Jomini, Antoine‐Henri

Jomini, Antoine‐Henri (1779–1869), authority on the art of war.A Swiss citizen in Napoleon's service, Jomini wrote profusely while becoming a general officer and chief of staff to Marshal Michel Ney and then had a long career in the Russian Army.

In his histories of the campaigns of Frederick the Great, the French Revolution, and Napoleon, Jomini expounded what he saw as the essence of the offensive strategy of Napoleonic warfare. In this, he assumed dispersed armies and advocated the use of interior lines of communication and supply, concentration against the center of a too‐dispersed adversary, and turning the flank of an opponent who was too concentrated. Napoleon's victories at Maren go, Ulm, and Jena illustrated this turning movement. Jomini summarized these ideas in his influential Précis de l’art de guerre (1837). Jomini had many expositors who helped educate English‐speaking soldiers in the British empire and the United States.

Beginning in the 1950s, some American military historians incorrectly attributed to Jomini an immense influence on the generals of the U.S. Civil War, who were, of course, influenced by Napoleon.
[See also Clausewitz, Carl von; Strategy: Fundamentals.]

Bibliography

Richard E. Beringer et al., , Why the South Lost the Civil War, 1986.
John Shy , Jomini, in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Peter Paret, 1986.

Archer Jones