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Featured Review
| David A. Bell. The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2007. Pp. x, 420. $27.00.
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| The wars revolutionary France waged from 1792 on helped radicalize the revolution, as the revolution, more gradually, radicalized war. Political and social change made possible new motivations for military service and new manpower policies, which after much trial and error led to changes in the army's organization, tactics, and operations. Initially the wars were defensive, even as they strengthened the Left in the Convention. New ideological fervor and traditional French interests turned them into wars of conquest. Opponents of the revolution were slow to recognize the new that emerged from the seeming disorder of the French forces; but that German military circles began to debate such matters as the value of enthusiasm in combat indicates that foreigners, too, were coming to understand that a transformation of war had begun. |
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Just as the generation that experienced it, historians have not been blind to the magnitude of this transformation. In the nineteenth century they interpreted the changes as important steps toward war in the age of industrialization and nationalism. In the twentieth century they saw the transformation as anticipating aspects of the wars of the modern age, whether limited or total. Early on they also recognized that military change could not be interpreted in isolation, since war and society acted on each other, and the push and pull between them occurred in all areas: political, social, and cultural. This interaction was, of course, not unique to France in the 1790s. It is perennial, and some historians have always been attentive to its variety and reach, even in this country in the 1960s, when it was not uncommon to hear war dismissed as a problematical subject of study and teaching. From Voltaire and Johannes von Müller, who based his history of the Swiss on his reading of their passion for freedom and their passion for war, to Thomas Babington Macaulay, Jules Michelet, Leopold von Ranke, Jakob Burckhardt, and their successors, historians who integrate the study of war, politics, and culture in their interpretations have found the omnipresence and significance of the interaction a rewarding subject, even as they have been challenged by its breadth. Historians habitually maneuver between generalization and the unique fact. Here they must also decide how far to pursue the particulars of the two interacting extremes, war and peace. |
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The subject of David A. Bell's book—the changes in thinking about war and in the conduct of war from the French Revolution to the Empire—demands this broad integrative perspective, and his work is exposed to its challenges. That a pronounced contemporary orientation informs his study adds to the analytic complexity. Like others before him, though with greater insistence on the character of totality of the changes after 1789, and on basic identities between then and today, Bell analyzes the new conceptualization and conduct of war. But he goes further and argues that two contradictory elements—the Enlightenment's belief in the disappearance of war as humanity progresses, and the French Revolution's tendency to identify and treat its enemies as evil—have come to dominate current thinking about war. Today, Bell writes in his introduction, "it has become very difficult to discuss war in non-apocalyptic terms"—surely too broad an assumption, but one that is thematically significant. It leads him to ask why "the West [has] returned again and again to the twin visions of an end to war and apocalyptic war?" In his book he intends to "explore why and how the pattern began" (p. 5). A few pages further he adds that he is trying to show "how the modern culture of war and peace first took shape" (p. 18). |
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