The Little Corsican General

Talking about men with great power who run roughshod over people, I recently finished a book on the Napoleonic era in Europe, entitled The First Total War by David Bell. This is a somewhat overlooked historical period in most American's education, including mine, and I learned a lot.

Napoleon Bonaparte became the French leader in the 1790s after the French Revolution had basically run its course, culminating in the great Terror and the attempts to completely restructure the society and culture of France, especially by the Girondins and Jacobins. In the meantime, war had broken out between France and the surrounding countries, who felt threatened by the radical change represented by the French Revolution.

Being a brilliant military commander, Napoleon rose to the top of the army and eventually became First Consul, then Emperor. And, given his enormous lust for power, he eventually occupied most of Europe, with only Britain in the west, Scandinavia in the north, and Russia in the east not ever being conquered. He installed his own family members, plus army generals, as the kings and queens of Europe.

According to Bell, the continental war that consequently raged until 1815 was the first case of modern, total warfare. Millions, both military and civilian, died in the bloody, pre-industrial carnage of musket, cannon, sword, and pike.

The conflicts of 1792 to 1815 did not witness any great leaps in military technology, but Europe nevertheless experienced an astonishing transformation in the scope and intensity of warfare....Before 1790, only a handful of battles had involved more than 100,000 combatants; in 1809, the battle of Wagram, the largest yet seen in the gunpowder age, involved 300,000. Four years later, the battle of Leipzig drew 500,000, with fully 150,000 of them killed or wounded. During the Napoleonic period, France alone counted close to a million war deaths, possibly including a higher proportion of its young men than died in World War I. The toll across Europe may have reached as high as 5 million. (p. 7)

I think it's true to say that, with our short memories, as well as our obsession with the Nazis, most Americans think of France as basically a sissy country, having lost WW II without hardly fighting, while the Germans have the reputation as aggressive warriors of great ferocity. But if you just reverse the countries, you'll have the situation at the beginning of the 19th century, as hard as it is to imagine. The French owned Europe. And 120 years later, Hitler was in many ways just imitating that little Corsican general, including, oddly enough, his ill-fated attempt to conquer Russia.