Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- Preface and acknowledgments
- 1 A “happy combination of clemency with firmness”: the small wars prologue
- 2 The road from Sedan
- 3 The paroxysms of imperial might in the shadow of the Great War
- 4 From Tipperary to Tel Aviv: British counterinsurgency in the World War II era
- 5 From small wars to la guerre subversive: the radicalization and collapse of French counterinsurgency
- 6 Vietnam, counterinsurgency, and the American way of war
- 7 “A conspiracy of heroes”: revolution and counterinsurgency in Latin America
- 8 Building the “most successful counterinsurgency school”: COIN as the British way of war
- 9 Britain’s Thirty Years’ War in Northern Ireland
- 10 Vietnam with a happy ending: Iraq and “the surge”
- 11 Conclusion
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
2 - The road from Sedan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of maps
- Preface and acknowledgments
- 1 A “happy combination of clemency with firmness”: the small wars prologue
- 2 The road from Sedan
- 3 The paroxysms of imperial might in the shadow of the Great War
- 4 From Tipperary to Tel Aviv: British counterinsurgency in the World War II era
- 5 From small wars to la guerre subversive: the radicalization and collapse of French counterinsurgency
- 6 Vietnam, counterinsurgency, and the American way of war
- 7 “A conspiracy of heroes”: revolution and counterinsurgency in Latin America
- 8 Building the “most successful counterinsurgency school”: COIN as the British way of war
- 9 Britain’s Thirty Years’ War in Northern Ireland
- 10 Vietnam with a happy ending: Iraq and “the surge”
- 11 Conclusion
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Bugeaud cast a dark shadow over France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. The surrender of Napoleon III and the major French army at Sedan on September 2, barely six weeks after war was declared, was a stunning reversal for French arms. Until this devastating loss, the French armed forces enjoyed the esteem of their countrymen and their counterparts in other national militaries alike. The army that had forged a fearsome reputation under Napoleon I, conquered Algeria, bested Russians in the Crimea, and trounced the Austrians in Italy while holding its own in Mexico produced what generally passed for the best soldiers in Europe. Many of its commanders fell into the savior general category so beloved of the right, while French colonial units like the Zouaves and the Chasseurs d’Afrique were regarded as the nec plus ultra of the military world – so much so that French uniforms were imitated in the US Army in the early nineteenth century while versions of French units were replicated in both Confederate and Union forces during the American Civil War.
Sedan produced a small wars backlash among makers of policy and military thinkers in France amid the general recrimination and soul searching of a Third Republic born of defeat. A big piece of the failure of small wars sprang from the dubious methods and motives associated with it. The problem wasn’t just that irregular tactics failed to translate to the European continent or even that the leading lights of nineteenth-century colonial warfare proved to be, in fact, shockingly inept soldiers in combat. The whole colonial project that small wars supported proved untenable for sound political, moral, and military reasons. For a nation-state attempting post-1870 to integrate a mosaic of peoples, a quarter of whom did not even speak French as their first language, into a French nationalist project, overseas adventures that would eventually incorporate 3.5 million square miles with a heterogeneous population of 26 million souls offered at best a distraction, at worst a perilous incongruity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- CounterinsurgencyExposing the Myths of the New Way of War, pp. 41 - 78Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013