Charles Esdaile
The Ubiquitous Brigand
Napoleon’s Other War: Bandits, Rebels and Their Pursuers in the Age of Revolutions
By Michael Broers
Peter Lang Ltd 232pp £25
In military terms, the period from 1792 to 1815 is very much remembered as an age of great battles (some of the greatest battles in history, indeed), but in practice, for many soldiers of the French Revolution and Napoleon in particular, it was in reality much more an age of little ones. Thus, in many of the wilder parts of the French imperium – in Brittany, the Auvergne, the Pyrenees, the Ardennes, the Rhineland, Illyria, the Alps, the Apennines, Calabria, Spain and Portugal – the French and their allies found themselves fighting not regular armies, but bands of freebooters composed of no more than a few hundred men. Casualties were usually not that high (in two and a half years of the French occupation of Andalucía, such bands accounted for a mere 800 dead and a further 2,000 wounded), but attempting to bring the regions concerned to order was nonetheless an exhausting business that tied down large numbers of regular troops and brought fire and the sword to hundreds of rural communities; in the process it played a large part in giving rise to the idea that the conflicts associated with the French Revolution and Napoleon were, in the words of David A Bell, the ‘first total war’.
Implicitly undermining, as it does, the whole notion that political progress is ipso facto a beneficent phenomenon that can count on popular support, this irregular struggle is clearly an important subject, but on the whole it is not one that has attracted very much attention. Here and there
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk