Excerpt from The French Army Before Napoleon Lectures Delivered Before the University of Oxford, in Michaelmas Term The event was to prove that Arthur Young had seen deeper into the Situation than the gentlemen in whose company he heard the declaration of war and even than the Governments which rushed or were hurried into it. After four years' struggle against Austria, Prussia, and Sardinia, reinforced in the second year by England, Spain, and Holland, France, so far from having been destroyed, had extended her frontier to ...
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Excerpt from The French Army Before Napoleon Lectures Delivered Before the University of Oxford, in Michaelmas Term The event was to prove that Arthur Young had seen deeper into the Situation than the gentlemen in whose company he heard the declaration of war and even than the Governments which rushed or were hurried into it. After four years' struggle against Austria, Prussia, and Sardinia, reinforced in the second year by England, Spain, and Holland, France, so far from having been destroyed, had extended her frontier to the left bank of the Rhine and induced Prussia, Spain, and Holland to make peace and acquiesce in her expansion. The factor which had evaded the observation ofthe Governments of the Coalition was the real nature of the Revolution. Louis XIV had said, L' Etat c' est moi' The State - why I am the State'. Fifty years of reflection and discussion of disco'ntents had given the French people its reply, which was, 'l' Etat c'est nous We are the State They had consti tuted the whole people into the State and given it the name of the nation. Thus reconstituted, France developed an energy which none of her adversaries could rival. But the source of this power was hidden from the statesmen of Austria, Prussia, and Sardinia, brought up as they had been to the very conception which the French had rejected. As soon as the Coalition had become dangerous to France her Government concentrated its powers in the hands of a Committee of Public Safety' of which the mere name was a sufficient indication that the energy of the whole people would be concentrated on the war. If the Governments of the Coalition were unable to perceive that the Revolution was a transformation, like that which occurs when the Chrysalis breaks and sets free a winged creature, still less could their generals be aware that a similar process had taken place in the French army, in which twenty years of strenuous work and thought had made possible a new organization, a new method of making war, and a new generalship. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at ... This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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