7. How This General Made a Virtue Out of Necessity
On the battlefield, Napoleon overthrew the linear warfare that had dominated battlefields since the days of Gustavus Adolphus, above. That process had begun early in the French Revolutionary Wars and was perfected by Napoleon. When the Revolutionary government enacted the levee en masse and conscripted the entire French population into the war effort, French armies were suddenly swollen by hundreds of thousands of new recruits. France was invaded on multiple fronts by her neighbors’ professional armies, and it lacked both the time and resources to train up the new citizen armies to professional levels. As seen below, they made the best of it and turned lemons into lemonade.
Swamped with massive numbers of untrained recruits, Revolutionary France lacked the time or resources to train and drill them as well as other European armies. So French military doctrine, as perfected by Napoleon, made a virtue out of necessity. It was changed to deemphasize linear tactics whereby soldiers lined up in neat rows opposite enemy forces to exchange volleys of musket fire. Such contests were usually won by the more professional army. Instead, the French emphasized attacks by massed troops in dense columns. That required relatively little training. As seen below, it worked even better than expected.
