The Counterrevolutionary Criminal
Napoleon's Other War: Bandits, Rebels and their Pursuers in Revolutionary Europe
The French Revolution was legitimized as serving the interests of the people against the elite, but the wave of rural insurgency it set off across Europe was not in support of it, but against it. Michael Broers’ book Napoleon’s Other War: Bandits, Rebels and their Pursuers in Revolutionary Europe is an account of this resistance, both against the French Republic and against its Napoleonic successor state. The book begins with an description of banditry under the ancien regime before, like the French armies themselves, starting with domestic resistance to the French Revolution and then moving out into Italy, the Rhineland, the Alps, Spain, the Balkans, and even Latin America.
A recurring form emerges across Europe. Rural communities — especially those in remote, mountainous terrain where it was hard for the state to exercise its authority — had preexisting patterns of lawless activity. Bandits preyed on travelers, smugglers bypassed unpopular taxes and monopolies, and, in truly ungoverned regions, local bigwigs maintained networks of armed retainers to keep their peasants in line and wage blood feuds with each other. These activities were crime in the eyes of the state, and could certainly victimize ordinary people, but by and large they were a normal part of these communities and depended on a broad social network of support to function.
When these communities were brought into contact with the Revolutionary and then Napoleonic state these criminal systems turned into networks of guerilla warfare. This was motivated by the state’s direct, tangible negative impact on the lives of ordinary people, not by broader ideologies of local nationalism or throne and alter conservatism, although it could take on shades of this once it had begun. Above all, this meant conscription, known across Europe as the “blood tax,” although the repression of popular religious rituals and confiscation of church land was also a factor. Forced military service was not new to Europe, but the mass call ups of entire generations of young men were, and they became the most invasive and hated innovation of France’s new modern state.
Generally, large numbers of young men who had gone underground to flee conscription coalesced around a hard core of professional criminals or local elites. They did their best to make the areas they lived ungovernable by the French. Organized crime found it straightforward to turn into political resistance. As Broers puts it, the bandit
had always stood outside the law, had always borne arms, was always on the move; he had networks - associations - well beyond the communal boundaries. He knew how to fight, how to hide, how to live a life that was wholly clandestine.
Their actions ranged in a spectrum from large scale combat against organized military units where government control was weakest, like in the Vendee and Tyrol, to simple smuggling in areas like the Rhineland where the French military presence was overwhelming.
Ultimately, this local resistance was stamped out almost everywhere, for similar reasons. French forces followed a consistent pattern of counterinsurgency wherever they went. First, large mobile columns went out to crush and disperse any large rebel formations, often with extreme brutality. Then, Gendarmes and bureaucrats were brought in and dispersed into villages to maintain order permanently. Previous governments had gone on periodical punitive expeditions to suppress rebellions before, but Napoleon’s state was not satisfied with playing whack-a-mole and didn't have to. With its institutions, above all the Gendarmerie — the new, and very effective, rural military police — and its tremendous capacity to mobilize resources, it was capable of maintaining a permanent coercive presence at the local level. The creation of the Gendarmerie
ranks as the major advance made by the state into the lives of ordinary people, during the years of the Napoleonic empire. The state was present, in force, in places it had never before been able to reach in so permanent or powerful a fashion.
Within a few years, these measures were usually sufficient to break even the most recalcitrant regions.
What gave this guerilla resistance strength — its deep roots in local communities — made it incapable of presenting a true threat to Napoleonic rule. Ultimately,
this disorder, at its most successful, was an adaptation of bandit behaviour by wider communities. That meant it was deep-rooted and tenacious, but it was also very local in its scope and effectiveness. Chouans [local French counterrevolutionaries] were not the vanguard of an internal army, and where they tried to become something akin to this, as in the Vendée, they were soon swept away even by the most ramshackle of regular forces.
Rural insurgents could not effectively operate outside of their own regions and were unable to come together into armies capable of holding off French military power on a permanent basis. Because of this, the new regime was able to steadily push them into smaller and smaller scale action — from large guerilla bands to small ones, and from small ones to gangs of a few men — until they became little more than a nuisance. The new French state was not a tottering third world dictatorship or retreating colonial power, but the most effective and modern bureaucracy the world had ever seen under the rule of one of the most capable men to ever exist. Areas could be made ungovernable for a period, but given time it could stamp out even the most deeply rooted local unrest.
