On April 20, 1792, the French National Assembly voted to declare war against Austria. In doing so, they unwittingly launched nearly a quarter-century of warfare upon the world, one that would end only with Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat on the battlefield of Waterloo and his imprisonment on a remote Atlantic island. Even more significantly, though, they inaugurated what could be regarded today as the modern era of warfare, with its nationalistic appeals, mass mobilizations, and widespread destructiveness.

These dual subjects are the focus of Tim Blanning’s book. Drawing upon his considerable knowledge of the era, he details both the background of 18th century European politics and the developments which led to the declarations of the revolutionary wars. More broadly, though, he also assesses modern theories about the nature of war, and how they contribute to our understanding of its existence. It’s an appropriate approach to take particularly for what is meant to be the first chronological volume in a series of books on the origins of modern wars, yet Blanning is wise enough to use them to inform our understanding of the elements that motivate modern wars generally rather than the causes of specific ones.

To determine the latter, Blanning focuses on the events that led to the outbreak of European wars in 1792, 1793, and 1798. In his view, none of them were inevitable, and broke out not over ideological issues, but by more practical political considerations. As he notes, for rulers in 18th century Europe war was a tool of policy, one waged with armies that were smaller and more professional than before. These were used to pursue territorial gain or economic advantage over other European. Traditional enmities barely factored into this, as nations who might oppose each other in one war might find themselves allies in the next.

As Blanning demonstrates, this did not change with the advent of the French Revolution. Here he challenges the common interpretation of the wars as ideologically driven, showing how the major European powers were more concerned with their existing contests for position than they were with the possibility of revolution spilling over from France. Many of the regimes that might have most feared a popular uprising in fact welcomed Louis XVI’s revolutionary plight in the belief that it weakened France’s ability to challenge their schemes elsewhere. While this proved true in the early years of the Revolution, many politicians in the French National Assembly were only too eager to exploit Austrian bellicosity in early 1792 as a means of rallying a fracturing polity behind them. This paid off with a victorious war against an Austro-Prussian coalition, with the newly empowered France becoming enough of a threat to British and Russian interests to bring them into the conflict the following year. These interests were also at play in 1798 with the outbreak of the War of the Second Coalition, by which time the revolutionary rhetoric that rallied the French population six years earlier was an increasingly distant memory.

Throughout his book Blanning displays an impressive command of both the available documentary materials and the decades of historical scholarship about the era, which he employs to provide his readers with an insightful examination of his subject. By integrating the diplomatic events of the 1790s into the larger context of contemporary European politics, he makes a persuasive argument for looking past the radical rhetoric in favor of the underlying continuities. It’s an impressive work that, over thirty-five years after its original publication, remains a valuable introduction to both the diplomacy of the French Revolutionary period in particular and the factors that lead to war more generally. ( )