The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know itHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007 - 420 pages The twentieth century is usually seen as "the century of total war." But as the historian David Bell argues in this landmark work, the phenomenon acutally began much earlier, in the era of muskets, cannons, and sailing ships -- in the age of Napoleon. In a sweeping, evocative narrative, Bell takes us from campaigns of "extermination" in the blood-soaked fields of western France to savage street fighting in ruined Spanish cities to central European battlefields where tens of thousands died in a single day. Between 1792 and 1815, Europe plunged into an abyss of destruction. It was during this time, Bell argues, that our modern attitudes toward war were born. In the eighteenth century, 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. As this brilliant interpretive history shows, a war for such stakes could only be apocalyptic, fought without restraint or mercy. 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 the hopes for an "end to history" after the cold war quickly gave way to renewed fears of full-scale slaughter. With a historian's keen insight and a journalist's flair for detail, Bell exposes the surprising parallels between Napoleon's day and our own -- including the way that ambition "wars of liberation," such as the one in Iraq, can degenerate into a gruesome guerrilla conflict. The result is a book that is as timely and important as it is unforgettable. |
From inside the book
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Page 3
... Bonaparte himself explained , foreshadowing Cooper : " It has cost us dearly to re- turn ... to the principles that characterized the barbarism of the early ages of nations , but we have been constrained ... to deploy against the common ...
... Bonaparte himself explained , foreshadowing Cooper : " It has cost us dearly to re- turn ... to the principles that characterized the barbarism of the early ages of nations , but we have been constrained ... to deploy against the common ...
Page 8
... Bonaparte , despite his taste for conquest , was no conscious advocate of total war ( still less was he the bloodthirsty megalomaniac of legend ) . But it was the radical intensification of war that brought him to prominence and power ...
... Bonaparte , despite his taste for conquest , was no conscious advocate of total war ( still less was he the bloodthirsty megalomaniac of legend ) . But it was the radical intensification of war that brought him to prominence and power ...
Page 11
... Bonaparte ( 1769- 1821 ) . I have already mentioned the single most important transforma- tion : the way war ceased to be seen as an ordinary part of the social or- der and began to appear as something entirely apart from the proper ...
... Bonaparte ( 1769- 1821 ) . I have already mentioned the single most important transforma- tion : the way war ceased to be seen as an ordinary part of the social or- der and began to appear as something entirely apart from the proper ...
Page 12
... Bonaparte in 1799 . The word " militarism " appeared about the same time . Of course , it has since become a familiar element of modern Western politics and culture . In the United States today , the historian Andrew Bacevich has ...
... Bonaparte in 1799 . The word " militarism " appeared about the same time . Of course , it has since become a familiar element of modern Western politics and culture . In the United States today , the historian Andrew Bacevich has ...
Common terms and phrases
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