Quotulatiousness

February 22, 2026

Britain’s recovery after a punishing existential war against a colossal European tyrant

Filed under: Britain, France, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The American Tribune considers how war-exhausted Britain staged a brilliant recovery after the decades of war against Republican and then Imperial France culminating in the exile of Napoleon to a remote island in the south Atlantic:

The grinding war is finally over after what feels like decades of bitter conflict on an inconceivably large scale. The entire world had become a battlefield in which the British had fought desperately to keep their imperial possessions secure in the face of vast hordes of enemies of all sorts, with the Navy and Army strained to the breaking point as battalions launched expeditionary raids and grinding, years-long campaigns everywhere from the steamy Orient to the Mediterranean, the bitter cold of the North to the coast and shores of Northern Africa.

Truth be told, victory, though it came in the end, had strained everything nearly to the breaking point. High taxes had driven the landed element to the breaking point. The necessity of convoys, of relying on domestic agriculture, of keeping the empire intact from an island the size of Michigan … had strained the British people and British society to the breaking point. Class tensions were high, taxes were already ruinously high, and to many elements, rich and poor alike, victory hardly seemed worth the immense cost in gold and blood.

And that was before considering the debt. The ruinous, mountainous, inconceivable debt. Well over 200% of GDP, it would later be calculated … and not at the negative interest rates of modernity either. Over 200% of GDP priced in real, somewhat gold-backed currency, with those who bought it demanding a real return. Ruinous, it was, ruinous! For this final conflict had been preceded not by many long years of peace, but by a similarly large, long conflict that had also involved campaigns across every corner of the earth, mutinous colonials, immense expense, and heavy taxation.

So victory had come. The war against an immense continental hegemon had been won, the international order was stabilized to the liking of and in accord with the ideology of the political elite, and the empire kept together in a hugely expanded state. But the cost had been high. Perhaps the cost had been ruinous …

I am, of course, describing Britain circa 1815, after its final victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. What followed was its century atop Olympus, the century where it ruled a quarter of the Earth’s surface, dominated all the sea lanes, was the world’s reserve currency, and became the world’s financial capital. Despite the expense, the defeat of Napoleon did not bring ruin, but success on an unimaginably immense scale.

What happened? Why did the Britain that defeated Napoleon become the hugely successful nation of the Victorian Age, but the Britain that followed the defeat of Hitler became a wrecked backwater, a miserable shell of its former self? The post-war debt load was similar. The human cost had been higher, but not remarkably so, particularly if the immigration outflows of the 19th century are considered.1 The logistical strains were similar, the social strains similar, and the fractious politics of the wars similar.

But the Britain of the 19th century became the hegemon of note, whereas that of the 20th century became essentially irrelevant. Mindset makes all the difference in the world, as I’ll show in this article, along with why this matters for Americans.

Britain after Napoleon

It is important to note that Britain’s immense imperial and economic success after the defeat of Napoleon was no sure thing. Yes, unlike much of Europe, it hadn’t been ravaged by invading armies. But it had lost its best colonies in the disastrous rebellion that followed the immensely expensive Seven Years’ War, a world war in all but name. It was staggering under a ruinous mountain of debt that could scarcely have been imagined earlier in the century: the national debt stood at somewhere around 210% of GDP, after post-war deflation had been accounted for, with somewhere around 10% of national GDP going just toward paying the interest on that debt.

Perhaps, worse, the population was restive. During the war, farmers and landlords had been pushed into embarking on extremely expensive schemes to drain and enclose land, schemes costing millions of dollars per thousand acres in today’s money; while that worked tolerably well during the war itself, as grain prices remained high, the expense and the cost of the debt used to achieve it was a crushing burden after the end of the war meant renewed trade and a fall in grain prices. That expense and the pain caused by it meant that not only were the farmers and the landlords struggling to make ends meet, but they had little left to pay agricultural laborers, who had their wages cut as a result, putting that bottom rung of the social ladder in an immensely precarious and dire economic position.

Much the same situation played out in the nascent industrial sector, where the end of war meant falling prices for finished goods and thus both lower profits and lower wages, angering industrialists and workers alike. As food remained expensive compared to wages, this meant major unrest, too. Thus, other than perhaps some financiers who were doing well off the debt, particularly given post-war deflation, most segments of society were unhappy at how the government was being run.

A high debt load that could only be maintained with high taxes, a highly restive and discontented population, and an economy-punishing bout of deflation are not the stuff of which great empires are typically made.

But the British figured it out, and did so without massive inflation, government default, or authoritarian societal repression.

  1. This is noted by AJP Taylor in his The First World War and Its Aftermath

January 3, 2026

Britain’s government – a modern-day Ship of Fools

Filed under: Britain, France, Government, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On his Substack, Dr. Robert Lyman takes a break from discussing events in India and Burma during the Second World War to consider the current British government:

The 1519 title page of Sebastian Brant‘s 1494 satirical book Ship of Fools

I began life as a medievalist and often find myself instinctively going back to old texts when contemplating today’s problems. I have been forced to think much in recent days about the incompetence of our current governing class in respect of their understanding of defence and its value. More especially, their failure to understand how to use the military instruments of defence to uphold our national interest. The Ship of Fools, which first appeared in Plato’s Republic but was resurrected in Europe in the late 1400s as a metaphor for desperately poor leadership, is the perfect allegory for me. It tells a simple story that resonates with thoughtful people in every age who look on in wonderment at the idiots governing them. The story is of a ship with a crew who talk (and drink) a lot, but with their cloth ears make all the wrong decisions. The result is chaos. In the 1480s the ship in question was the Church of Rome, but the allegory is easily transportable to Britain in the early days of 2026. What on earth is going on in defence in the UK as we enter 2026? I can only surmise that in the UK at least, we are in a ship governed by fools.

