Focusing especially on the nineteenth century, this module seeks to show why the lessons of the so-called French Wars legitimised rather than prevented the cataclysm of the First World War. The public interest generated by Napoleonic anniversaries even today illustrates the long term and in fact ongoing nature of this process, overlaid as it is by the memory of still more destructive total wars in the twentieth century.
This module examines how European societies came to terms with the 23 years of conflict that followed the French Revolution, a period one historian has called ‘the first total war’. Experiencing and Remembering the French Wars, 1792-1918
