Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Governing from the Skies
WORK NOTES: trans by David Fernbach
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1972
WEBSITE: http://thomas-hippler.net/english/
CITY: Caen
STATE:
COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY:
http://thomas-hippler.net/cv-english/ * https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas_Hippler * http://thomas-hippler.net/books/ * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/11/governing-from-the-skies-by-thomas-hippler-review
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2006105634
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2006105634
HEADING: Hippler, Thomas, 1972-
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670 __ |a Soldats et citoyens, 2006: |b t.p. (Thomas Hippler) p. 4 of cover (b. 1972)
PERSONAL
Born 1972.
EDUCATION:Undergraduate studies at Humboldt-University and Hochschule der Künste, Université Paris Nanterre, Florence University of the Arts, and UC Berkeley; European University Institute, Ph.D., 2002; École normale supérieure Lyon and University of Oxford, post-doctoral studies, 2003-07.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, philosopher, historian, educator. Sciences Po Lyon, France, associate professor, 2007-16; University of Normandy, Caen, France, professor of modern history, 2016–.
WRITINGS
Contributor of numerous articles to journals. Hippler’s books have also appeared in French and German.
SIDELIGHTS
Thomas Hippler is a professor of modern history at the University of Normandy in Caen, France, and the author of several books on the history of war and aerial bombardment. His books include Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies: Military Service in France and Germany, 1789–1830, Bombing the People: Giulio Douhet and the Foundations of Air-Power Strategy, 1884-1939, and Governing from the Skies: a Global History of Aerial Bombing, among others.
Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies
Hippler’s 2008 work, Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies, is an examination of the phenomenon of national armies which were created through compulsory military service. Hippler looks at this tendency in France during the French Revolution and in the nascent Germany via the Prussian Reform Period of the early nineteenth century. During the French Revolution, as Hippler shows, the concern of the revolutionary government was to create a bond between the military and the citizenry. Thus, to this end and as insurance that the army would not be used against the people, the “people” themselves became the army through inscription. Prussia, initially defeated by the vast armies that conscription yielded, learned the lesson of the early Napoleonic wars and introduced compulsory service which in turn helped lead to the victories of the coalition forces between 1813 and 1815. Since that time, conscription has been the norm in the modern nation state.
Reviewing Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies in American Historical Review Online, Alan Forrest noted: “Hippler’s purpose in this book is not just to trace the intersecting histories of conscription in two neighboring European states, or to investigate the soldier’s experience of conscription through letters, diaries, and memoirs. The book’s principal claims to originality lie elsewhere, in the examination of the necessary tensions that exist between democracy and authority, and the perceived dangers that a conscript army posed to society as a whole.”
Bombing the People
Hippler’s Bombing the People charts the career of air power strategist Giulio Douhet, an Italian general who championed the cause of aerial bombardment. The book traces this development from 1884 to the World War Two, beyond Douhet’s lifetime, but his theories proved influential and lasting. Douhet saw the possibilities of bombing from the air with dirigibles and the first fixed-wing aircraft, and as early as 1911 when Italy was at war for control of Libya, he proposed that the major purpose of aviation should not be reconnaissance but instead bombardment. Hippler goes on to show the further development of aerial bombardment in World War One, during the Ethiopian War, and onto World War II. Hippler looks at Douhet’s advocacy of strategic bombing in the general’s Command of the Air, and the reason he was a proponent for city bombing, which went strongly against what Douhet himself said in 1910–that the military should not consider action against defenseless cities. Later he determined that war in the modern world was not simply a battle between armies, but between societies. Thus, cities became valid targets in order to demoralize the citizenry. Hippler also writes of the resistance to Douhet’s theories inside and outside of Italy, including the criticism leveled by Amadeo Mecozzi.
War in History contributor John Gooch called Bombing the People an “especially welcome… contribution to Douhetian studies.” Gooch added: “Using the many articles he wrote for professional journals and general periodicals, Hippler traces the development of Douhet’s thought from the pre-war years to his death in 1930, and examines its immediate ‘afterlife’.” Writing in H-Net Reviews Website, Thomas Keaney also had praise, commenting: “Hippler successfully links these matters—the advent of total war and the role of aircraft—through an analysis of Douhet’s writings from the first decade of the century until his death in 1930, detailing the significant changes evident in Douhet’s perspectives over time on the use of air forces and their role in warfare. Just as important, Hippler introduces the many contrary arguments that Douhet had to confront, particularly from those within his own country and service. This study is more than a biography of the individual. It is the richness of intellectual ferment that gives this book its importance.” Similarly, History Today Online reviewer Richard Overy termed this a “detailed and thorough account of Douhet’s thinking.” Overy went to note: “Historians will be grateful to Hippler for putting Douhet and the debates he engendered firmly on the map.”
Governing the Skies
Hippler further explores the evolution of aerial bombing in Governing the Skies, from its first use by an Italian flyer in the Libyan campaign through its growing use in World War One and in the Spanish Civil War, to its total-war strategy in World War Two and the modern world of drone warfare. Hippler looks at aerial bombardment as a political and philosophical tool of the modern nation, a method of policing and of colonial domination. Hippler focuses attention again on Douhet and his strategies of aerial bombing, and also employs interviews and archival material for this look at a century of aerial bombing.
Reviewing Governing the Skies in the New Statesman, Richard Overy noted: “As a strategic option, [aerial bombing] eroded the distinction between combatants and non-combatants: it was, Thomas Hippler argues in his thought-provoking history of the bombing century, the quintessential weapon of total war.” Overy added: “The most extraordinary paradox at the heart of Hippler’s analysis is the way that most bombing has been carried out by Britain and the United States, two countries that have long claimed the moral high ground.” London Guardian Online contributor Steven Rose had similar praise for this study, observing: “By transforming the nature of war, Hippler argues, using the terminology of Michel Foucault, air power made possible a new form of governance. Where once wars were fought between armies, sparing most non-combatants, now, with the bombers, everyone had become vulnerable. … Hippler’s book tells an important part of the story of how we have arrived at this dystopia.” A Publishers Weekly Online writer likewise felt that Hippler “delivers a mostly clear, convincing argument that armed aircraft (drones included) have become the weapon of choice for great powers attempting to deter rivals and maintain the world order.” Writing in the Morning Star Online, Gordon Parsons also had a high assessment of Governing from the Skies, noting: “This fascinating book shows how the development of flight and the consequent dominant role of airpower in warfare has had a profound influence on our modern world.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
New Statesman, February 17, 2017, Richard Overy, review of Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing, p. 43.
