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The Journal of Military History 68.2 (2004) 598-599



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Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1750-1850. Selected Papers 1999. Tallahassee:Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution, Florida State University, 1999. Tables. Notes. Pp. xxii, 531.

For almost thirty years the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe has been an annual fixture in the United States. Held every February in Dixie, it has both brought together some of the great names in the field—past speakers have included Cobb, Hunt, Sutherland, Sydenham, and Chandler—and provided a forum for less established figures and doctoral students. This democratic approach has its disadvantages, however. Whilst junior scholars have been able to mingle freely with the great and the good, as the volume currently under review suggests, the papers have often been patchy in terms [End Page 598] of their quality. Thus, the contents begin with a vigorous round-table discussion on the state of French-Revolution studies, whilst this is followed by high-quality addresses by the leading British experts, Jeremy Black and Alan Forrest, on France's failure as a great power between 1750 and 1815 and the vision of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that may be derived from the letters written by French soldiers to their friends and families. After that, however, things become more mixed. There are many excellent contributions—examples here include Hanley on Napoleon's manipulation of the press; Blaufarb on military views of the French National Guard; Cuccia on popular vocal music of the French Revolution; Dym on the restoration of absolutism in Spain in 1814; Harmon on law and order in the Isère; and Vehse on the Jewish experience of French occupation in Hamburg. But at the same time there are also several papers that do little other than retail military or biographical narrative. On occasion this is not without interest—in this instance reading between the lines offers some useful details on both the relationship between the French and their German allies and the Prussian "people's war of 1813"—but the fact is that most of the campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars have been so thoroughly analysed that what is on offer here does little to advance the frontiers of historical knowledge. There will always be a place for the history of military operations, but what we need is not more of the same, but insights into aspects of the struggle that have hitherto gone undiscussed: the value of this collection of papers would have been infinitely greater had it included discussions of, say, the Finnish insurrection of 1808, or Russian ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the war against Turkey of 1806-12. Turning to the wider subject of the Napoleonic empire, the comparative lack of papers on such subjects as reform, resistance, and collaboration in the French imperium is quite striking. And, finally, it is a little disturbing to observe the presence of one or two contributions that are little more than imperial propaganda. So, two cheers only for the content on this occasion, but, a fortiori, three cheers for the Consortium as an institution: long may it continue.



Charles Esdaile
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, England


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