One of the legends of the Napoleonic period was that Napoleon had took an outdated ancien régime military system and turned it into a modern military machine. Napoleon's propaganda machine embellished his role in transforming France's military fortunes as well as emphasizing that the Napoleonic army was intimately tied to the person of the Emperor. While this legend fed into Napoleon's cult of personality and both during and after the Empire, it does obscure the innovations and developments in French military thought that preceded Napoleon. A long-view approach of French military history shows that Napoleon was not so much the genesis of change but rather was a beneficiary of reforms who refined a number of preexisting innovations and doctrines.

The Bourbon army's defeats in the Seven Years War had stimulated a number of military intellectuals to look to the deficiencies of French command, tactics, and organization with an eye to reform. One of the more prominent of these reformers was Comte de Guibert a French General and intellectual who had been greatly influenced by Frederick the Great's organization of his army. Guibert's treatises like his 1772 essay Essai général de tactique called for a greater flexibility and mobile operations and eschewed attention to minutia like precise drilling formations. The core of such a mobile force for Guibert were the experiments conducted by duc de Broglie in the 1760s in parsing out an army into self-contained divisions that would combine all arms (infantry, cavalry, artillery). Guibert argued that such a divisional system imparted not only greater mobility but also focused commanders on what should be their prime motivation: finding and destroying the enemy. Guibert also called for a greater professionalization and training of the officer corps, which while it would retain an elite status, would focus on warfare as a science.

Guibert was far from alone in wanting to reform the Bourbon army, as the Broglie's divisional experiments indicated. Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval spearheaded a significant military reform of France's artillery park in the 1770s which systematized and simplified the French artillery system. One contemporary military theorist of Guibert and Gribeveaval's pupil, Jean du Teil, proposed a greater role for the artillery. Pierre-Joseph Bourcet, like Guibert called for a greater professionalization of military education and developed guidelines for an embryonic staff system.

The collective results of these ancien régime reformers was somewhat mixed before the Revolution. The French army of the American Revolution was certainly more professionally-run than that of the Seven Years War and Rochambeau's staff included a young officer Louis-Alexandre Berthier. But while it was easy to philosophize on the ideal military structure and tactics, it was much harder to put them into practice. Reforms like the divisional or the Gribeveaval systems were only implemented in a patchwork fashion in the 1780s. Moreover, the military intellectuals of the pre-1789 period were seldom in agreement and there was considerable tension over the right direction of reform, with debates about the superiority of certain tactical systems like mixed order eating up a lot of space in military treatises. Finally, reform was not just a matter of military effectiveness but also a political process as well. Reforms had to take into account French budgets as well as the existing sociopolitical order. The professionalization of military education still had to cater to the minor nobility and careers were still dependent upon patronage and privileged access to elite social circles.

The Revolution helped break some of the institutional and political blockages that prevented a wider reform. Guibert's Enlightenment-influenced system was ideologically in resonance with a number of the Revolutionary factions, especially his idea that the ideal soldier was a citizen-soldier volunteer fighting for his patrie. The pragmatic elements of military reform also played into the philosophes' vision of a revivified and rational French state. The simplicity of a number of theorists' approach to military affairs also lent itself well to a political order that was increasingly chaotic after 1789.

But while the Revolution solved a number of these issues with regards to military reform, it also created a whole host of new problems. Not the least of these was the exile and death of so many of the ancien régime's noble officers. This created a vacuum within the French military leadership that was initially quite hard to fill when the Revolutionary Wars began with the execution of Louis XVI. The Terror and the rise of the Jacobins also injected a politicization of the armed forces as deputies and other political minders could interfere with military operations.

There was a good deal of latent strength beneath this chaos and seeming collapse of French military fortunes in the early phase of the Revolutionary Wars. The threat of Austro-Prussian invasion was never quite as strong as Jacobin propaganda held, and the allied coalition surrounding the nascent Republic was politically brittle and far from a united front. Fear of invasion actually worked to implement reforms like the levee en masse and using some of the Guiberts's ideas by virtue of their simplicity. The political interference of Paris into military operations did work to the latter's detriment at times, but it also melded the military much closer to politics than it had been under the Bourbons. Napoleon was only one example of a general whose career was aided by making the right friends in the Republic's government. The Republic's armies had by the mid-1790s had somewhat stabilized the situation in France's military fortunes and were themselves becoming an institution in their own right.

Although subsequent Napoleonic mythmaking and propaganda would emphasize his own rising to the top of the greasy pole as a fait accompli in Brumaire, Napoleon was only one of several popular generals that various conspirators within the Directory were hoping to use to kill off the existing French government. Emmanel Sieyès, one of the key plotters in Brumaire, would famously quip, "I need a sword," in other words, a man who could command the loyalty of one of the few powerful institutions that possessed a great deal of popular legitimacy within the Republic, the army. Bernadotte, a general and Minister of War, was the favorite of the Neo-Jacobin factions that wanted to reestablish the Revolution's leveling tendencies. Jean-Baptiste Jourdan toyed around with many different factions. Lazare Hoche, who enjoyed almost as much fame as Napoleon had unfortunately died of tuberculosis before Sieyès's initial soundings towards him could bear fruit. Jean Moreau, the youngest general in the army, refused to compromise himself with politics despite entreaties to do so.

As Consul and later as Emperor, Napoleon would systematize much of the Revolutionary reforms and add his own tweaks to them. Napoleon's chief of staff Berthier greatly expanded the systems championed by the likes of Bourcet. Napoleon also professionalized his logistical system of the French army which made it a much more sustainable force in the field. But Napoleon's chief innovation in this period was the propagation of his corps system. Corps d'Armée were much like the divisional system in that they were self-contained but greatly expanded in size. Berthier's staffwork as well as a crop of corps commanders seasoned by the Revolutionary Wars made the Corps d'Armée an incredibly potent system. The corps could move semi-independently and under ideal conditions, converge against an enemy with unprecedented speed.

Yet for all of Napoleon's genius in refining these various Revolutionary era systems, none of his innovations were arcane French secrets. Military reform was a European-wide phenomenon and the major armies of the pre-1789 period all had their own young Turks and would-be reformers. Defeats at the hands of Napoleon often galvanized these reformers to use Napoleon's own methods to reform their own armies. These reforms were also tied to the growing sophistication of European infrastructure such as roads as well as more productive agriculture. Napoleon's logistical system operated on the basic idea that "war should feed war" was predicated on using local supplies for the troops. Such foraging would have been impractical in prior generations and Napoleonic requisitions strained even the improved agriculture of the late-eighteenth century.

Napoleon also operated under the benefit of fusing both the executive of the state with the head of the armed forces. This meant he could direct the energies of the Empire towards military ends, allowing him to recoup losses and sustain a war effort much longer than other powers. This became a liability for Napoleon though as his political fortunes were tied to his military ones. As other militaries improved, he could no longer deliver the same kind of crushing victories as he did in the earlier stages of the Consulate and Empire.