History of the Peninsular War, Volume 1 (of 6)

by Robert Southey

♦Effect of this system.♦

By the operation of this system the French were made a military nation, a change equally inconsistent with their own welfare and with the safety and independence of the surrounding states. Beginning at first with all men between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, enrolling the whole rising generation afterwards as they attained to manhood, and retaining all who were embodied as long as their services were required, in other words, as long as they were capable of serving, ... the government had thus brought within its disposal every man who was capable of bearing arms; and this was the tremendous power which Buonaparte found already organized to his heart’s desire when he assumed the supreme authority. Such power might have kindled ambition in an ordinary mind; no wonder then that the most ambitious of the human race, when he saw himself in possession of it, supposed universal empire to be within his reach. His supply of men might well appear inexhaustible: there was neither difficulty nor expense in raising them; he had only to say what number he required, and the rest was mere matter of routine. ♦War made to support itself.♦ After his armies had once passed the frontier, there was no cost in maintaining them; war was made to support itself. This system also had been matured for him by his republican predecessors. The contributions which he levied upon conquered or dependent states discharged the soldiers’ pay: in an ally’s country their subsistence was expected as a proof of alliance; in an enemy’s it was taken as the right of war. And the perfection of the French commissariat was admired and extolled in England as a masterpiece of arrangement by the blind admirers of France, who either did not or would not perceive how easy the duties of that department were made, when every demand was enforced by military power, and nothing was paid for.

♦Former constitution of the French army.♦

When Louis XVI. began his unhappy reign, the French army was still constituted upon a feudal principle which had been well adapted to the circumstances of later times. The corps were divided into proprietary companies, the captains of which, receiving pay proportionate to the required expenditure, provided every thing for the men, and raised them among their own vassals. The system was liable to abuse, but it had great advantages: for if the captain should act upon no worthier motive than mere selfishness, it was his interest to be careful of his men, lest he should incur the expense of recruiting them; and it might reasonably be expected that he would treat them kindly to prevent desertion, and that he would spare no means for keeping them in health or restoring them in sickness. But there were better principles brought into action: the character both of the captain and of the men, in their native place, depended upon what each should report of the other; the men also knew that their fidelity would not be forgotten when their services were over, and that, if they fell, their good conduct would be remembered to the benefit of their family. Both parties were always in the presence of that little world, to the opinion of which they were more immediately amenable, and from which applause or condemnation would most sensibly affect them; and local and hereditary attachments, with all their strength and endurance, were thus brought into the service of the state. ♦Change introduced by M. de St. Germaine.♦ The system was abolished when M. de St. Germaine was minister at war, for the sake of some sordid speculations upon clothing and victualling the troops. Subalterns, who were learning their profession, and acquiring the love and confidence of the soldiers, were disbanded as a sacrifice to the prevailing fashion of economical reform: at the same time the penal discipline of the Germans was introduced, ... a poor substitution for the old bonds of feeling which had been thus rudely broken; and while all that was useful in the feudal constitution of the army was discarded, the worst part was retained by an order that no person should hold a commission unless he could prove the nobility of his family for four generations.

♦Levelling principle of the revolutionary service.♦

The republicans naturally went into the other extreme; and Buonaparte retained in his army the levelling principle which the revolution had introduced, because it is as congenial to a despotism as to a democracy. No Frenchman could be made an officer (except in the artillery and engineers) till he had served three years as a private or sub-officer, unless he signalized himself in action. Perhaps the conscription, in its full extent, could never have been established without such a regulation. It rendered the military service less odious to the common people, who saw the children of the higher classes thus placed upon a level with themselves, and who were deceived into an opinion that merit was the only means of promotion: it brought also into the ranks a degree of intelligence and ambition not to be found there in armies which are differently composed; and those qualities were a security for discipline and perfect obedience under circumstances in which ordinary troops might have become impatient of continual privations. But it may well be doubted, on the other hand, whether the officers derived any important advantage from being trained in the ranks; and there can be no doubt that any such advantage would be dearly purchased by the degradation to which they were exposed; for, while the soldiery were materially improved by the mixture of wellborn men who looked for promotion, these persons themselves were more materially injured by the inevitable effects of a system which levelled nothing so effectually as it did the manners, the moral feeling, and the sense of honour.

♦Honourable character of the old French army.♦

The policy of the old French government had often been detestably perfidious, and yet French history abounds with examples of high chivalrous sentiment; and nowhere were men to be found more sensible of what was due to their king, their country, and themselves, more alive to the sense of national and individual honour, than in the old French army. A fatal change was produced by the revolution. At a time when all persons of high birth were objects of persecution or suspicion, men from the lowest occupations were hurried into the highest posts in the army. Many of them were possessed of great military talents, and there were some few who in every respect proved worthy of their fortune. But there were others who never cast the slough of their old habits: no service was too bloody or too base for such agents; and, without feeling shame for the employment, or compunction for the crime, they were ready to obey their remorseless master in whatever he might command, ... the individual murders of Palm and the Duc d’Enghein, or the wholesale massacres of Jaffa and of Madrid, and those other atrocious actions in Portugal and Spain, of which this history records the progress and the punishment.

♦Honour not the principle of despotism.♦

It was observed by Montesquieu, that honour, which is the moving and preserving principle of monarchy, is not, and cannot be, the principle of despotism. Little did he apprehend how soon the state of his own country would exemplify the maxim. Among military bodies, honour had hitherto supplied, however imperfectly, yet in some degree, the place of a higher and nobler principle: but under the tyranny of Buonaparte, while his measures tended directly, as if they had been so designed, to subvert this feeling (already weakened by the false philosophy of the age), there remained nothing in its stead except that natural goodness, and that innate sense of rectitude, which, in certain happy natures, can never be totally extinguished, but which, in the vast majority of mankind, are easily deadened and destroyed. The humaner studies, whereby the manners and the minds of men are softened, and the sacred precepts whereby they are purified and exalted and enlightened, had been the one neglected, and the other proscribed, during the revolution; and a generation had grown up, without literature, without morals, and without religion.