War in History, November, 2014, John Gooch, review of Bombing the People: Giulio Douhet and the Foundations of Air-power Strategy, 1884-1939, p. 551.
ONLINE
American Historical Review Online, https://academic.oup.com/ (October 1, 2008), Alan Forrest, review of Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies: Military Service in France and Germany, 1789–1830.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (January 11, 2017), Steven Rose, review of Governing from the Skies.
H-Net Reviews, https://networks.h-net.org/ (September 19, 2017), review of Bombing the People.
History Today Online, http://www.historytoday.com/ (September 19, 2017), Richard Overy, review of Bombing the People.
Morning Star Online, https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/ (February 20, 2017), Gordon Parsons, review of Governing From the Skies.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (September 19, 2017), review of Governing from the Skies.
Thomas Hippler Website, http://thomas-hippler.net (July 24, 2017).
Vice, https://www.vice.com/ (February 4, 2017), Yohann Koshy, review of Governing From the Skies.*
Born in 1972 he studied history, philosophy and music in Berlin (Humboldt-University and Hochschule der Künste), Paris (Nanterre), Florence and UC Berkeley. PhD European University Institute, Florence, in 2002. Post-doc at the École normale supérieure Lyon (2003-2004) and the University of Oxford (2004-2007). From 2007 to 2016 he taught as Maître de conférences (associate professor) at Sciences Po Lyon. Since 2016 he is professor of modern history at the University of Normandy in Caen.
QUOTE:
As a strategic option, it eroded the distinction between combatants
and non-combatants: it was, Thomas Hippler argues in his thought-provoking history of the bombing century, the
quintessential weapon of total war
The most extraordinary paradox at the heart of Hippler's analysis is the way that most bombing has been carried out by
Britain and the United States, two countries that have long claimed the moral high ground.
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Print Marked Items
High explosive, damp squibs
Richard Overy
New Statesman.
146.5354 (Feb. 17, 2017): p43.
COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Governing from the Skies: a Global History of Aerial Bombing
Thomas Hippler
Verso, 218pp, 14.99 [pounds sterling]
Bombing from the air is about a hundred years old. As a strategic option, it eroded the distinction between combatants
and non-combatants: it was, Thomas Hippler argues in his thought-provoking history of the bombing century, the
quintessential weapon of total war. Civilian populations supported war efforts in myriad ways, and so, total-war
theorists argued, they were a legitimate object of attack. Bombing might bring about the collapse of the enemy's war
economy, or create a sociopolitical crisis so severe that the bombed government would give up. Despite efforts to
protect noncombatants under international law, civilian immunity has been and continues to be little more than an ideal.
Hippler is less concerned with the military side of bombing, and has little to say about the development of air
technology, which, some would insist, has defined the nature and limits of bombing. His concern is with the political
dividends that bombing was supposed to yield by undermining social cohesion and/or the general willingness to
continue a war.
The model for this political conception of bombing was the colonial air policing practised principally by the British
between the world wars. Hippler observes that the willingness to use air power to compel rebel "tribesmen" in
Afghanistan, Iraq and Africa to cease insurgency became the paradigm for later large-scale campaigns during the
Second World War, and has been reinvented in the age of asymmetric warfare against non-state insurgencies: once
again in Iraq and Afghanistan--and, indeed, anywhere that a drone can reach.
The problem, as Hippler knows, is that this type of bombing does not work. A century of trying to find the right aerial
platform and armament, from the German Gotha bombers of 1917 to the unmanned missile carriers of today, has not
delivered the political and strategic promise that airpower theorists hoped for. Air power is at its best when it is either
acting as an ancillary to surface forces or engaged in air-to-air combat. The Israeli strike against Arab air forces at the
start of the 1967 war was a classic example of the efficient military use of air power. In the Second World War, the
millions of bombs dropped on Europe produced no social upheaval, but the US decision to engage in all-out aerial
counterattack in 1944 destroyed the Luftwaffe and opened the way to the destruction of Germany's large and powerful
ground forces.
The prophet of bombing as the means to a quick, decisive solution in modern war was the Italian strategist Giulio
Douhet, whose intellectual biography Hippler has written. Douhet's treatise The Command of the Air (1921) is often
cited as the founding text of modern air power. He believed that a more humane way to wage war was to use
overwhelming strength in the air to eliminate the enemy's air force, and then drop bombs and chemical weapons in a
devastating attack on enemy cities. The result would be immediate capitulation, avoiding another meat-grinder such as
the First World War. The modern nation, he argued, was at its most fragile in the teeming industrial cities; social
cohesion would collapse following a bombing campaign and any government, if it survived, would have to sue for
peace.
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It has to be said that these views were hardly original to Douhet. British airmen had formed similar views of aerial
power's potential in 1917-18, and although the generation that commanded the British bomber offensive of 1940-45
knew very little of his thinking, they tried to put into practice what could be described as a Douhetian strategy. But
Douhet and the British strategists were wrong. Achieving rapid command of the air was extremely difficult, as the
Battle of Britain showed. Bombing did not create the conditions for social collapse and political capitulation (despite
colossal human losses and widespread urban destruction) either in Britain, Germany and Japan, or later in Korea and
Vietnam. If Douhet's theory were to work at all, it would be under conditions of a sudden nuclear exchange.
Hippler is on surer ground with the continuity in colonial and post-colonial low-intensity conflicts. Modern asymmetric
warfare, usually against non-state opponents, bears little relation to the total-war school of thinking, but it is, as Hippler
stresses, the new strategy of choice in conflicts. Here too, evidently, there are limits to the bombing thesis. For all the
air effort put into the conflict against Isis in Syria and Iraq, it is the slow advance on the ground that has proved allimportant.
The most extraordinary paradox at the heart of Hippler's analysis is the way that most bombing has been carried out by
Britain and the United States, two countries that have long claimed the moral high ground. It might be expected that
these states would have respected civilian immunity more than others, yet in the Second World War alone they killed
roughly 900,000 civilians from the air.
The moral relativism of democratic states over the century is compounded of claims to military necessity, an emphasis
on technological innovation and demonisation of the enemy. For all the anxieties being aired about militant Islam, the
new Russian nationalism and the potential power of China, it is the United States and Britain that need to be watched
most closely.
Richard Overy's books include "The Bombing War: Europe (1939-1945)" (Penguin)
Caption: Celestial rough justice: US bombers attack Bremen in the Allied offensive on Germany, April 1943
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Overy, Richard. "High explosive, damp squibs." New Statesman, 17 Feb. 2017, p. 43. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487281017&it=r&asid=d0c4fed7999d1319d8d57e916813dd70.
Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487281017
QUOTE:
contribution to Douhetian studies
especially welcome.
Using the many articles he wrote for professional journals and general periodicals,
Hippler traces the development of Douhet’s thought from the pre-war years to his death
in 1930, and examines its immediate ‘afterlife’.
Gooch, John. War in History. Nov2014, Vol. 21 Issue 4, p551-553. 3p. DOI: 10.1177/0968344514543617e.
Bombing the People: Giulio Douhet and the Foundations of Air-Power Strategy,
1884–1939. By Thomas Hippler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. vi + 285 pp.
£65.00 hbk. ISBN 978 1 107 03794 6
Reviewed by: John Gooch, University of Leeds, UK
Giulio Douhet stands at the head of the list of thinkers on air power. Widely consumed
– or at least widely noticed – in their day, his ideas apparently exercised some influence
on both British and American airmen in the interwar years, though exactly how much
remains one of scholarship’s many disagreements. By the summer of 1940 the events in
France seemed to Americans to have proved his ideas about ‘command of the air’ and
the coming predominance of bomber planes in battle wrong. Two years later, reviewing
the first substantial translation of his works in English, Alexander de Seversky praised
him as an ‘invaluable guide to future warfare’. In the early years of the Cold War his
ideas about the commanding importance of an independent air force, the pre-eminence
of the bomber, and the telling impact of what the nuclear theorists soon christened ‘firststrike
capability’ were caviar to the generals of the newly created United States Air
552 War in History 21(4)
Force. Neither the arrival of SSBNs in the 1960s nor the critical turn that air power
histories of the Second World War have taken since the 1980s did him and his theories
much of a favour. Since then, anyone wishing to excavate his thought has had to rely
chiefly on the 1942 translation of The Command of the Air, supplemented by a modest
collection of articles and chapters. There is no fully fledged biography either in Italian
or in English. All of this makes Thomas Hippler’s contribution to Douhetian studies
especially welcome.
Using the many articles he wrote for professional journals and general periodicals,
Hippler traces the development of Douhet’s thought from the pre-war years to his death
in 1930, and examines its immediate ‘afterlife’. Giving a new twist to the long-established
relationship between Douhet’s ‘Command of the Air’ and Mahan’s ‘Command of
the Sea’, he demonstrates that the ‘city-busting’ most commonly associated with his
subject took its cue in part from nineteenth-century French naval theory in the shape of
the guerre de course. Paradoxically – the author is fond of paradoxes – the early Douhet
showed an unexpectedly pacifist strain: in 1910 we find him declaring that ‘we must not
even consider action against defenceless cities’. He soon changed his mind. Challenging
Azar Gat, who situated Douhet’s thought firmly within Fascism and the then fashionable
cultural tide of Futurism, Hippler shows both that many of the essentials of Douhet’s
thought were in place before the First World War and that by 1915 events in Europe had
convinced him that war had changed and that the past was no guide to the future. Hence
another paradox – that ‘history is rejected in the name of history’ (p. 74). Douhet’s stress
on the importance not only of high explosives but also of incendiaries and (especially)
gas, and his argument that an all-out air war would be less costly in the long term than
a landlocked slogging match, produces yet another paradox – his ‘anti-human humanism’
(p. 75).
Among the many perceptive insights here, one of the most interesting is what the
author terms ‘the democratic paradox’, that is, the relationship between militarization
and democracy. Douhet took it as axiomatic that war in the modern world was a contest
not just between armed forces but between societies. Along with command of the air, his
list of possible targets for air power included the shattering of civilian morale as well as
paralysis of the enemy’s army and navy, and targeting ‘the directive organs of the enemy
country’ (this last was omitted in the 1942 English translation – one of several useful
corrections Hippler makes). Hippler explains the apparently inhumane idea of bombing
civilians by means of the concept of ‘insurrectional popular sovereignty’ (pp. 130–1,
257), that is, the supposition that sooner or later a battered civilian population will rise
up and force an end to the war. Douhet gave no real thought to how this would or could
happen – and of course it never did.
Readers with some knowledge of the outlines of Douhetian thought will have that
knowledge deepened by Hippler’s deft dissection of it. What they will probably not
know much – or anything – about is the intellectual furore that ensued in Italy after the
publication of the Dominio dell’aria in 1921. In the second part of his book Dr Hippler
examines the various pro- and anti-Douhetian arguments that filled the pages of the journals
in the years that followed. Douhet’s leading opponent, Amadeo Mecozzi, challenged
the whole edifice and instead proposed a completely new mode of air warfare that he
called volo rasente (low-level assault bombardment in indirect support of the other
Book Reviews 553
organized forces). Mecozzi thought future wars would be coalition wars and also civil
wars. Hippler’s likening of these ideas to current ‘hybrid warfare’ may be a mite too
generous, and his judgement that Mecozzi is to Douhet as Corbett is to Mahan is not
entirely convincing, but Mecozzi is certainly well worth knowing about.
There is a lot to enjoy in this book, and a lot to learn for those to whom the Italian
sources are inaccessible. Occasionally the methodology, which reflects the author’s
apparent fondness for postmodern theory, seems a little over-egged. The odd splash
of political theory adds nothing to the story, and nor do the mercifully rare appearances
of such neologisms as ‘organicist master-metaphors’ and ‘metonymical relationships’.
Hippler is puzzled that Douhet never considered tanks and seems to have
had little faith in civilian morale. The explanation for both shortcomings (and for
many of Douhet’s strategic positions) lies in the fact that he wrote partly as an Italian
seeking a solution to strategic dilemmas that were particularly Italian. Tanks were
irrelevant on Italy’s land fronts, and neither the politicians who ruled Liberal Italy in
peacetime nor the generals who led it during the world war ever really trusted their
own population. While attempting the timeless, Douhet was also a child of his time
and his place. Surveying the doctrinal controversies over air power to which the
Dominio dell’aria gave rise, Dr Hippler concludes that the Italian air force was ‘perhaps
the most intellectually productive air force in the world during the inter-war
period’ (p. 249). He charitably refrains from adding that it did not do them a bit of
good when war came in 1940.
QUOTE:
By transforming the nature of war, Hippler argues, using the terminology of Michel Foucault, air power made possible a new form of governance. Where once wars were fought between armies, sparing most non-combatants, now, with the bombers, everyone had become vulnerable.
Hippler’s book tells an important part of the story of how we have arrived at this dystopia.
History
Governing from the skies by Thomas Hippler review – drones and dystopia
This global history of aerial bombing considers the consequences of a century of death dropped from planes
Graffiti in Sana’a protesting against US drone operations in Yemen.
