Fear and loathing in old Europe

What marks out the Napoleonic wars from what had gone before, the great dynastic clashes of the two earlier centuries? It is by no means the only, or even the predominant, question that Charles Esdaile poses in this sweeping study, but in many ways it is the most challenging.

Professor Esdaile’s The Peninsular War demonstrated a mastery of the interplay of the many forces and factors in war, of which the economic, social and cultural are sometimes all too easily relegated to footnotes, together with the force of personality of the prime mover himself, and that factor which makes even the simplest thing in war difficult: what Clausewitz calls friction. The war in the Iberian peninsula was, however, a relatively small canvas on which to paint: five years’ fighting, at most, a singularly self-contained affair, and one that Bonaparte seemed for the most part content to let run at a remove. The proto-English Napoleonic historian John Holland Rose wrote that with the outbreak of war in 1803, ‘The history of Napoleon now becomes, for 12 momentous years, the history of mankind.’ Such a history must either be, therefore, a huge number of canvases stitched together, or else a work of massive compression. Professor Esdaile manages to combine the canvases remarkably seamlessly, and achieves the compression with a thrusting narrative and robust judgments. His conclusions will be contested, but few should doubt that he brings to the debate the essential questions.

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Ross Clark

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He tackles the Rose view seriously (not so much the history of mankind, but of Europe). It is in many ways the theme of the book. This makes for a rather different approach from Robert Harvey’s superb War of Wars, which was at heart an examination of Napoleon’s defeat, though both authors agree that the Great Disturber was as much swept along by forces and events as he was the wielder of the imperial broom.