The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It
432
The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It
432Overview
The twentieth century is usually seen as “the century of total war.” But as the historian David A. Bell argues in this landmark work, the phenomenon actually began much earlier, in the era of muskets, cannons, and sailing ships—in the age of Napoleon.
In a sweeping, evocative narrative, Bell takes us from campaigns of “extermination” in the blood-soaked fields of western France to savage street fighting in ruined Spanish cities to central European battlefields where tens of thousands died in a single day. Between 1792 and 1815, Europe plunged into an abyss of destruction.
It was during this time, Bell argues, that our modern attitudes toward war were born. Ever since, the dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war have been bound tightly together in the Western world—right down to the present day, in which the hopes for an “end to history” after the cold war quickly gave way to renewed fears of full-scale slaughter.
With a historian’s keen insight and a journalist’s flair for detail, Bell exposes the surprising parallels between Napoleon’s day and our own—including the way that ambitious “wars of liberation,” such as the one in Iraq, can degenerate into a gruesome guerrilla conflict. The result is a book that is as timely and important as it is unforgettable.
“Thoughtful and original . . . Bell has mapped what is a virtually new field of inquiry: the culture of war.” —Steven L. Kaplan, Goldwin Smith Professor of European history, Cornell University
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547525297 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| Sales rank: | 303,615 |
| File size: | 899 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
Officers, Gentlemen, and Poets
As I ponder'd in silence, Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long, A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect, Terrible in beauty, age, and power, The genius of poets of old lands ... What singest thou? it said, Know'st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards? And that is the theme of War ...
— Walt Whitman
Corsica, 1768. He is twenty-one years old, and beautiful. He has soft, fair skin, delicate red lips, seductively lidded eyes, and a trim, lithe figure. He wears an expensive, exquisitely tailored uniform, with a large white feather stuck rakishly in his hat. His name is Armand-Louis de Gontaut, but he is known by his title, as the duc de Lauzun. He is heir to another dukedom as well and to one of the largest fortunes in France.
France is fighting a nasty little war here in this wild, rocky Mediterranean island, and Lauzun is part of it. Earlier in the year, King Louis XV acquired Corsica from its nominal Genoese overlords, but the islanders, who have lived in a state of effective independence for decades, have no intention of resubmitting meekly to foreign rule. Their charismatic leader, Pasquale Paoli, is waging a struggle for independence, and France will need 25,000 soldiers to subdue him. (Among Paoli's followers are a young couple named Carlo and Letitzia Buonaparte, who will soon have a second son, Napoleone.) Lauzun, who holds the rank of colonel, is serving as aide to the French commander, the Marquis de Chauvelin. It is Lauzun's first taste of active service, and he wants to prove himself in battle.
He would seem to be behaving rather oddly, though, for an ambitious young officer. So eager is he to see action that he disobeys direct orders to wait for Chauvelin in France, and makes his way to Corsica surreptitiously by fishing boat — a feat that earns him several days under arrest. Afterward, he devotes less attention to his duties than to a flirtatious, doll-like, eighteen-year-old named Marie-Anne-Adélaïde Chardon. She has a husband — France's civil administrator in Corsica — a dour lawyer twice her age. But then, Lauzun has a wife, back in France. After Paoli inflicts a major defeat on the French in October, Lauzun rushes back to the French-held port of Bastia because Marie-Anne has hinted, in a note, that she is ready to surrender to his charms. And she does. Later that day, her distrustful husband arrives and tries to fool her into revealing her feelings by claiming that Lauzun has died on the battlefield. Disdainfully, she admits the affair: "Then I've brought him back to life, for he's in the next room, rather tired in fact, but I'm quite sure he's still alive." The happy couple continues to see each other openly through the winter of 1768–69, indifferent to Monsieur Chardon's reaction (although according to some sources, he finally agrees to a ménage à trois). Marie-Anne even follows her lover to the siege of Barbaggio in January, and the two dash across the battlefield together on horseback under Corsican fire, as if the war were nothing more than a glorious game.
