ABSTRACT
Napoleon had appalled and terrified his contemporaries as much as he had dazzled them by his successes on the battlefield. His armies represented the naked fury of Revolution and yet they had accomplished military feats hitherto undreamt of. The outright rejection of the Revolution, the restoration of the old order, could be attempted at the governmental level. But was it possible on the military? True, armies were the apotheosis of state centralisation in the eighteenth century. Their organs could conform to dynastic precedent. The conduct of war, however, had been elevated to a new and more awful plane, whence it seemed there was no turning back.
