@Fido,
I suspect that i understand Napoleon better than you do, for however much i imagine telling you that will piss you off. I would say the same about general European history. All of the European nations had reserve military systems in 1914, except for England. Germany, as was the case in France, Austria, Russian and Serbia, had many more reserve troops than they had professional soldiers in their standing army. Nobody in Europe resorted to conscription until the war was well under way. Unlike France, Austria and Russia, Germany mobilized their reserve troops at the outbreak of war, in order to implement von Schlieffen's plan. (It was quixotic, though, in that they had already modified von Schlieffen's plan, and would wreck it altogether due to their unnecessary panic over the Russian invasion of East Prussia.) In fact, it was the only possible way for Germany to fight a two front war, and reserve troops fought well in East Prussia in stopping the invasion, particularly in the opening battles during which von Pritwitz' eighth army finally stopped Rennenkampf's First Russian Army. The French quickly followed suit, and the Austians, badly embarrassed in their initial attempt to overrun Serbia (remember, the reason that war started?) had to do the same, faced as they were with a Russian invasion of Galicia as they were embrolied with the Serbs. The Russians were the first to use conscription after the destruction of Samsonov's Second Army in the battle which Ludendorf cleverly named Tannenburg.
Essentially, the Germans did not follow von Schlieffen's original plan until their 1940 offensive against France, when their eastern frontier was secure due to the pact with the Soviet Union. I don't know where you came across the contention about conscription, but either the person who wrote that is making **** up, or you did not fully understand what was written. For an clear understanding of the terms imposed on Germany in 1919, the best short work, a recent one, is
Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, Margaret MacMillan, 2002, published in the United States by Random House, New York.
You need to read a great deal more about the history of Germany from 1918 until the rise of Hitler and the NSDAP, too. The Allies allowed the Freikorps to operate in the Baltic states as a buffer against Trotsky's Red Army, and many former German officers jumped at the opportunity to organize small, local Freikorps units within Germany. The Allies either knew nothing about this, or chose to ignore it. After all, the French were sending troops all over central Europe, while the Czechs and Serbs tried to grab as much territory as they could in the wake of the defeat of the Central powers. With the tacit approval of the French, the Italians promoted what was to prove a disastrous failure of an invasion of Turkey by Greek troops--the final nail in the coffin of relations between Turks and Greeks. Pilsudski in Poland was organizing Polish veterans of the German, Austrian and Russian armies in order to establish a new Polish state, Poland having ceased to exist as an independent state with the third partition in 1795. The Freikorps in the Baltic states turned into robber barons, and were completely useless in stopping the Bolsheviks--in 1920 the French were obliged to rush troops to Poland to support Pilsudski as the Franco-Polish forces finally stopped the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw.
There was certainly an officer corps within the German officer corps of "Prussian" officers (not all of them were Prussian, nor were they necessarily aristocrats--the sons of wealthy men were entering the military schools and were regarded as "Prussian Junkers" even when they were neither aristocrats nor Prussians)--however, this was not an exclusive club. Rommel was born and raised in Württemburg, and after joining an infantry unit there, was sent to the Officer Cadet School in Danzig, which was then a part of East Prussia. (Today Danzig is a part of Poland, and is known as Gdansk.) This was fairly common, a realistic attitude on the part of the Imperial German staff acknowledging that Prussia could not possibly supply all of the officers needed for the regular line regiments and the vast reserve system. In fact, most "Prussian" officers weren't Prussian at all, and most of them were not of aristocratic descent, neither before nor after the Great War. To use Rommel as an example again, he was the son of a schoolmaster.
No one gave any one emergency powes in the Wiemar Republic. Hindenberg defeated Hitler in the Presidential election in 1932, Hitler polling about 35%. That was just what the NSDAP polled in the subsequent Reichstag elections. After the Reichstag fire, Hitler, who had formed a coalition with the DNVP (the German National Peoples' Party, a right-wing party) under von Pappen, was able to outlaw left-wing parties, but even then, the NSDAP could only poll 44%, so Hitler was still obliged to govern with a coalition government. However, by making promises to the Centre Party, a Catholic Party in a country which still casually discriminated against a very large Catholic minority, Hitler was able to get the two thirds majority needed to pass the Enabling Act in 1933, which allowed the NSDAP-DNVP-Centre Party coalition to govern without reference to the Reichstag. That was the point from which Hitler was able to eventually outlaw all other political parties, and seize autocratic power.
Napoleon was certainly conservative, but he was no reactionary. Nor did he torpedo the Revolution; in fact, he exploited the fiction of revolutionary ideals quite well for many years. The reaction to the revolution is seen in the collapse of the Convention, and the subsequent rise of the Directory. The French middle class was horrified by the excesses of the convention, and particularly of Robspierre, and after the fall of Robspierre, conservative forces within the Convention began moving to take power, and the Directory was establish with the Constitution of the Year III. The Directory held power from 1795 until Napoleon created the Consulate in the wake of his successful coup (which he came within an ace of totally ******* up) in November, 1799. Most of the institutions of the Directory were preserved, since they coincided with Napoleon's native conservatism.
Napoleon was no military genius. The militay system he exploited had been created before he ever attended
l'École militaire. He simply exploited the brilliant system which was created by the complete overhaul of the French military accomplished in the last years of the royal government before the revolution began. Napoleon was an organizational genius, and he was a good (and always cynical) judge of men. He put the right men in the right places, and he exploited their skills to the uttermost.
