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Does military history have a larger validity?
Or is it rightfully destined to remain the isolated and restricted province of the buff and the professional soldier?
We answer the first question with an unqualified 'yes'; as to the second, we can only hope that continuing effort will put an end to the marginalization of a field which, truly, can yield us understanding that belies its unfashionable and secondary status.
There is in fact no firm delineation of military history; soldiers, armies, tactics, technologies, weapons and the factories that produce them, all exist within larger social and temporal contexts.
Their study therefore illuminates not only the immediate subject, but also provide extremely revealing insights into the diplomatic, the socio-political and the economic realms.
So, in the specific context of the War of 1870, a highly detailled and technical discussion of military matters provides new, tantalizing interpretations of the how and the why of this conflict so loaded with significance — the igniter of World Wars I and II, the shaper of our time.
THE EMPEROR'S NEW ARMY
It is probably no coincidence that in his sadly famous boast about France's military preparedness, Minister of War Leboeuf made reference to a material object, the bouton de guêtre.
Reflected in this phrase we again see the problem of realities and mentalities, in this particular instance exemplified by too easy a tendency to fix attention on material aspects of war policy and all the while ignoring or minimizing conceptual factors, clinging to obsolescent attitudes and policies.
The war of 1870 and 1871 between France on one side and Prussia and the north German allies on the other is too wide a subject and we will naturally not attempt to present its entire history here.
The limited object we confine ourselves to in this chapter to is to situate French tactical and operational concepts within the technological context of the beginning of the campaign in August 1870 and to show how these factors played an important role in shaping this historical event.
We wish here to examine the end result of the long and tortuous evolution which had been ushered in during the Crimean War some fifteen years earlier, and to see if, and to what extent, lagging conceptions and practices had been able to catch up to material realities.
It is particularly important to note that material and technological factors — the size and equipment of armies, the productive structures which equip them —, as well as conceptual factors — tactics and strategy — do not materialize out of thin air: they all originate and evolve in specific ways from within specific socio-political contexts: studying how and why wars were fought, won and lost, not only enlightens our understanding of the discrete historical event itself, it tells us much of the societies involved.
Militarily, it is undeniable that the ultimately fatal errors on the French side during the Franco-German war played out on the strategic and operational levels before a backdrop of severe socio-political fragility.
These are the mistakes and conditions that rendered a final French defeat highly probable.
But the strategic and socio-political roots of France's defeat in 1870 by no means invalidate the study of the tactical dimension of the conflict.
On the contrary, the comparative analysis of applied tactics is valid on several levels: firstly, as representing the further development of the technological-conceptual interaction that first surfaced during the Crimean War, secondly because of the critical influence tactics exerted on the crucial battles of summer 1870, and finally, because it provides an illuminating insight into the internal morphology of the French regime itself.
The second point alluded to-the influence of tactics upon the battles of summer 1870 — is particularly important because the searching correlation of the material realities and capacities on one side and tactical/operational concepts together with first-hand accounts of the events themselves permit conclusions leading to a new understanding of how and why the French lost the war.
The disparity in numbers, bad artillery, bad shell fuses, lack of offensive spirit, chaotic mobilization, poor tactics and strategy, the incompetence or outright treason of Marshal Bazaine are the usual suspects.
For some few decades Michael C. Howard's Franco-Prussian War has stood as the authoritative last word on this conflict as far as English-language historiography is concerned.
Later historians have normally hewn to a line more or less convergent: France's defeat was predestined, its military performance utterly outclassed by the German coalition's, the French military and governmental edifice fissured from basement to attic, its collapse upon collision with a basically unerring teutonic machine a foregone conclusion.
Such a judgement, while presenting the advantage of tidiness and simplicity, seems unwarranted upon closer examination.
Napoleon III and his ramshackle Second Empire furnish fertile grounds for belittlement — in their own time as now — seeming almost predestined for parody, disdain, and caricature.
But the problem with Howard's and his successors' analysis is that they evidently derive from a posteriori approach; the conclusions, the indictment and verdict are reached, are kept in mind, from the very beginning of the investigation.
The reasoning appears to be 'so it was and so it had to be.'
What is more, these judgements appear to be more or less colored by the popular conception of the succeeding French campaigns of 1914 and 1940, and so characterizations associated with these later historical events, consciously or unconsciously, 'bleed' into earlier periods; it is history through interpolation.
The result is an over-generalization which though inescapably accurate in quite a few respects, is misleading in many others, obscuring important insights with its cursory causal approach.
If by chance — and, as we shall see this chance did exist — the campaign of summer 1870 had gone differently and the victory had been France's, the prevailing historical representations and explications would, ironically, probably be just as one-sided and deterministic.
Forensic historians would, with clinical precision delineate the various and unmistakable cancers that lay underneath the armored carapace of Wilhelm I's Prussia, the socio-political tensions that weakened its constitution, the internecine squabbles and doubt that ailed its military command, the material deficiencies that undermined its armies' potency, the foreign policy of its Kanzler that had ringed its borders with enemies.
Yes, they would agree, the German Confederation's defeat was historically logical and pre-ordained...
We have earlier reviewed some of the reasons typically adduced for France's defeat in 1870, most of which were institutional in character.
And, undoubtedly, these factors did play role, but one actor has normally escaped the responsibility a critical examination of events and conditions reveals: Marshal Mac Mahon.
It was Mac Mahon, not just Bazaine, who was the great incompetent and perhaps the great traitor of the tragic, vainglorious war of 1870.
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The years following Prussia's 1866 victory over Austria reflect a period where the problem of the conceptual integration of the new military technologies developed during and after the Crimean War posed itself to the French army with unequalled urgency.
The scale and pace of improvements in armaments — already emerging in 1854 — in 1870 was a factor as critical as it was difficult to predict.
In this perspective, our special object is terrestrial armaments.
How was one to incorporate the truly enormous increase in firepower — an infantryman's striking power progressing in the proportion of 1 to 35 in the fifteen years separating 1850 from 1865 — into a coherent system of tactics, operational art, strategy, and policy?
How were individual states to respond to the challenge of technological integration?
The short term importance of tactics in the campaign of 1870 is often eclipsed by the more spectacular operational and strategic blunders committed on the French side.