It hardly seems like the start of a serious military career. Indeed, Lauzun will soon leave Corsica to return to the social whirl of Paris and the gleam of the court of Versailles (the unstable Marie-Anne will eventually find God and return to a conventional marriage). For many years, Lauzun will continue philandering on a grand scale, squander his fortune, and gain a reputation as an outrageous rake — something that, I cannot stress enough, takes considerable effort for eighteenth-century French aristocrats. Rumors, which he himself does nothing to stifle, will even link him romantically to Queen Marie-Antoinette. Along the way, he will consult sorcerers, befriend famous authors, attend the literary salon of Madame Du Deffand, and dabble in intellectual fads of all sorts.
Yet in the same years, Lauzun will also become one of France's most famous soldiers. His courage under fire in Corsica will lead to the command of a prestigious regiment. In 1779, he will command an expedition that briefly captures Senegal for France. In 1780, he will raise a regiment of his own and take it across the Atlantic, following in Lafayette's footsteps to fight in the American Revolution. He will serve with particular distinction at Yorktown, risking his life to save a wounded man. Lauzun will go on to play a significant role in the politics of the French Revolution and in the French Revolutionary wars — indeed, as we will see, his life illustrates the shift to total war as well as anyone's.
To modern eyes, these two sides of Lauzun's career — the seducer and the soldier — sit uneasily with each other, to say the least. Yet in eighteenth-century France, the boudoir did not seem anywhere near as far from the battlefield as it does today. One of Lauzun's companions, the novelist and military officer Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, repeatedly likened the art of seduction to the art of war. In his novel Les liaisons dangereuses, the callous seducer Valmont (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Lauzun) compares his own amorous conquests to the battles of Frederick the Great, recounting how he carefully prepared the terrain and left nothing to chance before closing with "the enemy." One of France's most famous eighteenth-century generals, the duc de Richelieu (great-nephew of the more famous Cardinal), had almost as great a sexual reputation as Lauzun and was admired for his ability to overcome the most concerted feminine resistance. The great philosophe Voltaire, a school friend of Richelieu's, hailed him in verse as the favorite of Venus and Mars alike. Those famous nineteenth-century aesthetes the Goncourt brothers would claim that eighteenth-century men approached seduction the way soldiers approached siege warfare: "It was in this war and this game of love that this century perhaps revealed its most profound qualities."
It is precisely because Lauzun strikes our own sensibilities so strangely that he provides a good introduction to the military culture of his time. It was an aristocratic culture, very different from the one we know today in the West, for the idea of a sharp separation between "military" and "civilian" spheres of life did not as yet exist. (As I have already noted, the English and French languages did not even recognize the words "military" and "civilian" as opposites until the nineteenth century.) Men like Lauzun would have found the very idea of such a separation quite odd. They passed easily from the theater of the aristocracy that was the royal court, with its intrigues and scandals and seductions, to the theater of the aristocracy that was the military campaign, where they could find more of the same. In each arena, they were expected to show the same grace, coolness, and splendor. War was less a profession, in the modern sense of the word, than an integral part of their social identity. And this fact, in turn, had enormous consequences for the way wars were fought.
It is worth taking a moment to look at some of the principal differences between the military culture of Lauzun's Europe and our own. Today, military personnel are, to a very large extent, literally segregated from the rest of society: they have their own communities (military bases), complete with special forms of housing (barracks), a separate educational system (military academies and other specialized schools), and even a separate legal system. They are conspicuously marked off from civilians by their uniforms. Soldiering is a demanding, full-time occupation. But in eighteenth-century Europe, this infrastructure of differ ence was only beginning to develop — even in Prussia, the state usually cited as an example of precocious "militarism." Before 1750, virtually no peacetime European soldiers lived in barracks but instead were quartered on the general population (much to its displeasure). Only in the mid-eighteenth century did European monarchies begin creating specialized military schools, and even then, high-ranking officers, such as Lauzun, often failed to attend them and disdained the formal study of military science. Ordinary soldiers wore uniforms, but officers often did not. In France, for an officer to appear at court in military dress actually constituted a grievous breach of etiquette, and as late as 1758, the minister of war had to scold generals for not wearing their uniforms while on campaign.