I was going to start this piece by complaining that our government simply doesn’t understand Clausewitz, but I thought that this might be a little too obtuse for most politicians. But one of Clausewitz’s points about the use of military power is pertinent to our age. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 he did so not because he had an existential hatred of Slavs, or of the Tsar. Indeed, Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I had a remarkably friendly relationship. He did it because the practice of friendly diplomacy between the two leaders had failed. Napoleon had attempted to persuade the Tsar to refuse the British trading rights in Russia’s ports. Alexander I had demurred, so Napoleon considered that the only thing left to him in his tool kit of levers to persuade Alexander to change his mind, was force. So, he marched on Moscow. We know the story and its outcome well, so I won’t rehearse it now. Using this as an example, Clausewitz was simply saying that in the hurly burly of diplomacy, war is one of the tools available to a national leader to persuade an opponent to change course. Hence, we get the oft misquoted Clausewitzian maxim that “War is the continuation of policy with other means”.

Clausewitz was correct, of course. Yet we in Britain have forgotten this, if politicians over the past three decades have really understood it. Since 1990 I am not sure we’ve had any politicians who’ve truly understood it, despite the fine words we get from successive Secretaries of State about the first priority of government being to protect its citizens, etc. This, without action to demonstrate any understanding of how to achieve the protection of our citizens, is merely St Paul’s clanging cymbal. Put frankly, we no longer have an Army, Navy or Air Force able seriously to achieve any form of influence on the European stage — let alone deter an enemy or fight a serious war — and the state of the Continuous At Sea Deterrent (CASD) is abysmal I’m told, though you wouldn’t know this from the hollow rhetoric regularly emanating from No 10. We are deluding ourselves if we think we can exercise real influence in Europe or anywhere else for that matter if we don’t have the practical means to do so.

The truth is that the cupboard is bare.

How have we got to where we are? The primary reason over the years has been the saving of money for politicians who have simply not valued investment in the hard practice of defence, unless it is in a shipyard in their constituency. The end of the Iron Curtain in 1989/90 meant, to many people in the corridors of power, that we no longer needed to bear the burden of spending 5% of GDP on defence.

But a second problem is only becoming clear to me. I hope I am wrong, but I can only conclude that we now have a government that actively hates the idea of defence, and while it will never admit it, is determined to remove it as one of its levers or instruments of power. I came across this in a meeting recently. Why do we need defence, the argument seemed to go, when we should be encouraging the international community to regulate itself by means of adherence to international laws and norms of behaviour? Should not our effort as a country be in building up these international systems and structures of law and governance (many based on the United Nations as an idea and a regulator) and rely on these to reduce the potentiality for war? Surely, building up arms simply makes war more likely, not less?

Update, 4 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 31, 2025

Baker Pattern 1800 Rifle for Napoleonic Wars Sharpshooters

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 11 Aug 2025

The British military decided to organize their disparate small units of riflemen into a single standardized group in 1800. The 95th Regiment – the British Rifle Corps – was founded and it was equipped with a pattern of rifle designed by one Ezekiel Baker. This was a .625 caliber rifle with a 30” long barrel and a remarkably slow 1:120” rifling twist. That rifling was deliberately chosen to balance rifle accuracy with ease of loading and it worked quite well as a compromise solution. The Baker was considered effective on individual targets to 200 yards (300 with a particular skilled marksman) and area targets out to 500 yards.

The Baker was used throughout the Napoleonic Wars and only replaced in 1838 by the Brunswick rifle. This example is one of the original 1800 pattern, modified in 1815 to replace its distinctive bayonet bar (used to fit the large short sword bayonet made for the Baker) with a typical socket bayonet lug.

BritishMuzzleLoaders playlist on the Baker: • The 1800 Baker Rifle: Two (Very) Frequent…
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July 26, 2025

The unaffordable luxury of a second-best army

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At History Does You, Secretary of Defense Rock considers the downfall of Prussia’s vaunted army at the hands of Napoleon in a blink-of-the-eye campaign in 1806:

“Prussian wounded and stragglers leaving battle [after the battles of Jena and Auerstadt]. The mortally wounded Duke of Brunswick is the prominent figure in the painting.”
Painting by Richard Knötel (1857–1914) via Wikimedia Commons.

