ABSTRACT
The era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars saw mass national mobilisations that enabled extensive and extended operations by large armies, inspired in many cases by newly awoken nationalist ideologies. Innovations in command-and-control built on ancien régime precedents to refine the divisional and corps organisations that facilitated many of France’s greatest victories as Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power and dominance. Such systems, however, were then appropriated and adopted by the allied powers, which from 1809 onwards proved themselves increasingly formidable adversaries. This growth in military capability, however, was not matched by the developments in logistics necessary to support armies that came to number into the hundreds of thousands. France could support war in the fertile country of the Rhineland or Northern Italy, but not in the barren terrain of Poland or the Iberian Peninsula. This inherent contradiction between the ability to raise and command large forces, and the ability to feed and sustain them, came to its head with Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia. Even with logistical preparations more advanced than any before, Napoleon was losing men through hunger before his multi-national Grande Armée had even crossed the Russian border. Subsequent campaigns saw the revival of the Emperor’s tactical flair, but to no avail against the whole of Europe in arms against France.
