Six’s Generals

A data pipeline and quantitative analysis of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic military careers

Overview

Between 1789 and 1815, France transformed its army root and branch. The Old Regime had structured military careers by seniority, lineage, and the venal sale of offices; the Revolution dissolved those structures wholesale. Careers that had taken a generation to advance compressed into years. Whether a man broke into the officer corps — and how quickly he rose once inside — depended less on birth than on the timing of his entry into service and on what the Republic needed from him that week.

These dynamics survive in extraordinary detail in Georges Six’s Dictionnaire biographique des généraux et amiraux français de la Révolution et de l’Empire (1934), a two-volume work containing biographical entries for 2,206 generals and admirals. Each entry is a compact chronological record — rank promotions, unit assignments, campaign participations, wounds, honors — set down clause by clause in a consistent semicolon-delimited prose style. The dictionary is, in effect, a longitudinal panel dataset in prose form.

This project consists of two companion pieces:

The pipeline converts Six’s prose into structured, machine-readable data. It covers digitization via OCR, page-level cleaning, entry assembly across page boundaries, entry enrichment (errata, cross-references, date propagation), and clause-by-clause parsing into typed biographical events.

The quantitative introduction uses the resulting dataset to examine eight questions: how rank structures worked and how fast careers moved; where generals came from; which battles mattered most and how they clustered; how unit assignments and career roles were distributed; what post-career provisions looked like; and how the imperial honor economy functioned — both as an institution and as a response to individual battlefield performance.

Selected findings

  • Promotion times at every rank level collapsed during the Revolution (median ~1 year per step), partially recovered under the Empire (~4 years), but never returned to Old Regime pace (~5–6 years). The shift is over-determined: seniority rules abolished, army expanded from 180K to 700K men, performance displacing birth as the criterion for advancement.
  • There is essentially no individual “momentum” in promotion speed within eras (r = 0.003), with one exception: a within-Revolution correlation of r = 0.13 suggests modest merit-selection even inside the accelerated environment.
  • The Arc de Triomphe inscriptions are not a representative sample of the war’s battles — they systematically over-represent engagements where Napoleon was personally present.

Resources

Dataset available on request.