    A vain, immoderate faith in these institutions made it possible to overlook the fact that their vitality was gone. The machine could still be heard clattering along, so no one asked if it was still doing its job.1
    – Carl von Clausewitz on Prussia in 1806

In the autumn of 1806, the Kingdom of Prussia, “The Iron Kingdom”, suffered one of the most rapid and humiliating military defeats in modern European history.2 The twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt shattered not only its army but the myth of invincibility that had surrounded the legacy of Frederick the Great. For the young Carl von Clausewitz, then a junior officer in the collapsing Prussian forces, this moment marked a personal and national catastrophe that would shape his life’s work. Clausewitz would come to see the defeat not simply as a failure of generalship or tactics, but as the exposure of a more profound institutional and societal crisis; one in which a state had grown complacent, a military rendered obsolete, and a society stripped of civic vitality falling apart during “the most decisive conflict in which they would ever have to fight”.3 In that collapse and Clausewitz’s later reflections, one finds an unsettling parallel to present-day America, a powerful nation outwardly strong, yet increasingly vulnerable to the same internal rot.

Prussia’s disaster in 1806 was the formative experience for the author of On War. How the armies of Frederick the Great and the state that he painstakingly built collapsed like a house of cards was a question that bothered Clausewitz for many years.4 It was a comprehensive disintegration of a system that had, since the mid-eighteenth century, claimed a position of prominence in European military affairs based on its discipline, linear tactics, and centralized command. Yet by the turn of the nineteenth century, these very strengths had calcified into weaknesses. Clausewitz foresaw disaster. Even as a young lieutenant, he was already warning of the Prussian army’s growing detachment from reality. In his early writings, he criticized military exercises as highly scripted performances, lacking genuine tactical challenge, unpredictability, and creativity.5 The number of steps marched in a minute of the cadence, what awards should be placed on a uniform, how a rifle should be cleaned for parade, all of this he feared, was cultivating a “lassitude of tradition and detail”.6 Clausewitz understood that rehearsing war under artificial constraints produced not readiness but ritual. Even though he later wrote, “no general can accustom an army to war”, he worried, presciently, that when confronted by a real enemy operating under real conditions, the army would collapse, and in 1806, it did.7

Whatever reservations he may have held, Clausewitz fulfilled his duty. He led a battalion of grenadiers at the battle of Auerstedt and managed to withdraw with most of his men intact in the chaotic aftermath of defeat. His escape was short-lived; however, he was captured on October 28, 1806, and subsequently marched into captivity in France, where he would spend the next year as a prisoner.8 Napoleon’s campaigns revealed that war had been transformed: faster, larger, and fundamentally political. Clausewitz wrote, “War was returned to the people, who to some extent had been separated from it by the professional standing armies; war cast off its shackles and crossed the bounds of what had once seemed possible”.9 The levée en masse and the corps system shattered the static paradigms of eighteenth-century warfare. Yet the Prussian high command, clinging to the geometries of the past, failed to respond with imagination or speed with any kind of seriousness.

Clausewitz’s later concept of friction — the unpredictable resistance that disrupts even the best plans — emerged directly from this experience.10 The Prussian army collapsed not for lack of courage, but because its institutional mindset could not withstand the volatility of an age that demanded adaptability, political intelligence, and creative command.

    1. Carl von Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Paret and Daniel Moran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 32.

    2. Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006).

    3. Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, 81.

    4. Frederick the Great ruled from 1740-1786 and is usually credited as turning Prussia from a regional power to a continental power.

    5. Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 92-93.

    6. Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, 36.

    7. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 122.

    8. Partet, 126.

    9. Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, 287.

    10. Clausewitz discusses this concept in Chapter 7 in On War, 119-121.

July 18, 2025

The Napoleonic-era Royal Navy

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

David Friedman on some of the aspects of Britain’s Royal Navy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century which may be incomprehensible to modern readers who encounter it in works of historical fiction (like the books of C.S. Forester or Patrick O’Brian):

“HMS Victory in Portsmouth Harbour”
Painting by Charles Edward Dixon (1872-1934) via Wikimedia Commons.

I have read and enjoyed several series of novels set in the British navy during the Napoleonic wars, most recently one by Naomi Novik that departs a little further from history than its predecessors by providing the British and their enemies with dragons. The internal structure and the associated rules and customs of the navy seem very strange to a modern eye, yet it was a strikingly successful institution.

One feature likely to catch an economist’s eye was prize money. If a naval vessel captured a legitimate prize, an enemy warship or merchantman, and brought it back to port, the vessel and its contents were sold and the money distributed among those responsible. One large chunk went to the captain, another was distributed among his officers, a third among the crew, a fourth to the admiral under whose orders he was operating.

Another feature of the system was the role of patronage, political influence both within the navy and outside it in the career of an officer, especially a young officer. The critical step of promotion from lieutenant to captain depended in part on performance, in particular on the opinion of the captain under whom a lieutenant was serving. But it depended also on things that seem, to us, irrelevant.

One of Patrick O’Brien’s novels contains a conversation between Maturin, one of his protagonists, and a friend, a young officer of aristocratic birth. The officer has been having an affair with the separated wife of a high naval official and wants to know whether he should live openly with her. Maturin’s response is that, moral issues aside, it might be imprudent for him to offend a powerful official and so risk his future career. His friend replies that he has considered that matter but his family controls a significant number of seats in both houses of parliament and he thinks their influence will be sufficient to balance that of the man he will be offending.

