Extract
Owen Connelly claims on the first page of this study that one has to go back to the multi-volume histories of the nineteenth century to find a work which, like that of Antoine Jomini, deals with the wars of both the French Revolution and Napoleon. It seems a bold claim, given the plethora of more recent studies of those wars, not least in English; and yet closer inspection reveals that none of them actually covers the whole period from 1792 to 1815 in the sort of sequential detail that Connelly means here. His present account attempts to fill that gap, and it does so effectively within its comparatively modest scale. It is nicely balanced overall, with nearly half the main text covering the period up to the Brumaire coup of November 1799, including Napoleon's unsuccessful Egyptian campaign of 1798–9. Moreover, it is not so much a technical study for military history specialists, but rather a work of synthesis which draws on a wide range of primary sources (notably the letters, memoirs, and histories of contemporaries) as well as secondary ones, and is aimed at a wide readership. The various military campaigns receive detailed and expert treatment, in broadly chronological order, and with the plain economy of style and humorous irony that readers familiar with the author's earlier writings will appreciate again. Furthermore, those campaigns are related throughout to the wider political history of France, of her allies, and of her enemies at different stages of the wars, during which the French eventually gained mastery of the continental mainland but were steadily eclipsed by the British at sea. One benefit of this approach is that the continuities across the whole period are evident not only in its military history more narrowly defined (armies, weaponry, logistics, and tactics) but also in the impact of war on French society—a wider human experience that affected an entire generation of soldiers and civilians alike. Other countries no doubt underwent the same experience to varying degrees, but the book's principal focus is on France. Even the ferocious Peninsular War of 1807–14 and the legendary horrors of Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812 are examined primarily from the French angle.
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