The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Modern Warfare
by David A Bell
420pp, Bloomsbury, £20
Enlightenment thought, conceiving a society built on reason and justice, saw war as barbaric and exceptional: it dreamed of perpetual peace. In the early heady months of the French revolution, this fantastical ideal seemed possible. Robespierre, in a speech to the National Assembly in May 1790, saw "fraternity" as natural and France as the leading exponent of pacifism. Yet, within two years, his country had triggered one of the longest military bloodbaths in history - and, according to David A Bell, the fons et origo of "total war". To be raised to this dubious rank, war has to mobilise a country's entire resources, use industrial quantities of hardware, and define the enemy as criminal or sub-human, worthy only of "extermination" (Danton's word). Bell's thought-provoking epilogue suggests that George Bush's self-perpetuating "war on terror" borrows the rhetoric to make virtually anyone the potential enemy.
Like the participants in the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Bell is nostalgic for the ancien régime and its tendency to salute the opposite chaps before galloping at them in silk stockings: making war was as normal, in the gallant 18th century, as making love. It was still "an indescribable bloody horror", but kept on a leash. Rather than lose their costly professionals when the odds were poor, generals withdrew them. Civilians were decently treated. If musket, sabre or cannonball made the usual mess of soft flesh, there was none of the rabid bloodlust of the previous century's religious conflicts.
All this, Bell reminds us, was pulverised by the revolution and its sunny faith in humanity: the "military" became separated from the "civilian" sphere; conscription meant not only an endless cheap supply of cannon fodder but the subordination of civilian values to a superior "militarism" (a new concept); and war was revered as an individual test of worth - most vividly in the person of Napoleon, but also in the memoirs of ordinary soldiers now pouring from the presses. A super-size conflict might even end war itself, it was thought.
More controversially, Bell ascribes the revolution's embrace of perpetual warfare to cultural rather than geopolitical causes (the need to defend itself, for instance). It blames les philosophes and, further back still, Christian pacifism. "The true key to the museum of the 18th-century imagination", its emphasis on inner virtue and humility, was a proto-Romantic rebuke to court culture.
The Enlightenment regarded warfare as "fundamentally irrational", with Voltaire calling it "a million assassins in uniform". It was a primitive "remnant" of barbarism, a social pathology to be eradicated in a Europe where all were brothers - at least in commerce. Bell notes how Immanuel Kant disagreed, seeing the goal of peace as better conforming to moral laws rather than to historical inevitability. Meanwhile, the advocates of war were finding a shadow argument based on classical models: civilisation as a disease, war as a vaccine. For these powerful currents of thought to become embodied in political reality, where the pacifist line would undergo a kind of double-helix twist into horror, all that was needed was the destruction of the aristocratic system. In 1789, the French obliged.
However loaded his general thesis, Bell's account of the early, epoch-changing debates in the stuffy air of the National Assembly's converted riding arena is clear and gripping. The tumultuous assembly of May 1790 concluded with a declaration of peace, but with the proviso that if France had to fight it would "defend itself with newly righteous fury". "Out of a toxic mixture of ignorance, wishful thinking and pure, naked ambition," writes Bell, "the Girondins were pushing France toward wars that would last for 23 years and take millions of lives."
"The most extravagant idea that can arise in a politician's head," declared a prescient Robespierre, "is to believe that it is enough for a people to invade a foreign country to make it adopt their laws and their constitution. No one loves armed missionaries." The first episode of the wars that ran from 1792 to 1815 was a fiasco dragged forward by sheer political will. Most of the aristocratic generals had fled, the conditions of the ordinary soldier were appalling, conscription led to social unrest, and the "liberated" countries - for example Belgium, which belonged to Austria - failed to rejoice. The stakes were so high that "the absolute destruction of the enemy became a moral imperative". Amazingly, and partly because the enemy were playing by the old, cautious rules, the French "citizen's army" beat the Prussians at Valmy, a small battle swiftly mythologised by the brand new republic.
Within weeks, France was pitted against most of Europe. Even Robespierre came on board, now on his way to becoming the architect of the Terror. War was imagined as bringing about, in Bell's words, "an extraordinary break in human history". With it came delusional fantasies of romantic self-expression that condemned hundreds of thousands to grisly ends. Bell cites the military engineer Lazare Carnot declaring to a soldier who had lost his face: "None of us would refuse glory at the price it cost you." Although the French deputies balked at killing the British prime minister, they called for the extermination of his subjects. Total war, as opposed to "limited" war, was born; it was now in the hands of glacial types like Saint-Just, whose savage methods, coupled with France's demographic advantage, led to the republic's astonishing string of victories. In 1793, when the Catholic and royalist Vendée area rose up in internal rebellion, the republic's response was certainly total: an estimated 250,000 men, women and children perished "out of a principle of humanity", as General Carrier put it during the mass drownings at Nantes. The "hell columns" anticipated the SS by a century and a half, yet Bell points out that the names of some of the worst butchers still adorn the Arc de Triomphe: like Vichy or Algeria, the Vendée remains an awkward cyst in the national psyche. For Bell, it is the place where total war "was first revealed to its full, gruesome extent".
The second half of the book is devoted to Napoleon himself, a much more familiar story. Millions died as a direct result of this ruthless little genius. Bell makes clear that the total war that set his career in motion, and which he in turn encouraged and expanded to unique and grisly proportions, had its own infernal logic. In reaction, the trampled German powers were converting the idea of warfare into a sublime act of regeneration: a fantasy that stuck. As Bell reminds us, in his vivid description of the 1812 retreat from Moscow: "Total war ends with an army transformed into a starving, skeletal, lice-ridden, barely human mass, covered in motley rags, its eyes blank and hopeless."
· Time and again. Adam Thorpe's Between Each Breath is published by Cape