Feroz R Khan March 21, 2005

Tags: war , history

The French experience of subsidizing wars: 1789-1815

href="/tag/war">war was greatly influenced by the experiences of the French Revolution, as the French were forced to fight the forces of European monarchies, which were determined to defeat the revolutionary forces and restore the Bourbon monarchy to power. The period from 1789 to 1815 saw a major evolution in the nature of warfare, as wars increased in duration, totality of effort and in a conceptual sense, which would set the stage for the industrial wars of the early twentieth century. The year 1789 not only marked the end of the ancient régime in European politics, but it also marked the beginning of a new Europe based on the ideals of nationalism and the emergence of the raison d’état over the rights of the individual.

The constantly worsening economic situation in France and the wars of Louis XIV, particularly the War of the Spanish Succession, had ruined French credit and had bankrupted France. Under Louis XV, no serious attempt was made to reverse the declining fortunes of France and when Louis XVI would inherit the throne, he would be faced not only with a bleak economic situation, but also with increasing social and political tensions. France, on the eve of the revolution was a highly dysfunctional society and the wealth of the nation was unevenly distributed. The socio-political structure of France was divided between the First, Second and the Third Estate and all these estates were working at cross-purposes with one another. Out of the three, the First and the Second Estates were the most politically and economically powerful groups in France. The Third Estate was the most populous, but was also the most politically and financially marginalized.

The First Estate was dominated by the clergy and it made up about one percent of the French population and yet, it owned nearly ten percent of all the lands in France. Most of the land controlled by the church was rented out and the church was earning enough rent to maintain its opulent power. The clergy dominated the politics and in the legacy of Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin, it continued to exercise considerable influence upon the French monarchy. It had its own legal system to judge its priests and using its religious status as an excuse, it did not pay taxes to the government. The clergy was also organizationally divided between the parish priests and the bishops and the cardinals, who dominated its power structures. The parish priests, who were generally poor and lived and worked amongst the poor, resented the lavish life style of the higher clergy and its overtly political ambitions. The leadership of the church was outwardly religious, but it was pre-occupied with the struggle for power, which was a constant feature of the interactions between First and Second Estate.

The Second Estate was made of the French nobility and as a percentage of the French population; it was approximately about two percent. The nobility was well represented in the government and the military as it provided the majority of the military officers and the royal advisors to the king. The nobility also owned large tracts of lands in France and it practiced the old feudal customs and like the church, it also refused to pay any taxes to the government. It was also engaged in a conspiracy with the First Estate to glean more power from the monarchy and it was in a mutual alliance of convenience, with the First Estate, in resisting all demand for political or economic reforms in France. The nobility of France, in the years preceding the revolution, was dominated by petty social feuds and the yearning for a more enhanced social status, which seemed to consume most of its energies. Politically, it was a fragmented group and it would only become a cohesive entity, when it would act to resist the curtailment of its special powers and privileges.

The Third Estate, which consisted of nearly ninety-seven percent of the French population, was made up of people, who belonged to neither the First nor the Second Estate, but to the ever increasing French middle class. The Third Estate, itself, was divided into three groups; the bourgeoisie, the artisans and the peasants. The peasants worked on the farms as indentured and unskilled laborers. The artisans were the people, who had learned a skill and could earn a livelihood in the cities as skilled workers employed in the guilds. The bourgeoisie was the educated class of the Third Estate and it included the doctors and the lawyers and it was this group, which was spearheading the calls for political reforms in France. The Third Estate paid nearly all the taxes in France and in return, it was granted no political representation or economic rights. Since First and Second Estate refused to pay taxes, the kings of France would periodically turn to this group for additional taxes and by 1789, the Third Estate was screaming under the burden of taxation.

