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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... territory or the political sys- tem of every single European state . Guerrilla fighting left livid scars in regions of Spain , Italy , Austria , Switzerland , and France itself . This , then , was the first total war . The concept of ...
... territory or the political sys- tem of every single European state . Guerrilla fighting left livid scars in regions of Spain , Italy , Austria , Switzerland , and France itself . This , then , was the first total war . The concept of ...
Page 8
... territories as a buffer against these enemies and to impose revolutionary reforms there , even at the cost of provoking massive uprisings . These actions drove France's enemies , particularly rebels against French occupations , to adopt ...
... territories as a buffer against these enemies and to impose revolutionary reforms there , even at the cost of provoking massive uprisings . These actions drove France's enemies , particularly rebels against French occupations , to adopt ...
Page 13
... territory until quite recently and still lacks a systematic overview . True , many aspects of the story told here have fea- tured in history books before — it could hardly be otherwise , since by some estimates more than 220,000 books ...
... territory until quite recently and still lacks a systematic overview . True , many aspects of the story told here have fea- tured in history books before — it could hardly be otherwise , since by some estimates more than 220,000 books ...
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