Even during military campaigns, soldiers and civilians mixed promiscuously together. A 26,500-man Swedish army that tramped through Ukraine during the Great Northern War of 1700–21 brought along with it 1,100 nonmilitary administrators, 4,000 male servants, and 1,700 wives, children, and serving girls. As for the British army, during the Seven Years' War of 1756–63, as many as a quarter of the persons in its encampments were women (who had, by definition, no military status). In addition to wives, servants, and the inevitable prostitutes, women served as sutlers, nurses, clerks, wagoners, and laborers. Some critics blamed British general John ("Gentleman Johnny") Burgoyne's defeat at Saratoga, in the American Revolution, on the 2,000 women who accompanied his 4,700-man army. As late as 1812, the Duke of Wellington allegedly complained of his army in Spain: "We are a marching brothel."
Soldiering was also much less a full-time occupation than it is today. Campaigns generally took place between May and October, and when not in the field, soldiers and officers alike devoted relatively little time to drill and training. Lauzun, when not on active service, generally returned to court or to the pursuit of a new mistress, and less wellborn officers found their vocations scarcely more time consuming. While posted in Belfort in 1777, the future Revolutionary Théodore de Lameth whiled away his days drawing, playing music, and studying German. He reserved an hour a day for paying social calls "so as not to be seen as a savage." The young Napoleon Bonaparte, after gaining his commission in 1785, paid no such calls and devoted most of his copious free time to intensive reading: "I lived like a bear ... always alone in my small room with my books ... my only friends!" Napoleon also taxed the patience of his superiors by spending over half the period 1785–90 at home, on leave, but then, most French officers spent at least four months a year away from their regiments. And the army was delighted to see them go, because, like many of its European counterparts, it suffered from an absurd level of overmanning at the higher ranks. In 1789, the French state could provide full-time employment for less than a third of its 35,000 active officers.
One consequence of the overmanning was that it left officers free to pursue other vocations without resigning their commissions. Most strikingly, perhaps, many tried their hands at literature. Take the example of Napoleon before the French Revolution — a time when his opportunities for promotion remained distinctly limited. Serving in a series of dull provincial postings, he not only read obsessively through the great works of the Enlightenment but also took copious notes and even kept a file of obscure expressions to sprinkle ostentatiously through his own writings (rhizophage, cacique, tomogun). He tried writing everything from histories of Corsica to an essay on suicide, a dialogue on love, and short stories that betrayed an unfortunate taste for the grotesque: "having awoken, she saw — O God! — she saw a ghost that approached her bed ... He drew her hand to his neck. O horror! The countess's fingers sank into his broad wounds, and came out covered with blood." Chateaubriand would scathingly comment on these works: "Destiny was mute, and Napoleon should have been."
Napoleon's biographers have taken these ambitions mostly as yet another sign of this extraordinary man's extraordinary nature, but in fact, they were quite commonplace. Lauzun's companion Laclos, like Napoleon an artillery officer, started publishing poetry while posted in Grenoble in the early 1770s. A few years later, he turned a popular novel into a comic opera, but the audience booed the first and only performance, and the queen's presence in the theater only added to the humiliation. Laclos packed up his resentments and took them off to the Atlantic coast, where he helped construct France's naval defenses and in his spare time wrote Les liaisons dangereuses, arguably the greatest French novel of the century (and, in its savage portrayal of high society, a most satisfying act of revenge). The ranks of French soldier-authors also included that famous scion of an ancient noble family who fought bravely in the Seven Years' War (1756–63), rose to the rank of captain, and then retired to start exploring the outer limits of human experience: the Marquis de Sade. As for Louis de Fénelon, a French cavalry captain, he not only wrote poetry but also tried to ensure good reviews by challenging to a duel anyone who disliked it. And the long-serving officer Jean-François de Saint-Lambert was a true literary polymath, who published poetry, "oriental fables," short stories about American Indians and African slaves, dense treatises on human nature, and satirical verse on the quarrels of Catholic theologians. In 1785, no fewer than seven men with military backgrounds, including Saint-Lambert, numbered among the forty "immortals" of the French Academy, the royal institution charged with overseeing the French language and French letters.
