Editing Napoleonic Wars (section)

===Total war===
{{Main|Total war}}
[[File:Goya-Guerra (32).jpg|thumb|right|[[Francisco Goya|Goya's]] ''[[The Disasters of War]]'', showing French atrocities against Spanish civilians]]
Historians have explored how the Napoleonic wars became total wars. Most historians argue that the escalation in size and scope came from two sources. First was the ideological clash between revolutionary/egalitarian and conservative/hierarchical belief systems. Second was the emergence of [[nationalism]] in France, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere, that made these "people's wars" instead of contests between monarchs.{{sfn|Stoker|Schneid|Blanton|2008|pp=24, 31–32, 38}} Bell has argued that even more important than ideology and nationalism were the intellectual transformations in the culture of war that came about through the [[Age of Enlightenment]].{{sfn|Bell|2007|pp=7–13}} One factor, he says, is that war was no longer a routine event but a transforming experience for societies—a total experience. Secondly, the military emerged in its own right as a separate sphere of society distinct from the ordinary civilian world. The French Revolution made every civilian a part of the war machine, either as a soldier through universal conscription, or as a vital cog in the home front machinery supporting and supplying the army. Out of that, says Bell, came "militarism", the belief that the military role was morally superior to the civilian role in times of great national crisis. The fighting army represented the essence of the nation's soul.{{efn|Many historians say it was not the "first" total war; for a critique of Bell see {{Cite book |last=Frederick C. Schneid |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=V086MVIushMC&pg=PA1802 |title=Napoleonic Wars |publisher=Potomac Books |year=2012 |isbn=978-1-59797-578-0 |page=1802 |access-date=18 June 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150930174847/https://books.google.com/books?id=V086MVIushMC&pg=PA1802 |archive-date=30 September 2015 |url-status=live}}}} As Napoleon proclaimed, "It is the soldier who founds a Republic and it is the soldier who maintains it."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Robert Harvey |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JB1SXLBGP18C&pg=PT328 |title=The War of Wars |publisher=Constable & Robinson |year=2013 |isbn=978-1-84901-260-7 |page=328 |access-date=18 June 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150930180631/https://books.google.com/books?id=JB1SXLBGP18C&pg=PT328 |archive-date=30 September 2015 |url-status=live}}</ref> Napoleon said on his career "I closed the gulf of anarchy and brought order out of chaos. I rewarded merit regardless of birth or wealth, wherever I found it. I abolished feudalism and restored equality to all religion and before the law. I fought the decrepit monarchies of the Old Regime because the alternative was the destruction of all this. I purified the Revolution."<ref>{{Cite book |last=H.A Currathers |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VwBzCgAAQBAJ |title=Napoleon on Campaign |publisher=Sword & Pen Military |year=2014 |isbn=978-1-78346-250-6 |page=181 |access-date=5 June 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210715013934/https://books.google.com/books?id=VwBzCgAAQBAJ |archive-date=15 July 2021 |url-status=live}}</ref>