Debating the history of "total war"

For those who might be interested, here is the text of the talk I gave at the American Historical Association conference this weekend, as part of a panel with the theme “What Makes a War ‘Total’?” organized by former AHA President Mary Lindemann, and with papers by Wendy Goldman, Julia Roos, and Laura Matthew, in addition to my own.

The paper reflects on the concept of “total war,” and the debates on the subject that involved my 2007 book The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. I also have an essay on the subject coming out soon in the second volume of The Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars.

===========================================================================

Sixteen years ago, I published a book which cast the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars, together, as what I called The First Total War. Not surprisingly, this claim provoked a few objections. Some critics insisted that total war was a modern phenomenon that could not possibly have existed before the Industrial Revolution. Others argued, to the contrary, that it was a timeless phenomenon that had existed at least since Cato took to ending his speeches Carthago delenda est—maybe even since Homo Sapiens took on the Neanderthals. Still others contended that the very category of total war is essentially meaningless.

In a basic sense, this is not an argument that anyone can actually win. As with most categories of historical analysis, everything depends on the definition. If we associate total war with attempts entirely to eradicate an enemy population, then it is indeed hard to see it as anything other than timeless and universal, including everything from the Punic Wars to the Spanish invasion of Mexico to the Thirty Years’ War to World War II. After all, modern Western states and empires were hardly the first societies in history to practice exterminatory warfare. On the other hand, if we associate total war above all with the wartime mobilization of the lion’s share of a country’s human and material resources—including the creation of a “home front” and a dissolution of the distinction between military and civilian—then it would seem hard to view total war as anything other than an element of industrial modernity. Because in earlier periods it was impossible to divert more than a relatively small share of resources away from subsistence agriculture. Meanwhile, if we insist on only using the term in relation to times and places where it was an actor’s category, then it has only existed since World War I. Or maybe not even then. It's important to remember that in the first half of the twentieth century, most invocations of “total war” were not descriptive. They were exhortatory. Léon Daudet, the French journalist who actually coined the term in 1918, didn’t do so principally to describe the war then taking place. He did so to urge the French to even greater efforts than they were already making. The same applies to the most famous use of the term, by Joseph Goebbels in his 1943 speech at the Berlin Sports Palace, after Stalingrad. “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?” is what he said. “Do you want total war?” With the implication that the Nazis were not yet waging it.

So, when we ask “What Makes a War Total?” what we’re really asking is whether there is a definition of total war that can serve a useful intellectual purpose in convincingly distinguishing between different sorts of war, total and less-than-total. There could conceivably be different definitions of this sort, that place the emphasis on different factors: on the mobilization of resources, on human destruction, on environmental destruction, and so forth. The question is not: Which definition is correct? That’s in fact essentially meaningless to ask. The question is: which definition is most intellectually useful?

One reason why I set out to write my book was that I wasn’t happy with the definitions of total war that previous historians had offered.  These definitions were often impressionistic and vague. They haphazardly mixed different criteria, and they often ultimately used “total” as little more than a rhetorical device—basically as a synonym for “really, really bad.” But even when the definitions were more precise, their authors still had to admit the obvious, which is that no war can be truly “total,” in the sense of mobilizing all of a society’s resources or exterminating all of the enemy or entirely dissolving the line between military and civilian. So then, for these authors, the question became how things were measured, and where the threshold of totality was located. Did the 19th-century War of the Triple Alliance count? On the one hand, Paraguay lost as much as two thirds of its population. But its enemies didn’t mobilize anywhere near as much of their economies as 20th-century countries would do in the world wars. All in all, trying to measure thresholds of totality did not seem a very useful way of going about things.

A more useful approach, it seemed to me, started with the point I made a moment ago, namely that the term “total war” itself has most often been used by historical actors in an exhortatory, rather than a descriptive sense. It seemed important to me as well that the actors who used it were more often politicians and journalists than actual commanders. In other words, the term was political as much as it was military. It described an ideal of total mobilization and total destruction—an ideal towards which combatants needed to be pushed—and pushed mostly by people who stayed home. It struck me that “total war” might be more useful as a concept if it didn’t refer to a specific state of affairs but rather to a process, and, more specifically, a process akin to political radicalization. Of the writers I read, the social theorist Raymond Aron perhaps came closest when he spoke of modern warfare having what he called an “irrepressible dynamism” that leads to an ever greater commitment of resources and an ever greater level of hostility on the part of the combatant power. Defining total war as a process means not having to specify a quantitative threshold for “totality.” Total wars are instead distinguished from more limited wars by the fact that the combatants are not only unable to make a lasting peace with each other, but are driven to commit an ever greater share of their resources to the struggle, in pursuit of an ever greater level of destruction, until one side or the other is either conquered, or simply collapses under the strain. This definition obviously implies that some sort of implacable hostility exists, and relevant reasons might include ideology, religion, national hatred or even the simple desire for revenge. They might also include the conviction that victory will not just bring about the satisfaction of war aims, but also the creation of a fundamentally new, peaceful world order. This was very much the case in World War I, the so-called “war to end all wars.” It was also the case in the French Revolutionary Wars—or, as one leading French general called it in 1792, “the last war.”

