In 1812, as Napoleon’s Grand Armée began its disastrous invasion of Russia, the Prussian officer Carl von Clausewitz decided to quit his country’s army and join the forces of the tsar. In doing so, this patriotic German was not repudiating his nation, but trying to serve it. Ever since 1806, when Napoleon had annihilated the entire Prussian armed forces in a campaign lasting just over a month, Prussia had meekly borne the French yoke. Clausewitz, like many other Prussian officers, chafed at his country’s passivity, and when the invasion of Russia opened a new front in the continental struggle against Napoleon, he rushed to join in. In announcing his decision, the future author of the classic treatise “On War” explained that the world was living through a revolution in the way wars must be fought:

Formerly … war was waged in the way that a pair of duelists carried out their pedantic struggle. One battled with moderation and consideration, according to the conventional proprieties … The war of the present is a war of all against all. It is not the king who wars on a king, not an army which wars on an army, but a people which wars on another.”

These lines sum up the transformation that David A. Bell explores in his ambitious new history, “The First Total War” (Houghton Mifflin, 420 pages, $27). Between 1792, when the Revolutionary government of France declared war on its reactionary neighbors, and 1815, when Napoleon set sail for Saint Helena, Europe was wracked by a nearly uninterrupted series of devastating wars. Few periods of history have been more comprehensively studied; hardly a year goes by without a large new biography of Napoleon, and there have been literally hundreds of thousands of books about various aspects of his reign. He is, as Mr. Bell writes, “quite possibly the most recognizable figure from all of European history.”

But one facet of the Napoleonic era, Mr. Bell contends, is still unappreciated: its transformation of the way wars are conceived and fought. The term “total war” was invented to describe the militarization of societies in World War I, and the Nazis claimed it as a slogan for their own wars of conquest. But in fact, Mr. Bell argues, it was the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that first showed the world what total war really meant. “We see war,” he writes, “through conceptual lenses that were largely ground and polished two centuries ago.”

To prove his thesis, Mr. Bell, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University, attempts to do two large things in this relatively short book. First, he offers a cultural and intellectual history of warfare in the years between 1792 and 1815, showing how writers, politicians, officers, and common soldiers thought about the wars they were fighting. Second, and more doubtfully, he argues that these conceptions were both radically different from their ancestors’, and substantially the same as our own.

As Mr. Bell suggests in his introduction, his attempt to apply the techniques of cultural history to the subject of military history is a novel one. The fields are usually “unjustly separated,” he writes, since military historians tend to focus on old-fashioned questions of tactics and technology, while more au courant historians of culture tend to see war as a distasteful subject. But his own example brilliantly shows how much the cultural historian can teach us about war, which is, after all, not just a matter of battles and weapons, but of ideas and passions.

Never was this more dramatically the case than during the French Revolution. The events of 1789, Mr. Bell argues, caused a radicalization of ideas about war that had long been brewing in French culture. In the 18th century, European wars had been nearly constant, but as Clausewitz wrote, they were sharply limited as to both means and ends. A dashing French commander like the Duc de Lauzun, one of the exemplary figures of Mr. Bell’s study, could combine his military duties with a time-consuming career as a courtier and champion womanizer. Battles between European armies were deadly but infrequent, as generals sought advantage in maneuver and tried to preserve their expensive, highly trained forces.

No wonder that the philosophes believed that war itself was a historical anachronism, a pastime of spoiled kings that would one day become obsolete. “The glory associated with conquest, war and valor,” according to the Baron d’Holbach, “is visibly a remnant of the savage customs that prevailed in all nations before they were civilized.”

All of this was to change starting in 1792, and much of “The First Total War” is devoted to describing the sheer atrociousness of the new forms of warfare. The first change was ideological, and can be seen in the debates of France’s revolutionary legislature, which in 1791 declared that “The French nation renounces the undertaking of any wars aimed at conquest.” War was no longer to be a normal pursuit of governments. But as Mr. Bell shows, in one of his most subtle and persuasive arguments, this banishing of war from the realm of the ordinary is what allowed it to assume extraordinary, totalizing proportions. For it made possible the dream of one last, apocalyptic war to end war forever, by spreading revolution around the world.

So it was that just a year after abolishing war, the revolutionary government embarked on an aggressive war against Austria. The French general Dumouriez declared, “this war will be the last war,” a distinctly modern-sounding phrase that Mr. Bell uses as his book’s epigraph. And to win such a war, new tactics would be necessary, including the most savage. This was most evident in the Vendée, a region of western France that rose in revolt against the Paris government. The specter of counterrevolution drove the revolutionary armies to commit war crimes against their fellow citizens, crimes so brutal that some recent historians have characterized them as genocidal. Mr. Bell’s most powerful pages deal with the “hell columns” that criss-crossed the Vendée, killing and raping indiscriminately. One general announced proudly, “I have crushed children under the hooves of horses, and massacred women … I have exterminated everyone.”

This kind of ruthless ideological violence would spread across Europe during the Napoleonic era. It was most obvious in places like Naples and Spain, where partisan attacks provoked the French occupiers to retaliatory slaughter, of the kind that the Nazis infamously practiced in Lidice. But it was also evident on Napoleon’s glorious battlefields, where armies of unprecedented size were ground up like fodder. The doomed Russian campaign, for example, cost the French 370,000 casualties, with another 200,000 taken prisoner. Not until World War I, a century later, would Europe see death on such a scale.

After all these gruesome stories, Mr. Bell leaves the reader no doubt that Napoleon’s wars were criminal. But whether they really qualify as the origin of modern total war remains in doubt. In part this is because, as Mr. Bell admits, he has restricted himself to the ideology and culture of war. He has little to say about logistics, economics, and tactics, which must surely be taken into account in any definition of total war.

What’s more, his frame of reference does not extend back much before the 18th century, which was, as he acknowledges, a period of atypically restrained warfare. Compared to the 18th century, Napoleon’s battles were exponentially more devastating; but compared to the wars of religion in the 16th century, not to mention the wars of antiquity, the difference is not so clear. Nor does Mr. Bell demonstrate that the Napoleonic Wars involved the total mobilization and militarization of society, the defining quality of the two world wars. Perhaps it would take another book, or several, for Mr. Bell to fully prove his argument. But in “The First Total War” he has, at the very least, acquainted the reader with a dreadful and monitory chapter of European history.

akirsch@nysun.com