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Clausewitz and the Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Daniel Moran
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Extract

From the appearance of On War in 1832 until the end of the First World War, Carl von Clausewitz was known chiefly as the most profound, but also the most enigmatic member of a generation of strategists whose common object had been to discover and explain the secrets of Napoleonic warfare. This interpretation, although not entirely wrong, has lately come to seem one-sided, initially as the result of the work of Hans Rothfels in the 1920s, and most decidedly so in light of the more recent, comprehensive analysis of Clausewitz's life and ideas by Peter Paret. Today, most students of the man and his work would agree that the French Revolution itself, and not simply its Napoleonic aftermath, was the decisive influence on the development of Clausewitz's ideas about war.

Type
Article
Information
Central European History , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , June 1989 , pp. 183 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1989

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References

1. See Rothfels, Hans, Carl von Clausewitz: Politik und Krieg (Berlin, 1920)Google Scholar, and Paret, Peter, Clausewitz and the State (Oxford, 1976; rev. ed.Princeton, 1982)Google Scholar. The shift in critical perspective is nicely illustrated by a comparison of the first and second editions of Makers of Modern Strategy: in the first (ed. Earle, Edward Meade [Princeton, 1943])Google Scholar, Clausewitz, and Jomini, are bracketed together as “Interpreters of Napoleon”; in the second (ed. Paret, Peter [Princeton, 1986])Google Scholar, Clausewitz, Jomini, and Napoleon himself are discussed in a section entitled “The Expansion of War”—an expansion driven by the social and political revolutions that began at the end of the eighteenth century.

2. A selection of this material, taken from a notebook (now lost) that Clausewitz began keeping as a twenty-three-year-old student at the military academy in Berlin, was published by Rothfels in an appendix to his Clausewitz, 197–220. A few additional selections appeared later in Schering, W. M., Geist und Tat (Stuttgart, 1941), 6–19Google Scholar. These early notes, as well as the other essays and memoranda mentioned in this article, are translated and more fully analyzed in Paret, Peter and Moran, Daniel, ed. and trans., Carl von Clausewitz: Historical and Political Writings, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.Google Scholar

3. Rothfels, Clausewitz, 87–125.

4. See Clausewitz and the State, 286–306, 343–50.

5. Behrens, C.B.A., “Which Side Was Clausewitz On?” New York Review of Books, 14 10,1976, 41–44Google Scholar; cf. Paret's reply in “Die politischen Ansichten von Clausewitz,” in Freiheit ohne Krieg? Beiträge zur Strategie-Diskussion der Gegenwart im Spiegel der Theorie von Carl von Clausewitz, ed. Maizière, Ulrich de (Bonn, 1980), 343–45Google Scholar; and in the preface to the revised edition of Clausewitz and the State (Princeton, 1982), ix–x.Google Scholar

6. Teutschland und die Revolution (Teutschland [Coblenz], 1819).Google Scholar

7. “Umtriebe” (early 1820s), in Clausewitz, Carl von, Politische Schriften und Briefe, ed. Rothfels, Hans (Munich, 1922), 153–95.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 179. Clausewitz, it should be added, knew Görres, whom he had met while serving in Coblenz as chief of staff of the Rhine army, and admired the simplicity of Görres's personal life, on which he comments several times in “Agitation.” He also suspected that Görres's austere character concealed great ambition, which in a revolution would lead him to play the role of “a Vergniaud or a Danton, driving men to such extremes with a stentorian voice and volcanic eloquence that he himself would at last be carried away in the stream” (ibid., 183). In the end Görres would cast his lot with political reaction and the Catholic church, a choice foreshadowed, perhaps, by the air of cultural pessimism that pervades Germany and the Revolution, and one that, despite its unanticipated direction, seems to confirm Clausewitz's suspicion that Görres was a man to whom extremity would prove no vice.

9. See Clausewitz to Gneisenau, 28 Apr. 1817, in Pertz, G. H. and Delbrück, H., Das Leben des Feldmarschalls Grafen Neithardt von Gneisenau (Berlin, 1864–1880), 5: 214–16Google Scholar; and “Umtriebe,” in Politische Schriften und Briefe, 189–91.

10. “Umtriebe,” in Politische Schriften und Briefe, 179.