Now, the definition I proposed, of total war as process, might seem abstract enough that it could apply to wars throughout all of history—in other words, that I was coming down on the “timeless” side of the “timeless versus modern” argument. But this wasn’t actually the case. The reason is that the very idea of being able to mobilize all of a society’s resources for war depends on a very modern concept of what a society is. Before the late 17th century, European rulers for the most part literally had only the vaguest idea of how many people they ruled. Their states did not have anything like formal budgets. The notion of tallying up the total economic activity of their states would have been unintelligible to them. In an era of composite monarchies, and of overlapping and multilayered feudal jurisdictions, state boundaries were fluid and complex—nothing like the clear lines so confidently displayed on historical maps. It was only in the late 17th century that European states, in large part under the pressure of imperial competition, began to develop the sort of government apparatuses that conducted censuses, that drew up modern budgets, and that started to undertake surveys of social and economic resources. It was above all in absolutist France, and in the fiscal-military British state that John Brewer so well described in The Sinews of Power, that the idea of total mobilization of a society’s resources for warfare became thinkable. When we are thinking about transformations in warfare, we should not just be thinking about technology and industrial capacity. Bureaucracy, state capacity, and what could be called political imagination matter just as much, if not more.

I would also add here two points that I didn’t develop sufficiently in my book. Here’s the first. In the late eighteenth century, thanks to factors ranging from agricultural improvement to global trade patterns to the putting out system and to what Jan de Vries has called the “industrious revolution,” the proportion represented by subsistence agriculture in the economic activity of Western European states was rapidly declining, along with the share of the population involved in it. It was therefore becoming possible, even before the industrial revolution, actually to mobilize a significant proportion of a state’s economic resources for war without starving the population. One example would be the radically ambitious project that Napoleon Bonaparte pursued to rapidly put France back on a war footing during the Hundred Days of 1815.

The second point is somewhat different. Another key factor contributing to the realization that states could be mobilized entirely for war was political and intellectual: namely, the concept of the nation-state. Now, nations themselves existed in Europe since the Middle Ages. But only in the age of revolution did the idea arise that nations and states should naturally coincide—that all members of a given nation should be grouped into a single state, and that states should consist of members of a single nation. The idea of mobilizing a society for war became all the easier and more natural if all the members of that society were considered essentially similar and interchangeable. It became all the easier when it was assumed that the people in question would want to mobilize, out of patriotic fervor, and would not have to be forced, cajoled, or bribed to fight, and otherwise to aid the war effort. So, in addition to bureaucracy and state capacity as critical factors enabling the emergence of total war, I’d also add national patriotism and cultural capacity.

For all these reasons, then, I think it makes sense to view the eighteenth century in Europe as the moment when total war, as I have defined it, as a process akin to political radicalization, became possible. This was the moment when you had states with sufficient political and cultural capacity to pursue the goal of total mobilization in the service of total destruction. And starting in 1792, with the French Revolutionary wars, you also had the sort of implacable hostility that drove the combatants irresistibly forward in pursuit of this goal, for reasons that included both revolutionary ideology and the conviction that victory would bring about the creation of a fundamentally new, peaceful world order.

This is why I stand by my argument that it is intellectually useful to call the wars fought from 1792 to 1815 the “first total war.” Of course, they were not a single war. Of course, the combatants and the divisions between them changed greatly over time. But even after Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself emperor and sought to establish himself as a brother monarch to Europe’s other crowned heads, he was, significantly, still unable to reach a lasting peace with them. Instead, France and the allied coalitions it fought against were pushed to ever greater mobilization, with armies and battles swelling enormously in size, to reach levels never seen before in Europe. Certain theaters of operation – especially in Spain – degenerated into theaters of horror in which the line between civilian and military largely dissolved, with calls going out to the entire population – the entire nation-state – to resist the French invader, and with that invader taking hostages and deliberately slaughtering civilian populations. Finally, one side—France—collapsed, and the victorious allies tried to put the genie of total war back into the bottle—something they accomplished with a certain degree of success thanks to the Congress of Vienna and the Concert of Europe, until it burst forth again in 1914.

-