ABSTRACT
Revolutions in Warfare, 1775-1831 The period 1775-1831 saw not only political revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic, but also revolutions in warfare. Revolutions, in the plural: first, it ushered in what Clausewitz called ‘war in its absolute perfection’, Napoleon’s wars,1 the French waging of which was sometimes described as ‘small war in big style’.2 Secondly, French warfare under Napoleon could also be seen as having lost the special operations element of ‘small war’ discussed by Bertrand Fonck and George Satterfield: the Hanoverian General Georg von Berenhorst noted that in the Napoleonic Wars, ‘major war has swallowed small war, and in the campaigns of 1805-1806 there was no small war.’3 Thirdly, the period 17751831 also saw the partial replacement of the ‘petite guerre’, what we would call today special operations performed by special professional forces acting alongside regular armies, into ‘guerrilla’, ostensibly the same word, only this time in Spanish, but encapsulating for us today the element of insurgency, a politically motivated uprising.4