Nevertheless, these tactics — despite some clear imperfections — caused great difficulty to the German forces: they mitigated the proportions of German successes and prolonged the war; indeed, with a little luck they might even have changed the issue of the conflict.
Finally, the import of applied tactics in the war of 1870 does not end with the peace of 1871, for in this war is to be found the germ of those tendencies that, in 1914, were to reappear with even deadlier effect and even greater world-historical repercussions.
While Moltke and the Prussian army had possessed their weapon some thirty years and had, consequently, the opportunity during the intervening period to develop tactical and operational concepts and methods based on both their own practical wartime experiences in Schleswig-Holstein and Silesia as well as the careful analysis of contemporary wars, it was only in 1869 that the French army — heretofore a leader in the development of firearms — finally completed its rearmament with a breechloader.
Algeria, the Crimea, Lombardy, Mexico — all these campaigns the French had fought with muzzle-loading rifles (and poor ones at that).
The few shots fired on the Garibaldians at Mentana in 1866 — much trumpeted in the Parisian press by quotation of the telegraphic despatch "Les Chassepots ont fait merveille" — scarcely sufficed for the elaboration of a tactical doctrine adapted to an armament with capacities radically distinct from those of earlier weapons.
It is only in 1869 that we see the publication of the Règlement of the 16th of March 1869, expanding on the bases drawn by the Observations sur les Combats of Marshal Niel and the "Commission of the Three Generals" (de Failly, d'Autemarre, and Bourbaki), promulgate officially a regulation aiming to finally put French infantry tactics in conformity with the revolution in firearms.
Yet, before addressing the important issues of doctrine and applied tactics, it is necessary to delineate the technological and material balance sheet of the belligerents.
In the field of firearms it is a truism of any history of the Franco-Prussian War, be it the three-paragraph encyclopedia article or the multi-volume scholarly study, that with the M66 Chassepot rifle, France possessed an arm that was decidedly superior to the Dreyse that armed the bulk of German infantry.
True enough, but the fact remains that the Chassepot's superiority was not all it should have been.
While the Chassepot was undeniably a better arm than the Dreyse, a higher velocity weapon with superior accuracy, range, and rate of fire, it was not even in its own day, a truly modern weapon.
French military conservatism (as late as 1865 the Committee of Artillery seriously considered adopting an 11.5 millimeter muzzle-loading rifle), abetted by the ever-present concern over expenditures, prevented Second Empire troops from receiving a really up to date rifle, one firing metallic-cased cartridges and equipped with a magazine charger.
The Comité d'Artillerie defended its adoption of a Dreyse-type combustible cartridge by pointing out the "prohibitively" expensive cost of metallic-cased munitions, which were not at that time manufactured in very large quantities in France (even though Casimir LeFaucheux, the famed parisian gunsmith, had been producing them since 1835, while another Frenchman, Flobert, had introduced rimfire metallic cartridges in 1846 and the regulation French navy revolver, the M1858, also utilized a metallic-cased pin-fire cartridge, as did the Cent-Gardes' rifle, and the converted 'trap-door' (tabatière) M1867 rifles used a centrally-fired metallic cartridge case).
This argument is demonstrably specious; for if French industry, when confronted with the daunting task of producing a million rifles of unprecedented complexity in the shortest of delays had successfully responded to the challenge (with some assistance from abroad to be true) why would the production of metallic cartridges pose such an insuperable problem? The tooling and know-how of metallic cartridges was firmly established in 1866 and formed no state secret; proven on the battlefields of the American Civil War and in the use of sporting weapons, metallic cartridge technology was clearly becoming the dominant technological solution to the problem of truly effective obturation in the new breechloading arms.
Indeed, after the end of strife in America, the required tooling could have been bought at extremely attractive prices.
Cost, therefore, was only a pretext.
Finally, it should be remarked that the combustible Chassepot cartridge itself was a complex munition that required minute, meticulous fabrication — a fact which naturally occasioned production difficulties; consequently, the 'complexity' or 'cost' of a mettalic cartridge was a distinctly relative question.
The 'dead weight' of metallic cartridges was another reason put forward for persisting with combustible bullets.
But here again, the arguments are unconvincing.
Prior to the introduction of the modèle 1866 Chassepot the standard artillery caisson held either 886 kg of infantry ammunition totalling 12,600 cartridges or 840 kg of the heavier chasseurs ammunition totalling 10,800 cartridges; with the Chassepot the weight was reduced to 440 kg for 11,880 rounds.
With the overall weight of the newer, smaller caliber ammunition halved, the marginal increase entailed by metallic cartridge bullets (when France introduced the système Gras rifle in 1874, the overall weight of the new 11mm round was 11 grammes heavier — 43 versus 32 — than the Chassepot's combustible round of the same caliber) would not have been significant and would have been amply compensated for by the lessened barrel fouling and increased security of such munitions as regards water or fire hazards.
The Comité d'Artillerie, which since 1850 had been studying, and since then had numerous times rejected, the Prussian Dreyse needle-gun, paradoxically became mesmerized by this very same weapon after what we have seen were the situationally skewed successes of the German breech-loader in Silesia against the Austrians, and blindly followed the dead-end path of the combustible cartridge.
For the Chassepot is ultimately nothing more than a perfected Dreyse.
Why, when nations like Bavaria and Austria, states notably less industrialized and wealthy than France, were equipping themselves with modern metallic-cartridge infantry rifles well before 1870, did the Second Empire persist in slavishly following the Prussian model?
Why, furthermore, insist on fabricating over one million of these obsolescent Chassepots at a cost of 113 million francs when France was hard put to mobilize even 500,000 combattants of all arms?
With a modern infantry rifle in the hands of the French infantry, the battles of Spicheren, Wörth. Mars-la-Tour, and Saint-Privat — struggles that were only gained by the barest of margins by the Germans — may well have worn a different complexion.
But it was not to be; France would not equip with metallic-cartridge rifles until the advent of the M1874 Gras, nine years after the United States, eight years after Switzerland, and seven years after Austria.
A related and no less important question than that of the rifle, is the question of ammunition supply.
It should not be forgotten that the Chassepot can fire up to eleven or twelve shots a minute-a rate four or five times that of the arms it replaces (the large-caliber muzzle-loading M42T, M53, M57 rifles and M46, M59 carbines).
