Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONwere gods upon the earth and that they were bound to say thatwhatever they did was well done. Through this present change it ismore difficult to rule the people.' 6IVWe have seen the effects of the twenty-odd years of war on the politicalstructure of Europe. But what were the consequences of the actualprocess of warfare, the military mobilizations and operations, thepolitical and economic measures consequent upon them?Paradoxically these were greatest where least concerned with theactual shedding of blood; except for France itself which almost certainlysuffered higher casualties and indirect population losses than any othercountry. The men of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period werelucky enough to live between two periods of barbaric warfare—that ofthe seventeenth century and that of our own—which had the capacityto lay countries waste in a really sensational manner. No area affectedby the wars of 1792-1815, not even in the Iberian peninsula, wheremilitary operations were more prolonged than anywhere else andpopular resistance and reprisal made them more savage, was devastatedas parts of Central and Eastern Europe were in the Thirty Years' andNorthern Wars of the seventeenth century, Sweden and Poland in theearly eighteenth, or large parts of the world in war and civil war in thetwentieth. The long period of economic improvement which preceded1789 meant that famine and its companion, plague and pestilence, didnot add excessively to the ravages of battle and plunder; at any rateuntil after 18 n. (The major period of famine occurred after the wars,in 1816-17.) The military campaigns tended to be short and sharp,and the armaments used—relatively light and mobile artillery—notvery destructive by modern standards. Sieges were uncommon. Firewas probably the greatest hazard to dwellings and the means of production,and small houses or farms were easily rebuilt. The onlymaterial destruction really difficult to make good quickly in a preindustrialeconomy is that of timber, fruit- or olive-groves, which takemany years to grow, and there does not seem to have been muchof that.Consequently the sheer human losses due to these two decades ofwar do not appear to have been, by modern standards, frighteninglyhigh; though in fact no government made any attempt to calculatethem, and all our modern estimates are vague to the point of guesswork,except those for the French and a few special cases. One millionwar dead for the entire period' compares favourably with the losses of92