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| 1 Introduction Since the 1960s, Americans’ attitudes toward France have involved a wide array of emotions, from suspicion to anger and even, at times, betrayal. France’s withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s integrated military command in 1966 and its refusal to allow American military aircraft to enter its airspace during the 1986 bombing of Libya deteriorated the congenial American attitudes toward the French, which had been prevalent prior to World War II. The current global war on terror has not changed this opinion, and at times there has been a great deal of hatred of all things French. The “Freedom Fries” movement of 2001–2 that refused to use the word “French” when ordering fast food and the always popular jokes concerning the effeminacy of French arms are reminders of the animosity of Americans to all things French. A recent book titled Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship with France, which received favorable reviews from the Wall Street Journal, documented the history of evil French machinations against America.1 When France offered the United States advice about the dangers of appeasement in early 2010, Minnesota’s Governor Tim Pawlenty replied that it was like “AIG [a company generally held responsible in part for the financial collapse of 2007] lecturing us on financial responsibility.”2 However, this was not always the case. Across a broad spectrum of intellectual activity, America once considered France the model for a wide range of professions, including the profession of arms. Consider this scene from the United States Military Academy at West Point: there is a small classroom of sixteen cadets and a single commissioned officer professor, in this case a major. The cadets listen attentively to the officer as he describes the movements of Napoleon’s Grande Armée from its victory over the unfortunate Austrian General Karl Mack at Ulm, to its subsequent pursuit of the Austrians and their Russian allies. The officer provides a quick summary of Napoleon’s strategic situation, his capabilities and constraints, and his plan to draw the army of the Third Coalition into a decisive battle. The cadets then analyze the French plan and the Allied response, 2 | Introduction identifying the importance of accurate intelligence for battlefield decisionmaking . The officer directs the cadets to the large-scale map of the battle of Austerlitz laid out on tables in the center of the classroom. The cadets each take an icon of either a French or Allied corps commander and describe the situation and actions of their respective icon, moving the pieces through the phases of the battle of Austerlitz. As the cadets brief their parts, the officer asks them to critique the performance of the French and Allied commanders and their decisions and to explain the causes of Napoleon’s greatest victory. The cadets respond with intelligent criticisms and offer their own unique solutions to the tactical problems presented by the battle of Austerlitz. This scene came from the course “The History of the Military Art from 450 through 1900,” which I taught while assigned to the West Point Department of History from 2006 to 2009. Every cadet in their last year at the academy is required to take this military history course, and every instructor teaching the course includes a lesson on the battle of Austerlitz. This lesson was part of the Napoleonic history block that consisted of almost 25 percent of the material in the course. This demonstrates the enduring legacy of Napoleon in the undergraduate officer education of the U.S. Army. The study of Napoleon prepared these cadets to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, just as well as it prepared their predecessors to fight in the Civil War or World War I. However, French influence in the American army was once more than just the use of historical vignettes to teach cadets the history of the art of war. French tactics and military thought reshaped American warfare in the early nineteenth century. Using the 1791 French system of tactics to break a series of defeats in the War of 1812, Winfield Scott introduced French ideas into the American military tradition in 1814. These ideas included a dedication to offensive operations that culminated in an assault, the creation of an infantry army composed of nonspecialized infantry units, a linear but noncontiguous understanding of the battlefield, a desire to combine the effects of all auxiliary arms into the main infantry battle, and the adoption of nondogmatic tactics executed through the initiative...

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