>> So, if there are new concepts of rights, new norms about the body and
circulation, a question arises. Well, with kings and queens no longer seen
as the custodians of sovereignty, who, who's going to protect these rights?
How to protect these rights? Well, particularly since, in the old
regimes that are now so stigmatized, it was precisely the aristocrats and the
kings and queens who were among the first violators, right?
They had been the ones to tax people illegitimately.
And this was very important in the shift that, that, the support that was given to
the idea of the nation as the place in which sovereignty was being invested.
The nation was the vessel to protect citizens from violators, and everyone in
the nation was equally endowed with these rights.
The presumption then was for a kind of basic homogeneity, right?
That we were all co-members of the nation, we're all basically similar with some
important exceptions. Women, people of color, convicts.
These were not quite full members and for a long time, they would be seen more as
wards. But this question nonetheless arises, how
did this shift in understanding rights and their location affect total war?
And that's the question we're exploring here.
Well, two basic ways. One was, in the transformation in the
basic nature of armies themselves, armies that in the older regimes were dominated
by the aristocracies, paid as mercenary armies or forced soldiers would be forced
or pressed into service. One of the effects of total war was to
invent the idea that armies were themselves, popular.
They were not manned by men who were forced or paid to do service, they
volunteered to fight. This is very important move and it was a
political device to create the notion, the notion of a nation in arms.
Let's take a look at one of a popular image or, or rather, an image that would
have been very understandable for the people at the time from Prussia.
Germany, the German states were invaded by Napoleon and it set of a debate, right?
Over national identity in Germany, popular resistance to the invasion.
And here, we see an image of Prussian reserves.
They were called the land there. In the painting is itself, called The
Nation in Arms. And, Can we, Dan, take a zoomed in shot
of, of the painting? So here, what you see is a common image of
the time of volunteers going off to fight for the defense of the Prussian nation
against the invader, against the French invader with their family members wishing
them well. You know, what else do you see in here?
Anything else we ought to think about, Valeria?
>> Well, they all seem to be as you said, people from popular classes and.
>> Mm-hm. >> And then to the, to my right, I think I
see a Jewish man. >> Aha.
Yeah, very good. I don't know if we can get him close up,
Dan. Can you get him in yeah.
Yeah, you're, you're exactly right. This is the figure of a German soldier for
one of the questions that arises once everybody is included in the nation is
that Jews and Christian can coexist in this nation in arms.
It's very important move. Actually, I find it very curious the, the
discrepancy in the response of the mother to the child.
Maybe it's very Jewish, you know, that she's not so happy about this guy going
off to fight. The others, of course, are, are wishing
their sons and husbands well. But it's a powerful image then, of the
German nation, or in this case, the Prussian nation in arms.
So, what's a nation in arms? Well, here, what we mean is, that all
members of the nation enjoy rights to fight to defend the nation itself.
They were obligated by virtue of being citizens, which is very important.
We get a nation state, if it enjoyed legitimacy of its co-members, could
thereby rally and recruit soldiers as human resources in its defense of the
nation. In contrast to the old regimes, in
contrast to the old regimes that relied on paid mercenaries or forced soldiers to do
battle. This is really important.
This is really important because what is means now is that political organizations
have a capacity to penetrate society to draw resources, bodies of men and, and to
some extent women, to do service in the name of the nation, that the old regimes
did not have. They did not have.
They're fighting for themselves. The consequence of that is going to be to
raise the stakes. For belonging to the nation gives members
increasing rights. Right?
And therefore, to live outside the nation is to be bereft of rights.
And so there was a drive, as I mentioned this earlier to, to establish a line.
The line of exclusion of who is in and whose out that's why it's so interesting
to see the Jew represented in the painting.
Now, it's being integrated into the story of the nation.
It's sort of, in the dark and in the corner of the image itself.
But you can see the passage that even Jews are making into the nation state.
Greater freedom for those inside the nation, and greater un-freedom for those
outside. That the escalation of total war then,
draws a harder line between insider and outsider.
And so, full citizenship, if you are inside, the stakes are very high, you want
to stay inside. Full citizenship then is easier to uphold,
if citizens regard each other as fundamentally similar.
Racial, gender, religion. There is, ever since, it's taken us a long
time. Well, I'm sort of, fast forwarding here to
our days, to accept the idea of pluralism within the concept of citizenship.
It already tells you that there's some tension that in, within the painting
itself here. But here you have a concept of the
homogenous nation being represented in Prussia.
And so how is all of this related to war? Well, each war is seen then as a process
of creating a nation full of citizens, a redemptive, fulfilling process for the
nation ridding it or defending it from threats for without or exceptions from
within, alright? Reinforced by the notion that a new kind
of war could be the last war, I have mentioned this earlier.
For once, we have a world of stable nations, each containing homogeneous
rights bearing citizens within them capable of governing themselves, we can
live in peace. The war to end all wars is to store,
restore an essential harmony, a harmony, some might argue, that we were law, that,
that we lost once Judeo-Christians were cast out from the garden of Eden.
And so, the war to end all wars gives rise to a fraternity of liberty-loving nations.
It's so ironic, right? That the age that brings an end to torture
[laugh], that abolishes slavery, slowly, right?
Is also the age that increases the scale and scope of warfare.
Total War changes the interior and imperial conflict, wars become wars between empires
with stakes ever rising. In a sense, there's a core disequilibrium
within Europe where these processes got incubated and it sends riptides out to the
wider world. And now, again, these are not wars fought
over spoils, right? In the Napoleonic War, they're wars fought
as Napoleon did over Spain, over Brazil, over India, and over Russia.
This concept of total war would, in some respects, reach its acme in the invasion
of Russia. Napoleon would march into Russia with
600,000 soldiers. This was the nation in arms.
He would only return with 80,000. In Spain, he sent 500,000 troops, right?
Again, only a small fraction would crawl back to France.
Nations in arms fighting other nations in arms.
The last time the world had seen armies on this scale was a thousand years earlier,
in China. The stakes were rising, the scale of the
violence that we're talking about is escalating.
We're not going to see warfare on this scale again for another century, until
World War I. But as the Napoleonic wars swept across
the world, they compelled all that were involved, from the Ottomans to the
Mexicans, to invoke the defense of their political community now in the name of the
nation against that other invading nation. And the carnage became a redemptive
struggle for national defense. Again, I repeat, there is an essential
paradox at the heart of this dynamic that the rise of new rights coincides with the
increasing repressive power. The fighting machines exemplified in this
painting, the combination of liberty and lethality.
So let me ask you, what role then might books, images, like this one, and the news
about what's happening in far-flung corners of the world, what, what might
these forces, these images and these stories, what might, what role might they
have played in braiding together freedom and violence?