The Battle of Valmy, which took place in 1792, was decisive because it managed to stop the advance of the troops that were trying to reach Paris to end the French Revolution. Goethe was there, he accompanied the Prussian forces in a discreet background (“embedded”, we would say now). They say that he commented that the cannon balls passing through the air sounded like “the gurgle of water and the whistle of birds.” After the defeat, he wrote it a few years later, he addressed the soldiers and told them: “In this place and from today a new era begins in the history of the world, and all of you can say that you were present at its birth.”
The comment helps historian David A. Bell to explain in The first total war. Napoleon's Europe and the birth of modern warfare (Alliance) the profound change that took place then, and to which Goethe had drawn the attention of those Prussian soldiers. After the Revolution, France embarked on a great crusade to transform the world, and those who opposed the advance of freedoms were simply monsters: they had to be erased from the map. To achieve this, artillery was optimal, and those bombs whose whistles were so pleasing to the German writer. Robespierre explained the revolutionary design in a clear way: “Those who wage war on a people to stop the progress of freedom and annihilate the rights of man must be persecuted by all, not as ordinary enemies, but as murderers and rebellious bandits.”
Napoleon ended up being the great ambassador of the values of the French Revolution to the rest of the world. “I have shed blood, perhaps I will shed more, but without anger, and simply because bloodletting is a part of political medicine,” he once observed. The quote comes from Life of Napoleon. Told by himself (Edhasa), where André Malraux reconstructed his story by collecting fragments from his letters and his diaries and from his Saint Helena Memorial, and he placed them one after the other to reconstruct how he saw things year after year from 1796 to 1821 (with a first entry referring to 1786). He Napoleon by Ridley Scott that can now be seen on screens—entertaining, little more can be said—underlines the status of spectacle that the greatest brutalities have. Napoleon: “The battle of Austerlitz is the most beautiful of all I have fought. I have fought thirty battles like this, but none where victory was so decided and destiny so unbalanced. The foot guard could not enter the battle; “I was crying with rage.”
How will the brutal bombings against the civilian population of Gaza be counted in a hundred years? Who knows. Total wars where the enemy is exterminated are sustained by great causes that over time occupy everything and end up erasing the death and destruction of those who had to suffer a historical moment. “I rose from nothing to be the greatest monarch in the world,” Napoleon said. “Europe was at my feet.” Goethe, at the end of his days, told Eckermann that that “man who had trampled on the lives and fortunes of millions of people” had finally had “a very benevolent destiny” in Saint Helena. The epic of the great man made it possible to hide his ignominy.
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