In 1870 the French trooper carries 90 rifle rounds; in addition, there exists a cart attached to every two infantry companies that carries a further 24 rounds, while the divisional supply column carries 40 more rounds, for an overall total of 154 rounds.
This ammunition supply is therefore adequate for only fifteen to thirty minutes of intense fire.
When French troops in the Crimea firing the venerable muzzle-loader had a comparable supply and had burned 120 rounds in a day's battle, could one expect the ammunition allocation to be adequate with a new weapon with double or triple the effective range and five times the rate of fire of the earlier gun?
Yet even more important than the technological or material factor of weaponry in 1870 is the factor of how this technology is applied and what capital, if any, is derived from this application; as we saw in the Crimean campaign, the mere possession of technologically superior weaponry does not in itself translate into decisive battelfield superiority.
In 1854 and 1855 we often saw French and British soldiers make use of their formidable rifled-muskets — capable of deadly strikes on area targets at 800 meters and more — as bayonet-holders or clubs; too often they continued to use the weapon in the sense of the old: gun-barrel range or shock action.
Evidently, the weapon but not the concept of the arm has penetrated in the regiments.
It will be the same in 1870, for the French as for the Germans; practices, if not theory, are revealing: firepower is still not a fully understood idea.
A division still prevails, separating the material factors (technological, numeric) from the conceptual (regulations, practice).
To better understand the interaction of these factors behind the background of the military-industrial complex of the Second Empire and attempt to at least partially elucidate the apparent paradoxes of French policy in the fateful years preceding the disaster of Sedan, a brief excursus is necessary.
Ironically, France, for the better part of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, had always been at, or near, the forefront of military technological development.
A distinguished array of soldiers, technicians, gunsmiths, and savants — Lavoisier, Monge, Bélidor, Gassendi, Delvigne, Thouvenin, Tamisier, Treuille de Beaulieu and Pontcharra to name but a few — had played instrumental roles in laying the theoretical and practical foundations for developments in weapon development that virtually transformed the field from a trade to a science.
But under the brilliant surface of this scientific achievement, the industrial base — though impressive in size — was a sclerotic, unwieldy organism of great inertia and disparate structure.
The state system of arms manufacturies encompassing the great centers of Saint-Etienne, Chatellerault, Tulle, and Mutzig, an uneasy symbiosis of private and public enterprise, though it had generally weathered the strains of war and political revolution, was about to be tested by a technological revolution.
At the same time, one should not lose sight of the social dimension of arms production in France.
Labor was by far the greatest cost component of weapons production, accounting for two-thirds of a gun's price.
And, particularly in a time where manual work predominated, the specialized skill of gunsmiths was a limited, precious, ressource.
In line with Colbert's tradition of statist dirigisme, this caste of competent artisans had to be carefully husbanded.
This meant that at times the manufacturies resembled a subsidized welfare system more than a weapons production center strictly occupied with satisfying the state's need for arms.
In concrete terms this resulted in repairs and production being undertaken — but lacking relation to real military requirements, whether in the volume of arms or in their type.
Supplementary to these 'make-work' programs were special allocations of money that typically took place in the winter months and which provided modical sums to the workers and their families.
Alongside this social dimension, the two greatest challenges to reforming France's military industrial complex were financial and institutional.
The financial demands of covering the on-going costs of a large standing army left few funds available for investment in repair, let alone renewal of France's ageing arms manufacturies.
Even the expenditure of the most modest sums by the manufacturies occasioned voluminous and often acrimonious correspondence between the provincial manufacturies and headquarters in Paris.
The government that refused to disburse small sums to mend collapsing ceilings or for ten years annually refused a request for repair of a water-wheel was therefore unlikely to make available the considerable funds necessary for modernization.
The pattern of funding during the Second Empire was that Paris only disgorged funds in extremis, as war was imminent or, more typically, when war had already begun.
Then, magically, the purse strings were loosened and extraordinary allocations of funds and manpower appeared.
This is what occurred during the Crimean and Italian campaigns.
And so the state of the government facilities stagnated or even degraded.
The major private contractors of the state manufacturies, called 'entrepreneurs', had little incentive to make the investment as it would only reduce their accorded 20% bénéfice margin — especially in the view of unpredictable and fluctuating production demand.
In the meantime, the skilled cadres of the manufacturies continued to plan and plead for modernization, time after time producing well-reasoned, detailled, and well-supported proposals, but nothing was done.
The proposals of 1830, and 1857 were stillborn.
The 1855-1856 proposal to install an American-built and designed modern plant, inspired by the British example of Enfield, though promising and supported by the Artillery Committee, also came to naught.
But the 'strategic pressure' of new military-technological developments — rifling in the first instance — revealed the limitations of the arms production system more and more.
Whereas the old smoothbore infantry musket, by the very principle of its construction, required only the most approximate nicety in its construction (a simplicity that the appearance of the percussion lock in the 1840s had only enhanced by replacing the complex and delicately balanced flintlock mechanism), the rifled-musket depended on a higher level of precision in its fabrication.
The manufacturies were unable to supply the new rifled and tige arms in the quantities, rhythm, or quality necessary.
So it was that France — the engenderer of the new effective military rifles of the 1840s and 1850s — could not reap the rewards of the breakthrough it achieved because the techniques, tools, and work organization that prevailed in the state factories remained those of the 1700s.
Consequently, many of the new or converted rifles and carbines revealed themselves as unsatisfactory: the most common flaws being uneven grooves, or incorrect twist, or cocks that masked the sights, or misaligned sights, or unacceptable variations in caliber, or even erratic cartridges.
These problems were systemic and enduring, embedded not only in the tooling but in the organization of work.
Saint-Etienne, the largest of the manufacturies, exemplified the systemic nature of the problems that bedivelled precision military arms production in France.
The measure of control the army actually exerted on the manufacturies was in fact quite limited because the entrepreneur sub-contracted individual gun components to a variable constellation of small firms or individuals in addition to the work he himself conducted on his own premises or on the government's.
Many different workshops, with differing tooling and working conditions were involved, and one worker might well work in different workshops.
The quality of iron, wood for gun-stocks, and fuel for the forges was also variable.
