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ABSTRACT
Montesquieu’s many works contain a sophisticated account of military strategy that anticipated nineteenth-century developments in the subject. In particular, his influence over Jomini was more significant than previously realized.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Beatrice Heuser, Fenella Morris and two anonymous reviewers for commenting on earlier drafts of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For The Spirit of the Laws (De l’esprit des lois) I have relied on the first four volumes of Oeuvres de Monsieur de Montesquieu, rev. ed. (Amsterdam and Leipzig: Arkstée and Merkus 1757). For the other sources mentioned see: Oeuvres complètes de Montesquieu, Vol. I: Lettres persanes, ed. Philip Stewart, Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, Cecil Courtney, Edgar Mass, Pauline Kra and Didier Masseau (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation 2004); Oeuvres complètes de Montesquieu, Vol. II: Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence; Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, ed. Françoise Weil and Cecil P. Courtney (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation 2000). Various musings about war also appear in the notebooks in which Montesquieu recorded ideas for future development. See for example, Pensées et fragments inédits de Montesquieu, 2 vols (Bordeaux: G. Gounouilhou 1899–1901), 354–60. Unless otherwise specified translations are my own.
2 On this point see Anon., [Charles François Olivier Rosette, Chevalier de Brucourt] Essai sur l’éducation de la noblesse, new ed., Vol. II (Paris: Durand and Pissot 1748), 218–80.
3 Bonneval’s life is recounted in Septime Gorceix, Bonneval Pacha: pacha à trois queues, une vie d’aventures au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Plon 1953).
4 Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1961), 103–4.
5 For the record of a conversation between Montesquieu and Bonneval on the poor performance of Danish troops in past wars see Pensées II, 359. On Berwick: ‘I often heard him say that the thing he had most desired his whole life was a good place to defend’. Berwick, Mémoires de Maréchal de Berwick, écrits par lui-même, Vol. I (Paris: Moutard 1778), xxxviii with emphasis added.
6 The eulogy was never completed, but a draft was included in Berwick’s posthumously published memoirs. Ibid., xvii–xlviii.
7 Ibid., xxxvi–xxxvii. Montesquieu’s arc-and-chord distinction is adopted from Berwick’s own account of his defensive scheme. See Berwick, Mémoires See ibid., II, 66.
8 Montesquieu learnt of the effectiveness of Berwick’s resort to interior lines in conversation with officers who had been on the opposing side. Ibid. I, xxxvii.
9 There were of course exceptions to the general rule. See Beatrice Heuser, The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz (Santa Barbara: CA, Praeger 2010).
10 Christopher Coker, Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg (Oxford: Oxford UP 2010), 74, 169, 173–4, 176; Heuser, Beatrice Heuser, Strategy Before Clausewitz: Linking Warfare and Statecraft, 1400–1830 (London: Routledge 2018), 169, 173, 181, 187; Beatrice Heuser, ‘Clausewitz, Die Politik, and the Political Purpose of Strategy’, in Thierry Balzacq and Ronald R. Krebs (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy (Oxford: Oxford UP 2021), unpaginated. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198840299.013.4.
11 Crane Brinton, Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert, ‘Jomini’, in Edward Meade Earle (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton UP 1943), p. 91; Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State: The Man, His Theories, and His Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1985), esp. 171n; Peter Paret, Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1992), esp. 97–8; Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought: from the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford UP 2001). See Book I for references to Montesquieu.
12 L’esprit I, cxxxvi.
13 On his refusal to be ‘a wholehearted determinist’ see Isaiah Berlin, ‘Montesquieu’, in Henry Hardy (ed.), Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2013), 164–203.
14 L’esprit I, 1–6.
15 Ibid., 12–13.
16 Ibid., 9.
17 Ibid., 6–9; John Stone, ‘Thomas Hobbes as Strategist’, Defence Studies 21/1 (2021), 67–83.
18 L’esprit I, 15–58.
19 Ibid., 253; L’esprit II, 135–6; Réflexions, 346–8.
20 L’esprit I, 10.
21 Ibid., 275–6.
22 Ibid., 10.
23 Considérations, 118.
24 L’esprit II, 141, 144; Pensées II, 359.
25 L’esprit II, 31–8.
26 Ibid., 33.
27 Berwick provides an account of the battle in his Mémoires I, 391–5. It ought to be acknowledged that it occurred in the April, and Berwick does not mention the heat in this context. Scattered references to the challenges it posed do appear in other passages however.
