The Concept of `Total War' in the Revolutionary—Napoleonic Period

Abstract

The use of the term `total war' with reference to pre-twentieth-century military conflicts has become a matter of some urgency and controversy amid nineteenth-century historians. It has been made all the more so for Napoleonic scholars by the recent appearance of David Bell's thought-provoking book The First Total War. The article attempts to counter and nuance some of Bell's major claims for the applicability of the term, through a discussion of its pertinence to the ideological and political conflicts of the Revolutionary—Napoleonic period, alongside the questions it evinces in technological and military terms.