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Oxford, U.K. : Oxford University Press, 2013
xiv, 149 p. : ill. ; 18 cm.
I'm not sure what recently prompted me to want to read European history. Perhaps it's the 100th anniversary of the start of WWI - which will be commemorated this August - perhaps it's seeing books on the shelf about Napoleon, or perhaps it's just my wanting to get away from fiction for a while. Whatever the reason, I recently picked up a book I've been wanting to read for some time: Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower (about Europe in the decades just before WWI). Starting it made me realize that I wanted to know more about the period before Tuchman's book, so I picked up Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution. Guess what? Yes, I needed some background for 1848 and so I settled on this fine, little introduction to the Napoleonic Wars.
I love these "Very Short Introduction" books from Oxford. They cover a wide variety of subjects and are written for lay readers by experts in the field being covered, and are short and concise. As you can see, this one has just 149 pages, and the book is small enough that Napoleon could have it tucked under his buttons in the David portrait above - and we'd never know it!
Joking aside, the book was really eye-opening to the scale of carnage and destruction that the French Revolutionary and subsequent Napoleonic Wars brought to Europe (and the world). I had always thought that WW I was the first real mass-carnage, total war to take place in Europe - but Rapport makes the case that the percentages and scale of casualties (along with the global nature of the wars) puts the Napoleonic Wars in the same league as WWI.
I also appreciated his attempt to show the conflicting views on the legacies (good and bad) of Napoleon's expansionism - especially in light of the extreme reactionary responses to his aggression.
Now I'm ready to tackle 1848 and then, hopefully, to take on The Proud Tower.
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