- Title
- Memories of massacres and atrocities during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
- Creator
- Dwyer, Philip G.
- Relation
- Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History p. 157-169
- Relation
- Studies on War and Genocide 11
- Relation
- http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=DwyerTheatres#toc
- Publisher
- Berghahn Books
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- Most historians of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars consider flagrant massacres to be an aberration. One historian has recently argued, for example, that the two regions most renowned for their extreme violence, the Vendee and Spain, 'are noteworthy because their atrocities were not typical of warfare in the period'. The observation is shared by a French specialist of the civil war in the Vendee who believes that during the fighting there the 'normal rules of war disappeared' for some political and military authorities as well as for soldiers and rebels. There appears to be a commonly held view that, with few exceptions, the wars were relatively civilized and that there is 'little evidence that soldiers attacked civilians'. But this is certainly not the impression one gets from a reading of the memoirs, journals and letters of the period. It is clear from the sources that massacres were not only widespread, but that they were an integral and possibly an accepted part of eighteenth-century warfare.
- Subject
- massacres; Napoleonic Wars; mass killings
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1058371
- Identifier
- uon:16395
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780857452993
- Language
- eng
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