The Third Estate’s demand, in 1789, was the recall of the Estates-General, the name of the French parliament which had last convened in 1614, and that political reforms had to be implemented before it would give any more taxes to the crown. The interesting caveat to this demand was not the outright refusal to pay taxes, but to hinge a political price to the payment of taxes in form of more representation. Another interesting fact of the Third Estate was it provided the majority of the soldiers in the French army and some of them were the veterans of the wars of American independence and had returned to France, with the Jeffersonian ideals of “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”. Coupled, with this was the realization that bourgeoisie was heavily influenced with the political thoughts of Jean-Jacque Rousseau, and John Locke and looked towards the British parliament and Westminster model of constitutional monarchy as a possible answer to France’s political problems.

This was the political structure, which was girding the wars of France prior to the revolution and it was a political structure, which was completely alienated from the interests of the state. It is instructive to understand the politics of the pre-revolutionary France, with the post-revolutionary politics, because its greatest impact would in the manner in which wars would be fought on the European continent. The nature of the warfare, in pre-1789 Europe, could be best summed up in the Latin motto, which was inscribed on each cannon in the French army by the order of Louis XIV, and which said “ultima ratio regum”- the final argument of the kings. Wars were considered as the last option to settle outstanding disputes between kings and were not concerned with any national interest, but were fought to preserve the personal influence of the monarch. A nation’s power was measured as a proportion of the monarch’s personal power and influence and the conduct of the army and of wars was influenced by the need to protect this power and influence.

Consequently, wars were of limited nature and this was due to two reasons. One reason was that cost of maintaining an army was expensive and the risk of losing a better part of the army in a campaign was not a palatable one, especially since the wars of time were fought for limited aims. The second reason was that armies of the period fought static engagements, with the hope of causing enough punishment to the other side that it would ask for an end to hostilities. The military rout of an enemy was not considered as the sine qua non of a victory, because victory was equated with the skill, which preserved one’s own army but at the same time, forced the opposition to admit defeat. Warfare, in the eighteenth century, was a very expensive game played by the kings for their own personal glory and the conduct of the wars only affected the population in the sense that they had to economically subsidize this royal sport.

Furthermore, there was no viable incentive for the population to support wars. Wars really did not concern the populations of pre-1789 Europe in any significant manner, which could have altered the tedium of their daily struggles. The concept of nationalism, which originated as the result of the French Revolution, was still an unarticulated argument and the idea of dying for an indifferent king in an impersonal war, was not winning any new recruits to the armies. The profession of soldiering was not considered too highly for any person with a bright future to pursue. The European perception of soldiers was a dismal one, because it was colored by the bitter experience of the Thirty Years War. Soldiers were often associated with a mob, which was motivated solely by the considerations of plunder, rape and murder. This was not an unflattering assessment of soldiers, because most of them were from the lowest dregs of the society and it was not uncommon to find the European armies of period made up with the pariahs of the society.

The French Revolution did not change this perception, but what it did was to put a gloss of nationalism in the conduct of the wars, which seemed to legitimize wars as the extension of the state’s interests. Immediately after the revolution and the overthrow and imprisonment of the Louis XVI, France was attacked by the armies of Austria, and Prussia. The Austrian-Prussian aim was to defeat the republican form of government and restore the monarchy to power in France and secondly, to prevent the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution from corrupting the rest of the European monarchies. The chaos of the revolution had rendered France incapable of dealing with the external threats, as it was pre-occupied with the task of consolidating power internally. The French revolutionaries were forced to counter the Prussian and the Austrian, and to some extent the British, aggressive moves because if the revolution had to succeed, it had to be defended against the forces of Europe, which were anti-revolutionary.

France was also ill-equipped to deal with the threats on its borders, because in a meaningful sense, its traditionally aristocratic military leadership had either been disposed off by the guillotine, or they had gone into self-imposed exile in England. To overcome this handicap, the ideals of the revolution were infused with the notion of France itself and a sense of nationalism was created that made the French identify with the revolution and the forces of Prussia, Austria and Britain with the hated ancien régime. The option of losing to the anti-revolutionary forces was considered as too heavy a political price to pay and the citizens of the new republic were urged to step forward and fight for the revolution. To ensure, that the citizens of France fulfilled their patriotic duty, France for the first time in the history of Europe, and warfare, introduced the idea of a universal conscription for all of its male citizens. The levée en masse, as it was called, provided France with an almost inexhaustible supply of soldiers, who could be called to arms to defend France. This political innovation created a new idea in warfare; patriotism. This idea suggested that the interests of the individual must be subordinated to the raison d’état and what was important was not the liberties granted by the state to its citizens, but the raison d’erté of the state itself.

