The Partisan’s Metamorphosis: From Freelance Military Entrepreneur to German Freedom Fighter,1740 to 1815

Abstract

The unreliability of the ‘mercenary’ is legendary. However, this reputation is distorted, and the same is true of the mercenary’s prima facie antagonist, the ‘partisan’. In the eighteenth century the latter term was typically used to designate a regular detachment leader employed in skirmishes. Here, military action and military economic principles had survived, which gave the fighters a seemingly more archaic appearance than the prevailing pattern of standing armies. While the eighteenth-century term ‘partisan’ referred to a detachment leader who was often also a military entrepreneur, it underwent a metamorphosis to ‘freedom fighter’ in the Napoleonic age.