Day 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Month January February March April May June July August September October November December Year Please fill in a complete birthday Enter a valid birthday. Watches Casual Dress Sports. Eyewear Aviators Wayfarer Pilot Square. Underwear Boxers Briefs Undershirts Swimwear. Sponsored products for you.
- Derniers numéros;
- Similar Books.
- La cinémathèque française.
Paperback Language of Text: Be the first to rate this product Rate this product: The transformation of collective resistance into these successive phases made the task of pacification at once less overtly dangerous for French rule, but also progressively more difficult to achieve in the context of normalising the character of their rule and establishing confidence in its worth among their new subjects. Rather, they were beaten by hastily assembled reserve troops, composed of what every garrison units were to hand, sometimes with local help, sometimes without.
Nonetheless, they had developed shock tactics that enabled them to respond energetically. The key to French counter-insurgency was not to sit and wait: When peasant forces descended from mountain peripheries to try to take provincial centres, the French did not entrench themselves behind urban walls and either simply defend or launch sporadic strikes from these strongholds.
Early in the Vendean revolt, they had developed the colonnne mobile, and if any single thing characterised their approach to counter-insurgency it was mobility and, above all, a mobility that drove deep into the countryside. As long as there was a core of experienced regular troops to graft less hardened units around, the column could work. It was often a microcosm of the Napoleonic army corps, composed of cavalry and some mobile artillery as well as infantry, and so able to switch from skirmishing to open combat, to limited siege tactics, as it harried the rebels from one sort of position to the other.
La comète « Napoléon » : restauration du film d'Abel Gance
The colonne mobile was designed to chase, harry and displace rebels; it worked on the sensible assumption that it would not crush all of them in one place, that they would retreat to their original, often near-impregnable positions, and that the way to beat them was to keep up the pursuit and to confront them with different weaponry and battle tactics, as the terrain changed. It might be noted at this point, that the colonne mobile remained a feature of routine rural policing throughout the period, even after the successful pacification of a given area.
The principles of mobility and penetration of the countryside underpinned the workings of conscription, throughout the empire, and throughout the period. At least three times per year — four in the last, desperate years of the regime — the prefects toured their departments, spending several days in each of the canton chefs lieux, the seats of the justices of the peace, to carry out the tirage.
They moved from one to the next at the head of a colonne mobile composed of the regular troops of the reserve company established in each department, supported by the Gendarmerie, and more regular troops in difficult areas. The operation could — and often did — switch from an administrative process to a military occupation and localised counter-insurgency campaign, almost at will. The second phase of resistance was the splintering and regrouping of recalcitrant elements into banditry, usually in very difficult terrain to police.
The French responded to this with a new tactic and a very new, virtually novel weapon.
The Napoleonic Gendarmerie. The state on the periphery made real
The weapon was the Gendarmerie, and the tactic it embodied and enforced was dissemination, as opposed to the penetration of the colonne mobile. Its targets were the fragmented pieces of collective resistance, and where it could not stamp out banditry or other forms of guerrilla quickly, its permanent presence in their heartlands usually forced the bands into blatant criminality, often manifested in kidnapping members of the local elite for ransom, less discriminating highway robbery, common crime directed at the most vulnerable — from widows to isolated farms — all of which eroded their support networks.
Reviving and reforming the moribund, makeshift corps he had inherited from the revolutionaries was one of the first tasks Napoleon set himself, and with good reason. As his ruthless counter insurgency campaigns in France, Piedmont, Belgium and the Rhineland began to work, he saw he needed to move to the dissemination of coercive force, if the new system of conscription created by the Jourdan Law of was to work. By it, each department was to provide a fixed quota of men, three times a year, based on its population.
Such an operation could not work, if entrusted mainly to transient, mobile, colonnes mobiles: The new colonnes mobiles had to move into generally orderly areas. Moreover, with overt resistance coming to an end, the target now had to be sporadic or highly localised disorder. As French rule established itself in other parts of Europe, the pattern was repeated. From in Piedmont onwards, the Gendarmerie was always in place, prior to annexation.
