Changes in War: The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

This chapter in the edited volume The Changing Character of War begins with a survey of how the Revolutionary-Napoleonic wars were waged, followed by an analysis of how they were managed. The focus is on the Napoleonic, essentially French, armies because France set the pace of the wars, and so the military agendas of the era. The Prussian reform movement, the piecemeal emergence of a mass land army in Britain, the frustrated reforms of the Archduke Charles in Austria were all responses to the galvanizing of France, ‘the China of Europe’, into life.