Histories which concern themselves with events prior to the 20th century invariably collide with a problem endemic to the genre. The farther back in time they attempt to reach, the more opaque events become. Not only do the ravages of time rub out valuable sources of information necessary for the corroboration of events, the context in which the events took place is lost, leaving us to only wonder at the myriad motivations which impelled the past's prime movers. The Napoleonic Wars are a classic example of this problem. For while they transpired at the dawn of the 19th century, in a time of printing presses and parliaments which disseminated information that survives to this day, the shifting alliances, internecine conflicts and political firestorms are 200 years removed from us, mired in a barely post-feudalist world mostly ruled by absolute monarchs and the ambitious men who sought to eclipse them. In other words, this is very much not our world. Though Mr. Esdaile goes a long way to illuminating the wars themselves, he fails to connect us to the thought processes of the men who instigated them, an inadequacy which dooms his history.
The Napoleonic Wars were a series of ruinous campaigns which, for the first time in history, coupled technological advancements birthed by the Industrial Revolution with new military ideas of mass-conscription and standardized training to create huge armies the likes of which the world had never seen. These titanic forces smashed into one another all across Europe, soaking lands, from Russia in the east to Spain in the west, in the lifeblood of millions of dead soldiers. Sparked in 1793 by the First Coalition of European kingdoms which, in the wake of the French Revolution, banded together to use military force to restore the Bourbon monarchy to the vacated French throne, they did not end until the Seventh Coalition defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, casting him from Europe and condemning him to a death in exile. In the intervening 22 years, Napoleon rose from the ranks of a disorganized French army, hurriedly raised to defend the new republic from coalition invasion, to become the most powerful man in Europe. Originally cloaked in republican idealism, he soon became a tyrant, sweeping aside the violence and the confusion that followed in the wake of the French Revolution and replacing it with a military-backed empire with Napoleon at its head. He lead campaigns to conquer territory in Spain, Germany, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Russia and Egypt. In doing so, he very nearly succeeded in creating a single block of European kingdoms bent on locking his greatest enemy, England, out in the economic cold. But a guerrilla war in Spain, followed by a notoriously calamitous invasion of Russia sapped his great French army of strength and legitimacy, leading to his overthrow and abdication.
Mr. Esdaile bites off far more than he can chew in this self-styled international history of the period between 1803 and 1815, when Napoleon was emperor of France and very nearly ruler of Europe. Though the author is mostly successful in his attempt to escort us through the ever-shifting sands of the various alliances that sought to oppose Napoleon, he fails to provide anywhere near enough background on the various players involved, leading to confusion and dismay for a reader drowning in a sea of unfamiliar names and labyrinthine political compacts. As a result, Mr. Esdaile hits most of the major notes, the rise of Napoleon, the consolidation of the powers against him, the wars the two sides waged, and the consequences of those wars, while failing to animate the why behind these conflicts: the ambition that drove them, the politics that shaped them, the recriminations and retaliations that perpetuated them.
To be fair, Mr. Esdaile set himself a difficult task. How does one write a history about multiple wars, on multiple fronts, all while providing enough background to tie it all together? His unfortunate answer was to middle it, a single volume history which is too brief to tell the whole story and too long to provide a synopsis. Damningly, I learned more about the Napoleonic Wars from two hours spent with Wikipedia than I learned from blurrily staring at these 650 pages of half-explained alliances and dizzying conflicts. This may be well-researched, but it fails to do what a history must always do best, make explicable events and times now removed from us. (1/5 Stars)
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