The French post-revolutionary experience seemed to suggest that if the citizens identified with the policies of the state, then it was incumbent upon them to defend the state, when its policies were threatened politically. The levée en masse significantly militarized the French society and made it possible for the French to fight wars almost perpetually, with an endless supply of reinforcements. This concept radically altered the military balance of power in favor of France, because since the Prussians and the Austrians were still wedded to the old concepts of warfare, they were not politically and financially willing to risk the ruin of their armies in what seemed to be a war of attrition against the French forces. The levée en masse allowed the French to suffer defeats at the hands of the First Coalition, but it also meant that France or the ideals of the French Revolution could not be defeated in a military sense since the French were willing to sustain the wars of attrition against the European armies attacking France.

Given the sheer impossibility of defeating the French, the First Coalition made peace with France and ended its aggression against the French republic. This presented France with two opportunities; one was to consolidate power within France and restore the writ of the state and the other was the chance to defend the revolution itself by exporting the ideals of the French Revolution to the nations of Europe. According to the French, the best way to protect the revolution was to spread the ideas of the revolution by practicing a pre-emptive war and fighting such a war, when ever possible, outside of the territory of France. Instead of defending France periodically against the European forces, the French started to undertake offensive military operations to change the political status quo in Europe by seeking to turn the monarchies into republics themselves.

These wars, fought from 1789 to 1799 could be termed as the first wars of nationalism, in which the French armies brought the message of the revolution to almost all parts of the continent. The wars of this period could also be considered as the wars of liberation, because the idea behind French conquests was to liberate the people of Europe from the rule of the monarchies and in the process, it was hoped, to create a political balance of power in Europe, which would favor a French status quo. It is interesting to note, in these wars, that France was not claiming them as wars of conquest, but as a popular war in the sense that French public was supportive of the state’s war aims. Another aspect of these wars, which was interesting, was that these were the first wars undertaken by a state to defend its political philosophy by practicing an aggressive style of warfare.

Hence, the legitimacy of these wars was hinged on how successful they were in safe-guarding the interests of France itself. As long as they were successful, the French population was willing to support the costs of such wars. However, this posed a serious problem for the state, because it had to continually justify the political utility for waging such wars by winning them. Also more importantly, the state had to be seen as winning such wars in order to maintain a favorable balance between the rights of the individual and the interests of the state. The argument that was being constructed politically, by the experience of these wars, was that an average citizen was willing to subsume individual freedoms to a cause, which at least had the perception of increasing the state’s security. The political opportunity costs of wars of political nationalism was that since the raison d’erté of a state, was now, based on its war making powers, it had to be successful in such endeavors or it risked losing its writ of political legitimacy.

Another concern, which the French republic had to grapple with, in waging wars, was the financial costs of the wars themselves and how to avoid passing these costs to its citizens in the shape of crippling taxation. The wars of the French Revolution and the post-revolutionary period, which included the Napoleonic wars, spanned a period of nearly twenty five years, from 1789 to 1815. During this period, France was constantly at war with different combinations of European alliances arrayed against it. Consequently, it was no surprise that the biggest administrative problem faced by France dealt with the issues of generating the finances to pay for its wars. France had no dearth of manpower for its armies, because the levée en masse provided the republic with an almost bottomless reservoir of soldiers and the nature of the French society was so accustomed to the idea of war that for all practical purposes, France had a war economy. France, as a nation, was ideally suited for waging war, because the combination of politics, economics and social attitudes engendered a very tolerant view of war.

