Historians, says Armstrong Starkey, usually concentrate upon two aspects of the relationship between the Enlightenment and war: the development of strategic thought and theory, and the steady advance toward more humane practices in the conduct of operations. The latter has led to frequent assertion that, when compared to the contiguous periods, European warfare during the eighteenth century had a reduced impact upon civilian populations. Starkey identifies the specific contribution of the Enlightenment to these processes and generally queries the extent of this received wisdom. He is conscious that the result is “a small book on a big subject” (viii), but his intention is to initiate debate rather than provide a fully formed argument. Indeed, it would be neither inaccurate nor condescending to suggest that this book is really a collection of related essays rather than a monograph.

The principal theme is the “culture of force. … The ideas and values that guided the practice of war in the period.” Taking as his starting point the modern notion that the Enlightenment was poly-stranded and as often conservative and traditional as progressive, the reader is struck by just how little progress was made toward a modern version of warfare between 1700 and 1789. Proponents of the Military Enlightenment were as concerned as their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors about selecting models from classical antiquity. Despite some limited efforts to establish training and educational establishments for officers, the majority continued to learn on the job, receiving practical instruction from colleagues and noncommissioned officers within regiments: scant opportunity for the principles of the Enlightenment to be instilled. The eighteenth-century officer's sense of honor was as strong and fragile as that possessed by his seventeenth-century ancestors. Some commanders, Saxe is singled out, were intellectuals as well as men of action, but so were many in the pre-Enlightenment age, notably Vauban and Montecuccoli. Emmerich de Vattel advanced the concept of international law in degree rather than fundamentals, being heavily derivative of Grotius and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century jurists. Widespread military participation and conscription were not invented by Carnot and the levée en masse: neither did the concept of the citizen-soldier originate with Guibert and the French and American Revolutions, having its origins in sixteenth-century Scandinavia.

Similarly, popular warfare, usually revolts by minorities against the centralizing state fueled by the heavy fiscal, economic, and human burdens imposed by war—the Jacobite Rebellion in Great Britain, Pugachev's Revolt in Russia—were actually risings against governments already guided by the principles of the Enlightenment. Popular warfare was thus a violent expression of conservatism against grasping and demanding, yet Enlightened, absolute monarchies. Like Gustav II Adolf and Louis XIV, Enlightened monarchy was brutal to weak states, as the fates of Poland and Corsica bore witness. After 1700 there was virtually no technological improvement to the means of waging war, and precious little between 1600 and 1850. As has been pointed out many times before, the majority of the tactical, operational, organizational, technological, and governmental requirements for Revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare, both by land and sea, were in place long before the fall of the Bastille. The means were already to hand: all that was required was a political revolution to produce the will, necessity, and spirit.

However, care must be exercised. Just as it is tempting to overstate the influence of the Enlightenment on the practice of warfare during the eighteenth century, it is equally beguiling to interpret Napoleonic warfare as far more sophisticated and modern than was actually the case, a point recently reinforced by reading Adam Zamoyski's 1812 (London, 2004). Napoleon's soldiers lived off the land through requisition, plunder, and looting; most of their weaponry would have been familiar to Wallenstein; their medical services were little better than those of Bernard of Saxe-Weimar; while their behavior toward the civilian populations in Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Italy would have embarrassed Tilly's mercenaries. Even the size of Napoleon's armies was as much the result of conquest as revolutionary zeal and the levée en masse. Much the same process had been observable in the Swedish armies in Germany in the interval between Breitenfeld and Nördlingen. Why? Because the basic requirements of armies and soldiers did not change significantly, and no Early Modern peacetime government was remotely capable of suddenly producing sufficient military material on the outbreak of war.