David Bell, Napoleon: A Concise Biography. Reviewed by Katie Schupbach David Bell is a professor of History at Princeton University, who previously taught at Yale and John Hopkins. He is also an author of many books, including The First Total War and Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present. The theme of his book, The First Total War, is that late eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers unintentionally paved the way for a new kind of warfare that European culture had placed limits on in the past. This new idea of warfare is ultimately what made the character in his book Napoleon: A Concise Biography, possible. The character is Napoleon Bonaparte, a French military and political leader during the French Revolution. …show more content…
Bell discusses first the political changes in France, beginning when the Third Estate demanded a greater share of representation. This led to the storming of Bastille, and then later to the creation of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Bell writes, “With the coming of elections and a raucous free press, political figures learned to appeal directly to ordinary citizens to gain power.” Because of these changes, the Revolution made an unknown political authority possible. Political authority was not the only thing the Revolution was changing. It was also changing the nature of war. From 1772 to 1773, the revolutionary government began to make use of one of its greatest advantages that the Old Regime had never fully utilized, its population. With its greatest advantage, “Revolutionary generals now sought out major battles to make best use of their superior numbers, encouraged the formation of new revolutionary governments in occupied territories, and ransacked those territories to keep their own forces supplied.”[3] According to Bell, without these transformations, Napoleon’s massive, violent wars and crushing victories would have been beyond belief. And without