Neither party sees anything strange in either the assumption that giving personal offense to someone within the bureaucracy will make it harder for a competent officer to be promoted or that having a politically influential family will make it easier; that is just part of how the system works. It was a system that produced extraordinarily successful results, a navy that, from the late 18th century to the early 20th won almost every ship to ship or fleet to fleet battle it fought at anything close to even odds.1

A third feature was the seniority system. Once a lieutenant was promoted to captain, his future rank depended only on how long he survived. His name was on the list of captains, the list was ordered by strict seniority, and the next captain to be promoted to admiral would be the one at the top of the list. When two or more captains were working together it was the senior who commanded. That provided an unambiguous rule for allocating command, since every captain knew where he was on the list and knew, or could readily find out, where any other captain was. But it was a rule that had nothing to do with the relative competence of two officers of the same nominal rank.

Promotion beyond captain was entirely determined by seniority; what the officer got to do with his rank was not. An insufficiently competent captain who made it to admiral would end up as an admiral of the yellow, an admiral without a fleet, effectively retired on half pay. A sufficiently competent captain could be assigned particularly important duties, including the command of a group of ships with the temporary position of commodore — provided none of the other captains in the squadron was senior to him. A sufficiently incompetent captain could end up without a ship, on half pay with no chance of prize money. In peacetime, when there was no shortage of competent captains, a minor failing might do it.

[…]

Consider the case of the pre-modern British navy. Prize money was a property solution. The admiralty wanted captains to have an incentive to capture enemy merchant ships, defeat and capture enemy warships, even at risk to their lives. Most of the relevant decisions were made by the captain, so he got the largest part of the reward, but other people, including the admiral whose orders determined what opportunities the captain had to earn prize money, got some of it. A pattern that shows up in the novels, and presumably in the real history, is an admiral who puts an unusually competent and aggressive captain in places where he is likely to encounter enemy warships not because he likes the captain but because he hopes to profit from successful encounters.

Allen argues that prize money was an imperfect property solution because capturing a warship was much riskier, more likely to get the captain killed, than capturing a merchant ship, but prize money was awarded for both. One puzzle he does not consider is why the navy did not solve the problem of misaligned incentives by lowering the prize money awarded for merchant ships or raising it for warships, which should have been easy enough to do.

Allen offers the imperfect alignment of incentives, such as the temptation for a captain in a fleet action to hang back and let other ships and their captains take the risk, as a reason why the property solution had to be supplemented with elements of the other two systems. The admiralty had detailed information on what a captain did through a system of three different logs, one by the captain, one by his first lieutenant, one by the sailing master, the ship’s senior warrant officer. A captain whose career showed him to be incompetent or too inclined to go after merchant ships and avoid warships might end up spending the rest of his career on shore with no ship, hence no opportunity for prize money. A captain who declined a clear opportunity for combat with a ship of the same class was subject to trial by court martial; one admiral ended up convicted and executed for failing to pursue the enemy fleet after an engagement.

    1. With the possible exception of the War of 1812.

July 10, 2025

The Prussian defeats at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Dead Carl and You, Kiran Pfitzner describes the disastrous 1806 campaign that knocked Prussia out of the war against Napoleon and shattered the military reputation of the army built by Frederick the Great:

In brief, the course of the 1806 campaign was that the Prussians met the French at Saalfeld and were initially defeated. The Prussians therefore decided to retreat before meeting Napoleon himself in battle. However, poor command organization and irresolution ended up dividing and delaying the Prussian forces. Thus, the rearguard ended up meeting the French main body under Napoleon which was able to overwhelm it at Jena.

The battle itself was not especially punishing, but the relentless pursuit of the French cavalry yielded many prisoners and prevented the reconstitution of the army. On the same day, the Prussian main body had encountered a French corps under Marshal Davout at Auerstedt, but failed to overcome it in a series of piecemeal attacks that cost it the lives of its commanders. The Prussians were demoralized enough that an attack from the outnumbered French was enough to force the main body into disorder. The arrival of fleeing forces from Jena spread a general panic and prevented any chance of recovery. From there, the campaign was a matter of pursuit and capitulation — within weeks the French were parading through the streets of Berlin. This humiliating defeat gave Clausewitz impetus to seek an understanding of the nature of war. How could the vaunted Prussian army, envy of the world in the days of Frederick the Great (still within living memory), be so summarily dispatched?

It was clear to virtually all military thinkers of the time that war had changed. To many, Napoleon was utilizing a higher, more perfect form of war than had been previously known. Clausewitz instead recognized that Napoleon was not refining war, but recognizing that changes in social conditions had enabled fighting with more energy and violence than had been possible in the cabinet wars of the 18th century. This had proven significant because the limitations of the 18th century made maneuver and logistics central to skilled generalship. Battles were important, but much that was won or lost in a battle could be subsequently lost or won outside it.

The removal of these restrictions drastically increased the importance of battle as it was able to produce results that could not be compensated for actions outside of it. Skilled generalship was therefore no longer a matter of outmaneuvering the enemy or protecting your supply lines while threatening his, but of bringing maximum force to the point of battle. Initiative, coordination, and aggression become the key traits of an officer. Thus, more expansively, the task of the officer is to recognize changes to the character of war and so understand what is required in practice. Neither history nor experience can anticipate these developments — it falls to the judgment of the individual to recognize them.

