The French Revolution Notes

French Revolution

Contents

• Past questions

• Quotes

  • Sources

  • Recruitment

  • Warfare

• Chronology

  • Wars

  • Events

• Principal sources

  • The Encyclopédie

  • Some Few Brief Principles of Tacticks

  • The Levée en Masse

  • The Ungrateful Son, the Punished Son

  • La Patrie en Danger

• Secondary sources

  • The Coignet Diary

  • Jacques the Fatalist

  • The Mercer Wilson Journal

• Changes to warfare

  • Total war

  • Tactics

  • Administration

  • Recruitment – Britain

  • Recruitment – France

  • Occupation

  • Logistics

  • The British Army

  • The French Navy

  • The state

  • The law

  • Medicine

• The war at sea

  • Essentials

  • Tactics

  • Strategy

Quotes

Sources

• Without discipline, troops are liable to indulge in “plundering and chaos”.

  • The Encyclopédie.

• If battle can be avoided, “it is not excusable to risk the lives of so many brave soldiers”.

  • The Encyclopédie.

• Looking after the wounded “is a duty prescribed by humanity of which we need not remind French generals”.

  • The Encyclopédie.

• ‘For a victory to be complete, you must go on to attack the enemy's strongholds.’

  • The Encyclopédie.

• Artillery is ‘but an accessory’.

  • The Comte de Guibert.

• A ‘declaration of total war’.

  • TCW Blanning on the Levée en Masse.

• “Aren’t soldiers supposed to get killed?”

  • The landlady in Jacques the Fatalist, by Denis Diderot.

Recruitment

• “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail… A man in jail has more room, better food and commonly better company”.

  • Dr Samuel Johnson.

• “We have just seen the arrival of fifteen young men eager to serve their country. But what condition they have come in!”

  • A complaint from Parthenay in 1794.

• “It is not men we lack, but weapons!”

  • General Bernard.

• The British soldier “has no superior in the world; fortunately there are only a few of him”.

  • A French officer.

• Defend the constitution against the “visionary phantoms of modern Illuminati”.

  • Birmingham’s High Bailiff congratulating volunteers.

Warfare

• “From this day and this place commenced a new epoch in the world’s history”.

  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Valmy, 20^th September 1792.

• The Revolution “set in motion new means and new forces”.

  • Carl von Clausewitz.

• “They are laying the country waste”.

  • Lieutenant Villiers, 1795.

• And “as we received no victuals, we were obliged to live from pillaging”.

  • The dairy of artilleryman Bricard.

• The ‘rape of Europe’.

  • Charles Esdaile.

• “You must ensure, as a matter of principle, that war feeds war”.

  • Napoléon to Marshal Soult in 1810.

• “The French soldier is not an automaton”.

  • Report to the Military Committee of the Constituent Assembly.

• “The bullet misses, the bayonet does not.”

  • General Aleksandr Suvorov.

• “I not consider this to be a proper time period to alter the equipment of the army or to try experiments”

  • Arthur Wellesley, 1^st Duke of Wellington.

• “Our Emperor makes war not without our arms but with our legs”.

  • Common Napoleonic saying.

• “An army marches on its stomach”.

  • Napoléon Bonaparte.

• “Never was a kingdom less prepared for a stern and arduous conflict”.

  • A contemporary on Britain.

• “The ports, the ships of war, and even merchantmen, will be exposed to mutinies and insurrections”.

  • A letter to the Minister of Marine.

• “Les aristocrates à la lanterne!”

  • Cries of the mutineers at Brest.

• “It is revolution, not insurrection”.

  • The Captain of Le Northumberland, when asked if his crew was in mutiny.

Chronology

Wars

1618 – 1648 – Thirty Years’ War.

1642 – 1651 – English Civil War.

1648 – 1653 – The Fronde.

1672 – 1678 – The Dutch War.

1688 – 1697 – The Nine Years’ War (King William’s War or the War of the English Succession).

1702 – 1713 – The War of the Spanish Succession.

1733 – 1738 – The War of the Polish Succession.

1739 – 1748 – The War of Jenkins’ Ear and the Austrian Succession (starting in 1740).

1756 – 1763 – The Seven Years’ War.

1775 – 1783 – The American War of Independence.

Events

1697 – Proposal for the abolition of the British army

1745 – Battle of Fontenoy

1777 – Jean-Baptiste Greuze exhibits Le Fils Ingrat

1778 – Le Fils Puni

1779 – Franco-Spanish fleet gain control of the Channel

1781 – Ségur Ordinance

1782 – Battle of the Saintes

28^th August 1789 – National Assembly gives the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen

1790 – La Capricieuse lock up their officer as a counter-revolutionary

20^th September 1792 – Battle of Valmy

1792 – National Convention passes Edict of Fraternity ; Jemappes

August 1793 – Levée en masse

1793 – Revolution in one country

1^st June 1794 – Glorious First of June

July 1794 – Thermidorian Reaction

October 1795 – Vendémaire Rising

1795 – Creation of the Directory; Quota Act creates limited naval conscription

1796 – The Seaman’s Narrative published; abortive Irish expedition

1797 – Translation of Comte de Guibert’s tactics manual published

1798 – Jourdan Law; Battle of the Nile

1799 – Consulate established; La Patrie en Danger exhibited

1804 – Berlin Decrees; First Empire

21^st October 1805 – Battle of Trafalgar

May 1809 – Napoléon decrees that marauders are to be shot

1814 – Defeat of Napoléon

Principal sources

The Encyclopédie

• Denis Diderot’s work was not simply intended to be a compendium of knowledge.

  • But an affirmation of belief in reason.

    • A defence of liberty.

    • An attack on obscure and irrational customs.

• The entry for military discipline stresses the importance of rules and protocols for keeping troops in order.

  • Without discipline, troops become a rabble.

    • Unable to fight.

    • With a propensity for “plundering and chaos”.

  • Discipline is what set the Romans and Greeks apart from the barbarians.

    • It must be drilled into troops by an officer.

    • To whom they owe blind obedience.

• The entry on victories praises great and decisive victories.

  • But notes that there is more to being a great general than victories.

    • One may win victories and not be great.

    • Many great generals have few victories to their name.

    • For many mediocre leaders, gambling on a victory in open combat is the only way to...

Buy the full version of these notes or essay plans and more in our The Warfare of the French Revolution Notes.