Napoleon's empire was destroyed in Spain, not in Russia. People seem to think that France collapsed after the destruction of the Grand Army in Russia--ignoring or ignorant of the fact that at Leipsic in 1813, Napoleon disposed of nearly a quarte of a million troops at the "Battle of the Nations." Napoleon too eagerly disposed of the Spanish monarchy in 1808, and installed his brother Joseph as the King of Spain. He completely failed to understand the Spanish, and didn't realize that the Spanish were not interested in the importation of the revolution, and preferred their own corrupt Bourbon monarch to a foreign corrupt monarch. The endless war in Spain bled France white. After "settling" Spain in 1808, Napoleon was delighted to see the opportunity to attack Austria in 1809. He "won" the Wagram campaign, at the cost of the flower of the Grand Army. He lost Marshall Lannes, arguably his best battlefield commander while under the eyes of the Emperor. He lost literally dozens of generals, hundreds of field grade officers, and thousands of company grade officers and NCOs. One light infantry regiment when it finally retired from the line during the battle of Wagram was in the command of its senior corporal--every officer and higher ranking NCO was either dead or incapacitated by wounds. Although an extreme case, the Grand Army suffered an appalling loss of experienced officers and NCOs which Napoleon was never able to make good.
Meanwhile, in Spain, Arthur Wellesley (soon to become the Duke of Wellington) marched on Madrid with an Anglo-Spanish Army in 1809. At the battle of Talevera, the King's Geman Legion and regular British line infantry stopped a night attack by Ruffin's division, and thenn prepared to go over to the offensive the next day. However, they didn't do their basic staff work, and when the Scots Grays (a "storied" cavalry regiment) attacked the French right, they fucked their own charge by riding into a gulley in the tall grass that a simple staff engineer's survey the day before would have told them was there. Wellesley (Wellington) never made that kind of mistake again. Meanwhile, the French commander, Jourdan, sent in a series of attacks which the British managed to hold off--but the attack of the Dutch cavalry and the Polish infantry against the Allied right completely undid the Spanish, and Cuesta's army just flat out ran away.
The King's German Legion and the Royal Americans (i.e., Canadians) were able to hold of the exhausted French while Wellesley got his army out before it was encircled. He never trusted the Spanish again. He eventually enrolled and used to good effect some Portuguese brigades, but he had no use for the Spanish army, and didn't care where they were or what they were doing. The
guerilla, or "little war," carried out by Spanish irregulars, combined with the constant campaigning against a far superior commander (Wellington, of course) meant that Spain sucked up blood and treasure like a vacuum cleaner. Fine allied troops like the Dutch and the Poles were tied up in Spain for the last five years of the Empire, and some first-rate German regiments, too. At the battle of Wagram (there was a Wagram campaign, which culminated at the battle of Wagram, below Vienna), Prince Eugene Beauharnais (Napoleon's stepson) arrived with the Army of Italy literally in the nick of time. While the French line regiments were being slaughtered by the excellent Austrian artillery grouped around and on either flank of the village of Wagram, Prince Eugene sent Marshall MacDonald with the bulk of his army across the battlefield to the south of the French line, just in time to stop the Archduke Charles' counterattack which would have rolled up the French line. Charles retained a full army corps which was fresh and had not yet been committed, and that corps covered the Austian retreat. If the Army of Italy had not arrived in time, Charles would have used that corps to destroy the Grand Army, and Napoleon had nothing left to stop him. As it was, Charles was infuriated when the Austrian emperor capitulated.
When Napoleon invaded Russia, he depended heavily on German troops and, once again, the Army of Italy. They covered his flanks while he made the main drive on Moscow. Napoleon completely failed to understand the Russians, too. Defeating them at Smolensk and Borodino made absolutely no impression on Kutusov or his army, with the basic Russian attitude of "well, we were going to lose anyway." He also seemed not to understand that St. Petersburg was the capital of the Russian empire, and not Moscow. Apparently, he learned nothing from the example of Charles XII of Sweden, who idiotically drove on Moscow in 1708, and then tuned aside to invade the Ukraine--resulting in the eventual destuction of the Swedish army at Poltava in 1709. You can bet Napoleon knew about that, he was obsessed with history. That doesn't mean he had learned anything from it.
Kutusov not only wasn't impresed by being defeated at Borodino, he organzied the evacuation of Moscow, and then moved by his left to interpose his army between Moscow and his base to the south. Napoleon waited in the Sparrow Hills for the "boyars" to come out of Moscow to surrender to him. (He apparently wasn't aware that there no longer any boyars.) But the Russians weren't the Austrians, who were always eager to surrender when the French got near their beautiful Vienna. Moscow burned not because the Russians set fire to it, but because Napoleon was depressed in a situation he didn't understand (why weren't those pesky Russians hurrying to surrender to him ? ! ? ! ?), and he maintained no discipline in his army. A city of a millionn, built mostly of wood, and abandoned by the inhabitants, with an army of a hundred thousand sqatting there like a pack of brigands was bound to catch fire and burn down.
And Kutusov was just waiting for the French to come out again, and start their retreat. When Napoleon was building a new army in Germay in 1813, he couldn't call on the troops left in Spain, who were reeling from the hammer blows of Wellington's new and improved army. He couldn't call on the Germans who were either rotting in the woods and fields of Russia, or deserting as fast as their little legs would carry them. He couldn't call on the Army of Italy, which had wasted away in Russia even though they were never defeated in the field. He could only call up younger and younger Frenchmen, and Wagram four years earlier had destroyed the corps of NCOs and junior officers he would have needed to make a real army out of them.
Essentially, Napoleon, while an organizational genius, was a jumped-up Italian peasant with dubious claims to the minor aristocracy and the basic attitudes and family values of the Corsican. He certainly was no military genius.
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Do us both a favor, and don't try to tell me about European or North American history.
