November 9, 2007

David Bell (Johns Hopkins University)

The Culture of War in the Age of Revolutions

The paper is an overview of some of the main themes of his new book The First Total War. It proposes a new argument for understanding the shift between the aristocratic culture of limited warfare that prevailed in Europe in the eighteenth century, and the culture of unrestrained war that succeeded it after the start of the French Revolution. I suggest that this shift was not primarily due to the rise of nationalism or to new ideological splits, but was a consequence of new modes of thought about war that arose with the Enlightenment.

David Bell is Dean of Faculty and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He is a specialist in early modern French history. His publications include: Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (Oxford, 1994); The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 (New Haven, 2001), and The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It (Boston, 2007). His first book won the Pinkney Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and his second book the Gershoy Prize of the American Historical Association.