Abstract
The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, by their scale and duration, by their geographical extent and sheer massiveness, and by the technical and strategic transformations they ushered in, mark a major stage in the evolution of western warfare. Their contribution to this process of change and to the birth of ‘total war’ has been demonstrated here by the appearance of several factors: the trend to massive battles, the formation of an army of citizen soldiers, the ideological dimension taken by the conflict, the perception of the enemy as forged by patriotic sentiment and ideology, and the far-reaching impact of the war on civilian society.
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Notes
Marie-Cécile Thoral, Les limites de la centralisation administrative: l’administration locale dans le département de l’Isère du Consulat à la Monarchie de Juillet (Thèse de doctorat d’Histoire, Université de Grenoble, 2004, 3 volumes), vol. 3.
Isser Woloch, ‘“A sacred debt”: Veterans and the State in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France’, in David A. Gerber (ed.), Disabled veterans in History (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 145–62, 145.
Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Saint Napoleon: Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 78–104.
Natalie Petiteau, Lendemains d’Empire: Les soldats de Napoléon dans la France du XIX° siècle (Paris: La Boutique de l’Histoire, 2003).
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© 2011 Godfrey Rogers
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Thoral, MC. (2011). Conclusion. In: From Valmy to Waterloo. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294981_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294981_9
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