The critical criteria in the sustainability of these wars was the maintenance of the French public’s tolerance for wars and this was achieved by financially insulating the French public from paying the direct costs of France’s wars. The underlying assumption was that the French public support, for the war aims of France, was based on the popularity of the wars and wars which did not impinge the French public financially or did not venture beyond the limits of the public’s ability to pay, would remain popular. In other words, the French republic was quite successful in subsidizing the costs of war and making it affordable for its citizens to support it and this was one of the major reasons, why the French public was supportive of France’s wars for nearly a quarter of a century.
The subsidization of wars, by France, involved two different set of reasons and between them, they covered both the wars of the revolution and the post-revolution period and the Napoleonic wars and prevented the French population from suffering the financial constraints, which the state of France had imposed upon them through its wars.

The first reason was the political security of the republic itself and this reason remained valid from 1789 to 1800, when France was fighting to defend its republican form of government. The revolutionary France’s sense of republicanism was fused with the idea of nationalism, which was a political rationalization of the state’s interest. Patriotism and nationalism, when it was formulated as the extension of the state’s power created an obligation that demanded the preservation of the state’s political ideology. In the early years of the revolution, when France was besieged by the armies of Europe and the country was fighting for the very existence of its political ideals, the costs of war was defined in purely political terms and not in an economic sense. It was the French domestic political opinion, which was underwriting the costs of war and this domestic politics was imbued with a very strong sense of identification with the state’s political goals, which were nothing else less than political equality and representation based on the idea of an equitable taxation. It was this sense of patriotism, which was instrumental in creating an overzealous marshalling of France’s resources, both monetary and human, to meet the needs of defending the republican ideas of France from the forces of European monarchies.

Another reason for France’s ability to fight almost endless wars was the political and administrative reforms, which were instituted to govern the nation after 1789. The politics of ancien régime were put aside and as the republic sought to strengthen its rule, it embarked upon the nationalization of the French economy, which was made to support the war aims of the state. The increased numerical strength of the French army, made possible by the levée en masse, demanded a constant need of refurbishments in cannons, muskets and other military goods and this suggested that the French economy was benefiting from the continuation of war. This was a political windfall, because the collapse of the ancien régime had slowed the French economy, but the war was providing the needed economic activity, which could be taxed by the state to fund its wars. Since the economy was nationalized, the French state was willing to incur an ever increasing debt burden, because the need to prevail politically seemed to overshadow the economic costs.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s legal and political reforms such as ending of the Directory and replacing it with the Consulate refined the politics of France and helped in the centralization of power. The French politics had gone through a period of intense anarchy immediately following the revolution and before it could stabilize itself internally, the Reign of Terror created more uncertainty. The Reign of Terror was answered by the rule of Directory, which was a corrupt and an inefficient mechanism of governing France. The Directory, though it did not improve the politics of France, prevented another decline into political chaos. Napoleon’s coup d’état, which ended the Directory offered France centralized rule under Napoleon and through his engineered constitutional amendments; it made the exercise of power more effective and efficient. The end result of all this was that Napoleon, through the legal reforms of the Napoleonic Code and the creation of a Bank of France, was able to sooth the internal politics of France and control the value of the French currency and the costs of inflation, which were critical considerations towards France’s ability to pay for its wars.

The dilemma confronting France was, as the nineteenth century dawned, how to balance the costs of waging wars, with the need to generate taxes to pay for such wars. Even though Napoleon had brought stability to France’s politics, French economy was slowing down and it was reaching a point of diminishing returns in its ability to pay for wars. The reason was that due to political tensions with England and the fact that England was militarily resisting France, France did not have the option to import new technology from England. Therefore, France’s industrial development would be retarded and when peace would finally come to Europe in 1815, France would still be a pre-dominantly agricultural society with limited industrial development. Since the wars of the revolution and the post-revolution period were based on the political enthusiasm of French to defend their political ideology, this rationale was not very forthcoming when the nation was politically secured by the time of Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power in the early 1800s.

