David Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (New York: Mariner, 2008)
Biography: David A. Bell is currently an historian at Princeton University in the fields of Early Modern and Modern Europe with a particular interest in cultural and political history of France in the 17th and 18th Centuries.
Overview: This book was written specifically for the everyday reader. Bell sets out to explore the culture of war. As such it is not so much an exploration of archival sources, but rather a very digestible work that has its arguments embedded in sketches and stories rather than analysis alone. Bell attempts to answer the central question of why the west has returned again and again to twin visions of “an end to war” and apocalyptic war. He sets out to show how and why the pattern began, shortly after the French Revolution.
Central Thesis: The intellectual transformations of the Enlightenment and political fermentation of 1789-92 provided new understandings of war that made possible the cataclysmic intensification of the fighting over the next 23 years.
Scope of Book:
- Prior to French Revolution, European aristocratic culture placed real limits on what was permissible with the result that war inflicted less collateral damage than it had previously, or would do subsequently.
- Total warfare has several linked features: massive mobilization of state resources; the indiscriminate targeting of civilian as well as military life; the drive to exterminate the enemy (take no prisoners/scorched earth type stuff); and destructiveness of an enormous scale and intensity.
- Bell debunks two common historical theories about why war changed so much during this period. Most historians attribute this to ideology and nationalism as two primary factors. Bell shows that it was instead a new perception of the armed forces and militarism that contributed to wars of such a vast scale.
- He explores the culture of war during this period to look at the way war ceased to be seen as an ordinary part of the social order and began to appear as something entirely apart from the proper course of history.
- Two movements frame the change in outlook on warfare in the mid to late 18th Century:
- Enlightenment thinking that history was leading toward a perpetual peace
- French revolution- brought down aristocratic culture
- These two collided: apocalyptic war to end all wars required to achieve perpetual peace
- He finds an emergent ideological commitment to absolute peace, which “transformed peace from a moral imperative into a historical one,” thus opening “the door to the idea that in the name of future peace, any and all means might be justified—including even exterminatory war” (p. 77)
- The “first torch of total war” following the French Revolution and amalgamation of Old and New French volunteer armies was applied to insurgents at Vendee. It was total because of its erasure of combatant/non-combatant lines and “we destroyed the village to save” line of thinking. (p. 184)
- As French society mobilized completely, their opponents found that they also needed to do so, thus war escalated to a kind of totality.
- As Napoleon came to power, so too did notions of the military separate from civilian society.
- Napoleon as the world’s first media general and first post-revolutions Populist
- Total war ended in Russia with an army transformed to a skeleton of what it once was. The Grande Armee that once burned and pillaged its way to Moscow was left in shambles.
Problems:
- Overexaggerates how the storming of the Bastille went down. Really only a few had arms.
- “From Portugal to the Tyrol to Russia, insurgents declared total war on [Napoleon’s empire]” Purports that the entire area controlled by the French went up in arms in insurgent warfare, but really that was only in Spain. (p 265)
- Exaggerates the bloodshed. Bell says the French lost 1 mil KIA- In fifteen years the French lost 86,500 KIA, 1 million was the total casualty figure.
Commentary: Very interesting take on warfare and culture from a French cultural historian. Of particular note are his ideas of militarism.