Finally, the motive force of the jack-hammers, bellows, mills, and drills was mainly tied to Saint-Etienne's river, the Furan, whose flow also fluctuated, freezing in the winter, or sometimes restricted to two hours in summer; even in the best conditions, the function of a given hydraulic installation seldom exceeding 30 to 45 minutes, the time necessary for the upstream locks to fill up again...
Because neither the 1830 mechanisation project, with a cost estimate of 363,000 francs, nor the Ames project of 1856 with an estimated cost of 2.5 million francs, nor even a scaled-down project in 1857 came to fruition, the government contented itself with piece-meal emergency measures.
In the absence of either the will or the resources to undertake a robust and systematic overhaul of the arms production centers, French military-industrial policy was limited to punctual crisis-management measures which may or may not have temporarily resolved local issues, but certainly did not amount to a coherent effort to rouse the manufacturies from their slumber.
Thus, in May 1859, with French forces already fighting Austrians in Piedmont, comes to Saint-Etienne the order from Paris "... to expand as far as possible of the arms repair workshops" and to "immediately" purchase 5 new vertical rifling machines.
At Chatellerault this sort of 'band-aid' approach was also followed, with a trickle of new machine-tools entering service: a barrel drill and planing machine being added in 1860.
But even these limited, haphazard contingencies were questionable.
Again, with the overbearing compulsion to save money and cut corners wherever possible, the French military authorities vividly illustrated the truth of the old dictum 'penny-wise and pound foolish.'
One such measure was building many machine-tools in-house and by recycling old iron and steel parts in their construction.
Predictably, this practice resulted in some of the new machines, in particular parts exposed to heavy mechanical wear, like gear teeth, breaking down with alarming consistency.
Also, because there was little coordination or communication between the different manufacturies, there was little uniformity in tooling, which meant that while one manufactury might have developed a very effective machine, another might be continuing to use one which was slow or gave poor results.
Even the uniformity of caliber and measurement that had since revolutionary times been one of the most rigorous tenets of the state arms manufactury system was in practice flawed.
In 1858, for example, it was found that the caliber cylinders used by arms inspectors of the ateliers de précision of the different manufacturies to determine whether gun barrels they produced fell within permissible limits did not themselves correspond with the master cylinders held by the dépot central.
In retrospect, the 1850s were the 'lost decade' for the Second Empire's military infrastructure.
While Napoleon III pursued increasingly ambitious and fanciful geopolitical ambitions, a creakingly inefficient weapons production system muddled forward haltingly.
Where England took the courageous step of swallowing its national pride and orienting itself towards the American model of modern arms production by sending a well-funded, well-staffed mission to New England under Colonel Burns during the Crimean War, and returned loaded with plans, machine-tools and even the erstwhile director of Springfield Armory, it was only during the U.S. Civil War that France finally sent a mission across the Atlantic.
The French mission included Kreuzberger — a German who had worked in the New England arms industry — and a captain Malvan.
Kreuzberger had for some time been active in the so far lackluster effort to modernize French arms manufacturies, as an 'evangelist' for modernization, a go-between in contacts between the French government and US arms manufacturers, and as a designer, builder, and trouble-shooter for machine-tools at French arms factories.
But Kreuzberger's level of expertise is open to doubt; for while he certainly posed as an industrial expert, the report on the American and British arms factories he presented to the ministry of war on 15 December 1863 was rather long on generalities and thin on facts: the depth of technical knowledge it betrays is not very compelling, although an 1857 report he had produced on Enfield is somewhat better.
More troubling, there are indications that the machines he designed, built, and installed were not models of efficiency or modernism.
Ultimately, Kreuzberger's contribution to modernization of French arms plants may have been more as a catalyst than as a direct actor.
In the 1850s and the first half of the 1860s the archaic tactical thought of French superior officers and the archaic state of the arms manufacturies seem to have comforted each other.
The general officers liked the 'gros plomb', the 'fat lead', the familiar large caliber smoothbore that had taken French armies from Cairo to Moscow.
Mostly they had no need of finicky rifles and the unsoldierly moveable sights with their 'petit numéros', that the muskets be well-burnished, make a satisfactory clatter at the present arms, be sufficiently long and carry a gleaming bayonet, and occasionally fire a round or two, this was enough.
Then, there was sheer technological uncertainty — should France follow the trend and reduce the caliber of its muzzle-loaders, or go even further, an adopt a breechloader?
Perhaps it was better to wait-in any case it seemed cheaper. And so, alone among the great powers, France persisted with the 17.8mm and 18mm muskets well into the 1860s, cranking out hundreds of thousands of these obsolete weapons.
To be sure, deployment of new and 'transformed' or converted rifles continued apace, and, in 1857 the Emperor launched a programme to rearm all of France's infantry with rifles.
But these weapons, firing cumbersome bullets and lacking sights, were little more than palliatives; where the tige and Minié rifles of France's elite light infantry had given her an edge over the rudely armed Russians in the Crimea, by 1859 Napoleon III's soldiers everywhere faced better-armed opponents — even in Mexico.
Experimental development of small arms did continue in France during this crucial 'lost decade', but nothing substantive came from these experiences.
The breech-loading rifle represented the future, and France had experimented and even fielded a small number of these weapons, even before Prussia began producing the Dreyse needle-gun.
In 1853, the director of the Chatellerault manufactury, Arcelin, designed and produced 111 rifled breech-loading carbines of 12mm caliber which were tested by the cavalry.
There were also the breech-loading 9mm pin fire rifles designed by Treuille de Beaulieu which armed Napoleon III's household troops, the Cent-Gardes, a weapon that aroused the admiration of visiting American military experts.
And, of course, France continued to test foreign weapons, including the Dreyse.
But cost and scepticism continued to militate against the adoption of so radically new a weapon.
Still, the conviction seemed to be growing now, also in high places, that the rearmament question required action.
Even the stolid Mac-Mahon noted in 1862 that the high rate of fire breech-loading rifles promised was a powerful tactical advantage.
Already in this year, Chassepot, a young Chatellerault gunsmith whose father was an arms inspector, and who had collaborated with Arcelin on his breech-loading carbine, was proceeding with his own design, an improved needle-gun.
