cahn | 18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

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January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!

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From:

luzula

Do any of you have an idea of whether the brutality employed by armies against enemy civilians (or against civilians of their own country, for that matter) changed, if you compare the 17th and the 18th centuries? I haven't read anything about it (yet) but a guess is that it might have declined, because of increased state capacity. If the state is better able to supply and pay its army, then it doesn't need to rely as much on forage and plunder.

From:

selenak

I don't have any statistics at hand to back it up - statistics are Mildred's territory - but I do think that generally (exceptions always possible, etc.), there was indeed some change, and it could well be for this reason. I mean, atrocities still happened, as you from your Jacobite fandom know only too well, but precisely the fact they now attract attention the way they do in the 18th century would seem to indicate they are no longer the norm, which sadly they really became in the 30 Years War.

There's also the way armies changed - the French army was backwards before the French Revolution because it kept to the "officers only from the nobility" thing for such a long time, and one reason Prussia went from a minor German fiefdom to a European scale power in just three generations was because the soldiers of its army got regular payment and clothing from the state which they really could rely on, which was as important as the endless drills for the Prussian army's successes. And of course, people going to war except for the territory they conquer to benefit them later when the war is over, so it's in their interest not to devastate it completely. And presumably, that's why Peter the Great shocks not just the Swedes but everyone when using scorched earth tactics for his own people and territory in order to cut Charles and the Swedish army off from their supplies, and why Napoleon didn't anticipate the Russians burning Moscow etc.

From:

luzula

Okay, actually I found some support for this now:

...the early modern period seems to represent something of a peak in the uncontrolled destructiveness of armies, a combination of the burgeoning size of field forces as compared to the Middle Ages with state finance and logistics systems unprepared to cope with the new larger armies. Medieval armies may not have been any nicer, but they were smaller which reduced their impact, while the armies of the 1700s and 1800s were increasingly better organized and supplied and as a result less logistically destructive.

and

Repeated ‘contributions’ and foraging over the course of the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) in the Low Countries and the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) in the Holy Roman Empire both created depopulated ‘no man’s land’ areas which in turn made further military operations logistically challenging as no army can forage a depopulated countryside; devastation on this scale and over this much area seemed to have been mostly out of reach for the smaller armies of the Middle Ages. In the late 1600s, we see a marked shift towards a greater degree of central state supply and control which begins to reduce the uncontrolled destructiveness of armies (even as the intentional capacity for destruction of armies is rising), though foraging is still a major factor in warfare well into the 1800s.

Quotes from military historian Brett Deveraux.

And the destructiveness of Cumberland in the Highlands had nothing to do with needing to get food/plunder, that was intentional as a political tool.

Hmm, I wonder whether the attitude towards rape of women by soldiers changed as well? I suppose I will just have to actually read that book about women and warfare in the early modern period to find out...I'm waiting for it to come in at the library.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Funnily enough, when you posted that question, I had just gotten to the page where Marian Füssel talks about that in my reading (history of the Seven Years' War)!

I don't have statistics (other than the usual "Germany lost over half its population in places" and if that had happened again, I think we would know), but to summarize what he says:

* The historical narrative has always been that warfare got less destructive for a while after the Thirty Years' War, partly because more efficient bureaucracies meant less need to rely on forage and plunder, and partly because everyone got civilized and started avoiding big battles.

* But that's oversimplifying.

* Obviously 18th century warfare was not as bad as the Thirty Years' War or the coalition wars, says Füssel.

* But we have to distinguish between theory and practice.

* 18th century warfare was capable both of the civilized treatment of officers and of massacres, and the brutality was just as much a part of the Enlightenment as the rest.

That's what I've got.