Graffiti in Sana’a protesting against US drone operations in Yemen. Photograph: Yahya Arhab/EPA
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Steven Rose
Wednesday 11 January 2017 04.00 EST Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.30 EDT
On 1 November 1911, during Italy’s campaign to capture Libya from the Ottomans, Giulio Gavotti, an Italian aviator, decided, apparently on his own initiative, to drop a bomb on Arab fighters at an oasis close to Tripoli. On 31 October 2011, Nato ended its bombing campaign against Gaddafi by dropping bombs on the same oasis. Thus the French philosopher and historian Thomas Hippler neatly bookends his century-long story (nicely translated by David Fernbach) of the theory and practice of aerial warfare.
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The prescient HG Wells got there a couple of years before Gavotti. The War in the Air, his 1908 novel, foresaw destructive air power dominating a coming world war. When Blériot made his pioneering cross-channel flight from Calais to Dover, Wells wrote to the Daily Mail lamenting that the invulnerability of Britain as an island nation was lost. As a youngster besotted with Wells’s science fiction, I preferred his more utopian The Shape of Things to Come, which envisioned a world government policed by the air power of a benevolent dictatorship. Either way, Wells did better than most other futurologists, as Hippler’s history makes clear.
At the beginning of the first world war, planes were used for reconnaissance over enemy lines, but it wasn’t long before their potential as bombers was recognised. The response to bombers was the development of fighter planes, whose pilots rapidly achieved a romantic aura, their personal skills and bravery so different from the anonymous mud and slaughter of the trenches – think of the “Red Baron” Manfred von Richthofen. Futurists such as Marinetti embraced the fighter pilots as modern knights of the air, with their own codes of chivalry – an aura that continues even today to surround the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots as the Few who won the 1940 battle of Britain.
The reality for most was far from chivalrous, though. Between the two world wars, the leading colonial powers, notably Britain and France, used air power principally to suppress colonial insurgencies. In the 1920s the RAF, with the enthusiastic support of Churchill, bombed and gassed Kurdish rebels in Iraq, and the French bombed Damascus. In 1921 the British even bombed the Irish republicans. This was asymmetric warfare; the air warriors of the technologically advanced colonial forces were almost invulnerable to the weaponry available to the colonised. Imperial control, the military strategists argued in the 30s, could be achieved from the air without need for boots on the ground. Sound familiar?
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Air power soon came home from the colonised to the colonialists. It was above all the bombers that made 1939‑45 a people’s war, for Germany as for Britain. How to use the bombers most effectively was the subject of much debate among the tacticians on both sides. Military theorists argued that massive bombing campaigns could destroy the enemy’s infrastructure and demoralise the population. Hippler considers the role of Arthur “Bomber” Harris with his insistence on the destruction of German cities, but misses the political fight that led up to the decision on where to focus. The mathematical modellers who were developing the infant science of Operations Research argued that targeting railways and communication hubs was the most effective use of the bombers, but Harris had the ear of Churchill’s adviser Lord Cherwell and won the day. Saturation bombing of Cologne, Hamburg and then Dresden followed. And if 100-bomber raids didn’t achieve their goal, then a thousand bombers might. The resulting firestorms killed more than did the atom bomb at Hiroshima. But Harris was wrong: far from demoralising the population, mass bombing only strengthened solidarity. The OR specialists were wrong, too – bombing was so imprecise that only a small fraction came anywhere near their intended targets. Those of us old enough to recall the scattered bomb sites of postwar London can testify to that.
By transforming the nature of war, Hippler argues, using the terminology of Michel Foucault, air power made possible a new form of governance. Where once wars were fought between armies, sparing most non-combatants, now, with the bombers, everyone had become vulnerable. When the general population rather than just the troops are targeted, war changes from one between states to one between the peoples of those states. Across the century of air war, although the exact figures are hard to calculate and much disputed, the ratio of non-combatant civilians to military killed has dramatically shifted.
Where once wars were fought between armies, now, with the bombers, everyone had become vulnerable
For many years after 1945, air power reverted to its earlier use in asymmetric warfare, above all in the US strategy of carpet bombing and defoliation of Vietnam. The 6,800kg “daisy cutter” bombs could flatten the forest within a radius of 1,700 metres. But only in 1982 were bombs once again dropped on a modern city – by the Israelis on Beirut. When I was there soon after, the vulnerability of steel-framed high-rise buildings to the new weaponry was obvious; the concrete floors collapsed, one on top of another, forming a multilayered sandwich. Such damage is now seen every day on our TV screens as Russian bombers target Aleppo and British-supplied Saudi planes pulverise Yemen.
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Bombs have got smarter over the last decades, offering pilots sitting invulnerably, tens of thousand feet above the enemy, hitherto undreamed of precision in their targeting, as in the US’s “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq. But despite the confident predictions of the politicians, even the smartest air power alone has not proved sufficient. American, French, British and Russian boots are once more on the ground in the war-torn Middle East.
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The newest manifestation of air power is the drone, the epitome of asymmetric war. Hippler describes Obama’s weekly White House meetings, known as “Bloody Thursday” at which the president personally approves the list of targets and people to kill in the following week – though it is the CIA that runs most of the US drones. There is no romantic role for the pilots in this profoundly alienated form of warfare, as they are comfortably seated thousands of miles away from the combat zone – although apparently they suffer from a high rate of stress and burn-out.
The drones have a twofold function: as well as their hunter-killer role in a global counter-insurgency campaign, they offer unparalleled powers of surveillance, a modern panopticon in which our every action is visible to the eyes in the sky: governance, literally from above. Wells’s shape of things to come has become our everyday life, though not quite in the form he envisioned. Rather than the benevolent dictatorship of a world government, our governance is in the hands of a far from benevolent global superpower and its allies among the world’s 1%. Hippler’s book tells an important part of the story of how we have arrived at this dystopia.
