, rules and procedures, allegedly was transformed from its condition of near-permanent great power hostilities in the eighteenth century to a very different milieu, with radically distinctive, more benign modalities governing great power behaviour in the nineteenth (Schroeder, 1994). Second, the wars of the period 1792-1815 revealed the actuality of a strategic transformation, because French armies were wielded as would-be agents of radical political change. Warfare in pre-revolutionary Europe had not had implications for the structure of the political context. It was paradoxical, though probably predictable, that the extraordinary violence of the Napoleonic Wars should trigger political innovation in the approach of the great powers to the maintenance of order and the management of their differences.
