I was talking to a friend today who recently saw the movie Napoleon. She said that she hadn’t known much about Napoleon. I told her that I thought he was one of the most evil men in the 19th century. The reason: he was the inventor of the modern version of conscription, where men could be drafted and send over a thousand miles away to fight. As a result he got a lot of his own soldiers killed.
What I had in mind was the point made by German economist Johann Heinrich von Thunen in 1850.
Here’s what he wrote:
The reluctance to view a man as capital is especially ruinous of mankind in wartime; here capital is protected, but not man, and in time of war we have no hesitation in sacrificing one hundred men in the bloom of their years to save one cannon.
In a hundred men at least twenty times as much capital is lost as is lost in one cannon. But the production of the cannon is the cause of an expenditure of the state treasury, while human beings are again available for nothing by means of a simple conscription order. . . .
When the statement was made to Napoleon, the founder of the conscription system, that a planned operation would cost too many men, he replied: “[Ce n’est rein.] That is nothing. The women produce more of them than I can use.”
This is at the tail end of Christopher Jehn, “Conscription,” in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
The picture above is the famous one by Minard that Edward Tufte uses to show how disastrous Napoleon’s move on Russia was. The thickness of the line shows the number of soldiers alive at a particular place. You can see that it goes from a fire hose at the start to a tiny straw at the end of the return.
Postscript: I remember reading, although I can’t find the source quickly, that by instituting the draft and getting a lot of his fellow Frenchmen killed, Napoleon reduced the average height of the French population by about half an inch. Why? because the draft tended to get big guys.
READER COMMENTS
TMC
Nov 29 2023 at 8:52am
Interesting postscript. I wonder how war over the millennia has shaped human evolution. Killing off the larger and more aggressive men. Women also had to be tougher to compensate, or possibly didn’t have to be as tough as they didn’t need to deal with the most aggressive of the men. I can see the net effect going either way.
Jim Glass
Nov 29 2023 at 7:37pm
The evolutionary scientists are coming around to the idea that a key to humanity’s advancement to where we are now was the beta males getting together in a coordinated manner and killing off all the alpha males, literally. There are no human alpha males (all pop psychology and red pill blathering aside).
Killing off the violent alpha males enabled a rise in cooperative behavior and decline in reactive aggression as seen in no other species. If you don’t think humans have an amazingly low level of reactive aggression, pack a subway car standing-room-only full of chimpanzees, cats, lizards, or any other species, and watch the blood flow out from under the doors. For us it’s only another trip during rush hour. (Predatory aggression is another matter.)
And yes, it did very much change our physical make-up, making us smaller and weaker — specifically, neotenous. Neotony is a ‘regression’ to juvenile features that is common when animals are domesticated, for instance dogs show many juvenile traits of wolves. Humans show many juvenile traits of other apes, a fact that puzzled Darwin from the start. The concept is that humans advanced by domesticating ourselves, as the betas cooperated to purge the big, bad, violent, bully alphas. See Richard Wrangham, as per Did Capital Punishment Create Morality?
BTW, there’s still plenty of proactive, predatory, aggressive aggression in us humans, obviously. To see the difference in a household pet, a cat hissing, standing up on its hind legs and throwing its claws about is engaged in reactive aggression. One stalking silently through the grass until it sinks its fangs in the neck of its prey is engaged in proactive aggression.
The betas’ purging of the alpha males which made us the most pacific of all species reactively didn’t reduce our proactive aggression at all. To the contrary, by increasing our powers of cooperation far beyond those of any other species, it increased our powers of proactive, predatory aggression beyond theirs as well. There’s never been a Napoleon of chimps or bonobos marching 100,000 of them across a continent organized for battle.
All of which finally gives a scientific answer to the ages old question, are humans the most peaceful and philosophical of all species, or the most murderous and violent? Answer: Both.
nobody.really
Nov 30 2023 at 11:40am
Maybe not a Napoleon–but fans of Planet of the Apes will recall there was a Caesar.
Garrett
Nov 29 2023 at 9:04am
I can’t make out the words on the chart.
Garrett
Nov 29 2023 at 9:05am
Never mind it’s bigger in the link
John Hall
Nov 29 2023 at 9:48am
Not an expert in French history by any means, but my recollection was that they began increasing conscription a lot during the French revolution. Napoleon merely inherited that army and ramped it up further.