But the fabrication of the Chassepot dragged on for years.
Critically, in this phase of strategic tension, the industrial weaknesses of France's arms manufacturies were exposed.
The basic difficulty resolved itself into the familiar chicken and egg conundrum: to produce a modern rifle one needed first a modern, working prototype and, therefore, a modern, working plant.
France possessed neither, so she was forced to develop and produce a modern infantry weapon at the same time she radically restructured and retooled her military-industrial base.
This was an enormous undertaking.
The industrial hurdles that confronted France in developing and producing the Chassepot were numerous.
Two that emerged quite early in development were tied to the new gun's barrel.
The manufacturies simply did not have tools that could cope with so small a caliber; acknowledging this fact and remedying it by sending the barrels out to private workshops while the Imperial arms factories waited for their tooling caused repeated delays.
The skelps from which the barrels were formed also had to be furnished by a private atelier, that of Petin-Grandet.
Another major difficulty was dealing with the crucible steel used in the Chassepot, this new harder metal posing novel problems for the French manufacturies.
But these initial difficulties were only the tip of the iceberg.
A whole array of roadblocks derived from the lack of specific machine-tools, especially jack-hammers and milling machines.
In particular, the affair of the jack-hammers or 'marteaux-pilons' at Saint-Etienne went on for years.
Much of the delay in installing the 'marteaux-pilons' centered on technical discussions on which type of jack hammer, operating at what speed and requiring what power, was needed.
But other issues revolved around cost; there was some hope that Saint-Etienne's wealthy contractor, or Entrepreneur, Monsieur Escoffier, would foot the considerable bill for these important new machine-tools.
Escoffier did not turn down the offer, but wished to tie his agreement to the government extending the term of his lucrative concession as Entrepreneur.
Unsurprisingly, the ensuing negotiations further delayed installation.
And so, haltingly and hesitatingly, Chassepot development inched forward.
Then came Sadowa.
For once Louis-Napoleon and Friedrich Engels had been of one mind: they both confidently expected an Austrian victory.
Disquieting reports about the effectiveness of Prussian gunnery from General Bourbaki and others had previously been dismissed.
But things had gone unexpectedly in Bohemia; the Austrian tactics, the Prussian strategy, Prussian firing drill and the fast-shooting Dreyse needle-gun had resulted in overwhelmingly victory for Berlin and King Wilhelm I's troops were poised to continue southwards to Vienna.
Suddenly, the balance of power in Central Europe had shifted.
More subtlely, France's military primacy on the continent was challenged.
How would Napoleon III react?
The gaslight burned late at the Tuileries and Marshal Randon's staff made feverish calculations for rapid mobilization.
But as he had during the Polish and Danish crises of 1863 and 1864, Napoleon III hesitated.
Here the true cost of the years of penny-pinching, hesitations, and delays revealed itself.
France's infantry armament was 'suddenly' obsolete.
Napoleon III knew his army; he knew how close France had come to defeat in 1859 against Austria's badly led, ill trained, and disorganized troops.
In 1866 could France's badly armed infantry confront a dynamically commanded adversary armed with modern breech-loading rifles and breech-loading artillery?
Napoleon III did not think so.
It was only after the coup de foudre of Prussia's crushing victory at Sadowa that a superior level of urgency and priority animated the military programme.
Barely a week after the Prussian triumph, Saint-Etienne's director received a letter from the Inspection in Paris:
"My Dear Commander, In the present circumstances, the [War] Minister's intention is that the construction work of the new Saint-Etienne manufactury be pushed forward at the greatest speed so as to soon as possible assure the total expansion of production."
The Inspection also instructed Saint-Etienne to ask its contractors and suppliers to expedite all work orders set for the coming year 1867 and instead complete them before the end of 1866.
But almost in the same breath — for it is in a letter of the same day — Headquarters in Paris had to make the surprising admission that it was unable to even provide a single Chassepot model arm around which the entire crash programme centered:
"It is impossible for us to have a model arm of the type being fabricated at Chatellerault.
I don't even have one myself and one cannot say that the specifications have definitely been agreed.
It is only after the trials at Chalons that we will know what to expect."
In the same letter, the Director of the Inspection wrote that by year's end there would be 15 to 18 small-caliber drilling machines at Saint-Etienne and expressed the hope that given this new tooling the new production figures would be higher than the current ones which he qualified as "quite low" and which, moreover, were accompanied by wastage that was "énorme."
With the new machines the Director of the Inspection hoped that Saint-Etienne — if Petin Gaudet were able to deliver the skelps on time — would produce 6,000 Chassepot barrels by 1 October 1866.
He closed by advising Saint-Etienne to start amassing a suply of wood for stocking the new guns, but cautioned the commander of the manufactury to avoid spreading news of the production ramp-up, so as prevent any increase in the wood price.
Alongside the familiar pattern of tooling problems there now emerged another: labor.
In a subsequent letter from the Paris Inspection to Saint-Etienne's commander, headquarters minced no words in signalling the source of production quality problems: "... the presumption is that the incompetence and negligence of the drill operators are the real causes of the high wastage."
Headquarters went on to point out that Saint-Etienne's wastage percentage was consistently higher than Chatellerault's: 4 times more in drilling and planing, and also significantly higher in milling and reaming.
In the area of artillery, the similarly debilitating effects of military and budgetary conservatism are to be noted.
In 1870 the French field artillery arsenal consists mainly of two types: the Model 1858 Lahitte rifled four pounder and the converted twelve-pounder rifles, both of bronze and both muzzle-loading, unlike the steel breechloading C61 and C64 canon that equip the German armies.
Breechloading in artillery did not, at this juncture in the development of canon prior to the invention of effective recoil-dampening devices, confer any sensible increase in the rate of fire compared to that of muzzle-loading types.
It is therefore an anachronism to suggest as some (most notably Michael Howard) that either steel or breech-loading canon per se in 1870 represented a decisive qualitative edge.
The development of new technologies is not always as uni-linear nor as clear-cut as it may appear a posteriori; illustrative of this point is the experience of Britain, which early on became enamored of breech-loading artillery, but eventually returned to muzzle-loading.
Breech-loading in the state of 1860s and 1870s design and mettalurgy was by no means a perfect science.
