VII.

The Impact of the Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars had a considerable impact on 19th-century Europe. In political terms, their chief contribution was to give birth to an age of nationalism. In Austria and Germany the period from 1805 to 1814 had witnessed the emergence of a pan-German nationalist movement that saw unification and popular mobilization as the obvious answers to French aggression: Napoleon, it was argued, must be driven out by a great people's revolt, and France prevented from any further invasion of German territory by the creation of a new nation state. In the course of the wars themselves, this school of thought had far less impact than has often been imagined: revolt in Germany was at best sporadic, while the so-called “War of Liberation” of 1813 to 1814 was far more a matter of kings and princes than it was of peoples. After the return of peace, however, it was a different matter. In Germany, Austria, and Italy (where the wars had seen the emergence of a movement similar to that of Germany), nationalists were dissatisfied with the decisions of the Congress of Vienna, while in Belgium practical problems related to enforced union with Holland created further agitation. If it was not the only factor in doing so—it did not help, for example, that the wars gave military heroism a certain aura of romance, or that in Spain they gave rise to repeated civil wars and a tradition of military intervention in politics—all this helped make the period 1815 to 1848 an “age of revolutions”. That said, however, it was also on the whole an era of comparative stability in international relations: fearing war's political dynamic, the powers strove to avoid it and at first tried to manage their dealings with one another through a system of congress diplomacy.

In economic and social terms, the picture is more mixed. Demographically, the heavy losses of the wars—estimates range between 5,000,000 and 7,000,000—did little or nothing to check the steady rise in population. However, there seems little doubt that the general effect of the conflict was somewhat to retard the industrialization of Continental Europe. While Britain soared ahead thanks to her control of the seas, French protectionism and the shortage of raw materials that resulted from the Continental Blockade inflicted considerable damage on the industries of such areas as the Ruhr, while even French industry lost out thanks to its inability to keep in touch with the latest technological developments in Britain. Yet even here the picture is mixed, for the blockade of such ports as Bordeaux, Nantes, Antwerp, and Hamburg encouraged a shift from commerce to industry, for example, while the wars also stimulated the industrialization of certain areas that had hitherto been untouched by this development, a good example being Saxony.

The greatest contribution of the Napoleonic Wars to the history of Europe, however, lies in the development of the state. By 1814 war had come to involve an exercise of power that can only be described as prodigious by the standards of the 18th century. To fight the sort of wars that threatened in the future, all states would need to maintain powerful war machines of a sort that could simply not be fed, clothed, armed and administered by the resources of the ancien régime. For this reason, if for no other, there could be no return to 1789, most of Europe therefore seeing the retention of Napoleonic patterns of taxation, administration, policing, and military organization. In short, the modern state had arrived.