This framing shows clearly the mistakes of the Prussians. Operating in the old paradigm, they sought to make good with maneuver what they had lost in the opening battle of the campaign. They had divided their forces under the assumption the French would be unable or unwilling to aggressively pursue their retreat. At the same time, when they engaged the French, they showed caution entirely congruent with a cabinet army but fatally out of place when facing a Napoleonic force. On numerous occasions, the French made serious blunders that went unpunished because the Prussians failed to take the initiative and capitalize on them.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the failure of the Prussian main body to overcome the single corps it faced at Auerstedt. While outnumbering the French, the Prussian attacked piecemeal, becoming demoralized under French fire. The morale of the Prussians was substantially more brittle on account of their relative lack of nationalism — the state and therefore the army were not objects of any great affection by those subject to them. While this would require social reforms to remedy, Auerstedt had nevertheless been an opportunity for the Prussians. They had a French corps outnumbered more than two-to-one and merely needed to bring that force to bear to inflict a serious defeat. A Prussian victory would have positioned the main body to receive the retreating forces from Jena, allowing another confrontation with Napoleon on at least equal terms. Timidity and irresolution therefore played as big a part in the disaster as did the deeper defects.

In part, this must be ascribed to the advanced age of Prussian leadership. The senior commanders at both Jena and Auerstedt were over seventy. Not only did this ensure continuity with older forms of war, but men of such an age were unlikely to have the energy to campaign aggressively — by contrast, Napoleon and his marshals were three or four decades younger. The Prussian leaders did not lack physical courage, as their valiant deaths attest, but exposing oneself to danger is not the same quality that is needed for decisive and energetic action over an extended period of time.

The Prussian strategy deserves further criticism because by that point Bonaparte’s character was well known. There was no justification to have any illusions as to what the consequences of defeat would be. Prussia’s status amongst the great powers — if not its very existence as an independent state — would be determined by the confrontation. Leaving troops in Silesian fortresses or Polish garrisons (through which Prussia’s available forces were reduced by half) meant narrowing the odds of victory in pursuit of things that could be no substitute for victory and no comfort in defeat.

June 29, 2025

Does Russia Always Win Its Wars?

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 17 Jan 2025

The Russian Federation is at war with Ukraine, and some of its supporters insist it will win because Russia doesn’t lose wars. They point to its vast territory, its cold climate, its manpower reserves, or its peoples’ ability to endure hardship and accept death – and they point to great Russian victories of the past. So let’s put this claim to the test and see what history has to say about Russia’s record on the battlefield.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
02:03 Mongol Invasion of Kyivan Rus’
03:29 Livonian War
04:52 Time of Troubles
06:13 3rd and 4th Coalition Wars
08:12 Crimean War
09:31 Russo-Japanese War
11:44 First World War & Russian Civil War
14:07 Polish-Soviet War
15:25 Winter War
16:48 Soviet-Afghan War
18:34 First Chechen War
19:33 Conclusion
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June 12, 2025

QotD: Napoleon Bonaparte, arch-meritocrat

Filed under: Books, France, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

John: … When did this change? I am tempted to blame it, like everything else, on the rise of meritocracy.

Jane: But Napoleon was a meritocrat, in the strictest and most literal sense. He made himself emperor through sheer excellence, and the men he elevated were the same. I mean, let’s look at his first set of marshals: Augereau is the son of a fruit-seller, Ney’s father was a cooper, Masséna’s father was a shopkeeper, and Bessières’ was a doctor (in an era when that was a lot less prestigious than it is today). Bernadotte starts out the son of a provincial prosecutor and ends up king of Sweden. Only Davout had an aristocratic background. Obviously this was sort of inevitable, because the previous elite had been literally decapitated and a new one had to come from somewhere. Maybe it’s just what happens when you have a particularly profound disruption: people end up in power because they’re better than anyone else at making war to get the power in the first place. Just like you can’t follow the lineage of any European aristocrat back farther than the Germanic conquerors of the early Middle Ages. (The Psmiths, as is well attested, trace descent from the Viking Psmiðr who came to Normandy with Rollo in the 8th century.) But I think it’s more than that. Napoleon set up all kinds of meritocratic institutions outside the military: he had his competitive examination lycées, he was constantly promoting the talented young auditeurs he ran across in the Conseil … (Can you tell I liked the civil administration chapters better than the battle chapters? #thetwogenders)

So what is the difference between Napoleonic meritocracy and our present sort? I think the real difference is that in his case there was someone doing the choosing. This is important for a couple of reasons: first, because it takes a certain amount of talent to recognize excellence. You can get away with being a Salieri, but you need to have something. I think we’ve all seen institutions whose HR departments were so packed with drones that they couldn’t have recognized a genius if one fell into their laps, let alone wanted to work for them. And it’s way, way harder to keep around an institution full of competent intelligent people with correctly aligned incentives than it is to just … be good at identifying talent, personally. Second, a person exercising judgment can take a way more holistic view than any standardized metric. This is what college admissions claims to be trying to do when they’re not just using it as an excuse to keep out Asians. But a well-functioning meritocracy — or an emperor picking his men — should be searching for excellence. Studying hard and doing well on a test not only fails to reliably indicate excellence, it actually encourages and cultivates habits of mind that undermine excellence.

But the biggest reason this is important, I think, brings us back to Napoleon again, and might be the key to what you described as the strange inconsistency between his loving concern for his men and his willingness to send them to a hideous death. Because I don’t actually think it’s an inconsistency at all! And it has to do with mission. What’s the deal with our current meritocratic system? “We want to have the smartest people in power”. Okay but why? “So they can be effective”. Effective at what?

