REVIEW: The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It by David Bell

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When does a war become total? David Bell answers that typological question by illustrating the first time, to his eyes, a war ever bore the social, philosophical, and practical hallmarks of a conflict that saw mass mobilisation, radicalised war aims, and blurred the civilian-soldier line – hallmarks that, arguably, best encapsulate total war as a concept. The central thesis of The First Total War is that the Napoleonic wars demonstrated a significant break in military culture from the limited style of warfare that followed the religious wars. Bell illustrates this well and suits his purpose with this volume, although his argument forfeits detailed evaluation of total war as a continuity of features.

In Bell’s argument, the chief arena of change is social and philosophical rather than technological, though he certainly highlights the distinction between infantrymen fighting pikes versus cannon. Within the first chapter, Bell highlights the lack of distinction between spheres of life in the officer corps, where the theatre of aristocracy is staged in equal parts at court and during the campaign. Here, war is a part of social identity and a bridge to intellectualism, crossed by figures like Lauzun, Marquis de Sade, and Napoleon. These figures show their faces throughout, such as in the chapter on the National Assembly debating warmaking powers, but the throughline of cultural transformation is less clear in the rest of the book, which shifts its focus to the atrocities and radicalisation of a revolutionary army sweeping across Europe. In a way, the somewhat ambling structure of the book reflects the decline of the aristoracy as the centre of the military story into just another level of the corps in an increasingly distinct military identity.

Bell explicitly critiques John Keegan’s argument that early modern European militaries possessed a radically distinct warrior culture, counting such an interpretation as a projection of modern day experiences of West Point or Sandhurst, and this argument holds water. Nevertheless, there existed code of honour held sacred by the aristocratic cadre that harked back to the chivalric codes of the medieval period, when warmaking was the province of elites, and conflicts with the revolutionary fervour that ultimately gripped France.

As Bell rightly says, “it has become very difficult to discuss war in non-apocalyptic terms”, and this transition is well illustrated in his critique of the notion that uncontrolled conflict fed into the excesses of 1792-1815, considering that it disregards the scope and intensity of the French Revolution. His argument is made stronger by the chapter on philosophical shifts. Coming from an aristocratic culture saw war as unavoidable and natural, the philosophes of the Enlightenment were split into two camps: those like the abbé de Saint-Pierre who were emblems of pacifism versus those for whom war was a cataclysmic force capable of irrevocably cleansing and shaping a people and a nation; that is, those who saw war as the “sublime, redemptive, desirable exception” to normality. The key factor is that both saw war as an abberation and an extreme, rather than an ordinary state of affairs. The aristocratic code of honour that limited war, focusing on keeping well-trained soldiers alive in small armies and in isolated battlegrounds, was lost by the time of the revolution.

One of the most illuminating illustrations of this is in atrocities within the Vendée department, wherein the “exterminating angels” of the titular chapter - or the mass-mobilised Republican soldiers of revolutionary France - mete out their radicalised war aims indiscriminately against both suspected patriots and civilians. The Vendée sees such hallmarks of total war as the wholesale destruction of civilian lives and property as well as guerilla warfare. It breaks with the previous character of war in which audiences wanted “sonorously abstract invocations of splendor and glory” rather than the horrors and gore of the battlefield and where the “texture of individual experience and individual feelings…mattered very little”.

It is perhaps here more than elsewhere that Bell’s argument of the French Revolution as the distinctive break between the characterising of war as being total or not total is weakest, as it neglects the logical throughline of total war being a continuum and sets aside the relativity of totality. Technology is arguably a key arbiter of how “total” the experience is for an individual or a state, and this works in continuity rather than flashpoints. Further, when considering the revolutionary ideology, Bell’s occasional callbacks to the violence of the religious wars demonstrate that there is ultimately a similar fervour with indiscriminate violence between combatants and civilians. Perhaps the only element that lends a distinction – and which he rightly devotes time to – is the establishment of the modern state and the dawn of nationalism.

Bell certainly does not discount “the role of myth as a historical force in its own right”, and it is perhaps the mythic nature of revolution more than anything that, paradoxically, best demonstrates the sociocultural shift of the late 18th century that Bell cogently argues in The First Total War.