• Governing from the Skies is published by Verso. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. To order Governing from the Skies for £12.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
QUOTE:
delivers a mostly clear, convincing argument that armed aircraft (drones included) have become the weapon of choice for great powers attempting to deter rivals and maintain the world order
Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing
Thomas Hippler. Verso, $24.95 (240p) ISBN 978-1-78478-595-6
Hippler (Bombing the People), a philosopher and historian at Sciences Po Lyon in France, sidesteps traditional battle history in favor of a thoughtful analysis of bombing’s role in the conduct of political affairs over the past century. He opens his account with Louis Blériot’s pioneering 1909 flight across the English Channel from France to England. The event was widely cheered, but astute observers realized it heralded a new form of warfare. Hippler segues from there into his main theme, the democratization of war in the 20th century. Where warfare had previously been a clash of professionals on the battlefield, with civilians considered innocent bystanders, WWI made it clear that no great power (electoral democracy or not) could fight without the participation of its citizenry. Thus, civilians became legitimate military targets in subsequent wars, and were usually targeted from the air. This erosion of the military/civilian distinction is less revolutionary than it may at first appear, because European armies had already deemed civilians legitimate targets in their colonial wars. The book is a scholarly work and occasionally lapses into academic prolixity, but Hippler writes for a popular audience and delivers a mostly clear, convincing argument that armed aircraft (drones included) have become the weapon of choice for great powers attempting to deter rivals and maintain the world order. (Jan.)
WAR
Death from Above: How Aerial Bombing Changed the World
Yohann Koshy
YOHANN KOSHY
Feb 4 2017, 8:00am
Viewing history from the skies.
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Dresden, 1945, view from the town hall (Rathaus) over the destroyed city (Photo via Deutsche Fotothek)
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
When man stopped believing in God he started sending his own messages from the heavens. The 20th century, Thomas Hippler contends in his new book Governing from the Skies, can be read through the technology of the aerial bomb. Whether it's dropped indiscriminately from a shuddering aeroplane over the desert or remotely triggered by an unmanned drone, aerial bombardment reveals something about the power doing it and the people enduring it.
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Hippler begins by observing a neat historical coincidence. The first recorded instance of aerial bombing occurred in Libya, in 1911. "I decided that today I would try to drop bombs from the aeroplane," wrote Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti in his diary, having been posted to North Africa to help secure Italy's victory over the Ottoman Empire. His mission was reconnaissance, but buzzing through the bright blue sky some 15 kilometers from Tripoli, he happened upon "a troop of Arab fighters" near an oasis and decided to seize the initiative. Carefully balancing the plane's joystick between his legs and using his free hand to take a bomb out of a small box, he removed the safety pin with his teeth and lobbed it out the window. He didn't just kill soldiers and civilians, but destroyed the oasis too: "a social and economic system" far removed from the front lines of traditional conflict.
One hundred years later Nato launched a bombing campaign on the very same country to establish a No Fly Zone, thus framing a century of death from above. Nato changed its mandate to regime change—Gaddafi was assassinated by rebels greatly assisted by the bombardment—and "by a strange historical and geographical coincidence, the bombs launched… fell in the same places as those Gavotti [launched] a hundred years earlier."
When the Italian chancer threw a bomb out of his window he inaugurated a novel way of thinking about war that would define conflicts to come. It was no longer a pitch battle between the armies of sovereign states: a new matrix of conflict opened up in three dimensions. Military strategies would be forced to "mingle civilian and military objectives," leading to the "asymmetrical wars that have been an obsession ever since." These continuities and discontinuities run throughout Hippler's book, slowly forming a global history of the bomb.
US Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons at Aviano Air Base (US Army photo by Staff Sgt. Tierney P. Wilson, via)
Speaking to Hippler—a historian and philosopher who teaches at the University of Caen in France—over email, I asked why he found aerial warfare an interesting lens through which to see history. His first book, he responds, was about conscription—something both democratic, because it extends warfare to the civic population, and anti-democratic, because it forces the conscript into obedience. This contradiction alerted him to an idea, which he wanted to develop, that if conscription means everyone—i.e. male citizens—must fight in war then "this logic implies almost inevitably the contrary: everybody can become a victim of war." With the democratization of countries came "the democratization of death." Everything, from homes to city centres, was fair game.
When Gavotti improvised aerial warfare over Tripoli it was at a time when the potential of aviation was weighing on the minds of the West. Louis Blériot made the first airborne crossing of the Channel in 1909, prompting H.G. Wells, who was writing a report for the Daily Mail, to reckon with this revolutionary technology. He wrote that the ability to cross the Channel in minutes rather than hours could lead to a fundamental blow to the British Empire, with its unrivalled control of the seas: "Our manhood is now defective." But within a few years the utopian potential of flying was appearing in the fascist fever dreams of the Italian Futurists, who saw the fusing of man with machine, "a composite monster," as the pinnacle of human achievement. But it also figured in the ideals of cosmopolitan liberals. Aviation would mean the end of borders and a free movement of goods between all countries of the world. The fact that it could also bring about utter destruction was all the more reason that it would secure peace.
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As Hippler shows, this "peace" was based on a racist reading of humanity: it would be safety for the colonizer "and bombs for the colonized." In fact, when most historians write about aerial bombing they focus on the Second World War and ignore the attacks on colonized populations in the inter-war years, seeing them as a mere "dress rehearsal" for the real thing.
We learn of Britain's pioneering bombing campaigns in the Horn of Africa in the 1920s. Mohammed Abdullah Hassan—dubbed the "Mad Mullah" by the British for his crazy insistence on independence—was the first victim of an organized, sustained campaign of bombing by the newly formed Royal Air Force. Shouldering the white man's burden later in the decade, the RAF developed this form of "imperial policing" in Iraq, which allowed the British to reduce the ground costs of empire while totalizing control from the air. Rather than killing particular insurgents, "the objective was to break the social and economic life of rebel populations, to destroy their homes and villages, to kill off their cattle and ruin their agriculture".
Theorists like Aimé Césaire and Hannah Arendt argued after the Second World War that "the basic features of totalitarian rule were first implemented in the colonies before being re-imported to the centres of the world system."
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One of Hippler's central ideas is that "strategic bombing"—the kind of brutal air power that flattened Coventry and Dresden—was a way of reducing a "people" into a "populace." I ask what he means by this. "Since the end of monarchies, politics is essentially 'by the people, for the people'… the war-effort of modern states consists basically in strengthening the unity of its own people through various means, like the construction of air-raid shelters to social welfare, while simultaneously trying to undo the unity of the enemy nation, turning the enemy people into a disorganized populace." So the act of bombing doesn't just destroy individual lives; it changes the way we conceive of people themselves.
Today's aerial warfare is different. Instead of a war of unity between national populations, the enemy is a networked "terrorist" organized around disparate nodes. As Hippler tells me, "The whole political philosophy of targeting is very different." The pre-eminent bomber of this age is the unmanned drone, which, covering much of the same terrain over Mesopotamia as the RAF did in the 1920s, engages in a kind of perpetual, low-intensity policing. In Hippler's striking formulation, the bomb has "become the deadly truncheon of a global cop."
