Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [11]
The Napoleonic Wars, then, marked a watershed in the history of warfare and Europe alike. Let us conclude this introduction, however, by returning to the rulers of the eighteenth century and, in particular, Louis XIV. Even if he did not go to war himself after 1673, the ‘Sun King’ always remained a military monarch. The court at Versailles was very much the headquarters of successive French war efforts, and Louis’s leading male courtiers were invariably also prominent military commanders. There was, too, a strong fixation with martial glory: even as an old man Louis had himself depicted in full armour in his paintings, while Versailles was full of reminders of the glories of French arms. If Louis embarked on a series of wars as soon as he had assumed effective control of his dominions in 1661, it was in part because he saw war-making as a central part of the business of kingship, as the chief means, perhaps, by which a ruler could augument his status. There was, as we shall see, much here that was to be repeated a hundred years later, but there were also a number of crucial differences. Never entirely insensible to the horrors of war, Louis was capable of recognizing that there were moments when discretion was the better part of valour. Driven from Germany and Italy and forced to make war solely on the basis of France’s own resources and, for the most part, on her very soil, from 1706 Louis was desperate to end the War of the Spanish Succession. To his ever more generous proposals, however, the Allied response was to offer peace terms that were utterly unreasonable: France was not only to be stripped of many important border cities and forced to destroy many fortresses, but to send French troops to eject Felipe V from Spain should he refuse to abdicate voluntarily. In consequence, Louis deemed it was better to fight on; as he observed, if he must wage war, he would prefer not to do so against his own grandson. Indeed, it is quite clear that the ‘Sun King’ had never wanted war in the first place: the earlier Nine Years War of 1688-97 having already placed a serious strain on France’s resources, Louis would have been prepared to split the Spanish inheritance between Philippe and his Austrian rival even though the Bourbon dynasty had the stronger claim. And even in earlier years Louis’s ambitions were strictly limited: what he wanted was not an empire but simply secure borders.
Louis XIV may stand as a model for almost all the monarchs of eighteenth-century Europe. All were quite prepared to make use of war as an instrument of policy and to employ military success as the foundation and measure of their prestige, but, with the possible exception of Charles XII of Sweden, all set reasonable limits to their campaigns of conquest. If we take the case of Frederick the Great of Prussia, for example, the object of his wars with Austria was first to take and then to retain control of the province of Silesia, it being none of his business to conquer Bohemia or Hungary, nor still less topple the Habsburgs from their throne. Except for a very brief period in 1792 when the Brissotin leaders of the French Revolution were led by a rush of blood to the head to promise liberation to all the peoples of Europe, this principle of limited warfare was followed even in the French Revolutionary Wars of 1799: the Directory no more aspired to ‘jacobinize’ the whole of the Continent than the powers they were fighting were interested in turning the clock back to 1789. But Napoleon was different. At the end of his life Louis XIV is supposed to have lamented that he had loved war too well. This may or may not be true, but no such remark may be found in the annals of Napoleon’s exile on St Helena, and it is hard to imagine the emperor ever giving voice to such a sentiment. Napoleon Bonaparte was not just the ultimate warlord-a man who