Chapter 22 Chapter 1 Development Chapter 4 War 4

4 We have seen the impact of more than 20 years of war on the political structure of Europe.But what are the actual course of warfare, military mobilization, campaigns, and the consequences of the political and economic measures that follow? Paradoxically, with the exception of France itself, which almost certainly suffered more casualties and indirect human losses than other countries, places least associated with actual bloodshed were most affected.The people of the French Revolution and Napoleon were fortunate enough to live between two barbaric wars (the 17th century and our own 20th century) that ravaged the world in truly appalling ways.The area affected by the war of 1792-1815, even the Iberian peninsula, where military operations lasted longer than elsewhere, and were made more brutal by mass resistance and reprisals, was not as devastated as it was in the seventeenth century" Central and Western Europe in the Thirty Years' War and the Northern War, not as much as Sweden and Poland in the early 18th century, or much of the world in the international and civil wars of the 20th century. The long run of economic improvement before 1789 meant that famines, with their attendant plagues and vicious epidemics, did not unduly aggravate the devastation of war and pillage; at least after 1811 (the major periods of famine occurred during Later 1816-1817).Each battle tends to be short and intense, and the weapons used - relatively small arms and mobile artillery - are not very destructive by modern standards.Siege warfare is less common.Fire probably did the most damage to dwellings and means of production, but small houses and farmhouses were easily rebuilt.In an industrial economy, the really hard things to recover quickly are trees, orchards, or olive groves, which take many years to grow, but there don't seem to be many gardens in industrial areas.

The sheer human losses resulting from this twenty-year war therefore do not appear particularly high by modern standards, although in fact no government has attempted to calculate them, and all our modern estimates are vague to the point of speculation, The only exceptions are the casualties in France and a few specific occasions.A million war deaths over a 20-year period is not a lot when compared with the death toll of any of the major belligerents in the four and a half years of World War I or the approximately 600,000 deaths in the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865 .And if we also take into account the particularly severe lethality of famine and epidemics at that time, even if 2 million people died in an all-out war for more than 20 years, it would not appear to be particularly lethal.According to reports, a cholera epidemic in Spain as late as 1865 caused 236,744 deaths.In fact, with the possible exception of France, no country saw a significant decline in population growth during this period.

For most of the population, apart from the belligerents, the war probably disrupted normal life only occasionally, if at all, indirectly.Jane Austen's country families go about their business as if the war had never happened.Fritz Reuter's Mecklenburgers recall their period of foreign occupation as an anecdote rather than a drama; Herr Kugelgen recalls his time in Saxony (Europe) One of the "cockfighting grounds" in the United States, where the geographical location and the political situation attracted armies and battles from various countries, as if only Belgium and Lombardy could be compared) In childhood, only memories of the march of the army to Dresden Or a weird time at camp.It is generally accepted that the number of armed men involved in the war was much higher than normal in previous wars, though not particularly large by modern standards.Even if the army is recruited, only a small part of the number of conscripts is recruited. During Napoleon's reign, the Cote d'Or in France only provided 11,000 of the 350,000 residents, accounting for 3.15% of the total population. %.Between 1800 and 1815 no more than 7 percent of the French population were conscripted, whereas during the much shorter First World War a full 21 percent of the population was conscripted.But in absolute numbers, that's still a huge number. The "General Conscription Act" of 1793-1794 may have armed 630,000 people (from the 770,000 theoretically conscriptable); in 1805, Napoleon's troops in peacetime were about 400,000, and in 1812 the war against Russia began At that time, excluding the French forces in the rest of the European continent, especially in Spain, its huge army was composed of 700,000 people (300,000 of which were non-French).France's several enemies frequently mobilized much smaller numbers simply because (except Great Britain) they kept far fewer men on the field, and also because financial distress and organizational difficulties often made full mobilization impossible. It's not easy.For example, according to the 1809 peace treaty, the Austrians were entitled to 150,000 troops in 1813, but only 60,000 were actually available for combat.The British, on the other hand, maintained an army mobilized in extremely large numbers.At their height they had sufficient appropriations to support a standing army of 300,000 men and 140,000 sailors and marines, a manpower load they could carry through most of the war than There are far more French. (Since these figures are based on parliamentary-approved funding, actual enlistments are of course less.)

The loss of life was enormous, though not extraordinary by the standards of casualties of our century; but oddly enough, very few of the casualties were actually at the hands of the enemy. Between 1793 and 1815, only 6% or 7% of seamen who died in Britain were killed by the French, while 80% died of disease or accident.Dying in the field was a small risk; only 2% of the casualties at Austerlitz were actually killed, and maybe 8% or 9% at Waterloo.The truly dire risks of war are ignored, the filth, poor organization, deficiencies in medical services, and ignorance of hygiene that slaughter wounded and captives.In the right climate (such as the tropics), these factors are enough to kill everyone.

