The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Abstract

If the years from 1740 had seen repeated trials of strength between the armies of the European powers, these were dwarfed by the Wars of the French Revolution and Empire. Between 1792 and 1815 France was almost constantly in a state of war with coalitions of European states, and from 1803 — after the collapse of the truce signed at Amiens — there was no peace across the greater part of the continent until Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo. Napoleon himself moved restlessly from one campaign to another, fighting some sixty battles in all and winning the great majority of them (Gates, 1997, p. 5). Indeed, the sheer scale of warfare made it difficult for contemporaries to regard the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as simply the continuation of the traditional struggles between states that had characterized the eighteenth century. They distorted trade patterns and consumed an unprecedented proportion of the country’s economic wealth. And French objectives were not limited to the customary aims of traditional European wars, be they the acquisition of granaries, of neighbouring territories or of overseas colonies, dynastic successions, or (as with Louis XIV) dreams of attaining natural frontiers. France, it appeared, now thought on an altogether more ambitious scale, attempting to impose its new polity on much of continental Europe during the revolutionary years, before aspiring to create a new Carolingian empire under Napoleon.