Abstract
In the year 1813, as Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire was crumbling, Benjamin Constant issued one of the earliest and most powerful condemnations of what we now call militarism. It was highly dangerous, he warned, ‘to create in a country … a large mass of men imbued with an exclusively military spirit’. Would these men, at the end of a war, shed their attitudes along with their uniforms? To the contrary, ‘those without weapons strike them as an ignoble mob, laws as useless subtleties … opposition as disorder and reasoning as revolt’. Constant insisted that in a modern world of constitutional regimes and commerce, a military ‘spirit of conquest’was a menacing vestige of an earlier age.1
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Notes
Émile Durkheim, Suicide, Study in Sociology (New York, 1951), 238.
Hans Joas, War and Modernity (Cambridge, 2003);
and Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl, War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present (Princeton, NJ, 2013).
See Volker R. Berghahn, Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861–1979 (New York, 1982);
Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism (Westport, CT, 1981);
and Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy; the Prussian Experience, 1660–1815 (Cambridge, MA, 1958).
Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 32–34.
On the three orders see the classic work of Georges Duby, Les trois ordres, ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris, 1978).
On classical republicanism, see above all J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975).
See the discussion in David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know it (Boston, 2007), 21–37.
See Mark Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979).
Peter Wilson, ‘Social Militarization in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, German History 18/1 (2000): 1–39.
See Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change Through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, CT, 1983).
On the ‘military revolution’, see the essays in Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, CO, 1995).
John Trenchard, An Argument Shewing: That a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government, ed. Walter Moyle (Exeter, 1971); and Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 401–422.
See Caroline Cox, A Proper Sense of Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington’s Army (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004).
Quoted in Wolfgang Kruse, Die Erfindung des modernen Militarismus: Krieg, Militär und bürgerliche Gesellschaft im politischen Diskurs der Französischen Revolution, 1789–1799 (Munich, 2003), 59.
See Rafe Blaufarb, The French Army, 1750–1820: Careers, Talent, Merit (Manchester, 2002), 12–74.
See François Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York, 2006).
See Richard H. Kohn, ‘The Inside History of the Newburgh Conspiracy: America and the Coup d’Etat’, William and Mary Quarterly 27/2 (1970): 187–220.
See T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (London, 1996), 126.
Quoted in Wilhelm Janssen, ‘Johann Valentin Embser und der vorrevolutionäre Bellizismus in Deutschland’, in Die Wiedergeburt des Krieges aus dem Geist der Revolution: Studien zum bellizisitischen Diskurs des ausgehenden 18. und beginnenden 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Johannes Kunisch and Herfried Münkler (Berlin, 1999), 43.
Quoted in Philip G. Dwyer, ‘Napoleon Bonaparte as Hero and Saviour: Image, Rhetoric and Behaviour in the Construction of a Legend’, French History 18/4 (2004): 379–404, 389.
Thierry Lentz, Nouvelle histoire du Premier Empire: La France et l’Europe de Napoléon, 1804–1814 (Paris, 2007), 172.
Patrice Gueniffey, Bonaparte, 1769–1802 (Paris, 2013), 496.
Robert Morrissey, The Economy of Glory: From Ancien Régime France to the Fall of Napoleon (Chicago, 2014).
Quoted in Jean Tulard, Napoleon, ou le mythe du sauveur (Paris, 1987), 180.
Emmanuel de Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte Hélène (Paris, 1862), 193
See Berghahn, Militarism; Vagts, A History of Militarism; Alain Rouquié, The Military and the State in Latin America (Berkeley, CA, 1987);
and Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society (Oxford, 2004).
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Bell, D.A. (2016). The Birth of Militarism in the Age of Democratic Revolutions. In: Forrest, A., Hagemann, K., Rowe, M. (eds) War, Demobilization and Memory. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-40649-1_2
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