Another approach to a war of peoples was also sketched out during the ‘second war of independence’. The future president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, observed in 1882 that the British, who customarily abstained from personally mistreating civilians, had particularly targeted places where the population organized into a militia were putting up resistance to the former colonial power.24 The association between militia organization and bombardment of cities was certainly not accidental: once the population are armed for national defence, they almost logically become a target in war. According to this more modern view, the people are no longer a passive factor but the seat of sovereignty and capable of self-organization. Where they were previously an object of politics, they become its primordial subject. And it was not accidental that these incidents should have taken place at a time when revolutionary wars in Europe had placed on the agenda a new conception of sovereignty, concerning the relation between state and citizens.
These incidents aroused debate on the legitimacy of such actions, and on the laws of warfare in general. Since the mid-nineteenth century was a time of peace in Europe, it was the American Civil War that provided the occasion for the first modern codification of the laws of war. The famous ‘General Orders number 100’ issued by Francis Lieber on behalf of President Lincoln, and generally known as the Lieber Code, is rich in instructive ambiguities in this respect. Continuing the line of ‘national wars’ begun in 1792, Lieber laid down that ‘the citizen or native of a hostile country is thus an enemy, as one of the constituents of the hostile state or nation, and as such is subjected to the hardships of the war’ (Art. 21). Thus, the classic distinction between soldier and civilian no longer applies, once the civilian is a citizen (which in Rousseau’s formulation means a member of the sovereign against whom war is waged) and the citizen is a soldier.25
Lieber immediately goes on to add (Art. 22),
Nevertheless, as civilization has advanced during the last centuries, so has likewise steadily advanced, especially in war on land, the distinction between the private individual belonging to a hostile country and the hostile country itself, with its men in arms. The principle has been more and more acknowledged that the unarmed citizen is to be spared in person, property, and honour as much as the exigencies of war will admit.
Articles 21 and 22 are based on very different modes of reasoning, ‘logical’ in the first case and ‘historical’ in the second. As part of the sovereign, the citizen may be the target of military actions, yet the ‘advance of civilization’ has imposed the norm that unarmed citizens should be spared. These two developments are mutually contradictory. On the one hand, the political individual becomes a citizen, a quality that implies, among other things, the duty of taking part in defence of the country in case of war – modern citizenship, particularly in the institutional forms of conscript army or militia, thus tends to merge into the armed force of a state. On the other hand, nascent international law sought to separate citizen from soldier, to make soldiers the only legitimate target and grant a principled immunity to civilian citizens.
Another and still more important aspect is that Lieber’s ‘General Orders number 100’ distinguished between land war and naval war, determining that the ‘advance of civilization’ applied especially to the former. In other words, naval war is less civilized than war on land, quite simply because the theatres of naval warfare generally lay outside of Europe. Naval warfare had its codes and practices, largely in phase with those of colonial war. The Crimean War, however, marked a break with this point of view. In terms of strategic doctrine, it confirmed a technological development dating from the 1840s, steam shipping, which challenged the distinction between a European sphere of limited war and a peripheral sphere of unlimited war. The French strategic thought of the ‘Jeune École’ played a key role in the elaboration of the corresponding doctrine.26
In 1844, the French naval strategist François d’Orléans, Prince de Joinville, saw steam shipping as a way of reestablishing the glory of the French navy.27 He had the idea of reviving the old French naval strategy of a systematic attack on British trade by corsairs.28 While set battle had always been fatal to the French, in the face of the superior forces of the British navy, war against commerce, a ‘vital principle for England’, had always been crowned with success.29 Technological progress now made it possible to refine this strategy: steamships differed from sail in being largely independent of meteorological conditions, and so could be used to wage lightning attacks on the ports and coastal cities of the enemy nation.
A real strategic revolution was thus heralded, which took shape in two phases, first of all at the time of the Crimean War, then that of the Paris Commune and the advent of the Third Republic. Traditionally, navies had two objectives: in peacetime they served as a ‘maritime police’, and thus for protection of trade routes against pirates and corsairs: in time of war, they intervened against rival navies. In both cases, the element of the navy was the sea. This is what changed with the Crimean War of 1853–56, in which Russia was opposed by a coalition formed by Great Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire, and the navy now intervened also against coastlines.30 Odessa was bombarded in 1854, and Taganrog the following year.31 In other words, the Crimean War brought an end to the strategic separation between land and sea.32 The Third Republic saw the second phase of this break. In 1886, admiral Théophile Aube was appointed minister of the navy, and in his person the Jeune École made its entry into French naval strategy. Its protagonists were fervent republicans, ardent defenders of colonialism, and the minister himself had spent the greater part of his career in the colonies.33 The Jeune École, strongly influenced by the Paris Commune, drew two conclusions from this experience of social revolution: on the political level, imperialism had to open up new markets for France and thereby raise the living standard of the metropolitan proletariat;34 on the military level, the Jeune École strategists were persuaded that the revolutionary threat could be actively used as a weapon in war. Revolts happened when there was economic misery that state apparatuses were incapable of repressing. As a consequence, their political and military strategy consisted in eliminating misery in the metropolis as far as possible, thanks to colonial expansion, and attacking the trade and social cohesion of the enemy. In a word, the aim of their military strategy was to avoid revolution in France and trigger this in the enemy country.
The Prince de Joinville had already pinpointed two strategic targets in a naval war against England: British trade, and the ‘confidence’ of the British people.35 This programme took a more radical turn under the Jeune École. One of the collaborators of minister Aube, Gabriel Charmes, spelled out that ‘it is clear that the bombardment of fortresses will in future be only an accessory operation … It will be undefended coastlines and open cities that are attacked above all.’36 If the first phase of the nineteenth-century naval revolution had abolished the classic separation between land and sea, the second and political phase was to abolish the distinction between military and civilian objectives. This put an end to the firm precept expressed first by the French strategist Antoine-Henri Jomini and then reaffirmed by the American Alfred Thayer Mahan: ‘The organized forces of the enemy are always the principal objective.’37 For the republican strategists of the Jeune École, the armed forces were precisely no longer the principal objective. Since the nation was one, the army being the nation in arms and the citizen being the soldier, it was the whole enemy nation that found itself in the firing line.
These strategists naturally feared that the adversary would employ the same means, and had no illusions as to the possibilities of defence: it was impossible to foresee where the enemy would strike, thus impossible to defend coastlines effectively, unless naval forces were deployed entirely for this purpose, rather than in defence of the colonies and trade routes. Clausewitz’s fundamental principle, that defence is more economical than attack, thus underwent a complete reversal.38 First naval and then air, bombardment was thus more akin to techniques generally described as ‘terrorist’: whereas classic war involved a dialectic of attack and defence, we could say that a terrorist strategy consists in completely