The experience of being thoroughly beaten can prove to be a key turning point in life. Approached intelligently, a shattering failure can prompt rewarding questions: What could have been done differently? How could defeat have been avoided? Was the failure the result of a weakness or an opponent’s undervalued strength? Getting the right answers to these questions may teach one a valuable lesson, potentially bringing success closer the next time.
The forces ranged against Napoleon the Great (as Andrew Roberts has argued Bonaparte should be called) had years to brood over their failures. Time and again, the coalitions mounted against the French were fractured, beaten in the field, and outmatched in peace negotiations. Some of the best responses to these humiliations were the writings of Carl von Clausewitz and the gradual reorganization of tightly controlled 18th-century armies into larger, more aggressive 19th-century ones.
Napoleon has often been characterized as a gambler, willing to stake everything on his next big victory. To many at the time, and since, his type of warfare was riven by chance: Despite the best planning, actual combat was shot through by innumerable contingencies, a different interplay of which could have led to a different outcome. And yet, against this theory, Napoleon kept on winning, apparently master even of blind luck.
This conception of an unpredictable world, somehow tilted in favor of the French, underpins Anders Engberg-Pedersen’s excellent new study. He notes that the victories won (in the 18th century) by Frederick the Great were achieved by small armies operating within clearly defined spaces. And although they could be brutal, Frederick’s wars were relatively formal, bound by chivalric codes. By contrast, Napoleon’s wars saw armies of unprecedented size battle in terrains stretching from Paris to Moscow. Conceivably, anything could happen when so much had to be delegated, and so many individuals had the opportunity to disrupt events.
Engberg-Pedersen ranges over military theory, literature, philosophy, and cartography, as he traces the conceptual impact of Napoleon’s victories. In each of his discussions, the focus is on how the lived experience of war, and especially defeat, informed received ideas about how to fight. In his chapter on military judgment, Engberg-Pedersen investigates how the Prussians dealt with the problem of military education. The issue was how one could condition new recruits to the dangers of the Grande Armée, without actually entering them into mortal situations. Traditional teaching relied on geometry and mathematics to teach future leaders how to conceive of clear movements in space and time.
This thinking was developed into virtual exercises, relying on maps, games, and texts. The problem was that these techniques often ignored the elements of danger and fear. One might be excellent at military game-playing in the classroom, yet crumble under fire. As Clausewitz noted in On War, entering a theater of war could induce a state of near-paralysis. His response was to write a text of military theory that did not emphasize order but, instead, could bring his readers as near to the experience of fighting, yet keeping them safe:
In other words, On War attempts to capture the new reality brought by Napoleon while explicitly driving its readers (and author) towards a state of battle readiness.
Empire of Chance also features discussions of how realist literature sought to represent the difficulties of understanding Napoleon, with a capable analysis of War and Peace. Famously, Tolstoy’s Napoleon is a self-important yet small-minded character who does not admit to his own irrelevance. Dismissing any notion of genius in Napoleon, Tolstoy conceives of a world in which the smallest events can have momentous consequences. In such a world, no one can grasp, let alone control, the full significance of historical forces, in which everything is tied together by a multiplicity of causes and effects.
As Engberg-Pedersen goes on to note, Tolstoy’s novel is unconcerned with generic unity. Indeed, Tolstoy is openly contemptuous of neat writing, as he combines literary realism with lengthy historical-philosophical passages, which many of his readers seemingly cannot abide. Faced with the problem of trying to understand what really happened during the French invasion of Russia, War and Peace splits into a hybrid text, each part of it asking the same questions, but answering them differently.
Despite its inclusion of Tolstoy, Empire of Chance focuses almost exclusively on Prussian thought. We follow Clausewitz, his teacher General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, the philosophers Wilhelm Traugott Krug, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and other lesser-known names as they grapple with the challenges posed by an expansionist France. We see how their conceptualizations evolved to allow for actual experience, so that their students could square up to the reality of Napoleon. As Clausewitz noted, one must always allow for a new reality:
This is a rich seam of thought to mine, and Engberg-Pedersen does so with great skill. Curiously, though, he is silent about a host of other countries that fought against the French. In a study that stresses the need for a frequent cold shower of reality, it is ironic not to find reflections on several major aspects of how Napoleon was finally beaten. There are no passages on Russian bloody-mindedness—the Russians were willing to sacrifice Moscow rather than negotiate for peace—or on the Duke of Wellington’s sangfroid. British thoughts on the new disorderliness of the world are not considered here; but whether the British thought in these terms or not, they continued to foot many of the bills in Europe’s efforts to tame France.
Engberg-Pedersen is a charming analyst of a complex subject, and although he does not answer the question of how Napoleon could apparently master disorder—there seems to be little chaotic about winning almost every battle—let us hope he writes more about the philosophies that helped to defeat Napoleon the Great. Including, the next time round, the phlegmatic Britons and ruthless Slavs.
Andre van Loon is a writer in London.