Actual military operations directly or indirectly killed people and destroyed production facilities, but as mentioned earlier, they did not seriously interfere with the normal progress and development of rural life to any extent.But the economic necessity of war and economic warfare have far-reaching consequences. By 18th-century standards, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were unprecedentedly costly; indeed, their cost in money may have been more impressive in their contemporaries than in their lives.The decline in financial burdens felt by the post-Waterloo generation was certainly more dramatic than the decline in human losses.According to estimates, the average cost of the war in 1820-1850 was 10% lower than that in 1790-1820, while the average annual war death toll remained slightly lower than 25% in the previous period.How is this unprecedented expense paid for?The traditional solution is inflation (new money is issued to pay government bills), loans and minimal special taxes.The reason for only minimal tax increases is that taxation would provoke public dissatisfaction and (when taxes must be approved by Parliament and the House of Councils) political troubles.However, special financial needs and wartime conditions broke and changed all this.

First, they familiarized the world with irredeemable paper money. (In fact, before the end of the eighteenth century, paper money of any kind, convertible into bullion or not, was relatively uncommon.) To pay government debts with easily printed paper, on the Continent, This cheap approach proved irresistible.French bons detresors (1798), originally nothing more than bons detresors at 5 per cent, designed to advance the proceeds of ecclesiastical lands that would eventually be sold.Within a few months, the certificates evolved into currency, and each subsequent financial crisis caused more and more certificates to be printed. Accelerated the rate of depreciation.By the outbreak of the war, the coupons had lost about 40 percent of their value, and by June 1793, about two-thirds.The depreciation situation was maintained quite well when Jacobin was in power, but after the Thermidorian coup, the economy was seriously out of control, which accelerated the devaluation of the index to 1/300 of its face value, and it was not until 1797 that the country officially went bankrupt. The end of monetary events.This event predisposed the French for nearly a century against bank notes of any kind.Paper money in other countries had a less dire experience, although by 1810 Russian paper money had fallen to 20 percent of face value, and Austrian paper money (devalued twice in 1810 and 1815) had fallen to 10 percent of face value.The British eschewed this particular form of fiscal warfare, and they did not shy away from using banknotes with which they were familiar.Even so, the Bank of England could not resist the double pressure of the government's huge needs, much of it remitted abroad as loans and grants: private hoarding of gold and silver and the particular strain of famine years. In 1797, banks stopped paying gold to private customers, and non-convertible banknotes became de facto valid money: the one-pound note was one of the results. The "paper pound" never depreciated as badly as the Continental currencies did, bottoming out at 71% of face value, before bouncing back to 98% by 1817; but it lasted much longer than expected.Cash payments were not fully restored until 1821.

The alternative to taxation is loans. However, the length of the war and the heavy expenditure are unexpected, and the accompanying growth rate of public debt is even more dizzying and even frightening. Most of the most prosperous, richest and best financially managed countries.After five years of effectively financing the war on loans, the British government was compelled to take the unprecedented and ominous step of paying for the war by direct taxes, an income tax was introduced for this purpose (1799-1816).The rapidly increasing wealth of the country made taxation entirely feasible, and from then on the cost of the war was largely met by daily income.Had sufficient taxes been levied at the start of the war, the national debt would not have risen from £228 million in 1793 to £876 million in 1816, and annual debt payments would not have risen from £1,000 in 1792. million pounds to 30 million pounds in 1815, an amount greater than the total expenditure of the government in the year before the war.The social consequences of this lending are very serious, since in effect it acts like a funnel through which taxes, mainly paid by residents, are transferred in increasing proportions to the small wealthy class of "bond holders" in the purse.And so spokesmen for the poor, small businessmen, and peasants, such as William Cobbett, began to launch a thunderous attack in the press.Foreign loans were largely (at least on the anti-French side) borrowed from Britain, which had long followed a policy of financing military allies: between 1794 and 1814 Britain lent as much as £80 million for this purpose.Its direct beneficiaries are international financial institutions, British or French financial institutions, but the transaction activities are increasingly inclined to be carried out through London, which has become a major international financial center.For example, Baling, which played an intermediary role in these transactions, and the House of Rothschild (Founder of the bank, Amschel Rothschild, who in 1798 sent his son Nathan [Nathan] sent from Frankfurt to London).The golden age of these international financiers began after the war, when large sums of money were lent to help countries of the old system recover from war and to countries of the new system to strengthen themselves; Rothschild dominated the world's financial age (no one since the founding of the great German banks in the 16th century) and the foundations were laid during the war.

