Napoleon’s Wars: An International History, 1803–1815 by Charles Esdaille

Abstract

clothing practices to represent themselves and their politico-religious position outside the courtly context, Auslander maintains that “they created a precedent upon which many others contesting the established order would continue to rely thereafter” (63). In a subsequent chapter about the American Revolution, the author describes the clothes worn by American revolutionaries, specifying that the clothes had been chosen to convey a political meaning. The author refers back to the previous chapter and highlights important differences between the two groups of revolutionaries. This example is typical of what makes this book so enjoyable to read. References are meticulously connected and no loose ends are left. Themes Auslander introduced when discussing the seventeenth-century English revolutionaries, for example , reappear in the context of the American Revolution: tastes, styles and everyday life. Furthermore, the lucid and succinct text is delightfully punctuated by 25 good quality illustrations, the relevance of which is fully explained by the author. In her chapter entitled “The Politics of Silk and Homespun,” the illustrations of a woman’s cloak and a homespun boy’s jacket, which are contrasted with a silk gown, fittingly elucidate Auslander’s claim that what revolutionaries chose to wear represented an effort “to shape a particular republican and a particular national self” (86) rather than just a renunciation of luxury or nostalgia for a simpler life, as other historians have argued. The carefully selected illustrations come from such famous places as the Biliothèque Nationale de France, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Library of Congress; all are beautifully reproduced. Likewise, in her chapter entitled “Making French Revolutionaries,” Auslander shows how the music, street names, food, clothing, language, theater, calendar, and architecture that shaped people’s daily lives were “republicanized” because, as she argues, the Revolution needed to be lived by all, not simply made by only a few. Again, the illustrations (from the Musée Carnavalet and other famous museums ) are successfully offered as crucial evidence for her argument that objects effect historical change through social relations. Auslander handily meets her goal of leading her reader to rethink the meaning of “cultural revolutions” to include the problem of culture in the English, American, and French revolutions. Her book demonstrates that history can actually be made by objects, rituals, and practice, and that over time people have communicated meaning through textiles, wood, metal, dance, and music. Her book will be appreciated by historians and anthropologists as well as scholars of French cultural studies. Texas A&M University, Kingsville Jacqueline Thomas ESDAILLE, CHARLES. Napoleon’s Wars: An International History, 1803–1815. New York: Viking, 2008. ISBN 9780670020300. Pp. 622. $35.00. Anyone familiar with the debates about Napoleon’s place in history is also aware of such antonyms reflecting often strongly held interpretations of Napoleon’s career as conqueror or liberator, man of blood or martyr. Esdaille’s exhaustive review of the evidence seeks to provide a definitive solution to these debates and his is therefore a revisionist approach based on a prolific use of quotations from primary sources throughout the text. Esdaille is most critical of the 400 FRENCH REVIEW 84.2 “latterday soldiers of the grande armée” that have for generations painted Napoleon as the defender of France’s honor and the French Revolution and who wanted to free Europe from the institutions of the Ancien Régime (xiii). Esdaille succeeds admirably, but to one who has for more than twenty years team-taught a course in modern European history, much of his effort appears spent on the proverbial kicking in of an open door. There are, nevertheless, many useful revisions , for example, the revolts in Spain and Portugal were not based on “outraged patriotism,” but “engineered by various dissident groups for their own purposes” (347). The reader is also provided with an excellent presentation of European diplomatic and military history that goes back to the early eighteenth century (and beyond) and that is pursued through 1815, to demonstrate that Napoleon’s goals began as the (more aggressive) pursuit of traditional French policies and that the response of the great nations of Europe, more or less united in the several coalitions, were also more traditional than the oft-cited...