Editing Total war (section)

====Europe====
In his book, ''The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know it'', David A Bell, a [[French History]] professor at [[Princeton University]] argues that the [[French Revolutionary Wars]] introduced to mainland Europe some of the first concepts of total war, such as mass conscription.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Bell|first1=David A|title=The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It|date=2007|publisher=Houghton Mifflin Harcourt|isbn=978-0-618-34965-4|edition=First|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Pw5jup_LyHAC|access-date=19 January 2017}}</ref><ref>{{Citation |last=Bell |first=David A. |title=The First Total War? The Place of the Napoleonic Wars in the History of Warfare |date=2023 |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-the-napoleonic-wars/first-total-war-the-place-of-the-napoleonic-wars-in-the-history-of-warfare/065046D6425195228A731A91C357BA4B |work=The Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars |volume=2: Fighting the Napoleonic Wars|pages=665–681 |editor-last=Mikaberidze |editor-first=Alexander |publisher=Cambridge University Press |doi=10.1017/9781108278096.033 |isbn=978-1-108-41766-2 |editor2-last=Colson |editor2-first=Bruno}}</ref> He claims that the new republic found itself threatened by a powerful coalition of European nations and used the entire nation's resources in an unprecedented war effort that included [[levée en masse]] (mass conscription). By 23 August 1793, the French front line forces grew to some 800,000 with a total of 1.5&nbsp;million in all services—the first time an army in excess of a million had been mobilised in Western history:

{{blockquote|From this moment until such time as its enemies shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies. The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge arms and [[logistics|transport provisions]]; the women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn old lint into linen; the old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.}}

[[File:SavenayDrownings.jpg|thumb|The drownings at [[Battle of Savenay|Savenay]] during the [[War in the Vendée]], 1793]]
[[File:National Museum in Poznan - Przejście przez Berezynę.JPG|thumb|[[Napoleon]]'s retreat from Russia in 1812. Napoleon's ''[[Grande Armée]]'' had lost about half a million men.]]

During the [[French invasion of Russia|Russian campaign]] of 1812 the Russians retreated while destroying infrastructure and agriculture in order to effectively hamper the French and strip them of adequate supplies. In the campaign of 1813, Allied forces in the German theatre alone amounted to nearly one million whilst two years later in [[the Hundred Days]] a French decree called for the total mobilisation of some 2.5&nbsp;million men (though at most a fifth of this was managed by the time of the French defeat at [[Battle of Waterloo|Waterloo]]). During the prolonged [[Peninsular War]] from 1808 to 1814 some 300,000 French troops were kept permanently occupied by, in addition to several hundred thousand Spanish, Portuguese and British regulars, an enormous and sustained guerrilla insurgency—ultimately French deaths would amount to 300,000 in the Peninsular War alone.<ref>{{cite journal | last = Broers | first = Michael | author-link = Michael Broers | date = 2008 | title = The Concept of 'Total War' in the Revolutionary – Napoleonic Period | journal = War in History | volume = 15 | number = 3 | pages = 247–268 | doi = 10.1177/0968344508091323| s2cid = 145549883 }}</ref>

The Franco-Prussian War was fought in breach of the recently signed [[First Geneva Convention|Geneva Convention of 1864]], when "European opinion increasingly expected that civilians and soldiers should be treated humanely in war".<ref>According to [https://francehistory.wordpress.com/2018/06/03/was-the-franco-prussian-war-a-modern-or-total-war/ Karine Varley, ''Was the Franco-Prussian War a Modern or Total War?'', 03/06/2018, History of Modern France at War], "the besieged cities, most notably [[Paris]], [[Strasbourg]], [[Metz]] and [[Belfort]] came closest to experiencing total war. German forces regularly bombarded civilian areas with the intention of damaging morale. In Paris, up to 400 shells a day were fired at civilian areas".</ref>