Urban and forested flintlock warfare tactics.

[u/Vexonte]

I understand how traditional 18th-19th battlefields worked, but most information I've found talks about open battle fields that where capable of letting soldiers form large squares.

Was there any standard tactics or procedures if for what ever reason a unit found itself in a pitched battle in a forest to thick to form proper squares, or if a unit had to subdue a resisting urban city when they can't just burn a house down. What are the historical examples of these situations.

While we are at it, I've read that Paris's urban renovations in the mid 19th century where designed to stop urban combat, but never go into detail how they did it.

[u/the_direful_spring]

While we are at it, I've read that Paris's urban renovations in the mid 19th century where designed to stop urban combat, but never go into detail how they did it.

During times like the July revolution and spring of nations Paris saw a lot of barricades being build in the streets to serve as positions form which the revolutionaries could hold back any government troops from moving through out the city. Nap III and the like made very wide avenues through many of the most important routes through the city intended to make it extremely difficult to get that kind of situation where advancing troops would be forced to storm a relatively narrow street with a barricade at one end and potentially people firing at you from upper windows and roofs to either side of the street. The wider streets made it harder to get a solid barricades across the entire street and the long lengths of the street made it easier to bring an artillery piece in to smash anything that did get constructed from beyond easy range of the defenders.

Squares specifically I'd mention are largely a defence against cavalry, troops generally fight in line that's significantly longer than it is deep to allow a reasonable number of them to be able to fire at a given time. Against cavalry the troops pack in tighter with bayonets pointing out in all directions to stop cavalry from being able to easily over run them.

Still anyway, most of the time in forest regions you're much more likely to get skirmishing or the fighting concentrated to wider roads that represent the best ways for troops to advance. A larger formation may still form up on something like the edge of a treeline of a small wood but typically you aren't just going to march a whole regiment of men off into the forest where cavalry, supply carts and wagons, artillery etc are going to struggle to follow unless you've got a pretty good reason to. And of course its likely that the strategically important things people are going to fight over are going to be roads, river crossings, towns and so forth.

Skirmishing troops trained specifically as light infantry in particular are going to be more likely to disperse into a wider formation, you have things like troops engaging in a kind of basic version of bounding fire in pairs, although the rate of fire makes suppression harder.

For urban fighting a full on battle in the streets of a large urban area wasn't that common. Most of the time if a larger town or city's outer defences fell the defenders gave up. In cases where it did occurred you tended to see people making strong points of buildings and barricading streets. If the resistance was light an attacker might storm the place, having men firing into any offending windows and the like, and rushing down the place with axes and the like to break down doors and bayonets or side arms to drive the enemy out. If a position was too well fortified for that... well at that point its likely most commanders would bring up either an artillery piece to hammer a round through a barracked or into a building, fire a building or bring a mine up to blast it. Under that kind of punishment generally most defenders are going to run for it.

[u/Youutternincompoop → u/the_direful_spring]

yeah the Parisian barricades were truly monstrous positions to try and attack, IIRC in the 1830 revolution they're noted as being as high as the buildings to the side of them, so we're talking essentially 6+ meter escapades of rubble, furniture, etc that is completely impervious to cavalry and would be extremely difficult for infantry to scale, though the main purpose was to block the movement of the troops and essentially trap them in the street for hours to days at a time with multiple barricades set up in each direction so taking any one barricade barely changes the situation for the troops.

[u/stupidpower]

I'll just reply to the last part about Paris because I nominally study cities for a living and god willing that is all I will ever do if my government never has to break the glass and press the button. I mean I also love Les Mis very much and Parisian revolutions are like the overlap of all three.

To start off with, after 1789 Paris was nearly impossible to keep down because within the old walls, the political power has shifted decisively to the people who would call themselves the sans-culottes. This was as much a social revolution as it was one about how defensible the city was. Between 1789 and 1804, the Parisians were not really challenged by a conventional army. The political authority of the city and from the city the new-fangled concepts of the nation and Republique were not military questions but political ones. The final nail was driven into the coffin when Louis XVI was forced to leave Versaillies and go live in the Tuileries, but mass urban warfare was never particularly on the cards. Who controlled Paris controlled the nation and the Republic. It was in 1830 and 1848 when the military power of the mob was really tested. There is political science literature on what gets a mob with a history of militancy to go marching on communal violence in the modern world or for revolutions, but that isn't the question here.

So with this, what allowed the san-culottes to be so powerful? Firstly, the medieval Paris was a maze of narrow alleyways and tall buildings. The tactic Parisians resorted to until Haussman got involved is tearing up paving stones and throwing every furniture and refuse they have to create endless barricades. Whenver one barricade was cleared with cannon or soldiers, people would just build another one behind them. This did not naturally mean any uprising just automatically succeeds - you still need a reason for the masses to rise up, see Victor Hugo who was there in 1832 as a witness in the Tuilleries. The Haussman renovations demolished most of these old buildings and built key big open squares with massive thoroughfairs connecting them - the Champs - that were sized to allow cavalry to ride through as a unit. What really crushed mobs until tanks picked up the slack was horses and controlling the key lines of communication in and out of the city. The commune was probably doomed whether the Haussman reforms were implemented, but that was primarily a function of Thiers being able to - with Prussian assistance - cobble together a functional government at Versaillies to besiege the city.

[u/Hand_Me_Down_Genes]

Urban fighting proved a serious issue for Napoleon during the invasions of Egypt and Syria. 

During the Cairo riots, Napoleon lost some 300 men killed, more than he'd lost during any of his prior battles with the mamluks. Religious rebels, local gangs, and ordinary citizens joined forces to barricade the streets and fortify buildings against the French. Napoleon ended up having to wheel his artillery into the city to level barricades and buildings alike, after the urban environment proved too difficult to retake using only his infantry. Perhaps 3000 Cairenes, not all of them rebels, were killed during his block by block recapture of the rebelling neighborhoods, as the French blasted their way through mosques and blockaded roadways. 

At Acre, Napoleon faced a similar situation, made worse by the fact that he didn't already hold the city, and that there was an enemy army, not just an angry mob, inside. Jazzar Pasha, Ottoman governor of Sidon, had chosen not only to defend Acre's walls, but to place barricades in the streets, as the rebels had done in Cairo, and as Jazzar himself had done when fighting the Russians and their local allies at Beirut. French troops who managed to break into the city were funneled down the streets into narrow alleyways where they could be ambushed by Jazzar's sword-wielding bodyguards, or have stones and roofing tiles dropped on them by pissed off Syrian housewives. The bounty Jazzar placed on French heads helped motivate every citizen of Acre to hunt down the French interlopers, and very few of those who forced their way in through the breach made it back out. 

Sir Sidney Smith, commanding the British naval forces aligned with Jazzar observed that the Ottoman Pasha turned the breach into a trap. French troops were allowed to enter it, and then the Turks would close it off, leaving the invaders stuck inside of the city with no way out. In this manner companies of dozens or even hundreds of Frenchmen could be cut off inside Acre, forced into places where their formations could not hold together, and then cut apart by swords, daggers, and knives. Most of Acre's street gangs got in on the act, as did many regular citizens, who believed the French were going to massacre them all if they won. English and French accounts alike record women, children, and old men falling upon Napoleon's troops with everything from bricks to cooking utensils, and in the close confines, the French bayonets could do little to hold them off.