Information about the new book by Paddy Griffith The Art of War of Revolutionary France made the front page of the last issue of Greenhill Military Book News, and the interest this engendered caused us to ask the author to provide a background story about his interest in this period. Paddy Griffith writes: "My first interest in military history was the Peninsular War, but I had not read myself very far into it before I realised that both the British and French armies which fought in it owed a very great deal to their traumatic experiences during the 1790s. Wellington had experienced his first baptism of fire in the Netherlands in 1794, while all the French commanders of 1808-14 were in one way or another 'Children of the Revolution'. The problem I encountered was that most of the available books concentrated on what happened from about 1800 onwards, while the vibrant and decisive decade which preceded that was largely ignored in the literature. A few dark but unexplained hints were repeated with irritating frequency - eg 'the Levee en masse', 'massed bands of skirmishers', or 'revolutionary enthusiasm'. These few short shibboleths were accepted as encapsulating all that one really needed to know about the art of war of the 1790s. This simplistic dismissal of a whole decade always rather bothered me, as I later pursued my studies of the French army before and after Waterloo: but it was only very recently that I found an opportunity to revisit the subject and give it a good look. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I discovered that the 'Levee en masse' was as much an 'own goal' for the French war effort as it was a 'secret weapon'. The 'massed bands of skirmishers' represented a reversion to the most basic and least sophisticated type of combat tactics, rather than the great methodological breakthrough that has often been claimed. As for the alleged 'revolutionary enthusiam' of the French armies, perhaps my biggest finding was that the improvised French soldiers of the Revolution ran away on almost every occasion when the pressure became really heavy. They lost, or at best drew, almost every battle they fought. They had no 'military spirit' and, in particular, lamentably little ability to stand up against professional cavalry. Yet despite this, they did still tend to win their campaigns. Just quite how they managed to achieve that is the subject of my book.'" Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 85 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com