\nThe French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars honestly make a lot more sense when you remember that the British literally operated on the principle of ‘officer’s commissions are pieces of property we auction out to rich failsons with literally zero competency checking besides making sure the check clears’.
In an island country where the Navy is the outward-facing force, the Army largely exists to preempt the possibility of any other army taking over, in which capacity “alignment with existing dynamics of social power” is an advantage against potential subversion.
Like, the Napoleonic army very explicitly represented untethered officers as a power base capable of displacing the established social order, which the British system had very explicitly been arranged to prevent since the New Model Army in the English Civil War.
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