La France, pays de variqueux
Often numerous, well-armed and powerful, they were of no use of to the state, and less to the communities they were meant to serve. It was this task, and this relationship centred on conscription, that made the Gendarmerie an arm of counter-insurgency long after it was meant to settle into the role of routine policing. It could amalgamate with other, neighbouring brigades in the face of serious disorder, and summon regular troops from their urban garrisons. They formed the core of colonnes mobiles during the process of conscription. Above all, the Gendarmerie was the direct physical presence of the state at the most localised level possible.
Download This eBook
It made the law, as represented by the justices of the peace and the civil administration, and as represented by the maires, a reality, and the corps was usually more ready to enforce the former and sustain the latter, than their civilian counterparts. The Gendarmerie walked the knife-edge that separated the success of counter-insurgency from its failure: It could change from being the powerful strong arm of the new regime in the heart of the periphery, to a beleaguered, almost besieged outpost of a distant, tenuous authority, often worse armed than the bandits or rebels it was there to eradicate.
There was nothing inevitable about the former reality triumphing over the latter, but where it did, much else followed.
- Menu de navigation.
- Uncertain Ground?
- La comète « Napoléon » : restauration du film d'Abel Gance.
- No. 5: In der Nacht.
- Inspirational Thoughts!
- Bully Prevention- 3 Pack.
In the first instance, it assured the genuine pacification of a given region. Its ability to enforce conscription, to stamp out organised banditry, to inculcate into hitherto rebellious, independent communities the futility of violent, collective opposition to authority, marked the success and the end of the second phase of counter-insurgency.
- My Wishlist!
- Alice James: A Biography (New York Review Books Classics)!
- Military from D & E Lake Ltd. (ABAC, ILAB) - Browse recent arrivals?
- My Shopping Bag.
- Napoléon: La dernière phase by Earl of Archibald Philip Primrose Rosebery.
- Napoléon: La dernière phase by Earl of Archibald Philip Primrose Rosebery - Free Ebook.
This was the result of dissemination. There was more, however. The permanence of the corps in the hinterlands meant that things would never be the same again: Communities no longer policed themselves; the days of independence by default were gone for the European peasantry, where the Gendarmerie in its sedentary form took root.
There is a tendency among historians and political scientists to refer to the centralised state, to the modern state, and to the Weberian concept of the monopoly of violence as residing in the state in too abstract a manner. Weber saw one of the key characteristics of the modern state as its sole control of coercive force.
The close study of the Napoleonic Gendarmerie in action is the hard, usually brutal reality behind such theories. Indeed, where its effectiveness as a disseminated, sedentary corps succeeded, no successor regime to Napoleon ever disbanded it. Where it had failed to do so, as in Spain, even the most anti-Napoleonic rulers did not delay overlong in copying it.
This gave the new regime its focused goal: When the colonnes mobiles gave way to the sedentary Gendarmerie, the turning point had been reached.
This was seldom as clear cut as a schematic approach makes it seem, yet it can and was charted in clear institutional and operational terms. Once the corps became sedentary, it was able to devote itself to the protection of persons and property, as well as counter-insurgency. Napoleon began this process, and it is important to note that it began in an imperial context: The Gendarmerie as Napoleon conceived it was meant to weld an empire together through the image its men presented; this function was only transferred to national contexts after by its successor corps.
Gendarmes had to be tall, and great efforts were made to ensure that height requirements were met, to provide an imposing powerful presence in the most basic way among the communities they policed. Helena, was extremely critical of Napoleon's treatment at the hands of Governor Lowe and refused to pass on information to which he was privy. He was dismissed from his position, and his name was later stricken from the list of naval surgeons. II partly cracked, numbers written on 4 pages, scattered light foxing.
Her Majesty's Stationery Office, Printed For James Ridgway, First Edition in English.
RECENT ARRIVALS
Gourgaud was named general and aide-de-camp by Napoleon during the Hundred Days, and fought at Waterloo. The present work was written at St. Helena where he had accompanied Napoleon into exile, and is based mainly on his own observations and those of Napoleon himself. Librairie Hachette Et Cie. First Edition of the French Translation.