28 See Montesquieu’s comments on the strategic dilemma of republics below.
29 Réflexions, 360.
30 L’esprit I, 267–8; Réflexions, 360–61; Pensées, 310–12.
31 L’esprit I, 269; Réflexions, 360.
32 Anon., [Heinrich von Bülow] Geist des neuern Kriegssystems hergeleitet aus dem Grundsatze einer Basis der Operationen auch für Laien in der Kriegskunst faßlich vorgetragen von einem ehemaligen Preußischen Offizier (Hamburg: Benjamin Gottlieb Hofmann 1799).
33 L’esprit I, 248–9, 259–62.
34 Ibid., 49–51, 129, 250–51.
35 Ibid., 265–6.
36 Ibid., 268–9; Pensées, 312–3.
37 Considérations, 99–104.
38 Ibid., 99; Vegetius, Epitome of Military Science, trans. N. P. Miller (Liverpool: Liverpool UP 1993), 54.
39 Considérations, 90.
40 Ibid., 236–7.
41 Réflexions, 345–6. Maurice of Nassau (1567–1625) and Coehon [Menno Van Coehorrn] (1641–1704) were notable Dutch authorities on siege warfare.
42 Lettres, 416, 419–20.
43 For the implication that most wars are not resolved without multiple battles see Considérations, 185.
44 Considérations, 235.
45 L’esprit I, 276–305. Limitations of space prevent further consideration of this subject here.
46 Ibid., 292–3.
47 A brief account of the war can be found in Russell F. Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP 1991), 105–16.
48 L’esprit I, 293 with original emphasis.
49 Considérations, 128.
50 L’esprit, I, 295.
51 Gat 48, 50, 73-5.
52 Clausewitz, 175. See also Heuser, Strategy Before Clausewitz, 203, n12.
53 Gat, 196.
54 Ibid., 163–4, 196; Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, Volume 1: L’âge européen (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), esp. 24, 175, 295. Aron himself does not attach much significance to the possibility of Montesquieu’s influence over Clausewitz, although he maintains they shared common concerns in relation to ‘problems and methods’. Ibid., 374.
55 This point comes through in Clausewitz, 966–71.
56 In this respect see Clausewitz’s characterization of policy as ‘the intelligence of the personified state’. Ibid., 211–2.
57 In this connection Montesquieu’s reference to the concept of friction is intriguing. ‘Mechanics certainly has its frictions that often change or arrest the effects of theory; politics likewise has its own’. L’esprit II, 138.
58 Clausewitz, 212–3.
59 Brinton et al., 91; Antoine-Henri Jomini, Précis de l’art de la guerre, ou nouveau tableau analytique des principales combinaisons de la stratégie, de la grande tactique et de la politique militaire, Vol. I (Paris: Libraire Pour l’Art Militaire, les Sciences et les Arts 1837), 157–8.
60 Gat, 108, 128.
61 Jomini, Précis I, 5–23.
62 Ibid., 32–128.
63 For an earlier synopsis of his narrower views see Antoine-Henri Jomini, ‘L’Art de la Guerre’, Pallas: Eine Zeitschrift für Staats- und Kriegs-Kunst, 1/1 (1808): 31–40.
64 Antoine-Henri Jomini, Treatise on Grand Military Operations: or a Critical and Military History of the Wars of Frederick the Great, as Contrasted with the Modern System. Together with a Few of the Most Important Principles of the Art of War, trans. S. B. Holabird, Vol. II (New York: D. Van Nostrand 1865), 460–1. Gat (p. 128) reproduces substantially the same paragraph but omits the phrase ‘in his work upon the Causes of the Greatness and Decline of the Romans’.
65 Antoine-Henri Jomini, Traité de grande tactique, ou relation de la guerre de sept ans, extraite de Tempelhof, commenté et comparée aux principales opérations de la dernière guerre; avec un recueil des maximes, justifiées par ces différents événements, 2 vols (Paris: Giguet et Michaud, Magimel 1805). The title was subsequently changed to Traité des grandes opérations militaires. Antoine-Henri Jomini, Traité des grandes opérations militaires, contenant l’histoire critique des campagnes de Frédéric II, comparées à celles de l’Empereur Napoléon; avec un recueil des principes généraux de l’art de la guerre, 2 vols, 2nd ed. (Paris: Magimel 1811).
66 Jomini, Treatise II, 461–2.
67 Jomini, Précis I, 74.
68 Ibid., 143. Although Jomini might have read about the decline of Roman military performance directly in Vegetius, it was Montesquieu who connected this to the broader issue of imperial collapse.
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John Stone
John Stone is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He specializes in the history and theory of military strategy