Lawson’s review of The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It by David A. Bell
Nonfiction history paperback released by Mariner Books 16 Jan 08

I had originally read this book for my own enjoyment, as I’m a history nerd and Napoleonic history does it for me. However, when Gwen’s review of The Spymaster’s Lady went up, I remembered some of the historical aspects of the book and my view of the characterization of Annique changed because of Bell’s slant on some of the things that she’d gone through in France during the French Revolution. Though this is a history book, not a romance, it sheds some interesting light on what people were dealing with more than just the battles from 1792-1815 and the shifts in the view of the military and warfare. 

Though Napoleon is listed in the title, there’s more time spent on the Ancien Régime of Europe and the French Revolution than Napoleon himself. What this does, though, is offer a basis of comparison of Europe before, during and after the changes in 1792-1815. What Bell does is outline first the roles of the nobility in pre-1792 France. Though it’s generally taught in schools as the period when warfare was considered “civilized” in the way that two armies met at an agreed upon spot, discussed terms, had some maneuvers, then whoever seemed to be ahead was declared the winner. Warfare was conducted in the summer months, and the rest of the year the officers would go back to court, as most of them were aristocrats.

What starts to change, however, is the unrest in France and the subsequent limiting of the king’s power, the rise of the National Assembly, the seeming betrayal of the king and his beheading. Through all of this there’s a new rhetoric arising about the nature and view of war. War was the realm of the aristocrats, the soldiers, for there was no real standing army, were uneducated near draftees, but with the downfall of the king, and later the abolition of the nobility lead to a new view of war and its participants. After the king is beheaded by the guillotine and France is beset by declarations of war by other European powers, the military needs to be reorganized.

The campaigns and actions of the French army are now seen and recorded by a new type of soldier. A middle class volunteer, almost citizen army (for an interesing take on this read Citizen Soldiers by Stephen Ambrose about the American soldiers in Europe in WWII) who has heard the words of Robespierre, Danton, and Marat about the need for perpetual peace to benefit society. Those words had been inspired by Rousseau, Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers who were dreaming of a better society. Unfortunately when the radicals such as Robespierre gain control of the Committee of Public Safety, this call for peace is surpassed by the call for a cleansing war to eliminate the dissenters against the Republic, calling forth the Terror.

Part of the Terror is the actions in the Vendee, which is a department in northwestern France, near the Atlantic. What happens in the Vendee started as a common small revolt in demand of better treatment and the need for food. However, things get out of control when the church is suppressed, and there’s a call for defense on a religious level against the Republic which doesn’t have the resources to feed all the people of France (a common problem in wheat shortages throughout French history). The change here is when the Vendee revolt starts to fall apart, the French army instead of cleaning up the matter instead starts what we call today total war.

Men, women, children, the old, the infirm and even priests are not safe from the wrath of the French army, which leaves an interesting mark on the public consciousness of France. The change in tactics because of the Vendee is felt quickly by those at war with France, and it carries on from the fall of Robespierre to the end of Napoleon’s career in 1815. The other example of something like the Vendee is the actions of the Spanish against Napoleon in 1808-1814, when the term guerrilla warfare was introduced into the lexicon.

Bell uses a lot of sources, such as speeches, newspaper articles and letters to show the mindset of the French Revolutionaries. Each year from 1789-1795 (the “start” to the end of the Terror) the rhetoric, the attitudes, and the feelings of the politicians and leaders changes so that the shift is seen as almost a polarization in those 6 short years. When Napoleon then gains control in 1799 and spends basically the next 15 years fighting nearly every other power in Europe, the view of his actions by the French people was seen as bringing them glory, even though in his battles so many of the young French died.

What is left then, after 1815, is a consciousness of war and the military as a society of their own. There are no longer pampered aristocrats who play at war with a noble opponent, but strategists that have worked their way up the ranks and performed well. The parallels can be drawn to current views of the military in the US, all of which were born in the violence of the French Revolution.

So, in reading all of this military and cultural history, Annique has a new light shed on her. The French Revolution was not an easy time to live in. The exact body count of the Terror, the Vendee and other minor purges that sought to save the republic from the people who sought to destroy it may never be known. However, the reasons why Annique is the character she is, why her motivations are what they are and how she copes with life have been shaped by the birth of total war.

It’s hard for me to grade this book. Being nonfiction, it is presenting fact, but it’s still an argument of point of view, and the aspects that Bell gives to defend his idea of the birth of total war during the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars is put forth in a way that gives attention to detail as well as deftly explaining the point. It also gives a good entry into the perceptions that people had of life an what was expected of them in the Ancien Régime, the French Revolution, and after Napoleon.

Grade: A

Between 1792 and 1815, warfare on an unprecedented scale ripped jaggedly through Europe. It caused millions of deaths, affected every state on the continent, and saw the creation and destruction of the greatest European empire since the days of the Caesars–Napoleon’s empire. It was the first total war.

It was during this time that modern attitudes towards war were born. During the eighteenth century, many educated Europeans thought war was disappearing from the civilized world. So when large-scale conflict broke out during the French Revolution, they could not resist treating it as “the last war”–a final, terrible spasm of redemptive violence that would usher in a reign of perpetual peace. Ever since, the dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war have been bound tightly together in the Western world, right down to the present day, in which hopes for an “end to history” after the cold war quickly gave way to renewed fears of full-scale slaughter.

The First Total War tells this story through a mixture of narrative and analysis. After an introduction which lays out the principal argument, the early chapters describe the aristocratic culture of war which prevailed before the Revolution, and the new currents of thought which arose during the Enlightenment. Subsequent chapters explore the impact of these ideas during the French Revolution of 1789, as the new revolutionary state first tried to renounce war, but quickly ended up embroiled in a massive international and civil conflict. The final chapters offer a new interpretation of the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, discuss the fate of his empire, and discuss the implications of the story for the present day.