So while domestic police forces have turned into something resembling armies—engaging in pitch battles against urban rioters with armour-plated tanks—the military has become a global police officer, seeking out individual terrorists no matter the country they happen to be in. It's neither war nor peace, but something in between.
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For all the talk these days of an impending World War Three, Hippler's book gives the impression that we're already living inside it: a perpetual, asymmetric conflict between state and non-state actors. It seems impossible, I suggest, to imagine the old imperial centres like London or Paris being bombed today from the air, with their working classes and energy routes dispersed across the global south.
Hippler agrees, but adds a caveat: "The most plausible scenario for a future major conflict is what strategists call 'hybrid war,' which includes terrorist and guerrilla operations… but also financial operations. The boundary between war and peace is increasingly difficult to draw. A plausible worst-case scenario is perhaps no direct bombing, but rather a massive cyber attack on the electricity supplies, which would lead to a massive social breakdown within a couple of days."
The bomb might have exhausted its use, but its progeny will be even more deadly.
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This fascinating book shows how the development of flight and the consequent dominant role of airpower in warfare has had a profound influence on our modern world.
The Class War’s Ultimate Weapon
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2017 Monday 20TH posted by Morning Star in Arts
Governing From The Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing
by Thomas Hippler (Verso, £14.99)
IN THIS global history of aerial bombing, philosopher and historian Thomas Hippler traces the development of air power in warfare from the “police-bombing,” by which imperialist powers controlled colonial peoples in the early years of the last century, to the present daily use of drones by the US to assert its declining influence.
It is doubtful whether Donald Trump will cancel Barack Obama’s weekly “bloody Thursday” White House briefings approving the list of people to be killed in the next seven days.
After a fairly brief period of air warfare, when the knights of the sky heroically matched up to each other, the stalemate of WWI saw the aeroplane become a key weapon, attacking not only the contending army but their support structures behind the lines, including the morale of the population.
As Hippler has it, “Aerial bombing thus became an essential element of ‘total war’ in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.”
Unlike colonial subjects, European citizens had previously been treated as non-combatants. Now war had become “democratised.”
From Dresden to Aleppo, no holds have been barred. But although the bomb is neutral and can destroy anyone, those who select the targets are not.
The people as a whole were now in the firing line but “some are more part of the people than others, given that class differentiation holds a determining place in air strategy … it is workers above all who are singled out, for reasons both technological and political.”
Hippler recognises that since the French revolution, “war between nations has always hidden a class war.”
He argues that the Establishment powers’ awareness of the revolutionary dangers in destroying the social framework of a state led to the need to demonstrate to the populace that “we’re all in it together.”
Consequently, in WWII both Germany and Britain provided air raid shelters and, in the latter case, introduced welfare systems which became foundations of the post-war deal with the people.
The newly developed national “social state became capable of actively taking responsibility for class conflict and absorbing it” and, as Hippler pithily observes: “bombing is the hell of a world whose paradise is social security.”
This fascinating book shows how the development of flight and the consequent dominant role of airpower in warfare has had a profound influence on our modern world.
With the technical advent of the hunter-killer drone “the people, the principle entity of politics, has become the principle target” of a “perpetual, low intensity war directly linked to a global war machine that goes beyond states.”
Gordon Parsons
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Hippler successfully links these matters—the advent of total war and the role of aircraft—through an analysis of Douhet’s writings from the first decade of the century until his death in 1930, detailing the significant changes evident in Douhet’s perspectives over time on the use of air forces and their role in warfare. Just as important, Hippler introduces the many contrary arguments that Douhet had to confront, particularly from those within his own country and service. This study is more than a biography of the individual. It is the richness of intellectual ferment that gives this book its importance.
Keaney on Hippler, 'Bombing the People: Giulio Douhet and the Foundations of Air-Power Strategy, 1884-1939'
Author:
Thomas Hippler
Reviewer:
Thomas Keaney
Thomas Hippler. Bombing the People: Giulio Douhet and the Foundations of Air-Power Strategy, 1884-1939. Cambridge Military Histories Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 294 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-03794-6.
Reviewed by Thomas Keaney (Johns Hopkins University)
Published on H-Diplo (October, 2014)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach
Giulio Douhet and His Critics
One hundred years ago, in World War I, combatants began initial reconnaissance flights in aircraft barely able to carry a two-man crew. By that time, Italian army officer Giulio Douhet had already spent a decade writing about warfare becoming more about conflicts between nations themselves, not just between the military forces of those nations. As Thomas Hippler emphasizes, to Douhet, “a given nation’s morale and political cohesion” could become a target in warfare (p. 36). And, with an associated interest in technology and how it changed warfare, he had naturally moved on to envision the role of aircraft in such conflicts. Hippler successfully links these matters—the advent of total war and the role of aircraft—through an analysis of Douhet’s writings from the first decade of the century until his death in 1930, detailing the significant changes evident in Douhet’s perspectives over time on the use of air forces and their role in warfare. Just as important, Hippler introduces the many contrary arguments that Douhet had to confront, particularly from those within his own country and service. This study is more than a biography of the individual. It is the richness of intellectual ferment that gives this book its importance.
The book’s two sections address each of these major themes: first, Douhet and the development of his ideas, “Douhet’s Strategic Thought”; and, second, the intellectual ferment evident in Italy during the time period covered in the book, “Douhetism under Discussion.” That division does not fully describe the focus, however, for while Douhet’s strategic thoughts appear in the first section, that section also includes much discussion of the corresponding ideas of his critics, also the subject of the entire book’s second section, a point that might not be immediately evident in the book’s title. The book features Douhet, but is really about Italian strategic thought on airpower more generally.
Hippler has extensively researched Italian sources and archives and that comes through in the extent of his development of Douhet’s ideas over time. Apparently there is a lack of material on Douhet himself as opposed to what he wrote—he was a prolific writer—and that brings some difficulties: in his writings, Douhet changed his focus and his mind on many occasions, often within the same year. Giving details or charting some sort of progression of his thoughts on air power, therefore, poses particular problems for Hippler as he must deal with clear contradictions in Douhet’s early writings; Hippler at times refers to these contradictions as paradoxes, but they do not often deserve that classification. Granted, Douhet was writing during a period of rapid advances in the capabilities of aircraft and had to often modify his positions, but still, he did not leave a clear path for historians to follow. Douhet argued very early on for the acceptability, or inevitably, of targeting civilians and a country’s economic infrastructure (by whatever means) in future wars, and by 1915 he specifically introduced aerial bombardment as the means in the strategy for which he is best known. But the progression of his thoughts was not linear, and Hippler is left to explain some often odd turns.
