Lübcke, C. Kurmainzer Militär im ersten und zweiten Koalitionskrieg

The military of the Electorate of Mainz made an extremely remarkable development in the second half of the 18th century. From an army that was mainly used for representative and police tasks within the empire during the ancien régime, it developed within a few years into a battle-hardened field army.

In addition to imperial execution tasks, it was above all the conflict with the French Revolution that shaped the development of the Kurmainz army. In the fight against the French revolutionary army and after the loss of the imperial fortress of Mainz, the years 1799 and 1800 saw a change from a fixed, rigid defence to a flexibly conducted defensive war, which bore clear signs of what Clausewitz later defined as a "small war". With the involvement of the armed rural population, the army of the Electorate of Mainz succeeded in defying a numerically far superior opponent for years. The Electoral Mainz Landsturm was the first state-organised general armament of the people on German soil that was successfully implemented. It contributed to keeping the Electorate of Mainz alive even beyond the Imperial Deputation of 1803. Christian Lübcke is a military historian and was a teaching officer for politics, law and history at the Air Force NCO School until the beginning of 2016.