Customer Reviews

The French Revolutionary Wars (Essential Histories)

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I was pleasantly surprised by this volume in Osprey's Essential Histories series. In a scant one hundred pages the author does an excellent job of capturing the essential facts relating to these conflicts sprinkled with useful maps and chronologies as well as some superb representational pieces of period art. I enjoyed the two interesting sidebars, one on a British naval officer and another on Nelson's ladylove, Emma Hamilton. The short bibliography lists two of my favorites, Paddy Griffith's ART of WAR of REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE and T.C.W.Blanning's THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS. Fremont-Barnes has done a very good job on supplying the interested reader an introduction to an extremely colorful and fascinating period.

This period is really extensively complicated by alot of fascinating events. A purely Military History view would still be 1000 pages, because the French Revolutionary Wars were just such a fascinating time, with so many campaigns, battles, skirmishes, sieges.
This book attempts to give it a concise shape, and does a good job a the operational level of untangling the web of campaigns. Its difficult to find, in English, good stuff about this war. On Napoleon, there is an avalanche of books, even on specific battles. But not so much about this period, besides the Italian campaigns of Napoleon that ended these wars.
At the operational, it gives a good account, however, it lacks just due to the space about what occurred at the unit level at each of the battles, since each battle was its own story within a story. The way a Civil War book would spend a few pages on Antietam, Bull Run, and 5 pages on Gettysburg alone. There are 3-4 fronts at any given moment in this period, and untangling them all is done in a pretty decent way. The reader has a solid picture of what had transpired before Napoleon enters the stage. From than on, well, most of you have probably read a good deal on Napoleon already.
For those who haven't gotten a Napoleonic military history background, the Smithsonian History of War - Napoleonic Wars is a great starting point. Too bad it skips everything before Napoleon's Italian Campaign, which is why I own this book. This series also has a very good 7 years war and Spanish Succession books about the wars of Frederick the Great.

This book provides a good introduction to its topic for those with only about 2 hours to invest in reading its 96 page length. The book starts out by providing the geopolitical balance of power prevailing before the wars and a description of the militaries of each of Europe's major combatants. Then it goes into how the wars played out covering not only military campaigns but how the militaries themselves evolved during the course of the war, the role of ideologies and the after effects of the war. All and all a very good introduction.