The technical details of wartime finance, however, are less pervasive and less consequential than the great diversion of resources from peaceful to military uses, which is the main legacy of war.It would be plain wrong to think that the cost of war was all suck or at the expense of the civilian economy.The Armed Forces can mobilize to some extent only those who would be unemployed unless they were soldiers, or who could not even be employed within their economic sphere (overpopulated mountainous areas like Switzerland, with their tradition of emigrating as mercenaries in other countries, would is built on this basis).Military industries, while diverting manpower and materiel away from civilian markets in the short run, help in the long run to advance sectors that might otherwise be overlooked in peacetime considerations of profit.We all know that the most obvious example is the iron and steel industry, which, as discussed in Chapter 2, could not grow as rapidly as the cotton textile industry, and therefore has always been dependent on government and war incentives.Dionysius Lardner wrote in 1831: "In the eighteenth century the foundry of iron was almost as much as the foundry of cannon." We therefore have good reason to think that some of the capital diverted from peaceful uses, in In essence, it is a long-term investment in the development of capital industry and technology.Among the technological innovations brought about by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were the beet sugar industry in continental Europe (to replace sugar imported from the West Indies) and the canning industry (derived from the British Navy's quest to preserve food on board ships indefinitely. ).Yet, despite all reservations, a major war implies a major transfer of resources and, in the case of a mutual blockade, perhaps even a direct competition for resources that are equally scarce, both in the war and peace sectors of the economy.

The obvious consequence of this competition is inflation. The price curve that had been slowly rising in all countries in the 18th century was pushed up by war, although this was caused in part by currency depreciation.Wartime needs themselves imply or reflect a certain redistribution of income, with the economic consequence that part of the income is transferred from wage laborers to merchants (since wage growth normally lags behind price rises), from Manufacturing was transferred to agriculture because it was generally accepted that agriculture welcomed high wartime prices.Conversely, the end of wartime needs releases on to peacetime markets a large number of resources (including manpower) previously devoted to wartime, which often creates more intense realignment problems.To give an obvious example, between 1814 and 1818, the British army cut about 150,000 people, which means that the number of cuts was more than the total population of Manchester at that time. 5 shillings, down to 64.2 shillings in 1815.In fact, the period of post-war adjustment, as we know, was one of particularly difficult periods for the economy of Europe as a whole, and this difficulty was exacerbated by the severe agricultural failure of 1816-1817.

However, we should ask a more general question.To what extent has the diversion of resources resulting from this war hindered or delayed the economic development of countries?Obviously, this issue is of particular importance to France and Britain, which are the two economic powerhouses and bear the heaviest economic burden.At the end of the war, France’s burden was not mainly caused by the war, because the war was mainly supported by war, and what was sacrificed was the territory it conquered and the manpower and material resources it plundered. They forced manpower, material resources and money from foreigners. From 1805 to 1812, about half of Italy's tax revenue was given to France.These revenues may not be able to fully meet the needs of the war, but at least they have significantly reduced the war expenditure (both real and monetary), otherwise the expenditure would have been even more staggering.The real damage to the French economy stemmed from the years of the Revolution, the Civil War and chaos. For example, the output of the lower Seine (Rouen) steel manufacturing industry fell from 41 million tons to 15 million tons between 1790 and 1795. The number of workers From 246,000 to 86,000.To this should be added the loss of overseas commerce due to British control of the sea.Britain was burdened not only by the cost of her own war, but also by the customary funding of her Continental allies, some of which went to attack countries other than France.During the war, Britain borne a far greater financial burden than the other belligerent powers: it cost Britain three or four times as much as France.

The answer to this question is easier in France than in England, for there is no doubt that the French economy is in a state of relative stagnation, and that without this revolution and war French industry and commerce would almost certainly have grown further and more rapidly.Although the country's economy had grown considerably during Napoleon's reign, it could not make up for the regression and loss of impetus in the 1790s.For the British, the answer is less obvious, because they are developing at a meteoric rate, the only question is, would they have developed faster if there had been no war?The generally agreed answer today is yes.This question is generally less important for other countries, which, like most of the Habsburg-controlled areas, have slow and erratic economies and whose war spending has relatively little quantitative impact. Of course, such a straightforward statement is based on unproven assumptions.Even taking the overt economic wars of the British in the 17th and 18th centuries as an example, we would not think that the economic development after the war was due to the war itself or the stimulus brought about by the war, but because of victory, because competitors were eliminated and captured. new market.The "cost" of these wars in terms of destroying commerce and diverting resources, etc., is measured against the "profit" obtained, which is reflected in the strength and decline of the warring parties after the war.According to such standards, the compensation obtained for the 1793-1815 war is obviously more than sufficient.At the expense of a slightly (but still rapid) economic growth rate, Britain decisively eliminated its most dangerous potential competitor and within two generations, became the "factory of the world".In every index of industry or commerce Britain was further ahead of all other countries (except perhaps the United States) than in 1789.If we are to believe that the temporary elimination of its competitors and the de facto monopoly of shipping and colonial markets was an important prerequisite for Britain's further industrialization, this was not too expensive to obtain.Even if we argue that, without the long war after 1789, Britain's predominance was sufficient to secure its economic hegemony, we can still say with certainty that the political and economic threats of France are no longer necessary to protect this hegemony. The price paid is not too high.