Tom Hull: David A Bell: The First Total War

I don't know much about Napoleon's wars, but I found the following quote to be interesting. It is from Adam Gopnik's New Yorker (Feb. 12, 2007) review of a book by David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Houghton Mifflin):

The most intense parts of Bell's book are devoted to the Peninsular War -- the battles in Iberia between 1808 and 1813, where Napoleon's and Wellington's troops first fought each other, even as the locals rose up against French hegemons. In fact, the Peninsula was the original intractable insurgency, which, in turn, shaped the modern model of counter-insurgency, and Bell doesn't hesitate to draw parallels between our time and then: "Spain saw the development of a guerrilla war every bit as destructive as -- and eerily similar to -- the insurgency now under way in early-twenty-first-century Iraq," he writes. Napoleon's armies had taken Iberia at a time when it was not unlike the Middle East now: a culturally impoverished backwater, once grand but fallen on hard times, with a brutal, decadent ruling class and a fanatic clerical class, sandwiching a handful of liberals who at first welcomed the invading armies and went to work for them. In the beginning, Napoleon's revolutionary army promised Spain reform and even democratic enlightenment. But, in short order, the insurgency grew, until the occupation of Iberia by the French became untenable; we see the nature of the insurgency, and its human consequences for victor and vanquished, in Goya's series of etchings "The Disasters of War."

Given the horrific nature of the old regime, and the common interest that the people, including the peasants, might have had with the more or less benign new regime, or at least with the promise of modernization, why did they resist so fiercely? Bell argues that the insurgency was fuelled by the extraordinarily tenacious hold of religious culture. It seems to have been not so much religious faith as the whole, enclosing framework of Catholicism, which, whatever its faults, gave order and meaning to the great mass of Spaniards, and which they were not about to surrender. "O happy gothic, barbarian and fanatical Spaniards!" one Spaniard exclaimed. "Happy with our monks and with our Inquisition, which, according to the ideas of the French Enlightenment, has kept us a century behind other nations. Oh, if we could only go back two centuries more!" It was as if, to take the terrible dialectic one step further, the dream of total peace that had produced the fact of total war threw the bleeding and bewildered masses back on the only fixed piont left: an absolutist religiosity, made more fanatic by persecution. During the siege of Saragossa, which began in 1808, a miraculous apparition of a palm tree with a crown raised the morale of the entire population. At a time of complete disruption, the Church represented cultural continuity.

Ignore the nonsense about dreams of total peace engendering total war. The salient point here is how foreign occupation drove people ever deeper into the embrace of their religion. That's what the US is doing in Iraq, what Israel does in Occupied Palestine, what the US did via our proxy the Shah in Iran. That's even part of our own folklore in the line about there being no atheists in foxholes. It may also be why those seeking religious revival are so welcoming of war.

posted 2007-02-12