But, by virtue of permitting a closer fit of projectiles in the barrel, it may have permitted some marginal increase in the velocity, especially insofar as the French, utilizing fire-ignited time fuses, had to allow a certain play between barrel and projectile in order for the exploding propellant to simultaneously light the igniters in their shells, which necessarily reduced pressure and velocity (on the order of 30 meters per second according to contemporary sources).
But the loss of precision and range consequent to these characteristics of French canon versus German types were relatively trifling.
Rather, the material inferiority of French artillery in 1870 is to be found in its numerical weakness and, to a lesser extent, in the inefficiency of its shell fusing.
Throughout the 1860s the French artillery service had suffered from theeffects of various cost-cutting measures which had generally juggled the number of cadres and batteries, reducing the number of artillery pieces from the 1,200 previously fielded — the shortage being not in weapons but rather in men, horses, and money.
The result was that, in July 1870, the statutory strength of French artillery was 154 batteries disposing altogether of 924 pieces confronting German forces with 1,584 pieces (of which approximately 1,200 belong to Prussia and the Northern Confederation, with the remainder belonging to the southern German states).
In the opinion of the contemporary artillery expert General Susane, this disproportion was of such magnitude as to render the question of a supposed German technological superiority academic: « Dans une telle proportion, le nombre domine la valeur ».
While the Demarest percussion fuse had been approved by the French Artillery Committee as early as 1859, and an even more advanced "mixed" (percussion and ignition) fuse of Maucourant approved in December 1869, the fuses used in 1870 remained of the old pattern.
But the utility of these fuses was even further reduced in 1859 when four of the six settings on the Treuille de Beaulieu fuses were painted over so as to "minimize the confusion of the artillerymen."
It was thus to be hoped that the Germans be sure to place themselves at either a distance of between 1350 and 1550 meters or a distance of 2,650 and 2,850 meters so that the shells might correctly explode...
Prussia, on the other hand, which had introduced the Neumann/Engel percussion fuse for its muzzle-loading artillery in 1858, was able in 1867 to equip its Krupp breechloaders with the Richter percussion fuse.
Now, while an airburst detonation by a shell is normally a more damaging explosion in an anti-personnel role, it calls for a nicety of range estimation (rendered all the more difficult in the French case due to the limitations brought on in 1859) and reliability of function which, in the state of 1860s technology, were less than ideal — the great number of duds reported by the Germans on the receiving end of these projectiles confirms the fact.
The percussion fuse, in contrast, called for no such finesse: once armed it detonated on impact.
The ace in the hole that might have redressed a part or all of this artillery weakness were the 190 Reffye Mitrailleuses, the "secret" weapon the Tuileries based so many hopes on.
This weapon, more precisely known as "canon à balles" or "bullet canon", was designed to counter-balance the tactical void that had been created during the Crimean War by the redoubling effectiveness of infantry rifle fire.
Outranged and less precise than rifles, canon's traditional anti-personnel mainstay rounds, case-shot and grape, had lost a great part of their effectiveness.
At the battles of the Alma, Inkerman, Magenta, Solferino, and Sadowa, not a few canon had fallen prey to humble foot soldiers and their rifles.
And while the appearance of rifled canon in 1858 had to some extent begun to redress the imbalance, rifled guns were still considered less than ideal in an anti-personnel role because their very design limited the shotgun-like dispersion of projectiles desirable in the fire of these small caliber multiple rounds which the earlier smoothbore had permitted.
Reffye's canon à balles sought to turn the tables again and make artillery once more redoutable to infantry.
With a stack of twenty-five rifled barrels firing 13 millimeter rounds at a then-stupendous rate of fire ranging from 25 to 125 rounds a minute, the Reffye mitrailleuse was a potentially formidable weapon whose munitions — thanks to a muzzle velocity that approached the relatively high figure of 500 meters a second — reached ranges of up to three kilometers.
But given declining kinetic energy as well as aiming and ranging difficulties — tracking bullet impacts at long range being impractical — the true useful battle range of the Reffye mitrailleuse was much under 3,000 meters and probably even under 1,000 meters.
Under development since 1864 under a shroud of silence in a special atelier at Meudon using discretionary funds personally supplied by the Emperor, the Reffye canon à balles was only just being deployed as hostilities began, and this circumstance certainly did little to favor its effective utilization, as both servants and officers reportedly had little idea of how best to employ it since the Instructions on its use were distributed simultaneous with the weapon.
Yet, even taking into consideration the premature introduction of the Mitrailleuse, it appears that it simply was unsuited to the role it had been assigned: the engagement of infantry outside normal rifle range, thus effectively replacing the canister and grape rounds previously used by artillery.
Perhaps theoretically tenable, this operational concept of the Mitrailleuse proved unworkable in the hard school of real combat.
Secret mitrailleuse trials held in 1868 illustrate the tactical thinking that surrounded the employment of the novel weapon; firings were undertaken on batallion and deployed batallion targets (70 meters wide by 1.8 meters high and 210 meters by 1.8 meters high) at 1,400, 1,800, and 2,200 meters artillery range.
While the powerful 13 millimeter munitions of the Reffye certainly outranged the sluggish Dreyse rounds, it could not compete against the Krupp breechloading canon firing large explosive percussion-fused shells.
Nevertheless, the Reffye could be quite effective when used properly, that it to say, as a medium-range infantry support weapon rather than a full-fledged artillery piece capable of sustaining independent long-range action.
It is important to note that some limitations of the early machine guns had already begun to emerge before 1870.
In prolonged public comparative trials of field-canon and Gatling machine-guns undertaken by the British army in 1867, the superiority of the heavy explosive artillery rounds over the rapid fire of the machine-guns at long range had been demonstrated.
Later tests nuanced these results, demonstrating that at ranges up to 700 meters, the Mitrailleuse could hold its own against cannon as heavy as 9-pounder or 12-pounder caliber.
But the comparative trials themselves betray contemporary concepts of machine-guns as an alternative to cannon rather than as an adjunct with a different role.
Bearing in mind the conceptual and technical difficulties involved — for, despite some very limited and ambiguous instances of use during the American Civil War, machine-guns marked a bold path into uncharted military territory — the construction and deployment of the Reffye gun were a notable achievement.
