To war!
The first total war: Napoleon's Europe and the birth of warfare as we know it, by David A. Bell.
"This war will be the last war." -- Charles-François Dumouriez, 1792.
The years '89 and '90 were years of elation and hope. A powerful and much-loathed regime not only collapsed unexpectedly but did so with suprisingly little violence. Amid its ruins, a new international order seemed to be taking shape, built on a respect for peace, democracy, and human rights. So transformative did the moment appear that many advanced thinkers predicted nothing less than the coming end of warfare. But disillusion followed with cruel speed. The years that followed brought not peace but unremitting violence, which the dominant powers found frustratingly difficult to contain. Soon, the widespread expectation of an end to war gave way to the equally widespread conviction that an era of apocalyptic conflict had begun. Indeed, it was widely argued that to defeat evil adversaries, war now needed to be waged on a sustained and massive scale, and with measures once condemned as barbaric.
The strange thing about this description is that it applies equally well to two different countries. Most obviously for us, it apples to the period that began in 1989-1990. Even before the rotten timbers of the Soviet Union finished crashing to the ground, prominent political scientists were claiming that an end to war was at hand. Some thought that the world had simply begun to outgrow large-scale conflict. Others believed that peace would follow the spread of democracy, since democracies supposedly do not fight one another. Francis Fukuyama, in a famous and unjustly mocked article, linked the end of war to "the end of history" -- by which he meant an end to conflicts over the proper form of society.
Instead of an end to war, of course, there followed an intensification of conflict and danger: in the Gulf War, the wars in the Balkans, and then the global upheaval that began on September 11, 2001. In the wake of that day's horrific terrorist attacks, U.S. president George W. Bush began to describe the struggle between the West and its adversaries as one between the forces of freedom and the forces of evil. Prominent supporters of his administration likened it to World War II and warned that the very survival of the West hung in the balance. Some insisted that to prevail, the West would even have to flout established restraints on military behavior. "Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle," wrote the British diplomat Robert Cooper in an influential 2002 essay. Soon afterward, the United States and its allies began a preemptive war in Iraq, started with an open attempt to assassinate its head of state. Since then, American military operations have involved a number of well-publicized lapses into the "laws of the jungle." At this writing, it is difficult to see how or when the current period of violent instability and danger might come to an end.
So far so familiar. Yet, surprisingly, the description applies just as well to the years 1789-90, when the collapse of the Old Regime and the beginning of the French Revolution untethered hopeful imaginations around the world. Even before these events, advanced opinion in the West was already beginning to think of war as a rapidly vanishing anachronism. As an optimistic English clergyman wrote 1784: "The time is approaching, when the sound of the trumpet, and the alarm of war, will be heard no more throughout the earth." On May 22, 1790, France's new revolutionary government went so far as to issue a formal renunciation of "wars of conquest," in what has been called a "declaration of peace to the world." It promised that France would henceforth use its armed forces only in self-defense. But just twenty-three months later, France invaded Austrian-ruled Belgium, starting a conflict that would drag in all of Europe's major powers and continue, with only short interruptions, for more than twenty-three years, until France's final defeat in 1815. From early on, both sides saw this long struggle in apocalyptic terms: "a war to the death," as one of its early French advocates declared, "which we will fight ... so as to destroy and annihilate all who attack us, or to be destroyed ourselves." Neither side went so far as to practice assassination openly. But desperate guerrilla warfare and savage attempts to repress it spawned atrocities across the Continent on a scale not matched again until World War II. As Napoleon Bonaparte himself explained, foreshadowing Cooper: "It has cost us dearly to return ... to the principles that characterized the barbarism of the early ages of nations, but we have been constrained ... to deploy against the common enemy the arms he has used against us."
Needless to say, the parallels are hardly exact. The sheer scale of bloodshed and destruction in Napoleon's Europe -- by which I mean both the Europe he lived through as a young officer and the one he came to dominate as ruler of France -- greatly exceeded anything yet seen since 1989. Yet neither are the parallels coincidental. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw fundamental changes in Western attitudes toward war and the start of a recurrent historical pattern, of which events since 1989 provide only the most recent, if also a particularly clear, example. In this pattern, the dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war have been bound together in complex and disturbing ways, each sustaining the other. On the one hand, a large and sustained current of public opinion has continued to see war as a fundamentally barbaric phenomenon that should soon disappear from a civilized world. On the other hand, there has been a recurrent and powerful tendency to characterize the conflicts that do arise as apocalyptic struggles that must be fought until the complete destruction of the enemy and that might have a purifying, even redemptive, effect on the participants. Today, these twin languages of war and peace define the extremes of Western, and particularly American, thinking on the subject, with "speakers" of each dismissing their opponents as a species of reality-denying mental patients: the "delusional" doves versus the "paranoid" or "war-mongering" hawks.
