War and Society in Europe

It is perhaps a hard truth that the history of Europe between the emergence of Napoleon and the beginning of World War I is very much a history of war in Europe. For most of the period Wawro takes as his subject, the nation-states of Europe more or less routinely chose to settle rivalries by warfare. Wawro takes as his thematic starting point a comment famously made by Karl von Clausewitz, a theoretician of Napoleonic war, that war is a continuation of politics by "other means," if that term is taken to mean the "larger social, political, economic and cultural context" (ix) in which war is waged.

Wawro's history of European war constitutes a history of the evolution of warfare itself. If one agrees with him that Napoleon "cudgelled modern war into existence" (1), then it is no great leap of logic to suggest that World War I cudgeled fully mechanized and industrialized war into existence. Wawro's reference to the "second industrial revolution" (1) suggests that the development of ever more mechanized warfare robbed energy from the social and political transformations that the Industrial Revolution worked on Europe irrespective o

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and France some little social-reform progress was made by 1830 (Wawro 36), on the Continent there were two lines of activity that were running counter to each other. At the level of political power, rulers sought to fix in the public mind the breadth of their power. Wawro cites Louis XVIII's "invasion" of Spain in 1823, a counterrevolutionary effort to reinstall the Spanish king on his throne; Charles X's naval pursuit of Algerian pirates, undertaken to "furnish the French press and public with a steady diet of adventures which would win acclaim for the government" (39); and Louis-Philippe's bourgeois coup d'état, which displaced the ultraconservative Charles X. On the other hand, Louis-Philippe, who was himself displaced by the Revolution of 1848, could not reconfigure in France's favor Continental borders or Mediterranean power relations in the face of British naval supremacy (40). Wawro cites Louis-Philippe's foray into jingoism when he "flagrantly" invoked the French memory of Napoleon's greatness by having the emperor's remains ceremonially transported to Paris. This kind of adventurism is linked to the fact that the traditionally bourgeois and aristocratic French officer corps gradually left military, leaving a vacuum that
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Approximate Word count = 3813
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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