France, as she had with rifled small-arms, rifled artillery, and ironclads, with the Montigny-Reffye machine-gun once again demonstrated military-technological leadership.
And the contribution of the quixotic figure at the head of la Grande Nation had, as in the two other instances, played a significant role in opening the road for that innovation.
It is easy to dismiss the Reffye canon à balles as just another of Napoleon III's flights of fancy; after all, he was a well-known military dilettante who also dabbled with a history of Julius Caesar and building models of Roman triremes.
The Prussians affected ostentatious ridicule of the weapon, but whether this sentiment was sincere or not, it certainly was the only politic position to take: admitting the effectiveness of an enemy weapon would only have encouraged its use.
Used sensibly in a defensive role, the Mitrailleuse could and did inflict terrible damage.
The problems that attended its deployment and which to a certain degree vitiated its military potential in some ways resemble those which had accompanied the deployment of the equally revolutionary French Lahitte rifled 4-pounder during the Italian Campaign of 1859.
Already field-tested in Algeria in 1857 and 1858, the guns were slated for quantity production, but delivery fell behind despite continual complaints and exhortations from the Emperor.
When operations in Piedmont finally commenced in May 1859 only a limited number were available, and the advantages in range and precision the new artillery piece offered were never fully realized.
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In summarizing the Franco-German material balance of military power at the beginning of 1870 we can thus say that a German superiority did exist, an advantage that was both technological in the realm of artillery pieces and fuses and numerical in terms of batteries fielded.
In the field of portable firearms the advantage incontestably lay on the French side but, as we shall see, here, as in the domain of artillery, the ultimate sources of tactical and operational superiority were to be found not so much in matériel as in conceptions and modes of organization and use.
What then was the situation of French infantry tactics at the beginning of the 1870 campaign?
We have already seen that in the Crimea as in Italy, from 1854 to 1859, the French army had not truly integrated the tactical, operational, or strategic consequences of the introduction of rifled long-range accurate arms.
A continuity of concept and usage dear to senior officers subsisted, exemplified in the use of dense columnar dispositions and bayonet charges that had proved so terribly effective against opponents as diverse as Abdel-Kader during the Algerian razzias or against Franz-Josef in the orchards and canals of Piedmont and Lombardy.
But Sadowa had finally come to signal the rise of a new challenge to French military primacy and, almost immediately, the long postponed technological overhaul of armament had commenced.
And, one way or another, the material symbol of this renewal, the Chassepot, had been delivered.
But what adaptations had French tactics undergone in order to conform to the new military technologies?
In 1869, but a few months before the fateful events of the coming year of decision, general Andlau, French military attaché to the Austrian court in Vienna had written an interesting and, in many respects, prophetic mémoire on French tactics.
Beginning with the recognition that during the Crimean War the quality of French infantry had made a great stride forward thanks to the "... development and regularization of individual combat..." Andlau nevertheless concluded that "... tactical procedures however remain the same as under the [First] Empire."
In Andlau's view the drill and maneuvers current under the Second Empire persisted to be fundamentally based on the evolutions employed in the time of the Revolution and Napoleon I: primarily the use of columns — especially in the attack — and the secondary employment of deployed lines, mainly in defensive circumstances.
Thus, the regulation of 1831, which, in fact, was little more than a revision of that of 1791, "... received almost no application in the field."
The important insight this realization of the cleavage between theoretical dispositions on one hand and actual practice by no means suggests that the règlement of 1831 was some sort of progressive breakthrough that had wrongly been ignored, but rather the simple fact that no clarity or regularity at all actually existed in the tactical realm:
"There were thus not any more rules as under the Empire for the movements of masses; all depended on the will of the leader, absent any regulation indicating the principles of grand tactics..."
This general perspective which Andlau brings us is already enlightening, but was the actual state of tactics within French infantry regiments prior to the life and death struggle of 1870?
We will find no better guide in answering this query than Ardant du Picq.
Allying a wealth of battle experience to a remarkable depth of analysis, this soldier, who was fated not to survive the summer of 1870, had seized the essential tendencies of the modifications which the perfection of armaments brought to warfare.
His conclusions — without being infallible — have a great historical value.
Du Picq's vision of tactics is complex.
He at once combines a historical and critical perspective to an extraordinary psychological acuity and joins to these two elements the practical sense of a true soldier benefiting from a real combat background.
His first conclusion is, like Andlau's, a remark on the deep malaise in which French tactics find themselves in 1870:
"Our infantry no longer has combat tactics; the initiative of the soldier holds sway.
The First Empire... only had confidence in the moral and passive action of masses.
Today, the initiative of the soldier rebels or would rebel against this passive attack in masses, and one fights in skirmishing order, or one marches forward like a herd of sheep, of whom three-quarters straggle en route if the fire is heavy.
The first method, better than the second, which is very bad too, if a strong discipline, a combat method studied in advance and everyday through the practice of practical regulations..."
As this passage shows, du Picq is certainly not blind to the defects of dispersed skirmisher tactics; but he concludes that it is illusory to try and impose a geometric control of infantry dispositions and fire — which even in the days of Napoleon I and Frederick the Great functioned indifferently and which presently — in the face of canon and firearms multiple times deadlier, no longer has the faintest chance of success.
To retreat towards an archaic tactic based on closed-up masses is equivalent to ignoring the sheer fact of modern firepower:
"From the day that firearms became the deadliest, most effective weapon, a unit that closes up to fight is a unit whose morale is weakening."
Du Picq considers this tactical change in forming lines firing in salvoes as a return to the old Prussian drill of the Potsdam school:
"... as one became infatuated, and as one still is; and as the Prussians (all men of drill, of mathematics, etc., ultimately take the lead), the Prussians of Jena had fallen for it themselves, and since then they are the first to have moved along the reasonable path, while we in France still remain with the Potsdam maneuvers..."
The French army's late penchant for geometric line dispositions (which coincided oddly with the introduction of the Chassepot) comes in opposition to all the practical experience of the last years; there was, therefore, a great risk in letting oneself be seduced by a concept and a tactical regulation which have no real basis:
"Most of the generals who have taken part in our last wars, under real conditions, demand skirmishers in great bands, well supported; for our soldiers are wont to fight in this way, to such an extent that even despite the will of their leaders, one does not fight in any other order."