Outside France, those crossing the military-literary divide included many other famous names. There was Frederick the Great of Prussia, who wrote philosophical treatises and verse (in French); the great British essayist Richard Steele; and General Burgoyne, who moonlighted as a playwright (his successes included The Heiress, The Maid of the Oaks, and a comic opera called The Lord of the Manor). Imagine, by way of comparison, a Norman Schwarzkopf or a Colin Powell taking time off from Middle Eastern combat to compose poetry or engage in philosophical correspondence.
Today, a sign of the existence of a distinct military sphere is the fact that soldiers, no matter how rich or well connected, can attain high rank only by working their way up the military ladder, according to professional criteria of merit. Not so in eighteenth-century Europe, where high birth and money trumped talent and seniority. Lauzun had a typical career in this regard, entering the army at age twelve and becoming a colonel at nineteen. Maurice of Saxony, one of France's best-known eighteenth-century generals, reached high rank at fifteen, yet even he was a grizzled old-timer next to George, Lord Ettrick, who, in 1688, took titular command of a company in the Royal Scots at the tender age of eighteen months! Although most officers in the British and French armies started at the rank of ensign (just below lieutenant), advancement often required hard cash. The most prestigious French commissions could go for as much as half a million pounds — a vast sum for the day, thousands of times larger than a laborer's annual wages. France abolished "purchase" in the 1770s, but a grandee, such as Lauzun, could still create his own, "proprietary" regiment. In Britain, the system lasted well into the nineteenth century.
Perhaps the most powerful factor that today sets military service aside as an exceptional, quasi-sacred vocation is the idea of patriotic sacrifice. Soldiers, unlike the rest of us, stand ready to give their lives for a cause, for their country. Patriotism had a powerful place in eighteenth-century culture as well. But inside the military, the persistence of a powerful mercenary ethos did much to dilute its importance. Foreign soldiers, for instance, made up roughly 20 percent of France's wartime army — including most of Lauzun's regiment. Maurice of Saxony was German and would not have won his most famous victory, against the British at Fontenoy in 1745, during the War of the Austrian Succession, without the soldiers of the Clare Regiment, who charged into battle screaming the Irish war cry Cuimnidh ar luimneach agus ar feall na Sasanach ("Remember Limerick and the deceit of the English"). Lauzun seriously considered enrolling in the Russian army; the young Napoleon, in the Turkish. Consider also the well-traveled comte de Saint-Germain. Forced to leave the French army after killing a fellow officer in a duel, he went into the service first of the German prince Palatine, then of the Holy Roman Emperor, and then of the Elector of Bavaria. He returned to France during the Seven Years' War, only to leave soon afterward for Denmark, where he became a field marshal and commander-in-chief in the 1760s. The moves entirely failed to raise patriotic eyebrows back home, and Saint-Germain crowned his career in old age by becoming French war minister. Aristocratic officers generally did not fight against their native countries, but apart from this stricture, their code of honor mattered more than the particular sovereign they served.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2007 David A. Bell.
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Table of Contents
Maps and Illustrations viii Acknowledgements ixIntroduction 1 1. Officers, Gentlemen, and Poets 21 2. Conscience, Commerce, and History 52 3. Declaring Peace; Declaring War 84 4. The Last Crusade 120 5. The Exterminating Angels 154 6. The Lure of the Eagle 186 7. Days of Glory 223 8. War’s Red Altar 263 Epilogue 302
Notes 321 Bibliography 360 Index 397