"This war will be the last war." -- Charles-François Dumouriez, 1792.
The years '89 and '90 were years of elation and hope. A powerful and much-loathed regime not only collapsed unexpectedly but did so with suprisingly little violence. Amid its ruins, a new international order seemed to be taking shape, built on a respect for peace, democracy, and human rights. So transformative did the moment appear that many advanced thinkers predicted nothing less than the coming end of warfare. But disillusion followed with cruel speed. The years that followed brought not peace but unremitting violence, which the dominant powers found frustratingly difficult to contain. Soon, the widespread expectation of an end to war gave way to the equally widespread conviction that an era of apocalyptic conflict had begun. Indeed, it was widely argued that to defeat evil adversaries, war now needed to be waged on a sustained and massive scale, and with measures once condemned as barbaric.
The strange thing about this description is that it applies equally well to two different countries. Most obviously for us, it apples to the period that began in 1989-1990. Even before the rotten timbers of the Soviet Union finished crashing to the ground, prominent political scientists were claiming that an end to war was at hand. Some thought that the world had simply begun to outgrow large-scale conflict. Others believed that peace would follow the spread of democracy, since democracies supposedly do not fight one another. Francis Fukuyama, in a famous and unjustly mocked article, linked the end of war to "the end of history" -- by which he meant an end to conflicts over the proper form of society.
Instead of an end to war, of course, there followed an intensification of conflict and danger: in the Gulf War, the wars in the Balkans, and then the global upheaval that began on September 11, 2001. In the wake of that day's horrific terrorist attacks, U.S. president George W. Bush began to describe the struggle between the West and its adversaries as one between the forces of freedom and the forces of evil. Prominent supporters of his administration likened it to World War II and warned that the very survival of the West hung in the balance. Some insisted that to prevail, the West would even have to flout established restraints on military behavior. "Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle," wrote the British diplomat Robert Cooper in an influential 2002 essay. Soon afterward, the United States and its allies began a preemptive war in Iraq, started with an open attempt to assassinate its head of state. Since then, American military operations have involved a number of well-publicized lapses into the "laws of the jungle." At this writing, it is difficult to see how or when the current period of violent instability and danger might come to an end.
So far so familiar. Yet, surprisingly, the description applies just as well to the years 1789-90, when the collapse of the Old Regime and the beginning of the French Revolution untethered hopeful imaginations around the world. Even before these events, advanced opinion in the West was already beginning to think of war as a rapidly vanishing anachronism. As an optimistic English clergyman wrote 1784: "The time is approaching, when the sound of the trumpet, and the alarm of war, will be heard no more throughout the earth." On May 22, 1790, France's new revolutionary government went so far as to issue a formal renunciation of "wars of conquest," in what has been called a "declaration of peace to the world." It promised that France would henceforth use its armed forces only in self-defense. But just twenty-three months later, France invaded Austrian-ruled Belgium, starting a conflict that would drag in all of Europe's major powers and continue, with only short interruptions, for more than twenty-three years, until France's final defeat in 1815. From early on, both sides saw this long struggle in apocalyptic terms: "a war to the death," as one of its early French advocates declared, "which we will fight ... so as to destroy and annihilate all who attack us, or to be destroyed ourselves." Neither side went so far as to practice assassination openly. But desperate guerrilla warfare and savage attempts to repress it spawned atrocities across the Continent on a scale not matched again until World War II. As Napoleon Bonaparte himself explained, foreshadowing Cooper: "It has cost us dearly to return ... to the principles that characterized the barbarism of the early ages of nations, but we have been constrained ... to deploy against the common enemy the arms he has used against us."
Needless to say, the parallels are hardly exact. The sheer scale of bloodshed and destruction in Napoleon's Europe -- by which I mean both the Europe he lived through as a young officer and the one he came to dominate as ruler of France -- greatly exceeded anything yet seen since 1989. Yet neither are the parallels coincidental. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw fundamental changes in Western attitudes toward war and the start of a recurrent historical pattern, of which events since 1989 provide only the most recent, if also a particularly clear, example. In this pattern, the dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war have been bound together in complex and disturbing ways, each sustaining the other. On the one hand, a large and sustained current of public opinion has continued to see war as a fundamentally barbaric phenomenon that should soon disappear from a civilized world. On the other hand, there has been a recurrent and powerful tendency to characterize the conflicts that do arise as apocalyptic struggles that must be fought until the complete destruction of the enemy and that might have a purifying, even redemptive, effect on the participants. Today, these twin languages of war and peace define the extremes of Western, and particularly American, thinking on the subject, with "speakers" of each dismissing their opponents as a species of reality-denying mental patients: the "delusional" doves versus the "paranoid" or "war-mongering" hawks.