Mass Mortality, Military Movement, and the Forces of Nature in the Napoleonic Wars

This book examines the environmental history of the Napoleonic Wars through the lens of everyday military mobility, demonstrating that warfare created distinctive “militarized landscapes” along the roads traversed by armies on the march. These environments shaped wartime experience in fundamental ways, above all by leaving both soldiers and civilians vulnerable to the effects of exposure, hunger, and epidemic disease. France itself experienced these miseries during the opening years of the conflict in the 1790s, but Napoleon’s victories opened the path for a strategy of displacing the zone of conflict as much as possible from French soil. The rise and fall of Napoleon’s empire ultimately hinged on the movement of people, plants, animals, and the microbes responsible for epidemic disease, and a closer look at this example reveals that potential for a better understanding of wartime environments as dynamic landscapes shaped by the everyday mobility of a wide range of human and non-human actors.