“Der Gebirgskrieg” di Franz Kuhn von Kuhnenfeld: i precursori e il caso italiano nella guerra in montagna

Abstract

War in the mountains was studied by numerous authors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: among the first Pierre-Joseph de Bourcet (1700-1780) in full Enlightenment, a period in which topographic surveys were conducted on a large scale and detailed cartography was produced parts of the Alps. In the first half of the nineteenth century, after the Napoleonic wars, the theoretical effort turned mainly to understand war as political or organizitive fact: however Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) and Antoine-Henry de Jomini (1779-1869) faced the topic, but the Austrian Franz Kuhn von Kuhnenfeld (1817-1896) dealt with it autonomously, exerting considerable influence on subsequent military thought and above all on the Italian one from 1870 onwards. However, no theorist had considered the possibility that extended wars could be fought in the mountains, but only secondary or subsidiary operations, that is, connected to the course of the war on the plains. In other words, the mountain was not considered a possible operational factor.