ABSTRACT
France was capable after 1789 of revolution and conquest simultaneously, because in contrast to the infant American republic, the apparatus of the absolutist state was in place, highly developed, and more active and effective administratively than any other political entity on the European continent. From the scal crisis that became the catalyst for the revolution between 1787 and 1789 to the Republic and Terror of 1792-1794 and the Directory of 1795-1799, the French state underwent upheaval, reconstitution, and internal anarchy, yet emerged territorially intact, administratively even more centralised, and the ideal instrument for the ambitions of the politically astute and militarily gifted. When in 1791 the new National Assembly ordered all ofcers to sign a pledge of allegiance, Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself for the republic. When the patriots of his native Corsica called for liberation from the foreign yoke, Napoleon would not hear of separation from France; instead, he espoused the Jacobin cause, and “talked and wrote the revolutionary jargon with such success as to be called the little Robespierre.”2 The military and political career that followed thereafter has since moved even seasoned historians to rank Napoleon among the ancients.3 This book renders no general verdict on Napoleon’s place in history but rather an assessment of his legacy to war prosecuted by the modern states of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The effort necessarily
begins by placing Napoleon in circumstantial context as a thoughtful student of the military arts and the most successful of the Revolution’s soldiers. Captain Bonaparte’s revolution became a revolution in the European profession of arms.
