Abstract
This study on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars from the perspective of ordinary French soldiers and civilians appears with Palgrave Macmillan’s burgeoning series War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Writing anything new on these conflicts is something of a challenge. To an extent Thoral succeeds, though the main argument – namely that these wars represented a step change that foreshadowed the total wars of the twentieth century – remains unconvincing. Letters, diaries, and memoirs provide the bedrock of source material underpinning the book.
A conclusion that emerges from this material is that soldiers’ responses to battle varied, and depended ultimately on the personality of the individual. That said, general patterns do emerge. Most soldiers, for example, avoided writing much on the subject of personally killing others, as opposed to witnessing killing. Death, of course, was ever-present, though, as before, disease rather than combat carried off the larger proportion. This was hardly surprising given the inadequacies of medical facilities within the French army, and analysis of how these malfunctioned is one of the book’s highlights. Propaganda celebrated Napoleon’s apparent concern for his soldiers’ welfare, but the wounded and sick were basically dumped by the wayside when of no further use. And while most soldiers accepted the prospect of death in combat, they dreaded an ignominious end in some disease-ridden field hospital.
French soldiers, surrounded by death, became hardened. That said, on the whole this did not translate into callous treatment of enemy wounded or prisoners, with the obvious exception of theatres ravaged by guerrilla war. Thoral nonetheless asserts that hatred of the enemy played a greater role than in previous conflicts, given the newly charged ideological dimension especially apparent in the 1790s. Under Napoleon the ideological element weakened, to be replaced by a militarized-cultural French identity. Thoral convincingly argues that this stronger sense of Frenchness coexisted with other identities. Provincialism survived as soldiers within particular units sought out companions from their own locality, and the fear of losing face in front of one’s peers remained an immensely powerful motivational force. Yet at the same time soldiers were part of a self-consciously French force that marched across the length and breadth of Europe. And as they marched they observed, passed judgement on foreign societies they saw, and in the process refined their own sense of nationality.
Also strong is Thoral’s coverage of France’s naval and maritime experience, despite some more exaggerated claims about the supposed ‘unprecedented intensity and violence’ of the period. This book provides a fairly detailed picture of the devastation caused by the British naval blockade of France: the ruination of its transatlantic trade, and along with it the economy of the western seaboard; the subsequent collapse of French commerce in the Mediterranean; and a counter-offensive by French privateers whose exploits provided not only some material compensation at the expense of ‘the freebooters of Europe’, but also a boost in the pride of coastal communities facing hard times.
Thoral stresses the novelty of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars throughout. Most obviously, she points to their scale. Napoleon typically led armies numbering over 100,000 men into battle, compared with the tens of thousands at the disposal of Frederick the Great. The battle of Leipzig in 1813, which was the largest Napoleonic land engagement, involved 420,000 men according to Thoral, a conservative estimate. This, she reminds us, compares with the 77,000 Frederick the Great deployed at Hohenfriedberg (1745). However, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that Frederick, according to these statistics, mobilized a significantly higher proportion of Prussia’s population of roughly 4 million souls than Napoleon managed for the French Empire, whose demographic resources were at least ten times greater. In terms of geographical extent, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were no more impressive than the Seven Years War. Nor are descriptors such as ‘formal’ or ‘elegant’ any more helpful in analysing eighteenth-century warfare than the assertion that they were fought in the ‘monarchical’ tradition – especially when one remembers that most of the belligerents in the First World War, which was undoubtedly ‘total’, were monarchical rather than republican.
However, setting aside the characterization of pre-1792 warfare, one finds that Thoral’s book contains much that convinces. As a whole, it offers valuable new insights into how the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were experienced by ordinary French soldiers, sailors, and indeed civilians.