As at the battle of the Alma and, especially, in the chaos of battles such as Inkerman or Solferino, it is the deadly reality of firepower, not the abstract conceptualization of a schematic regulation which rule here:
"Skirmishers in great bands are something forced under fire for the French, when the terrain and the liveliness of the action cause the leaders to lose the initiative, abandoning it to the soldiers, to small groups."
The formation — or, rather, it absence — in skirmishers allows not only a greater mobility and reduces vulnerability in presenting less dense of a target, it also favorizes the use of weapons:
"One has weapons in order to use them; the best attack disposition (in material terms) or defense is that which permits the easiest and deadliest use of weapons; this order is dispersion, the thin line."
For du Picq it is taken for granted that such a system of combat — in dispersed skirmishing order — requires reinforced leadership and training for officers and men; even if rifled arms have equipped much of the army since 1857, and the breechloading Chassepot has armed some units since 1866, the bare fact of the troops' armament in nowise garantees their real aptitude for individual fire and movement combat tactics.
Whereas previously each battalion possessed its own specialized skirmisher or Chasseur company, these had eventually been grouped to form entire independent Chasseur battalions and regiments.
Indeed, in examining the fighting in the Crimea and in Italy, it is undeniable that these concentrated groupings of elite troops, benefitting from their special training and armament, had played a very prominent, or arguably a preponderant, role in assuring French victories during these wars.
A real dichotomy in the army had therefore come into being, a 'first class' and a 'second class' army based on their respective weaponry and tactics: the line infantry contenting itself with a heterogeneous mix of new and patched-together large caliber rifles devoid of sights and firing the execrable M57 bullet, and the picked troops, the Guard, the Zouaves, and the Chasseurs armed with the less cumbersome carbines of 1846, 1853 and 1859, all fitted with excellent sights and firing heavy but effective munitions:
"We were still in the grip of this, in min view false, idea — which, moreover has reigned until these past few years [NB-written in 1870], namely that a particular corps should have a particular arm."
But, warns Du Picq, with war on the horizon, war with a fearsome and well armed enemy, it will be necessary that the entire army know how to fight actively in skirmishing order and from this circumstance necessarily results a great risk because of the dichotomy in the army, a differentiation which, with the issue of the Chassepot to almost the entire army, is no longer materially based in its weaponry, but whose traces and influence nonetheless persist in practices and capacities:
"Yesterday's experience must always serve for the morrow; but as the morrow is never identical to the eve, the councils of experience can never be applied to the letter...
But it so happens that the mode of combat has been transformed, and so one assembles in élite corps the élite companies and the batallion now weakened no longer has strong wings; or else skirmishing combat is the rule, and the voltigeurs companies mostly being in skirmishing order, the batallion is no longer girded, etc.
Nowadays, the skirmishing of deployed batallions is no longer possible; and one of the basic reasons for the élite companies is still girding!"
General Trochu supports Du Picq's assertion; the dichotomy of troops amounts to the "... weakening of the mass for the benefit of groups", moreover, the "specialty of the chasseurs is no longer useful... the specialty of their armament, greatly diminished by the entire army's adoption of rifled arms, dissappears with the adoption of the rapid fire rifle [NB-the Chassepot] become the common weapon."
Materially obsolete, the concept of élite companies and batallions is no longer, according to Trochu, usable in practice:
"Divisional generals, who have been in command in time of war, have in this regard carried out conclusive trials.
Placing at a given point the division's chasseurs batallion so as to cover one's front with skirmishers in such a way as to afford each of the batallions a proportional share of this protection, by men whose leadership is independent of the batallions themselves, that is almost impossible."
The consequences of specifying in the manuals, école de soldat, école de bataillon, école de régiment, movements and maneuvers which in practice on the field of battle — as distinct from the parade ground — are impossible is grave:
"... in the late wars the divisional generals have, for the most part instead of this role assigned to the chasseurs batallion the role of reserve...
Thus, troops which specifically represent France's light infantry, that is to say the aggressive force, necessarily become support troops!"
At the batallion level, the same perplexity is evident; the emergence of a valid new tactical concept is not easily forthcoming.
Du Picq clearly grasps the tactical consequences of modern firepower, of the defensive's tactical primacy, but worries that the regulations fail to reflect this reality:
"With rapid-fire arms issued to the infantry, the advantage lies in the defense completed with suitable offensive movements...
Everyone shouts that rapid fire... renders impossible its charges [cavalry's] against infantry that is not completely disordered, demoralized, etc.
And the charges of infantry then, infantry that marches when cavalry gallops, what will become of them?
One should no longer attack in deep masses, as one never should have, should not be difficult to advise."
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One assertion habitually made in accounts or histories of the Franco-German war of 1870-1871 is that the M1866 Chassepot was greatly superior to the Dreyse equipping the Germans.
In fact, it is oftentimes not even mentionned that a good part of Bavarian infantry were not equipped with the Podewils (a converted 13.9mm muzzle-loading rifle similar to the British Snider), but with the Werder, a metallic-cartridge breechloader that was far superior not only to the Dreyse, but superior to the Chassepot as well.
Yes, the Chassepot was superior to the Dreyse, but of what character was this superiority and how pronounced was it?
Much of the Chassepot's superiority over the Dreyse stems from its higher muzzle velocity: up to 430 meters a second for the French rifle as opposed to under three hundred meters a second for the Prussian rifle.
The superiority of the projectile itself also lay with the French weapon: the Chassepot's bullet was 11 millimeters in caliber as against 13.6 millimeters for the Dreyse's (the 13.6mm caliber applies to the 'Spiegel', or sabot, which held a sub-caliber bullet of 12mm).
The end result of these ballistic factors were power, range, and precision.
Because of the Chassepot's vastly higher velocity and its better proportioned projectile, its trajectory was much flatter than the Dreyse's: at 300 meters the high point of its trajectory was l meter as opposed to 3 meters for the Prussian gun; in practical terms this meant that whereas German troopers had to exercise some nicety of judgement in aiming their rifles — and the arcing path of their rounds would fly high above the heads of any enemy soldiers in between — the French could fire their weapons directly.
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