No one ever had to ask Napoleon “effective at what”.

He was willing to throw himself, and his closest friends, and the meanest infantryman whose boots he nevertheless obsessed over, into some of the most hellish experiences yet devised by men1 in service of something greater. And you can be snide and say the something greater was “Napoleon”, and that’s sort of true, but to him and to France “Napoleon” had come to stand for law and knowledge and liberty and order and greatness itself. Napoleon’s meritocracy worked because it had a telos. Our meritocracy is the idiot fluting of a blind inhuman blob.

Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Napoleon the Great, by Andrew Roberts”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-21.

    1. Another book recommendation! The Face of Battle.

March 23, 2025

How To Invade France

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, History, Humour, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HardThrasher
Published 2 Feb 2023

For more than 1,000 years British people have studied how to invade France, here then are the fruits of that wisdom.

1. Be German
2. Head for Sedan

November 18, 2024

QotD: Napoleon and his army

Filed under: Books, France, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

To me the central paradox of Napoleon’s character is that on the one hand he was happy to fling astonishing numbers of lives away for ultimately extremely stupid reasons, but on the other hand he was clearly so dedicated to and so concerned with the welfare of every single individual that he commanded. In my experience both of leading and of being led, actually giving a damn about the people under you is by far the most powerful single way of winning their loyalty, in part because it’s so hard to fake. Roberts repeatedly shows us Napoleon giving practically every bit of his life-force to ensure good treatment for his soldiers, and they reward him with absolutely fanatical devotion, and then … he throws them into the teeth of grapeshot. It’s wild.

Napoleon’s easy rapport with his troops also gives us some glimpses of his freakish memory. On multiple occasions he chats with a soldier for an hour, or camps with them the eve before a battle; and then ten years later he bumps into the same guy and has total recall of their entire conversation and all of the guy’s biographical details. The troops obviously went nuts for this kind of stuff. It all sort of reminds me of a much older French tradition, where in the early Middle Ages a feudal lord would (1) symbolically help his peasants bring in the harvest and (2) literally wrestle with his peasants at village festivals. Back to your point about the culture, my anti-egalitarian view is that that kind of intimacy across a huge gulf of social status is easiest when the lines of demarcation between the classes are bright, clear, and relatively immovable. What’s crazy about Napoleon, then, is that despite him being the epitome of the arriviste he has none of the snobbishness of the nouveaux-riches, but all of the easy familiarity of the natural aristocrat.

True dedication to the welfare of those under your command,1 and back-slapping jocularity with the troops, are two of the attributes of a wildly popular leader. The third2 is actually leading from the front, and this was the one that blew my mind. Even after he became emperor, Napoleon put himself on the front line so many times he was practically asking for a lucky cannonball to end his career. You’d think after the fourth or fifth time a horse was shot out from under him, or the guy standing right next to him was obliterated by canister shot, the freaking emperor would be a little more careful, but no. And it wasn’t just him — the vast majority of Napoleon’s marshals and other top lieutenants followed his example and met violent deaths.

This is one of the most lacking qualities in leaders today — it’s so bad that we don’t even realize what we’re missing. Obviously modern generals rarely put themselves in the line of fire or accept the same environmental hardships as their troops. But it isn’t just the military, how many corporate executives do you hear about staying late and suffering alongside their teams when crunch time hits? It does still happen, but it’s rare, and the most damning thing is that it’s usually because of some eccentricity in that particular individual. There’s no systemic impetus to commanders or managers sharing the suffering of their men, it just isn’t part of our model of what leadership is anymore. And yet we thirst for it.

Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Napoleon the Great, by Andrew Roberts”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-21.

    1. When not flinging them into the face of Prussian siege guns.

    2. Okay, there are more than three. Some others include: deploying a cult of personality, bestowing all kinds of honors and awards on your men when they perform, and delivering them victory after victory. Of course, Napoleon did all of those things too.

October 22, 2024

A Conquering Hat: a History of the Bicorn

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HatHistorian
Published Jul 1, 2022

Emblematic of Napoleon Bonaparte and his age of conquest, the bicorn is a distinctive military hat that became part of the most formal of dress uniforms and remains to this day in certain ceremonial outfits

The bicorn I wear in this video comes from Theatr’Hall in Paris https://www.theatrhall.com. The uniform comes from thejacketshop.co.uk

Title sequence designed by Alexandre Mahler
am.design@live.com

This video was done for entertainment and educational purposes. No copyright infringement of any sort was intended.

October 1, 2024

QotD: Napoleon Bonaparte and Tsar Alexander I

Filed under: Books, France, History, Military, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Jane: … The most affecting episode in the whole book [Napoleon the Great by Andrew Roberts], to my mind — even more than his slow rotting away on St. Helena — is Napoleon’s conferences with Alexander I at Tilsit. Here are these two emperors meeting on their glorious raft in the middle of the river, with poor Frederick William of Prussia banished from the cool kids’ table, and Napoleon thinks he’s found a peer, a kindred soul, they’re going to stay up all night talking about greatness and leadership and literature … And the whole time the Tsar is silently fuming at the audacity of this upstart and biding his time until he can crush him. The whole buildup to the invasion has a horror movie quality to it — no, don’t go investigate that noise, just get out of the house Russia! — but even without knowing how horribly that turns out, you feel sorry for the guy. Napoleon thinks they have something important in common, and Alexander thinks Napoleon’s very existence is the enemy of the entire old world of authority and tradition and monarchy that he represents.

