Napoleon's Wars: An International History 1803-1815 (review)

With the passing of David Chandler in 2004, the quill of the long-reigning dean of Napoleonic military history fell silent. By virtue of their various authoritative works, Rory Muir, David Gates, and Frederick Schneid all can be considered worthy successors. However, Charles Esdaile has clearly emerged as the heir apparent. Esdaile's Napoleon's Wars: An International History 1803-1815 is his most recent addition to an impressive list of publications that includes The Peninsular War: A New History and Fighting Napoleon: Guerrillas, Bandits, and Adventurers in Spain, 1808-1814. As these two titles suggest, Esdaile first achieved prominence as a historian of the conflict in the Iberian Peninsula. With Napoleon's Wars, he sheds his identity as a specialist on the Peninsular War and establishes his reputation as the new authority on Napoleonic military and diplomatic history.

In Napoleon's Wars, Esdaile strives to achieve several objectives. Most importantly, he intends to provide "a history of the Napoleonic Wars that reflects their pan-European dimension and is not francocentric." Second, he attempts to examine the Napoleonic Wars within the context of a Europe "whose international history was dominated by events, not in the West, but rather in the East. The focus of attention at the time was above all on Poland and the Ottoman Empire, and the maneuvering that centered on these states. . . . These foci did not alter either for the events of 1789 or for those of 1799" (pp. xiv-xv). Esdaile admits that this approach is not original, citing Paul Schroeder's 1995 "magisterial" work, The Transformation of European Politics, as his model. In addition to these objectives, Esdaile utilizes the study of international relations to answer the question of whether the history of Napoleon was the history of Europe. Finally, he drives home the point that Napoleonic France was not acting in a vacuum and that much of Napoleon's success was due to the fact that the other European powers continued to pursue traditional eighteenth-century strategic and diplomatic goals, all of which predated the French Revolution and its succeeding regimes.

Esdaile attempts to achieve his objectives by combining the primary and secondary elements of the book's title: Napoleon's Wars and An International History 1803-1815. As for the former, he forcefully asserts that the wars of 1803-1815 did not stem from an ideological crusade against France, but from Napoleon's own aggression, egomania, and lust for power. Esdaile places blame for the wars of the period squarely on Napoleon. Yet he also argues that structural and systemic factors such as the decline of Sweden, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the colonial and commercial conflict, cannot be ignored. Thus, Esdaile invites us to consider the Napoleonic Wars not "as a new type of conflict that foreshadowed the total wars of the twentieth-century," but "in terms of the dynastic wars of the eighteenth-century" (p. 6). At the root of these dynastic conflicts was a Napoleonic imperium "bent on nothing more than exploitation." Esdaile maintains that the other powers clearly recognized that they faced "complete subjugation to Paris" (p. 4). Even so, he concludes that by 1808 Napoleon could have achieved victory over Great Britain but failed and that to the very end the conflict with Russia that led to Napoleon's ill-fated invasion of 1812 could have been avoided, had the French emperor been willing to compromise with Tsar Alexander over at least one of the issues that divided the two states.

Space does not permit a recital of all of Esdaile's main points, but the author does indeed achieve his objectives in a grand style. That said, a few points do need to be made. While the book certainly is far from being francocentric, the reader may find the detailed accounts of British political history a bit taxing at times. Moreover, neo-Bonapartists and Francophiles...