The opening decade of the 19th century saw Napoleon at the height of his power, in control of an empire that stretched from the Channel coast to the borderlands of Russia. Only from 1809 did his ascendancy begin to decline. He was without question the dominant figure of his age, admired and reviled in equal measure by his contemporaries. Two centuries on, the debate continues about the reasons for Napoleon’s exceptional run of military victories. He had few rivals in his capacity for forward-planning, his intuitive grasp of the nature of the battlefield, and his ability to lead and motivate an army. A more critical view is that he lacked originality and was a hasty improviser who was lucky to encounter less able opponents.
Controlled aggression
Napoleon was an active practitioner with little time for military theory. His written statements on the nature of warfare are sparse and uninformative, going little beyond the need to exploit circumstances as they arise. ‘There are no precise or definite rules,’ he once declared. ‘The art of war is simple, everything is a matter of execution.’ At the heart of Napoleon’s thinking was a ruthless belief in offensive action. The aim was to engage and smash the main enemy force in a decisive battle. Sieges and prolonged occupations of cities or territory were distractions from the main purpose.
The classic illustration of this approach was the campaign that Napoleon undertook in the second half of 1805, when he set out from France to crush the forces of Habsburg Austria. The good roads of western and central Europe enabled the 176,000-strong Grande Armée to make rapid progress. In October, barely seven weeks after leaving the camp at Boulogne, it surrounded General Karl Mack’s 33,000-strong army at Ulm in southern Germany, leading to a practically bloodless capitulation. Five weeks later, after marching a further 500 miles to the east, the French defeated a combined Austro-Russian force at Austerlitz in the present-day Czech Republic. This was an even more remarkable victory, achieved in the depth of winter at the end of extended lines of communication.
Review – The Lost King