Good thing the Russian Empire never gets decadent and unknowingly harbors the seeds of its own destruction!

John: Yeah, I think you’ve got the correct two finalists, but there’s one episode in particular on St. Helena that edges out his time bro-ing out with Tsar Alexander on the raft. It’s the supremely unlikely scene where old, beaten, obese, dying Napoleon strikes up a bizarre friendship with a young English girl. It all begins when she trolls him successfully over his army freezing to death in the smoldering ruins of Moscow, and after a moment of anger he takes an instant liking to her and starts pouring out his heart to her, teaching her all he knows about military strategy, and playing games in her parents’ yard where the two of them pretend to conquer Europe. Call me weird, but I think this above all really showcases Napoleon’s greatness of soul. That little girl later published her memoirs, btw, and I really want to read them someday.

Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Napoleon the Great, by Andrew Roberts”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-21.

July 17, 2024

What do “‘elf an’ safety” concerns have to do with VIP protection details? A lot, it seems

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I haven’t been following every twist and turn of the post-assassination-attempt story, but this one really does have me scratching my head. According to the person who had the overall responsibility, the reason the shooter’s location was not properly secured was due to health and safety concerns … for the Secret Service agents, rather than the person they were supposed to be protecting:

Oddly, the roof that the counter-sniper team was occupying visually seems to have a steeper pitch than the one identified as too dangerous:

Since we’re looking at the biggest news event of the year (so far), let’s consider what N.S. Lyons calls “The World Spirit on a Golf Cart“:

I’m going to do something I normally resist doing and offer some hot take thoughts based on recent events. Not on the details of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump specifically (there’s already plenty of that out there), but on what feels like his role in our general moment in time.

In the minutes after Trump dodged a bullet on live television, I joked on Substack Notes that “one does not simply shoot Napoleon”. This proved open to misinterpretation in a few different directions, but what I meant was this:

Napoleon famously led from the front, charging time and again into a hail of bullets and cannon shot, and yet not once was he ever seriously injured. In fact his luck seemed so impervious that he quickly acquired a legendary aura of invincibility. This became part of his overwhelming charisma – meaning not just his social charm but the inexplicable sense of unstoppable destiny that he seemed to exude. This aura proved so captivating to normal men that when he escaped from exile and landed alone in France to … well let’s call it make his “reelection” bid, the army sent to stop him promptly surrendered and switched sides at the mere sight of him.

Napoleon had seemed to become something more than mere mortal: he was a living myth, a “man of destiny” whom Providence had handed some great role to play in history (for good or for ill) and who therefore simply couldn’t be harmed until that role had been fulfilled and the world forever changed. This is why when Hegel witnessed Napoleon he described him with awe as “the world-spirit on horseback”: he seemed truly an “epic” figure, the sweep of history seeming to have become “connected to his own person, [to] occur and be resolved by him” alone, one way or another.

This, it should be noted, used to be the standard way of explaining how the course of the world’s history was shaped. Thus was Alexander understood; thus was Caesar. Only after the Enlightenment and the onset of rationalistic modernity did this mythic view begin to wither away with the broader disenchantment of the world, to be replaced by a depersonalized and mechanistic view of historical causality.

We’re so back now though. Donald Trump has always been something of a bafflingly lucky man, as even his enemies are prone to admit. But witnessing him, in response to whatever whisper of Providence, tilt his head at precisely the right moment and degree to cheat death, I and it apparently many others can’t help but feel like he may be more than lucky – that he now seems as much myth as man.

And when he emerged, shaking off his bodyguards and streaked with blood, to stand and pump his fist in defiance beneath the American flag (as captured by a photographer who just happened to be there at the perfect place and time to reveal an era-defining symbolic image), this was rightly described by awed watchers in the stands and across the nation as “epic”. Maybe epic is the word that comes to their mind only because it’s become internet parlance for “cool shit”. But I suspect that they may mean more than that, that they may be attempting to describe the deeper charisma of someone who really seems to somehow have become a man of destiny, and that they intuited the scene as truly epochal in its meaning.

Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raises his fist after an attempt on his life during a campaign speech in Butler, PA on 13 July, 2024.

Earlier, Mark Steyn wondered whether the security failures in Butler were caused deliberately or through utter incompetence:

Let’s cut to the chase — the US Secret Service: In on it? Or just totally crap?

Well, I’ve thought the Secret Service were rubbish not just since we learned of the Cartagena hookers but for at least another decade before that. And increasingly, when it comes to American officialdom — from Kabul to Uvalde — to modify Henry Ford, you can get it in any colour as long as it’s bloated, lavishly over-funded and entirely dysfunctional.

And yet and yet … it’s hard to believe even these guys (plus their bevy of five-foot-two-eyes-of-blue Keystone chorus girls) could be this crap. Assuming for the purposes of argument that the body on the roof is actually that of the perp, a goofball barely out of high school hatched a plan to have Donald Trump’s head explode in close-up on live TV – and, wittingly or otherwise, the world’s most flush money-no-object security state did their best to help him pull it off.