11. When “Agitation” was finally published, in 1878, Hans Delbrück observed that Clausewitz's interpretation of the Revolution's origins anticipated Tocqueville's (“General von Clausewitz,” in Delbrück, Hans, Historische und politische Aufsütze [Berlin, 1887], 214)Google Scholar, a comparison that has recently been further pursued by Paret, Peter, “Continuity and Discontinuity in Some Interpretations of Tocqueville and Clausewitz,” Journal of the History of Ideas (1988), 161–69.Google Scholar

12. On War, trans. Howard, Michael and Paret, Peter (Princeton, 1976), 605, 607Google Scholar. This aspect of Clausewitz's thought has proven disproportionately attractive to historians on the left. Lenin, who made a close study of On War, copied the entire paragraph from which the second cited passage is taken verbatim, marked it with three vertical lines down the side, and noted in the margin that it represented “a step toward Marxism.” See. Lenin, V. I., Clausewitz' Werk “Vom Kriege”: Auszüge und Randglossen (East Berlin, 1957), 38–39.Google Scholar

13. “Über die politische Vorteile und Nachteile der preussischen Landwehr,” in Schwartz, Karl, Leben des Generals Carl von Clausewitz und der Frau Marie von Clausewitz geb. Gräfin von Brühl (Berlin, 1878), 2: 288–93Google Scholar. Clausewitz first gave the memorandum to Gneisenau, who thought better of passing the full text along to Hardenberg, though the latter was evidently apprised of its contents. See Clausewitz to Gneisenau, 17 Dec. 1819, and Hardenberg to Gneisenau, 22 Dec. 1819, in Pertz, and Delbrück, , Gneisenau, 5: 400–401.Google Scholar

14. Paret, Peter, “Bemerkungen zu dem Versuch von Clausewitz, zum Gesandten in London Ernannt zu Werden,” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittle- und Ostdeutschlands 26 (1977): 161–72.Google Scholar

15. See Clausewitz's retrospective accounts of the Prussian reform movement, “Über das Leben und den Charakter von Scharnhorst” (1816–17) and “Nachrichten über Preussen in seiner grossen Katastrophe” (1823–24), in Verstreute kleine Schriften, ed. Hahlweg, Werner (Osnabrück, 1979), 207–41, and 303–492.Google Scholar

16. Blanning, T.C.W., The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London and New York, 1986)Google Scholar, makes a convincing case that this misapprehension, which was matched by an equally misplaced French belief in the inherent decadence of monarchies, contributed to the outbreak of war in 1792.

17. Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein phihsophischer Entwurf (Königsberg, 1795).Google Scholar

18. The question is elegantly surveyed in Howard, Michael, War and the Liberal Conscience (London and New York, 1978), esp. 25–51.Google Scholar

19. Diary entry for 21 Feb. 1831, in Schwartz, , Leben, 2: 313.Google Scholar

20. “Zurückführung der vielen politischen Fragen, welchen Deutschland beschäftigen, auf unserer Gesamtexistenz,” in Politische Schriften und Briefe, 229–38. The Allgemeine Zeitung turned down Clausewitz's article despite a direct appeal to the publisher, Johann Cotta, by a mutual friend, Johann Eichhorn, an official of the Prussian foreign ministry. Hans Rothfels has speculated that Clausewitz's tough-minded devotion to raison d' état may not have sat well with Cotta, whose liberal and cosmopolitan sympathies were well known (Politische Schriften und Briefe, xxxii–xxxiii). In fact, Cotta's personal response to the revolutions of 1830, although cast differently than Clausewitz's, was equally skeptical (see Moran, Daniel, Toward the Century of Words: Johann Cotta and the Politics of the Public Realm in Germany, 1794–1832 [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990], 269–70Google Scholar). More to the point, the AZ was distinguished by its respect for diversity and authoritative opinion, and would probably have published almost anything sent to it with the endorsement of a responsible senior figure like Eichhorn. In this instance, however, the decision may have been taken out of the editor's hands by the ministry in Munich, which was determined to avoid being drawn into Prussia's impending police action in Poland (ibid., 264). No correspondence touching the rejection of Clausewitz's article survives; but the overall level of intrigue surrounding the AZ and other Bavarian periodicals at the time was high.

21. The letter appeared in the Zeitung des Grossherzogtums Posen on 21 July 1831, and was widely reprinted. See Paret, Peter, “An Anonymous Letter by Clausewitz,” Journal of Modern History 42, no. 2 (1970): 184–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. “Über das Leben und den Charakter von Scharnhorst” in Verstreute kleine Schriften, 207–41. On Clausewitz's decision not to publish it, see Gneisenau to Clausewitz, 7 Apr. 1817, and Clausewitz to Gneisenau, 28 Apr. and [May] 1817, in Pertz, and Delbrück, , Gneisenau, 5: 203–4, 213, and 221Google Scholar. There is no question the essay's contents were politically sensitive. Ranke, who finally published it fifteen years later in his Historisch-politische Zeitschrift 1 (1832): 175–222Google Scholar, still found it expedient to eliminate two passages that portrayed the king's relations with the Prussian reformers in an unflattering light. These silent deletions were first exposed in Lehmann, Max, Schamhorst (Leipzig, 1887), 2: 639–41.Google Scholar

23. “Unsere Kriegsverfassung” (1819), in Politische Schriften und Briefe, 142–53.

24. Darnton, Robert, “What Was Revolutionary about the French Revolution?” New York Review of Books 35, nos. 21–22 (19 01 1989): 3.Google Scholar

25. On War, 87.