Yet this book is more than a tour de force of erudition.
Among the thousand or so footnotes in The French Revolutionary Wars are references to works in German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian, as well as French and English. He is one of the few historians who can move comfortably from France to Germany to the vast Habsburg empire stretching from Belgium to the Balkans, and he has filled in the remaining gaps with extraordinarily vast reading. Not only has he written extensively on the French Revolution he has written a book on Mainz under the Old Regime and the revolutionary republic, another on the French occupation of the Rhineland, and two biographies of the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II. He is especially well placed to take on this task. Blanning enriches our understanding of the Revolution by placing it in its European context, by showing how it affected and was affected by France's neighbors.
Far more ambitious than its modest title suggests, it is a history of the French Revolution as well as a military and diplomatic history of Europe from 1787 to 1802. Blanning, is a superb work of historiography. The French Revolutionary Wars: 1787-1802, by T.
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