Abstract
The period of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire has long been recognized as a watershed in the history of warfare. At the heart of this military revolution lay the greatly enhanced power of the state to mobilize the latent resources of society. Revolutionary rhetoric quickly described this as a nation in arms, but from 1793 onward it was more accurately a state in arms able to put more than a half-million men into military uniforms. Considerably larger armies using more flexible tactics, less dependent on supply magazines, and sustained by better morale proved much superior to the armies of the ancien regime.1 Improved methods of selecting and promoting officers, generally known as "opening careers to talent," were equally crucial to this great increase in the effectiveness of military power. The trend toward officer professionalism has been well studied for the early Revolution and the Napoleonic period,2 but only vague
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