While browsing through the bookstores of Oxford last month (much as I love Amazon.com and my Kindle, no on-line bookstore has yet reproduced the experience of wandering through a great bookstore as random titles catch your eye), I ran across the kind of book I love: a big fat paperback narrative history. It’s been a guilty pleasure ever since; I spend time reading this that ought to go toward reading for the five capsule reviews I owe Foreign Affairs in a couple of weeks.
War of Wars by Robert Harvey is 926 pages of old fashioned narrative history about the revolutionary wars that convulsed Europe between 1792 and 1815. It’s told from a staunchly patriotic British point of view; Napoleon emerges as one of the great stinkers of all time as Harvey chips relentlessly away at the Napoleonic legend. The Corsican was not as great a general as people think, he was brutal to Josephine, the Code Napoleon was more rigid and reactionary than its generally reputed to be, and at key periods in his career Napoleon’s character flaws and poor judgment led him to destruction.
Meanwhile, lots of attention is paid to the dashing British sea captains who thrashed the Frogs by sea. Thomas Lord Cochrane, the real life model for the hero of Patrick O’Brian’s sea novels, gets the full treatment. Nelson is there, Lady Hamilton, the blind eye, and the Victory’s signal at Trafalgar and all; England expected every man to do his duty and that one did, except to his wife.
The brutality and coarseness of British heroism at the time gets its due as well. The captains flog and the generals shoot; the upper class officers beat and bloody the rabble into order and, reduced to order, the rabble fight and die for God and St. George. To read books like this is to be very grateful for 1776; the Revolution kept this country out of the hands of men like the Duke of Wellington and Lord Nelson, and a very good thing that was. The army officers came up through the public (private) schools, I suppose, and the naval officers started as midshipmen; as David Hackett Fisher showed in Washington’s Crossing, from colonial times leadership in the United States worked very differently. On the other hand, we could never produce a leader like William Pitt, catapulted to 10 Downing Street at the age of 24, holding the post almost without interruption from 1783 and living mostly on port until he died aged 45 in 1806
But those are incidental delights. The real merit of War of Wars is that it lays out in a more or less comprehensible and rational fashion the whole long and tangled complex story of the last and greatest of the pre-twentieth century world wars. Always keeping his eye on the big picture, Harvey shows how the various theaters of the conflict were linked, how it passed through a succession of phases, and how the internal political situation in the various countries shaped their roles in the conflict. Harvey is particularly good at summarizing the political evolution of Napoleon’s empires, his struggles with his conniving and frequently incompetent relatives, and the ways in which his foreign policy was often dictated by domestic politics. Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Egypt and march through Palestine opened a new stage in East-West relations that we are still trying to cope with today; Harvey’s crisp but informative telling of the tale will remind Americans that not everything happening in the Middle East today is new — or is our fault.
If American history were taught the right way, more Americans would know the story of the Napoleonic and revolutionary wars. The conflict between Britain and France shaped the emergence of our first party system before ultimately helping to break the Federalist Party, enabled Jefferson to make the Louisiana Purchase, and both caused and shaped the War of 1812. It led directly to the independence of Spanish and Portuguese America in ways that ensured that Britain rather than the United States would be the major military and economic power in the western hemisphere for most of the ensuing century. The moral failure of the French Revolution, passing through the reign of terror to military despotism and culminating in Napoleon’s imitation empire, shaped the American political imagination in ways that are still with us.
In some ways, the Napoleonic Wars seem very alien to us. Americans are, mostly, used to short and simple wars. Our three greatest military conflicts — the Civil War, World War One and World War Two — were relatively short. The alignment of forces was relatively stable — few powers switched side. After some initial setbacks, victory came relatively swiftly; we never suffered the shattering setbacks that drove the British out of Europe during the Napoleonic wars as coalition after coalition went down to defeat. We have sometimes had a hard time envisioning the road to victory; we have had some grim moments, but in those wars at least we have never stared total military defeat in the face.
The Cold War was the longest and most complex international contest in which the United States has ever engaged as a leading protagonist, and that conflict was less intense and less complicated than the Anglo-French conflict of 1792-1815. Britain’s major allies in that war — Austria, Prussia, Russia and Spain — all dropped out or changed sides at various points along the way. By contrast both NATO and the Warsaw Pact were remarkably stable coalitions.
But ever since the end of the Cold War, the world has been trending back toward the kind of kaleidoscopic politics of 18th and 19th century Europe and away from the more stable configurations of the late twentieth century. With no single great power threat to the world order currently on stage and a variety of issues agitating international politics, many countries are exploring new options and testing new partners. While the world hopefully is not on the road to another global conflict on a Napoleonic scale anytime soon, Americans need to prepare for an era of changing coalitions and individualistic and prickly great and middle powers seeking to elbow their way onto center stage. Not all of them will know what they are doing or understand how the game is played; frequently they will be pursuing their own short term interests at the expense of a much greater general good. Books like War of Wars, A.J.P. Taylor’s The Struggle For Mastery in Europe 1848-1918 or Henry Kissinger’s classics A World Restored (out of print, alas, but available) and Diplomacy can help prepare the mind for a new era in world politics.
All these books do two important things: they provide readers a solid chronological foundation in history and they stimulate the imagination to understand how power works — and how it fails. They are also a lot of fun to read.