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Napoleonic Wars: Anticipating the Age of Total War

  • Korean Review of French History
  • Abbr : KRFH
  • 2016, (34), pp.55~83
  • Publisher : KOREAN SOCIETY FOR FRENCH HISTORY
  • Research Area : Humanities > History

Lee Yong Jae 1

1전북대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

‘The Transformation of War’, which has been made during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), reaches its culmination in the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815). Napoleonic era was a period in which military purposes were infused into foreign policies, the politics being overwhelmed by war efforts. Human and material resources in the rear have been mobilized to the war efforts, and the culture of war in full bloom was fueling social base for war. Napoleonic Wars to annihilate the enemy’s main force has caused tremendous casualties. With Napoleon, ‘god of the war’, the warfare reached at the level of ‘absoluten Krieg’, to borrow an expression from Carl von Clausewitz. Total war is often defined as a war involving the complete mobilization of a society’s resources to achieve the absolute destruction of an enemy, without any distinction between combatants and noncombatants. In this sense, Napoleonic Wars merit attention as a beginning of modern Total War rather than as a mere succession of the French Revolutionary Wars. ‘True’ total war would have to await a new military technology and logistics resulted from Industrial Revolution. In a broad political and cultural context, however, total war avant la lettre exists in the Napoleonic Empire.

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