CONTEMPORARY SCHOLARS AGREE THAT THE WARFARE that ravaged Europe between 1792 and 1815 was as formative for the culture of the period as the French and Industrial Revolutions. The Napoleonic Age has been described as the moment at which sustained international conflict became an “all-engrossing spectacle” that structured communal existence such that a militarized society became the norm, an everyday affair under whose reign we may still be living today. Such claims are supported by the work of military historians, who generally view the Napoleonic Era as the first time that entire nations were mobilized in the support of well-defined military goals, the inauguration of an epoch of “total war” that would reach its apotheosis in the titanic world wars of the twentieth century. Guided by these observations, one can identify numerous literary and philosophical texts from around 1800 that ask whether the fighting of the day was a genuinely new phenomenon or a logical outgrowth of longstanding trends. Questions about the form—and the inevitability—of future wars were also a prominent concern.

In exploring the conceptualization of war in this period, it is important to recognize that its disruptive potential constituted a challenge both to existing power structures and to the way in which the representation of historical experience was understood. If military scholars today tend to stress the scale and destructiveness of the combat at Waterloo or Austerlitz, authors at the turn of the nineteenth century also dwelled on the complex epistemological problems presented by these epic clashes.