his people; but in the suppression of a rebellion the refractory subjects of the ruling power must all be chastised and subdued.’15 In Europe, the enemy was considered as ‘just’ (justus hostis) inasmuch as it was sovereign states and their regular armies that confronted one another.16 The attribute of justice distinguishes an enemy from a rebel or a criminal. Outside of Europe, on the other hand, the attribute of justice was not applied, and neither combatants nor civilians had this right to protection.
It was thus in regions outside of Europe that most bombings took place. In 1855, the Americans bombed the town of San Juan in Nicaragua, provoking the indignation of the British, who condemned an action ‘without precedent among civilized nations’. But this did not stop their own armed forces from bombing Canton the following year. The Chinese had arrested the crew of a British ship. After intervention by the consul, the authorities agreed to release the prisoners, but refused to make a public apology and give guarantees that such an incident would not happen again. The British then decided to open fire. In London, the Liberal MP Ralph Bernal Osborne justified the action in these terms: ‘Talk of applying the pedantic rules of international law to the Chinese!’17
In the nineteenth century, however, the first cracks already appeared in this binary arrangement, divided between a European sphere, with limited state wars, and a ‘peripheral’ sphere that was the theatre of unlimited war. Quite logically these cracks appeared on the border between the European centre and the colonized periphery, in the US during the ‘second war of independence’ and in Russia during the Crimean War. North America, traditionally external to the space of European international law, was gradually assimilated into the sphere of civilized Christianity.18 As for Russia, it was always situated on the margins of Europe: without being as ‘civilized’ as other European nations, it was nonetheless geographically close and of Christian religion.19 During the war that Great Britain fought with the United States in 1812–15, British naval forces bombarded Baltimore, Washington, and other US cities20 – with the aim, according to the strategist Alfred Mahan – of giving the American people21 concrete experience of war so as to force their government to make peace.22 The people became a factor in war but, according to an old point of view that considered them as a passive element, only capable of explosions of sporadic violence.23 As we shall see, this mode of thinking would structure a good part of air strategy in the twentieth century.
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:
