French Napoleonic Infantry Tactics 1792–1815

The Legacy of the Seven Years' War

This is a book about the way French infantry actually fought, from the start of the Revolution all the way through to Waterloo; and about the way its leaders thought it ought to fight - which was not always the same thing at all. There was always a tension between practice and theory, just as there was between tactics that depended on shock action and those that depended on firepower. There were further wide variations in approach from one individual commander to another, and from one type of battle to another. The tactics that could be executed by experienced and well-trained troops were much more complicated than those that were within the grasp of freshly raised or second-line troops.

During the period 1792-1815 the French fielded many different armies in many different theatres, and their quality was far from uniform. The veteran Grande Armée that marched out of the Boulogne camp in the autumn of 1805 was one of the best exercised and most manoeuvrable forces ever seen in the whole of military history. By contrast, most members of the two Young Guard Divisions that were fed into the battle at Craonne on 7 March 1814 (known as 'Marie Louises', after Bonaparte's virginal second wife) had been pressed into the army only a month earlier.

During the 1790s the French armies were often relatively inexperienced, and even ramshackle in terms of their logistics and supply arrangements; yet at least they were usually led by well-trained commanders. Admittedly, a few of the generals were incompetent political appointments, while an even smaller minority were brilliant natural leaders who rose rapidly through the ranks to find the proverbial 'marshal's baton in their knapsacks'. However, between these two extremes the vast majority of French generals were good soldiers and noblemen (more or less), who had received a long induction into the classic military culture and tactics of the Ancien Régime. They had attended royal schools and had spent time in the headquarters of the king's armies. Bonaparte himself was no exception, although his extreme youth when he first rose to prominence has perhaps obscured this fact (he was 24 years old at the siege of Toulon in 1793).

It is important to remember that the military thinking of the Ancien Régime had been very significantly moulded by French experiences during the Seven Years' War (1756-63). Many fruitful debates had been generated then which had already - long before the First Empire - placed the French well in the forefront of the most modern 'art of war' as it was internationally understood. Marc-René Montalembert had designed an innovative system of casemated fortification, and Jean Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval had designed and built some of the best mobile artillery in the world. At the level of strategy, staffwork and operations, Pierre Bourcet had written a textbook on warfare in the Alps that would become very much a 'set text' for the young Bonaparte.