The Last “War in Lace” or the First “Total War”?

Abstract

Reading articles by Nikolai Promyslov and Victor Taki made me think of an heirloom from my grandparents, an old three-mark coin from imperial Germany. One side shows King Frederick William III of Prussia surrounded by his people, beneath famous patriotic verse: Der Konig rief, und alle, alle kamen (The king called, and everyone came). On other side, we see Prussian eagle crushing snake of Napoleonic tyranny. The coin was issued in 1913 to mark centennial of of Liberation. We all know what happened a year later. hindsight, 1914 appears to us as beginning of an era of uniquely modern calamities, but at time many saw new war as latest in a chain of earlier conflicts that stretched back to Napoleon. With declaration of war, an American author wrote in 1914, the world turned back to Trafalgar, to Waterloo, to Koniggratz, to Franco-Prussian War.... The names are a little different, battlefields a few miles apart, but same principles are there. (1) The French and Germans picked up where they had left off in 1870-71, when Germany had taken revenge on Napoleon III for evils of Napoleon I. The British, by contrast, viewed Wilhelm II as second coming of Napoleon. As for Russians, who had just recently celebrated anniversary of War of 1812, they dubbed new conflict Second Patriotic War. Our current transition from bicentennials of 1789-1815 to centennials of 1914-45 offers an opportunity to ask what events of 200 years ago may have meant for Russia's entry into modern age. Were Napoleonic Wars, to borrow title of David Bell's book, the first total war, an anticipation of Verdun and Stalingrad? (2) Or was this last of what French call les guerres en dentelles, the wars in lace, fought by aristocrats in lace-trimmed uniforms whose decorum on battlefield matched their gallantry with ladies? Last, did wars influence Russia's domestic history by inflecting educated society's experience of what Norbert Elias called civilizing process? (3) The articles by Taki and Promyslov offer a wealth of material for reflection on these questions. Looking Ahead to 1914? Taki and Promyslov provide considerable food for thought about parallels between Franco-Russian conflict of 1812-14 and two world wars of 20th century. At times, two articles bring to mind analysis of World I in Modris Eksteins's Rites of Spring. Eksteins argues that Germans and Britons supported war in 1914 out of fundamentally different motivations: Germans went to war in search of spiritual experience, while British fought to defend a rules-based order of society. (4) Both of these tendencies are discernable in Russia's war against Napoleon. In both articles we find a conception of war as an ineffable experience of individual spirit, not unlike that which Eksteins attributes to Germans. Taki argues that some Russians aestheticized spectacle of battle and by rendering it sublime--a term that described any awe-inspiring yet delightful sight, object, or phenomenon that challenged representative capacities of language and art by virtue of its incommensurability with viewer (271). Promyslov detects a similar pattern in French memoirs, which portrayed French army as seriously wounded at Borodino, subjected to inhuman suffering, yet managing all same to tear itself from clutches of death (262). Combat, in this view, was an end in itself and provided its own justification. The attitude that Eksteins attributes to British--the desire to uphold a conservative sense of order in both individual behavior and international relations--is also present in two articles, although to a lesser degree. Taki argues that Russian officers were determined to uphold traditional conventions of war to show Europeans that Russians were civilized people. …