One aspect of Douhet’s theories that Hippler addresses is the Italian’s leap into the future in assessing the nature of warfare while remaining grounded in current experience and the lessons of the First World War. Hippler’s explanation is Douhet’s “ahistorical historicism,” which, if I understand it properly, describes a process of recognizing historical change but disregarding the immediate lessons of the past as limited and backward thinking (p. 75). Such a formulation is used to define how Douhet’s theories on the use of aircraft rested on the promise of technology, not on any demonstrated capabilities.
Hippler provides some themes to guide the reader through the decades of Douhet’s writings, pointing out the association with Alfred Thayer Mahan and sea power theory, linking the command of the air with that of the sea, for instance. Another important trail is how Douhet moved from emphasizing air defense as a primary mission to a final position of declaring air defense impossible. At times, Hippler reaches too far in presenting contrasts, as when he describes how Douhet shifted from a position of pacifism while on his path to a strategy of city bombing. The evidence he presents is of Douhet’s early advocacy of international laws against warfare or at least internationalizing the use of force (as within the League of Nations), but the evidence takes the point further than that. Douhet made such statements while at the same time advocating the further production of bombers and theorizing on how to conduct offensive warfare, neither of which fits within a definition of pacifism.
In the concluding part on Douhet’s strategic thoughts, Hippler describes a major debate of the time over the priority of achieving command of the air or initiating ground attacks. At issue is whether these would be two separate missions. An added element, however, and not mentioned by Hippler, was Douhet’s plan to attack enemy air forces on the ground (destroying nests and eggs in his parlance), thus obviating the need for air combat as a separate mission. Here and in other places in analyzing the evolution of Douhet’s thoughts, Hippler does the reader no favor by assuming knowledge of Douhet’s final formulations in his book The Command of the Air (1921; rev. ed. 1927). Without those final formulations as background, the reader is left with no reliable means to follow or measure the path of Douhet’s thoughts on air power strategy as those ideas move from aircraft as an auxiliary force to aircraft dominating warfare. A several-page summary of the key points from The Command of the Air would have helped enormously.
These minor criticisms aside, Hippler does well in capturing and assessing Douhet’s thoughts on warfare, his responses to critics, and his effects on his own country’s air force. By putting Douhet in the middle of the debates on air power taking place in Italy in the 1920s, the author draws in very well the competing ideas of Douhet’s critics concerning the relative importance of support for ground and naval forces, air to air fighting, and fragility of the civilian population under air attack. In this regard, Hippler seems certainly correct in depicting the Italian air force during the period as the most intellectually productive of any country. In this context, Douhet is regarded as a player, but not a dominant one, in “the foundations of air-power strategy” (as stated in Hippler’s book’s title) of the time. And, his influence on what that strategy and force became was limited. Finally, as shown in this account, Douhet, though apparently an ardent Italian fascist, linked none of his theories to that ideology, and vice versa.
After Douhet’s death, the future of the Italian air force lay in the hands of his critics, and Hippler describes as most prominent Armedeo Mecozzi, to whom he devotes an entire chapter. As opposed to Douhet, who was not a pilot, Mecozzi served as a combat pilot in the war and was accomplished in both air to air fighting and in air to ground attacks. This experience left him not at all ahistorical about the effectiveness of anti-aircraft artillery and the need for what are now termed tactical aircraft, not just bombers. Thus, Mecozzi dealt with tactics and specific capabilities (and limitations) of aircraft, subjects that were of much less interest to Douhet. Because of his perspectives and ideas, Mecozzi deserves this separate chapter, and Hippler integrates well the areas in which he agreed and disagreed with Douhet. This chapter becomes probably the most important one of the book, as it investigates issues discussed at the time that remain unresolved or are still open to interpretation: division of targeting authority between air and ground forces, value of attacks on forces themselves or on their supporting industries, and the value of targeting civilian morale.
The book concludes with an epilogue, in which the author examines the history of strategic bombing as defined by Douhet and similar theorists in other countries. The chapter is a short one and only touches lightly on a variety of campaigns. It does dwell importantly on the question of strategic bombing, here considered attacks not aimed at surface forces, but at the country’s leadership or “the social, economic and political life of the country” (p. 252). In this respect, Hippler theorizes, or at least asks the reader to question the ultimate effects of, air attacks that result in the decapitation of a country’s leadership or a rebellion of the people against their leadership, conditions that might lead to civil war or internal political chaos. Dwelling on these implications rightly brings the book’s account of Italian debates of the time into the present, making the arguments applicable to not just major state on state war but also to the hybrid forms of conflict now underway. The ideas presented on this subject are well worth further examination, as is the book overall.
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Citation: Thomas Keaney. Review of Hippler, Thomas, Bombing the People: Giulio Douhet and the Foundations of Air-Power Strategy, 1884-1939. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. October, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42478
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QUOTE:
detailed and thorough account of Douhet’s thinking
historians will be grateful to Hippler for putting Douhet and the debates he engendered firmly on the map.
Bombing the People
By Richard Overy
Published in History Today
Aviation, Military
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Bombing the People: Giulio Douhet and the Foundations of Air-Power Strategy, 1884-1939
Thomas Hippler Cambridge University Press 285pp £65
The Italian soldier, Giulio Douhet, is one of the few well-known names in the history of air power strategy, along with Hugh Trenchard, father of the RAF, and Billy Mitchell, the American air power pioneer. Command of the Air, originally published in 1921, was the mature statement of Douhet’s theories about how the air could change the nature of war.
Thomas Hippler’s detailed and thorough account of Douhet’s thinking shows us that his ideas were slow to mature and full of paradoxes and contradictions. Writing before the First World War, Douhet was a ‘pacifist’ on bombing, hostile to the idea that aircraft should be used to bomb civilians. By the time Command of the Air was published, he had become an advocate of a large-scale and immediate attack by bombers, using conventional bombs, gas and germ warfare, against the vulnerable urban heart of the enemy nation. This was a remarkable transition. Hippler argues that Douhet came to accept the ‘democratic paradox’ that a modern nation has to employ any means to defeat a wicked enemy. Since the enemy was responsible for violation, the citizens of the enemy state shared that responsibility and should become legitimate objects of aerial warfare. By 1915-16 Douhet’s later ideas on bombing the vital centres of the enemy to demoralise and terrorise the enemy home front had already appeared in print. To create the possibility for doing so it was necessary to establish what Douhet called ‘command of the air’, or, more commonly today, air superiority. The contradiction lies in Douhet’s argument that counter- force attack to win command of the air should be carried out at the same time as massive bombing attacks, creating an unresolved tension between the air or the ground as the principal objective for an air force. This may be less of a contradiction than Hippler implies, for it is exactly what the Luftwaffe tried to do in September 1940 and the American air force in 1944 over Germany.