[T]hrough the perpetual, unrelenting use of flying columns, the military occupation of recalcitrant villages and, above all, the regular work of the Gendarmerie, from 1810 onwards - after a long struggle - they were brought into line, and yielded up their sons, however unwillingly. This was a grim victory, one without heroes or parades to mark its achievement, but it marked the advance of the Napoleonic state into its hinterland, a front secured.
Defeating such a system would have required rural counterrevolutionaries to come together into a force capable of not only temporarily hampering the the new regime but permanently defeating it — in short, not just local networks, but an actual army. In the end, the conservative force that stopped Napoleon was not rural communities but a coalition of rival great powers.
There is a seeming exception to this pattern — Spain. The Spanish insurgency, which actually gave us the word guerilla, or little war, similarly overlapped with ordinary banditry. However, it began very quickly, all over the country, even without the introduction of conscription, and the guerilla was fought on a scale and with a level of participation that was unprecedented.
When the French attacked any village in the [Andalusian] sierra, they met the same, well co-ordinated tactics: all non-combatants had been evacuated before the French arrived; then every house was fortified and/or mined. The French had to fight not just for every house, but every attic, risking being blown to bits in the process . . . Such people may not have fought for the hazy notion of Spain, but there was more behind their motives than pure gain, probably unlike the small partidas of deserters and smugglers who were cheek by jowl with the people of La Ronda.
Historians debate just how crucial this was to the final defeat of the French in Spain — some, like Charles Esdaile, who wrote a wonderful history of the Peninsular War which I also recommend, see the guerillas as mostly bandits who actively harmed the allied cause — but Broers makes a solid argument in their favor. The guerillas may have been unable to defeat the French on their own, but they made normal government and collaboration impossible, and tied down large numbers of French troops who were therefore unavailable to fight the Spanish and Anglo-Portuguese armies.
The key difference was that there were allied regular armies, and a Spanish government in Cadiz which could serve as focal point for resistance. They couldn't exercise operational control over the guerillas but, as Broers points out, every guerilla band recognized their authority, and they had enough control over the country to conduct nationwide parliamentary elections in 1810, despite the French occupation. Spanish insurgents couldn't defeat the French on their own, but they could support the allied armies who ultimately did. That being said, even the Spanish resistance barely held off the French juggernaut. Marshal Soult had begun to make real progress in re-establishing order in his area of responsibility in 1810-11, when Spain could be given the regime’s undivided attention, and this was only cut short by the need to pull troops out for the invasion of Russia in 1812. Counterfactual history is always fraught, but I see no reason why the French would have been unable to suppress the guerilla with the same methods that had proved so effective elsewhere, if they had only managed to strike a decisive blow against the allied armies and destroy the government in Cadiz beforehand.
Broers' book is worth reading not only for the general patterns that I tried to summarize above, but for the individual stories of rebels and their hunters, all of whom seem to be larger than life characters — they probably had to be, given the situation they were in. The stories of how small bands of rebels and bandits struggled with the soldiers and police sent after them are all as dramatic as any adventure novel, and Broers’ writing is never dry. (I'll note that, for all of its swashbuckling camp, nothing captures the feel of this kind of war and the people involved in it as much as Sharpe.)
This is a commentary on Napoleonic Europe, not on any modern conflict or political situation. Not all of its lessons are universally generalizable. That being said, it should give pause to those who have romantic notions of ordinary people and local communities rising up to defeat bureaucratic states and professional armies. These ideas are ultimately rooted in ideology and emotion, not history. The modern state outcompeted premodern forms of political organization because it was better at mass violence than they were. Successful insurgencies are the farthest thing from premodern, or from ordinary people who “got pushed too far.” They are organized as counter-states, with counter-armies, and are capable of mobilizing resources on a mass scale and escalating until they can fight the state on its own terms and impose their own political order. This is not a pattern that is likely to be broken any time soon.