Total War French Revolution

The wars of the French Revolution took aspects of warfare that had existed individually during the reign of the Old Regime and brought them together ultimately culminating in a new form of warfare known to history as total war. A new scale of warfare was achieved thanks to the recruitment of all that France had to offer including men, women and all other available resources. The French people set out on a grand quest for universal liberty looking upon those who resisted them as evil and something which needed to be eradicated no matter the cost. The Russians were to effectively use the scorched earth policy slowing and draining the French of resources until Napoleons Grand Armee could take no more. Together these main, aspects of the Revolutionary

With their mindset moving away from the limited wars that were fought by the old regimes, people’s ideas of war turned towards the extreme. Most French leaders had a new understanding of war, something that must end in either total victory or total defeat. This is also exemplified in the idea that the revolutionaries believed the war to turn into a war of liberation and that the ideals of the revolution would be applicable to all peoples in all countries. If the French were to successfully embark on a war or conquest with such a high purpose it would be by its nature, long, grueling and as David Bell feels, potentially apocalyptic. Due to the hostile nations and governments surrounding the French at the time, in order to achieve such a goal the French would have to be prepared to conquer in order to live free from outside enemies or perish to the last man in the process. Anacharsis Cloots, a Prussian nobleman who played a significant role in the French revolution spoke of the way that the French must fight if war was to

The best example of this comes from the violence and horror that took place in the Vendee, in the west of France during the War in the Vendee. The war itself was an uprising, seen as counterrevolutionary by those in Paris, against an early 1793 levy and the closing of churches in the Vendee area. A year into the revolt in 1794, the republican general Louis-Marie Turreau sent twelve detachments of two to three thousand soldiers each marching across the Vendee area, with orders to make it uninhabitable. The so called “hell columns” burnt down houses and woods, confiscated or destroyed food, killed livestock and in some areas engaged in large scale rape and slaughter. According to David Bell the most reliable of estimates sits at around 220,000 to 250,000 men, women, and children lost their lives in the years 1793-1794 during the War in the Vendee. David Bell also believes that what made the Vendee so much worse than previous mass slaughters was that it took place during the kind of warfare with no precedent, total war. Previously, enemies of the revolution could expect to be relatively well treated bar providing food and accommodation for the passing soldiers. Enemies of the revolution, no matter whom they may be were perceived as an “existential”