David Henderson
Nov 29 2023 at 10:47am
I’m not an expert on French history either but my point about Napoleon being the inventor of modern conscription is about his taking these men and sending them over 1,000 miles away to fight. I don’t think the “conscriptors” in previous French regimes did that.
steve
Nov 29 2023 at 12:46pm
Conscription has been around forever. Modern conscription, essentially a universal draft was established before Napoleon at the end of the revolution, but was used mostly to supply enough troops to fight counter-revolutionaries. I believe you are correct that Napoleon was the first to use these conscripts in far away wars. Other European countries quickly followed the example of France and set up their own universal conscriptions but I believe he was first to use them to invade. If memory serves I think it is believed that Napoleon called up between 2-3 million conscripts and about a million were lost (dead, prisoners, never came back).
I have never seen anything about the height changes. There was a lot of speculation about height and mortality in trench warfare in WW1 but have never seen it mentioned for Napoleonic France.
Steve
David Seltzer
Nov 29 2023 at 4:55pm
“my point about Napoleon being the inventor of modern conscription is about his taking these men and sending them over 1,000 miles away to fight.” Yes! The war in Vietnam saw thousands of US conscripts drafted and sent to die some 8400 miles from home. Muhammed Ali famously said, ” I ain’t going no 10,000 miles to help murder and kill other poor people.”
in time of war we have no hesitation in sacrificing one hundred men in the bloom of their years to save one cannon.
I enlisted in 1960, served in SE Asia for nineteen months. I returned to the US in 1964 and enrolled at Indiana University. The more tragic thing I saw was the fear that incarcerated young draft eligible students, fearful of dying in a place they’d scarcely heard of. Most deserving of scorn is McNamara’s comment regarding his role in the war. It was “wrong, terribly wrong.” How does his regret make up for the 58,000 dead combatants and the million or so Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians killed or maimed.
Peter
Nov 29 2023 at 12:03pm
More a general question but how is the Napoleon “modern” conscription army any different than yesteryears, it was still effectively a press gang. I don’t have the feeling, but will admit complete ignorance, that Napoleon was running a modern peace time conscription service to ensure you had an adequate trained conscript supply to call on in war; which is what I think is the defining feature of ‘modern” conscription.
David Henderson
Nov 29 2023 at 12:22pm
You ask:
What made it different, as I mentioned, is that he conscripted them to send them over 1,000 miles away. Some of the 13 colonies had conscription during the Revolutionary War but it was for a local militia. Very different.
Jeff Hummel
Nov 30 2023 at 5:28pm
Far more about the widespread militia conscription in the British colonies and in the U.S. during the Revolutionary War and beyond, making the Mexican War the first in U.S. history to be fought solely with volunteers, see my article “The American Militia and the Origin of Conscription: A Reassessment,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 15 (Fall 2001): 29–77. So what was new and unique at the time about France’s imposition of the “levee en masse“ and Napoleon’s use of it? David suggests the distance Napoleon drove his conscript army, and that is certainly the case. But I would put more emphasis on France’s introduction of the first centrally managed and fully comprehensive national conscription.
Jeff Hummel
Nov 30 2023 at 5:32pm
Forget to include the link to “The American Militia and the Origin of Conscription: A Reassessment,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 15 (Fall 2001): 29–77.
sierra
Nov 29 2023 at 12:09pm
Re shorter French men, I think there’s a Russian saying: don’t be that blade of grass that’s too tall. Literally the case here.
Craig Pirrong
Nov 29 2023 at 4:30pm
The French conscription system–the “levee en masse“–was an innovation of the Revolutionary Republic introduced in 1793. It resulted in the creation of armies far larger than those mustered by France’s foes, such as Austria and Prussia. In 1797 the system was changed to one of annual “classes” of maturing age cohorts.
That said, Napoleon certainly pushed the French conscription system to its limits. After the Russian disaster he resorted to calling up recruiting classes early, resulting in younger and younger men being dragged into the army–and their graves.
Also worth noting that Peter I of Russia introduced conscription in the early-17th century. The Russian system as particularly oppressive. Typically each village was required to supply one conscript, who would serve for 25 years–effectively for life. It was not uncommon for villages to hold funerals for those who had been conscripted.
Matthias
Dec 2 2023 at 4:46am
They drafted men. Women and children are smaller on average.
So even if they don’t articularly target tall men, the average would go down.
(Of course, if they manage to get proportionally more civilian casualties, war might increase the average height.
But not sure average height is something we should care about in this context? Either way, it’s awful.)
Gerry
Dec 3 2023 at 3:11pm
The Russian invasion of 1812 must be put in context. During the entry into Russian territory, allied troops were abandoning the campaign, up to 1,000 per day. These were not conscripts. They were allied soldiers from countries that Bonaparte controlled. This can be seen in the graph.
The worst losses occurred during the battle of Borodino before reaching Moscow and of course the disastrous march back during the brutal Russian winter. During one river crossing, many died. No doubt it was one of Napoleon’s worst military campaigns. Complete lack of judgment and strategy.
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