The heavy reliance of the French economy on its agricultural, coupled with the poor logistics of access to markets, meant that France was being gradually left behind as England industrialized and through industrialization, was able to finance the wars against France. As England’s economy became increasingly industrialized, it was also becoming evident that a nation’s economic strength was now pegged to its industrial output and this ever increasing industrial production was responsible for sustaining its politics. France’s agricultural economy was simply incapable of producing the levels of taxes, which the industrialized economy of England was creating, and the option facing the French was whether to increase taxes, to pay for wars, or resist increasing taxes and see a corresponding decline in France’s ability to finance wars.

Both options were untenable. The introduction of increased taxation risked another political crisis, against the increased levels of taxation, with its attendant ripples of political instability in France. As France was not willing to curtail its war making powers, an urgent answer to this question, how to pay for wars, needed to be found and the solution was discovered in guise of French imperialism. French imperialism, under Napoleon, was tasked to the notions of financial liquidity and its sole purpose was to lessen the burden of taxes on the French people. It was these ideas, which prompted France to military annex and occupy large areas of Europe. The reason was that the conquered European states would help to subsidize the costs of French wars through their taxes to France and thus, prevent the French population from being over taxed in order to finance France’s wars.

Consequently, it was the political skills of the French, which tried to prevent the French population from directly experiencing the costs of wars, which explained the reason why the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era never lost their popular appeal. The expansion of the French influence in Europe, from 1804 to 1812, was linked to this proposition and it was to ensure that France received a steady source of taxes, from the French dominated Europe, which would service France’s war debts. This was the intention behind Napoleon Bonaparte’s Continental System, which was designed to create an economic zone in Europe, which would be dominated and influenced by France and that its economics benefits would go to France. Therefore, it is not surprising that the refusal of Russia to abide by this political arrangement and its willingness to trade with England, in breach of the French political-economic monopoly of Europe, would force Napoleon Bonaparte to invade Russia in 1812. Once more, the French decision to wage war in Europe, in 1812, is very instructive because France avoided taxing its population directly in order to fund the war against Russia and instead, it opted to sell its North American colony of Louisiana to United States. The French Grande Armee, which invaded Russia and was nearly 600,000 men strong, was mostly composed of non-French soldiers and non-French soldiers were recruited to prevent the French population voicing its opposition to the war. It was a brilliant gambit, because when the Grande Armee was destroyed during the retreat from Moscow, the French losses were painful but not staggering and this also explained why the French were able to afford, politically and economically, another three years of warfare till the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Hence, the experiences of France in the period of 1789 to 1815 showed that feasibility and popularity of wars, if the population was not shouldered the costs associated with wars. In a similar sense, the British were able to keep their military resistance to France popular, because England never directly fought the French, but was more content to finance alliances against the French in Europe. The political lesson of the wars of 1789-1815 and how they evolved was that the ability to practice and wage wars was proportional to the support it enjoyed with the population and to keep that level of support, it was imperative to isolate the population from suffering the financial costs of war. Increased financial costs of wars were viewed as unpopular, and they were also considered not worth the political risks they entailed, because such risks restricted the state’s ability to persecute wars. The most critical ingredient in all of this was the level of political apathy in a population towards a war and this political apathy was quite high, when the population was not asked to participate in a war.

The wars of 1789 to 1815, as they emerged out of the French experience, suggested that there is a proportional balance between the economic costs of a war and the levels of political interest; lower economic costs favor political indifference and higher economic price of a war encourages increased levels of political awareness, which invariably translates into political opposition to the war. While this was the lesson of the French wars, from 1800 to 1815, the wars of 1789 to 1800 seemed to suggest that wars can be supported with a popular opinion, if they are portrayed as a struggle to defend political ideals, with which the population identifies its interests. However, the most interesting conclusion of the French wars, over a quarter of a century, was that patriotism and nationalism can be defined as an economic commodity and a nation’s aptitude to wage wars is limited to its ability to politically subsidize the economic costs of nationalism and patriotism and make them more politically affordable for its citizens. The wars of French Revolution and Napoleonic France taught the world that nations, which are successful in this endeavor, have the capacity to lose wars and still survive and nations, which fail at this task, seldom survive the tests of political legitimacy.