The first total war Napoleon's Europe and the birth of warfare as we know it

Bell (Johns Hopkins; editor, New Republic) travels well-ploughed ground here in asserting that the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon marked the birth of total war. He departs from numerous standard accounts (Hoffman Nickerson, J. F. C. Fuller, Lynn Montrose, Michael Howard, Hew Strachan, et al.) in assigning the main impetus for this development not to nationalism or to the revolutionary ideologues in Paris, but to intellectual transformations that occurred during the Enlightenment. Most important of these was that war "ceased to be seen as an ordinary part of the social order ... [but] something entirely apart from the proper course of history." Curiously, Bell does not explore the nexus between the democratization of society and apocalyptic visions of war: democratic societies axiomatically fight only for millennial causes since citizen armies implicitly reject the "normalcy" of war. The volume's impressive bibliography includes archival material, the works of the philosophes, and numerous secondary sources, though it does lack many of the classic overviews of modern military history. A valuable addition to the literature. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Useful for all readership levels, but of greatest interest to graduate students and faculty. All libraries. G. P. Cox Gordon College

The wars of the French Revolution acquired a pitiless character and an unprecedented scale for which historians have groped for explanations: ideology and French nationalism are most commonly cited. Bell elaborates an alternate viewpoint without dismissing traditional analyses. The author of two books on the ancien regime, Bell roots his thesis in Enlightenment theorizers of progress and, less philosophically, in the eighteenth-century aristocratic attitude toward war. Bell effectively personifies his case in a nobleman favorable to the Revolution but ultimately consumed by it, titled the Duke of Lauzun. The boudoir and the battlefield were all the same to him, stages for stylized and restrained performances of honor. When Lauzun was sent to western France to quell royalist revolt in 1793-94, his scruples doomed him as radicals demanded the annihilation of rebels. In this shocking civil war of the Vendee, Bell observes the seeds of the total war methods that grew apace in ensuing wars and established dark precedents for the future. Astute and fluid, Bell's study has ramifications beyond his historical specificity. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2006 Booklist

Bell combines his roles as professor of history at Johns Hopkins and contributing editor for the New Republic in this interpretive study arguing that history's first total war was waged during the Napoleonic era. Scholars have increasingly stressed the global aspects of the network of conflicts extending across North America, South Asia and Europe during that time. Bell goes further, presenting a fundamental transformation of war from an ordinary aspect of human existence to an apocalyptic experience whose "terrible sublimity" tested societies and individuals to their limits and ultimately became a redemptive experience. Total war developed not in the context of nationalism or revolutionary zeal, but in the fundamental sense of a "culture of war" driving participants in the direction of complete engagement and total abandonment of restraint. Ironically, the intellectual roots of this modern militarism are in the Enlightenment belief in the coming of perpetual peace. Revolutionary France transformed a moral concept into a practical one: war to emancipate humanity from its past. Bell's conclusion that this mentality survived two world wars is open to challenge, yet his appeal for the rediscovery of restraint and limitation is particularly relevant at a time of nuclear proliferation and apocalyptic rhetoric. (Jan. 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Napoleon is widely credited with changing both the perception and the waging of war. Bell (history, Johns Hopkins Univ.; The Cult of the Nation in France) makes a convincing case that this transformation preceded Napoleon's career and to some extent shaped it, pointing to the French Revolution. Prior to that, the 18th-century ideal of honor among the nobility, which mitigated the ferocity of war, had produced warfare that was comparatively genteel. The French revolutionaries who overthrew the nobility scorned the idea of honor, however, and initially denounced war as an unnatural affront to human dignity. A self-governing people, they maintained, would have no desire for war, and when all peoples were self-governing, war would cease. Bell shows that when the revolutionaries themselves found it necessary to wage war, they transformed their own ideas and rhetoric to denounce war into justifications for waging it even more fiercely. As "people in arms," they were much more violent and much more self-righteous than the nobles had ever been. Thus, Bell demonstrates that the 20th century's cataclysmic warfare, which was both portrayed as a newly horrifying throwback to primitive behavior and justified in apocalyptic terms, was in fact part of a historical evolution. Suitable for public and undergraduate libraries.-Richard Fraser, formerly with the Coll. of Physicians of Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.