An 'invisible giant', the seventeenth-century French army was the largest and hungriest institution of the Bourbon monarchy. Combining social and cultural emphases with more traditional institutional and operational concerns, this book examines the army in depth, studying recruitment, composition, discipline, motivation, selection of officers, leadership, administration, logistics, weaponry, tactics, field warfare and siegecraft. The portrait that emerges differs from what current scholarship might have predicted. Instead of claiming that a 'military revolution' transformed warfare, Lynn stresses evolutionary change. This work also offers surprising insights into absolutism and the relationship between the monarchy and aristocracy. Questioning widely held assumptions about state formation and coercion, Lynn argues that this standing army was primarily devoted to border defence and only rarely to internal repression.

The men who fought in Napoleon’s Grande Armée built a new empire that changed the world. Remarkably, the same men raised arms during the French Revolution for liberté, égalité, and fraternité. In just over a decade, these freedom fighters, who had once struggled to overthrow tyrants, rallied to the side of a man who wanted to dominate Europe. What was behind this drastic change of heart? In this ground-breaking study, Michael J. Hughes shows how Napoleonic military culture shaped the motivation of Napoleon’s soldiers. Relying on extensive archival research and blending cultural and military history, Hughes demonstrates that the Napoleonic regime incorporated elements from both the Old Regime and French Revolutionary military culture to craft a new military culture, characterized by loyalty to both Napoleon and the preservation of French hegemony in Europe. Underscoring this new, hybrid military culture were five sources of motivation: honor, patriotism, a martial and virile masculinity, devotion to Napoleon, and coercion. Forging Napoleon's Grande Armée vividly illustrates how this many-pronged culture gave Napoleon’s soldiers reasons to fight.

A number of nations, conspicuously Israel and the United States, have been increasingly attracted to the use of strategic barriers to promote national defense. In Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?, defense analyst Brent Sterling examines the historical use of strategic defenses such as walls or fortifications to evaluate their effectiveness and consider their implications for modern security. Sterling studies six famous defenses spanning 2,500 years, representing both democratic and authoritarian regimes: the Long Walls of Athens, Hadrian’s Wall in Roman Britain, the Ming Great Wall of China, Louis XIV’s Pré Carré, France’s Maginot Line, and Israel’s Bar Lev Line. Although many of these barriers were effective in the short term, they also affected the states that created them in terms of cost, strategic outlook, military readiness, and relations with neighbors. Sterling assesses how modern barriers against ground and air threats could influence threat perceptions, alter the military balance, and influence the builder’s subsequent policy choices. Advocates and critics of strategic defenses often bolster their arguments by selectively distorting history. Sterling emphasizes the need for an impartial examination of what past experience can teach us. His study yields nuanced lessons about strategic barriers and international security and yields findings that are relevant for security scholars and compelling to general readers.

A magisterial history of French society between the end of the middle ages and the Revolution by one of the world's leading authorities on early modern France. Using colorful examples and incorporating the latest scholarship, William Beik conveys the distinctiveness of early modern society and identifies the cultural practices that defined the lives of people at all levels of society. Painting a vivid picture of the realities of everyday life, he reveals how society functioned and how the different classes interacted. In addition to chapters on nobles, peasants, city people, and the court, the book sheds new light on the Catholic church, the army, popular protest, the culture of violence, gendered relations, and sociability. This is a major new work that restores the ancien régime as a key epoch in its own right and not simply as the prelude to the coming Revolution.

EARL J. HESS is Stewart W. McClelland Chair in History at Lincoln Memorial University and the author of fifteen books on the Civil War, including Kennesaw Mountain: Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign ; The Knoxville Campaign: Burnside and Longstreet in East Tennessee ; and The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi.

Helmut Illbruck traces the concept of nostalgia from the earliest uses of the term in the seventeenth century to today as it evolves with different meanings and intensities in the discourses of medicine, literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. Following nostalgia’s troubled relations to the philosophical project of the Enlightenment, Illbruck’s study builds a cumulative argument about nostalgia’s modern significance that often revises and thoroughly enriches our understanding of cultural, literary, and intellectual history. Illbruck concludes with an attempt at a reinterpretation and defense of nostalgia, which seduces us to read and think with, rather than against, nostalgia’s wistful yearning for the past. Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease is a comprehensive, insistent, and profound interdisciplinary investigation of the history of an idea. It should appeal to readers interested in the cultural makings of the Enlightenment and modernity or in the histories of medicine, literature, and philosophy.

The two centuries that chronologically bind the topics in this volume span a period in which Europe was in its global ascendancy. The projection of imperial powers reflected the increasing centralization of states. The ability of state institutions to control and pay for the acquisition, protection and maintenance of empires could only be achieved when internal threats abated and centralized bureaucratic states emerged. Expansion, however, was not uniform, and the desire to export power was often limited by economic considerations and internal political and social conflict. Nevertheless, between 1618-1850 hegemonic empires were established and yet, the incidence of conflict between them declined in the years after 1815. This volume explores the various factors related to the projection and limitation of imperial powers in the western world. Contributors are Jeremy Black, Paul W. Schroeder, John A. Lynn, Dennis Showalter, Peter H. Wilson, Janet M. Hartley, Ciro Paoletti and Robert Epstein.

From an esteemed military historian, a sweeping history of the revolutions in war-fighting that have shaped the modern world Heraclitus wrote that “war is the father of all,” and it has formed much of the modern world. Although the fundamental nature of war has not altered over the centuries, constant change, innovation, and adaptation have repeatedly reshaped how wars are fought in the West. Revolutions in military practice cannot be separated from larger social developments in areas like logistics, finance and economics, and the culture of military organizations. In The Dark Path, Williamson Murray argues that the history of warfare in the West hinged on five revolutions, which both reflected the social, political, and economic conditions that produced them and in turn influenced how those conditions evolved. These five key turning points are the advent of the modern state, which formed bureaucracies and professional militaries; the Industrial Revolution, which produced the financial and industrial means to sustain and equip large armies; the French Revolution, which provided the ideological basis needed to sustain armies through continent-sized wars; the merging of the Industrial and French Revolutions in the U.S. Civil War; and the accelerating integration of technological advancement, financial capacity, ideology, and government that unleashed the modern capacity for total warfare. An ambitious work of synthesis, this book shows how the world continually re-creates war—and how war, in turn, continually re-creates the world.

Explores the life and court career of Madame de Maintenon. A study in queenship, it reveals how the dynamics of power and gender operated within the realms of early modern high politics, church-state affairs and international relations while providing unique insights into the Sun King and his court.

A definitive reinterpretation of the role and influence of the French army during Richelieu's ministry.