Napoleonic Warfare and the line of battle.

The line of battle in the Napoleonic wars will basically remain the same: a line of musketeers in the center, cannons on the flanks, with cavalry on the furthest ends of the flanks. In the early cabinets wars of the kings, the line of musketeers was strung out, would slowly alternate fire with moving forward until bayonets were fixed for a melee charge. The cannons would do what they could, and the cavalry did what it did.

It is the composition of the army, and what Napoleon will do with it that will be different. Napoleon's infantry will be citizen soldiers and not hirelings of a king. At first they will be revolutionary volunteers, and later "levee en masse" conscripts.

Napoleon will have his hot blooded infantry form into columns and then have those columns move as fast as they can to smash through and melee with the enemy infantry line. The enemy infantry, moving slower, and not used to this kind of thing, will break sooner under the greater speed, weight and ferocity of the larger army. Or as Napoleon put it: "The strength of an army, like the power in mechanics, is estimated by multiplying the mass by the rapidity."

Napoleon, being an artillery man, also used cannons differently. He will bring more of them to the battlefield, and will have them all fire at once into the center of the enemy line to smash a hole in it for his infantry columns to run through and widen.

Another difference between the Napoleonic armies and the cabinet war armies is that Napoleon's armies did not take trains of supply wagons with them to battle like the cabinet war armies did. Cabinet war armies used supply wagons in order to prevent the looting of civilian farms on the way to battle and to ensure supply. But this made their marches slower then Napoleon's armies. Napoleon's armies "lived off the land" (i.e. looted) as they marched, so they could march faster.

With this faster rate of march, Napoleon was often able to execute what is called a "defeat in detail." If he had multiple forces moving against him that could add up to a larger army if they got together, he would then march faster to catch each force by itself and destroy it before it could link up with the others.