From Valmy to Waterloo: France at War, 1792-1815

Despite the mountains of scholarship published on the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, a concise, readable and reliable survey of the experiences of the French population in wartime has been lacking. Marie-Cécile Thoral has rectified this situation in her modest, but useful and instructive volume. Drawing principally on printed memoirs, correspondence and diaries, Thoral illuminates the experiences of both soldiers and civilians, with individual chapters examining land and sea combat, military medicine and morale, identity formation, economics, and what we would now call the home front.