The real problem with Douhet, Hippler suggests, is the idea that air power was a democratic instrument suitable for an age of total war, that seemed to justify immediate assault on the enemy home population from the first days of a war. Douhet claimed this would produce victory for the side that could hit hardest and soonest. This was not supported by any practical experience, nor any appreciation of the technical problems involved. Like the bombing-scare literature of the inter-war years, it was a fantasy, well beyond the capability of the Italian, or any other, air force in 1939. Bombing Germany took four years of ever heavier escalation. It did not produce instant victory after a few devastating raids, as Douhet had supposed. Perhaps, Hippler points out, the fact that Douhet never learned to fly reduced his ability to understand the inherent limitations of air power.
Hippler is rightly cautious about ascribing too much strategic influence to Douhet. His major works were available in France, Germany and, later, the United States (in 1942), but Douhet’s writing simply preached to the converted, on issues such as the need for an autonomous air force or the fragility of civilian morale. Although not very original, Douhet expressed his views in powerful and articulate polemics against his many critics. He has been rescued from obscurity because what he said has reinforced air force claims later in the 20th century for an independent organisation and a distinct doctrine. In practice this has proved to be a dead end. Douhet’s greatest critic, the Italian airman, Amedeo Mecozzi, favoured limited but effective strikes using fighter- bombers against the key tactical and strategic targets supporting the enemy’s military operations. The First Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 has sometimes been viewed as the triumph of Douhetism, but it was in reality the vindication of the much-neglected Mecozzi.
Although over-long and densely written, historians will be grateful to Hippler for putting Douhet and the debates he engendered firmly on the map. In the end, much of what he wrote on air power and total war was evident to anyone reflecting on the lessons of 1914-18. The American bombing of Japan in 1945, and of Korea and Vietnam later on, did not need Douhet except as corroboration.
Richard Overy is author of The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 (Allen Lane, 2013).
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Hippler's purpose in this book is not just to trace the intersecting histories of conscription in two neighboring European states, or to investigate the soldier's experience of conscription through letters, diaries, and memoirs. The book's principal claims to originality lie elsewhere, in the examination of the necessary tensions that exist between democracy and authority, and the perceived dangers that a conscript army posed to society as a whole.
THOMAS HIPPLER. Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies: Military Service in France and Germany, 1789–1830.(War, History, and Politics.) New York: Routledge. 2008. Pp. x, 260. $149.95
Thomas Hippler . Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies: Military Service in France and Germany, 1789–1830. (War, History, and Politics.) New York: Routledge. 2008. Pp. x, 260. $149.95.
Alan Forrest
The American Historical Review, Volume 113, Issue 4, 1 October 2008, Pages 1226–1227, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.113.4.1226
Published: 01 October 2008
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With historians increasingly examining the relationship between military service and citizenship in different European countries, it is a timely moment for Thomas Hippler's transnational study comparing the very different experiences of France and Prussia in the period dominated by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Both countries turned from small professional armies complemented by the recruitment of mercenary units in wartime to a system of conscription linking army service to rights of citizenship. Each did so against a backdrop of war when the state was endangered and the call to arms was associated with national liberation. It was a way of channeling or, in the author's words, “appropriating” popular violence, and so redefining the relationship of the individual, the state and the nation (p. 3). That both France and Prussia underwent something of a nationalist awakening in these years gives the comparison plausibility: France through its identification with the revolution and the cause of the sovereign people, Prussia through romanticism and the spread of a German cultural identity. The comparison seems strong, and is supported by official discourses, philosophical and literary texts, and the writings of army officers involved in the conflict. It is reinforced by the history of conscription in the two countries and by their tendency to learn and to borrow from each other ever since the Seven Years' War.
And yet, the circumstances in which the two states opted for conscription were starkly different. France was a revolutionary nation that spoke in the name of its people, whereas Prussia was an autocratic monarchy, its institutions dominated by a landowning Junker elite and infused with a militarist tradition. France declared its people to be citizens, offered the Rights of Man, and then demanded duties and services from them on the basis of their citizenship. Prussia imposed conscription before rewarding its conscripts with rights derived from their service. Both nations had a history to overcome of periods when militia service was opposed and resisted by large sections of the population or when mercenary regiments were feared by civilians and denounced by pamphleteers as violent and immoral. Public confidence had to be rebuilt after centuries of distrust, and it is striking that many of the intellectual arguments for conscription were about morality and the relationship of the army to society rather than about military effectiveness. It was assumed that citizen-soldiers would identify with their families and civil communities, the communities to which, when the war or campaign was over, they would ineluctably return. In Joseph Servan's writings of 1780 we already see the figure of the soldat-laboureur so beloved of nineteenth-century French military reformers, while in Prussia the claim was repeatedly made that mercenaries were indifferent to the country's goals and did not see their opponent as their enemy.
Both countries embraced an almost philosophical belief in the benefits of conscription. The French stressed the value of a spontaneity and ideological commitment that led men to rush into battle and throw themselves at the enemy—the idealized representation that left traces in French battlefield tactics and in the enduring republican myth of the levée en masse. For their part, Prussian military theorists sought to replace French élan with strict and repeated drill that would discipline them into a machine-like obedience. Bravery, they argued, could only be acquired “mechanically,” and could not be “the effect of an ecstatic identification of the individual with a community but passively cultivated through habit and obedience” (p. 137). By the 1870s in France, following the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War, there were many who agreed.
But Hippler's purpose in this book is not just to trace the intersecting histories of conscription in two neighboring European states, or to investigate the soldier's experience of conscription through letters, diaries, and memoirs. The book's principal claims to originality lie elsewhere, in the examination of the necessary tensions that exist between democracy and authority, and the perceived dangers that a conscript army posed to society as a whole. One of the major debates in both France and Germany was about the longer-term effects of conscription. Should it imply the militarization of society or the socialization of the military? And what role should be given to popular enthusiasm, the right to insurrection that the French had listed among the fundamental rights of man? Prussia was always more resistant to this, seeing it as an invitation to anarchy and disorder. Yet we find traces of it during the Wars of Liberation, especially in the raising of the Landwehr by the East Prussian estates. This was not, as Hippler shows, a simple case of popular arming. Rather it should be seen as a compromise “between the insurrectional popular arming and partisan war of the Landsturm on the one hand and the standing army on the other” (p. 205).