During the wars, France alone counted close to a million war deaths. Just four years later the Battle of Leipzig drew 500,000, with fully 150,000 of them killed or wounded. Before 1790 only a handful of battles had involved more than 100,000 combatants in the 1809 Battle of Wagram, largest in the gunpowder age to date, involved 300,000. The figures speak for themselves: More than one-fifth of all the major battles fought in Europe between 14 took place in the 25 years after 1790. The result was a steady escalation of horror that did not stop even after the high point of revolutionary radicalism had passed in France itself, and after Napoleon took power there in 1799. France declared that its opponents were not honorable adversaries but enemies of the human race who amounted to nothing more than criminals. Not only would young men go into the army, but women, old men and even children would turn their energies to the war effort, producing weapons, uniforms and supplies. By 1793, its leaders were calling for total military mobilization of the population.
Revolutionary France overthrew the country’s aristocracy along with its king and queen, and brought in new men (including the young and talented Bonaparte) to lead its armed forces. The French Revolution marked a sudden and dramatic break with this tradition. It was not play-acting by any means, but earlier wars proceeded according to a fairly strict code of aristocratic honor. The major powers and their armed forces were still dominated by hereditary aristocracies, and war retained the feel of an aristocratic ritual. Enemy officers dealt with each other as honorable adversaries. Noncombatants could hope for relatively merciful treatment. The armies tended to avoid large-scale battle.
Long before 1792, the major European powers had fought with each other at regular intervals, but those conflicts were remarkably limited in scope.
These wars marked something fundamentally new in Western history, and collectively deserve the title of the first ‘total war.
Instead, 1792 marked the beginning of a long, grinding, hideously bloody series of wars that would drag on in every state in Europe and last, with scant interruption, until the final defeat of France’s Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo in 1815. When Revolutionary France declared war on the Austrian empire in the spring of 1792, its leaders promised a short, sweet and victorious campaign.
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