Winner of the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award 2023 (Reference) “’The God of War’ is near to revealing himself, because we have heard his prophet.” So wrote Jean Colin, naming Napoleon the God of War and Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, comte de Guibert, as his prophet. Guibert was the foremost philosopher of the Military Enlightenment, dedicating his career to systematizing warfare in a single document. The result was his magnum opus, the General Essay on Tactics, which helped to lay the foundation for the success of French armies during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It is presented here in English for the first time since the 1780s, with extensive annotation and contextualization.

The essays in this volume examine the historical place of revolutionary warfare on both sides of the Atlantic, focusing on the degree to which they extended practices common in the eighteenth century or introduced fundamentally new forms of warfare.