In any accountable “public service”, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secret Service gal would already be gone. By this point after the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, Lord Carrington (Foreign Secretary), Sir Humphrey Atkins (Lord Privy Seal) and Richard Luce (Minister for Latin-American Affairs) had already resigned: see my column of September 17th 2001 expressing in my naïve Canadian way mystification as to why, six days later, all the 9/11 flopperoos had not been similarly dispatched.

Because that’s how it goes in the Republic of Non-Accountability, and, if he’s harbouring any doubts about his fitness for the job, Mayorkas figures it can wait till someone takes out RFK Jr. This is a depraved political culture.

What’s the old line? When seconds count, the police are minutes away? Not at a Secret Service event: even when the police are on site in massive overwhelming numbers, they’re still minutes away.

June 16, 2024

QotD: Napoleon Bonaparte – the great man?

Filed under: Books, France, History, Military, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

John: … I think my favorite big picture thing about the Roberts book [Napoleon the Great] is the way it cuts through two centuries of Anglophone ignorance and really shows you why the continent flung itself at this man’s feet. The pop culture image of Napoleon as this little bumbling dictator is so clearly a deliberate mystification by the perfidious British who felt inadequate in the shadow of this guy they (barely) beat.

Remember, the real Napoleon was so impressive he literally caused a crisis in 19th century philosophy! Everybody had carefully worked out their little theories, later exemplified by Tolstoy, about how human agency doesn’t matter in history and everything is just the operation of vast impersonal forces like the grinding of tectonic plates, and then boom this guy shows up and the debate springs to life again. You know it’s real when two guys as different as Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are both grappling with what we can learn from somebody’s existence. And I think Raskolnikov’s unhealthy Napoleon fanboyism was supposed to be a bit of a satire of some very real intellectual currents among the European and Russian intelligentsia.

So what do you think? Does Napoleon vindicate the great man theory of history? I’m still working out my own answer to this, which I briefly allude to in my review of Zhuchkovsky’s book. Basically, I think we can transcend the traditional dichotomy by constructing a political/military analogue of the Schumpeter/Kirzner theory of entrepreneurship. Vast, impersonal forces (such as technological progress or structural economic changes) can create opportunities — in fact they’re pretty much the only thing that can, because the force required to reconfigure society is usually far beyond what any person or group can manage.

But once the opportunity is there, it takes a lot less raw power to act on it, assuming you can recognize it. Imagine a process of continental drift that slowly, slowly raises a mountain-sized boulder out of the ground, and every year it’s inching closer to this precipice, until finally it teeters on the edge. A human being could never have done that, it would be far too heavy, but once it’s up there, there might be a narrow window, a few precious moments, when a solid shove by somebody sufficiently perceptive and motivated can direct and harness this unimaginable force.

So the question is: what made Europe so ripe for Disruption (TM) at that moment? Obviously the French Revolution, and there were some pretty important changes in the nature of warfare too. What else?

Jane: Well, you know what I’m going to say: it’s the Enlightenment, stupid.

I was going to compare Napoleon to, say, Odoacer, but I don’t think the analogy actually holds. The Goths were conquerors from outside; their approach, their whole worldview, was very different from the Romans’.1 But Napoleon is extremely inside. The people he comes from are not actually all that different from the ancien régime — they’re feuding hill clans, but they’re aristocratic feuding hill clans — and yet he’s so thoroughly a creature of Enlightenment modernity that even when he’s engaging in the time-honored feuding hill clan pastime of resisting integration by the metropole he’s doing it by writing pamphlets. He might be a Corsican nationalist but he’s been intellectually colonized by France. Or, more accurately, by the elements of French culture that are in the process of undermining and overthrowing it.

I think you’re right about political entrepreneurship. (So here we see the Psmiths wimp out and answer the great man/impersonal force dichotomy “yes”.) It’s perhaps more neatly summed up by that famous Napoleon quip: “I saw the crown of France lying on the ground, so I picked it up with my sword”. Which: based. But also, if we’re going to continue his metaphor, he didn’t knock the crown onto the ground. Everything was already irredeemably broken before he got there. And this, I think, distinguishes him from the Germanic conquerors, who found something teetering and gave it a final push. Caesar, similarly, came up in the old order but dealt it its death blow.

But back to the Enlightenment: the crown is on the ground because the culture that held it up has fallen apart, and it’s fallen apart because gestating in its innards was an entirely different culture that’s finally burst its skin like a parasitic wasp and emerged into the light of day. A lazy reading of history sees Napoleon with a crown giving people titles and building palaces and goes “ooh, look, he’s just like the ancien régime“, but this is dumb. Napoleon is obsessed with modernizing and streamlining. He wants to wipe away the accumulated cruft of a thousand years of European history and build something smarter and cleaner and more rational. He’s just better at organization and psychology than the revolutionaries were. The French Revolution (and the total failure of the Directory) created the material conditions, but the entire intellectual milieu that made the French Revolution possible also made it possible for people to look at Napoleon and go “whoa, nice”.

Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Napoleon the Great, by Andrew Roberts”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-21.

    1. There’s some very interesting stuff on this, and about later efforts from both cultures to bridge the gap, in Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization.

February 24, 2024

Feeding Napoleon – Chicken Marengo

Filed under: Europe, Food, France, History, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Nov 21, 2023
(more…)

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