Tracing the grim beginnings of modern war to the French Revolution
The First Total War, By David A. Bell, Houghton Mifflin, 420 pp., $27
At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, as the French armies engaged in a series of increasingly titanic clashes across Europe, the writer François-René de Chateaubriand pondered how vast and all-encompassing warfare had become. "These enormous battles go beyond glory," Chateaubriand lamented, alluding to epic confrontations like the 1809 Battle of Wagram, one of the largest clashes of the gunpowder age. Chateaubriand looked back to an age of "civilized warfare . . . which left peoples in peace while a small number of soldiers did their duty."
"Civilized warfare" might strike some as an oxymoron -- can warfare ever be civilized? Yet, as David A. Bell argues in his often-remarkable meditation on the emergence of modern warfare, the violence of battle is often a matter of degree. In the decades before the French Revolution, warfare in Europe was a bloody but self-limiting affair. Soldiers were expensive to train and equip, and thus were carefully deployed in battle. ("It's a shame to lose a grenadier," lamented one general. "It takes time to make men like that." The typically upper-class officers who led troops believed in an aristocratic code -- honor, civility, poise -- that regulated conduct on the battlefield. If warfare was accepted as an inevitable feature of civilization, it was still waged with restraint, with some exceptions.
The French Revolution changed all this, Bell contends, unleashing a savage new culture of warfare whose toxic legacy remains with us today. What concerns him is a "recurrent historical pattern" since 1789, a paradoxical cultural dynamic in the West that considers warfare an unnatural, barbaric phenomenon but at the same time has been responsible for the worst bloodshed in human history. It's an interesting argument, though Bell dodges some central questions raised by his provocative thesis.
Fusing cultural and military history, Bell does double duty as an intellectual historian and a historian of war. It's an ambitious (sometimes too ambitious) tack, though he is a bravura stylist. Bell really knows how to write -- his descriptions of battle, some of the best I've read, are incredibly vivid and utterly terrifying.
Before he plunges us into the fury of the Napoleonic Wars, Bell sketches the cultural background to his account, and an emerging Enlightenment-era discourse on pacifism and commerce. Trade was drawing countries together; the philosopher Condorcet proclaimed, "War, like murder, will one day number among those extraordinary atrocities which revolt and shame nature." However, as Bell argues, there was a sinister catch to all the feel-good talk about peace. The philosophers, he writes, "transformed peace from a moral imperative to a historical one. And so they opened the door to the idea that in the name of future peace, any and all means might be justified -- including even exterminatory war."
The French Revolution made the theory a dreadful reality. Initially, the revolutionary government signaled its dedication to peace. (Robespierre, of all people, was a pacifist in these early days.) That soon changed. Elections swept aristocratic legislators -- who knew the realities of war -- aside, and brought to power a new breed of politician, drunk on revolutionary rhetoric. With little actual experience of war, the new leaders glorified battle as a purifying, existential experience. A new culture of militarism was forming. As the forces of counterrevolution massed on its borders, France was soon rampaging across Europe, which wouldn't see peace for nearly 20 years.
A defensive war mutated into something else altogether -- a messianic crusade to bring about peace through war. Apocalyptic talk filled the air; enemies were no longer to be defeated with honor: They were to be annihilated. France even turned on its own people. Bell's most superb chapter is on the Vendée, a stronghold of Catholic monarchism. Bell conjures up a vision of hell. There was no distinction between combatants and noncombatants: men, women, children were all targets. "It is against an entire population that we must fight," thundered a revolutionary delegate. In 1794, "Hell columns" hunted down Vendeans with no mercy. If we want to know the origins of the total wars that would devastate Europe in the 20th century, it is to the horrifying Vendée that we must look.
Though Bell is not entirely clear on how war came to be seen as an exception to the natural order, his narrative swings into full gear with the rise of Napoleon, who, Bell writes, "was . . . the product, master, and victim of total war." Though Napoleon tried to return to some older notions about the practice of warfare, he was still in thrall to "the new model of military glory, [which] was less a model of aristocratic perfection than of romantic transcendence."
Guerrillas in Spain and the Italian peninsula fought Napoleon's armies to a stalemate. Here Bell excels, his prose reaching a searing, literary pitch -- his account of the siege of the Spanish city of Saragossa, which the French armies all but destroyed in 1808, is surreal and hair raising. For Bell, our own moment has many troubling parallels with the Napoleonic era. In his view, Iraq is no replay of Vietnam; rather, like France was to Spain, a great power is pinned down by a numerically inferior yet relentless insurgent force. Unfortunately for us, the analogy works.
Matthew Price is a freelance writer. 
