Mark Hewitson. Absolute War

With Absolute War: Violence and Mass Warfare in the German Lands, 1792–1820 and The People’s Wars: Histories of Violence in the German Lands, 1820–1888, Mark Hewitson has produced two ambitious volumes. They form the first installments of a planned trilogy that will challenge the way historians have interpreted German attitudes to war since the late eighteenth century. Neither the rise of nationalism during the Napoleonic Wars nor continuities with earlier conflicts adequately explain how Germans responded to military violence, the author contends. Instead, he believes that the long duration of the French Wars (1792–1815) and the introduction of conscription furthered the acceptance of war as an end in itself. “In an age of conscripts and mass warfare,” Hewitson notes in Absolute War, “the nature of the fighting and the wider ramifications of a campaign were more important for the majority of combatants than the aims or causes of a conflict” (5)

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