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.