David Bell, an accomplished historian of early
modern France, makes the point of his latest book clear in its first
paragraphs: the hopes of 1989–90 that the Cold War, and perhaps all
war, had at last come to an end recalled the great hopes on the eve
of the French Revolution, 1789–90, that the age of war was at last
over, because a polity of Reason had come to power. These hopes were
of course cruelly disappointed in each case by the outbreak of a
period of savage warfare.
Like a symphony whose initial theme quickly
disappears only to emerge later for further development, this
opening argument, more psychological than historical, to the effect
that the deep disappointment and frustration of those who had hoped
for an age of peace would subsequently fuel an age of terrific
violence, soon gives way to a second theme, the argument of the
book's title, that the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon,
1792–1815, were "the first total war." Bell's comparison of the
'89–'90s, two centuries apart, is as original as it is dubious. His
second and main theme, that the wars of 1792–1815 were the prototype
of future total wars, is convincingly developed but unoriginal. He
cites Jean-Yves Guiomar's L'Invention de la guerre totale[1],
published in 2004, but his primary argument that the years from the
battle of Valmy (1792) to the battle of Waterloo (1815) saw the
origin of what may reasonably be called total war was adumbrated
already in 1812 by Carl von Clausewitz, who asserted that nothing in
war would ever be as it had been, as well as a number of later
writers.[2]
Bell gives credit to Guiomar, and he quotes Clausewitz, though not
as fully as he might have. His originality lies only in giving this
old theme its fullest development, using a wealth of modern
scholarship and a narrative so energetic that it threatens to
overwhelm the larger thematic argument.
By "total war" Bell means what is generally
understood by this flexible term: war without limits, in which every
available resource, human and material, is mobilized, legal and
moral restrictions are brushed aside, and military effort and
political direction become fused by a superheated emotional climate
to a degree that makes any rational definition of purpose and
objective virtually impossible. Bell makes his case in several ways,
each constituting a subordinate theme.
The first two chapters deal with the epoch before
the French Revolution—the Ancien Régime. Here we learn that warfare
in the Old Regime was an expression of aristocratic culture and
therefore a fairly ridiculous business, essentially a sport for the
nobility, who led the armies of Europe in a kind of military minuet
or chess game, each side maneuvering to achieve minor advantage
while avoiding battles, which were indeed rare but often very
bloody, further encouraging avoidance. The evident restraint with
which the great powers fought one another, and in so doing observed
the rules that protected civilians and prisoners of war from war's
violence, reflected the strictly limited aims of warfare itself.
Bell builds on this picture of contemporary limited war to expose at
some length the hopes of Enlightened Europe, articulated by men of
Reason from Fénelon to Kant, that under a rational New Regime this
absurd spectacle would simply disappear. The weakness of these
chapters is that on both themes he has exaggerated greatly.
Bell's account simply ignores other determinants
of limited warfare in the Old Regime—the balance of European power,
the tremendous financial burden of maintaining armed forces and
replacing their losses, operational methods imposed by primitive
infantry weapons and highly developed systems of fortification, and
situationally defined limits on strategic objectives. In doing so,
Bell has rehearsed an old, flimsy stereotype of Old Regime
warfare—effete generals leading brave but incompetent officers who
command peasant‑soldiers too brutalized to run away in battle.
Quoting Clausewitz on this subject is to succumb to the Prussian's
rhetorical device as he set off to join the Russians in 1812. Like
Machiavelli ridiculing the warfare of the condottieri, Clausewitz
knew perfectly well, and wrote accordingly, that warfare before 1789
was not some kind of great international joke, but a serious
business.
On the hopes of the Enlightenment to end all war,
Bell is again guilty of exaggeration. A few men of Reason interested
themselves in war, but not many, and the argument that their
reasoning on war influenced a whole generation of Europeans is as
mistaken as Bell's characterization of warfare itself in the Old
Regime. On the weakness of this part of his argument rests the
dubious comparison of 1989–90 with the situation exactly two
centuries earlier. What may be more interesting is the possible
inference, perhaps unintended by the author, that the laws of war,
designed to limit the violence visited upon non-combatants, were a
byproduct of aristocratic culture, and could not survive the fury of
democratized warfare.
In the following six chapters, the main part of
the book, dealing directly with war from 1792 to 1815, Bell gives
great emphasis to just those aspects of warfare that involved armed
civilian resistance to the imposition of rule by the French Republic
and Empire. From the war of the Vendée, when the peasants of western
France followed their priests in resisting the Revolution (1792–94),
to the comparable but far more extensive resistance of priest-led
Spanish peasants to French occupation (1808–13), and to the many
lesser insurrections against French rule from Belgium to the Tyrol
and on to Calabria, Bell stresses what may be called the Goyaesque
horrors of the "guerrilla"—ambush, atrocity, unsparing retaliation,
and extermination. He invokes Vietnam in this account, and is
explicit in his message for an American audience today: "To grasp
the essence of the conflict, we need look little further than the
uncannily similar situation that unfolded in Iraq after the American
victory in 2003" (284). But Bell has again gone over the top, as if
this kind of war were the only kind that mattered. In fact, except
for Spain, these nasty conflicts were sooner or later suppressed,
and not even Spain deflected the course of Imperial strategy. The
Empire functioned despite local resistance; it extracted resources
from occupied territories and kept most of them relatively
acquiescent. In the end, the Empire was strong enough to invade
Russia in 1812, and after a horrendous defeat to regain quickly a
formidable presence. It went down fighting, and from a Napoleonic
perspective these awful guerrilla wars were no more than a nuisance.
Bell has managed to bend the picture of the French wars into a shape
that Napoleon would not have recognized.
Every generation writes history in terms of its
own concerns, but by imposing the concerns of twenty-first-century
America on a bravura portrait of an earlier, remarkable time, he has
reduced his brilliant historical essay to a mere polemic.
University of Michigan
johnshy@umich.edu
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[1] Paris: Éditions du Félin, 2004.
[2] See, e.g., Jean L.A. Colin, Les
Transformations de la guerre [1911], Eng. ed.,
Transformations of War, tr. L.H. R. Pope-Hennessy (1977;
rpt. Cranbury, NJ: Scholars Bookshelf, 2006); Guglielmo Ferrero,
Peace and War, tr. B. Pritchard (London: Macmillan,
1933); Hoffman Nickerson, The Armed Horde, 1793–1939 (NY:
Putnam, 1940; 2nd ed. 1942); J.F.C. Fuller, The Conduct of
War, 1789–1961 (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers U Pr, 1961; rpt. NY: Da Capo, 1992).
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