When the armies of the French Revolution crossed the frontier of the Holy Roman Empire in 1792, their proclaimed objective was to spread liberty, equality, and fraternity and their slogan was ‘war to the châteaux, peace to the cottages’. They had been assured by the Brissotin orators of the National Assembly that the appeal of this combination would prove irresistible to the oppressed peoples they were seeking to liberate. Not the least of Ute Planert's achievements in her very long but enthralling book is to show how this emancipatory mission was doomed from the start. The crucial passage is reached on page 134 where she demonstrates that even those Germans who entertained some sympathy for the revolutionary programme were immediately alienated by the actions of the French soldiers. Of the many illustrations, the most poignant is the story of the young man who donned his best suit before sallying forth to greet his liberators. But before he could make his speech of welcome, they stripped off his suit, taking his watch and wallet into the bargain. He escaped in his underwear, sadder but wiser.

The best of ideological intentions were wrecked by material reality. With no resources of their own, the French were obliged to make ‘war sustain war’ by living off the land they had conquered. As the occupants of the châteaux fled eastwards, it was immobile occupants of the cottages who bore the brunt. Plump and complacent after decades of peace and prosperity, they now faced a terrible awakening, as the enormous hordes of ravenous and undisciplined soldiers poured through their towns and villages. Levies, requisitions (of every conceivable object), forced loans, forced labour, looting, rape, and murder were now the order of the day. The human and bovine epidemics transmitted by the armies also decimated the communities along their march. In short, all the horrors of war erupted on a scale not seen since the Thirty Years War. Even the notorious campaigns of Louis XIV paled by comparison. Many communities were still paying off debts incurred half a century later.

It was not just the French: there were also the Austrians and, later, the Russians to contend with. If initially the former paid for what they took, increasingly they resorted to worthless promissory notes. All years were bad but some were worse than others. Especially horrific were 1796, 1799, 1805, 1809, and 1813–15, for it was then that the biggest armies were present for longest. For example, in the summer of 1815 in the Grand Duchy of Baden, whose total population was under a million, there were 270,000 Russians and 225,000 Austrians to be fed. The effects of this sustained exploitation were not just material. All observers agreed that there was a simultaneous social and cultural collapse, as vagrancy, crime, suicide, illegitimacy, and superstition all boomed. The great beneficiaries were the three German princes lucky enough to catch the eye of Napoleon when he destroyed the Empire: the elector of Bavaria, the duke of Württemberg, and the margrave of Baden, who were given fancy new titles (king, king, and grand duke respectively) and vast amounts of territory. The price was paid by their wretched subjects, who found their taxes doubling and doubling again and their sons sent off to die in Spain or Russia.

This terrible story is very well told by Ute Planert, who has a keen eye for the illuminating detail and revealing episode. Every now and again the dead hand of German academic convention reaches out – in the immense footnote that tells us how many books she has read on nationalism, for example – but for the most part, this is a book that can be read with pleasure as well as profit. It is not the last word, however. This is very much a book for the era of Franco-German amity that now happily prevails. At every stage she is at pains to highlight any of the scanty evidence of co-operation between conquerors and conquered. Indeed, so keen is she to bend over backwards in giving the French credit that she often topples over, felled by the weight of material that she herself presents. This is especially obtrusive when she is seeking to play down the frequent and often very violent popular resistance to the French. It also distorts her account of the national hatreds that were not created by the French invasions but were certainly intensified by them. At one point she states that no ordinary Germans left records of their feelings – and in the next breath assures us that none of them experienced any national feelings. It might be thought unreasonable to ask her to add to her formidable list of primary sources, but if she had consulted the French military archives at Vincennes, she would have found plenty of evidence pointing in just the opposite direction. Nor is she convincing when asserting that the ‘war of liberation’ was a myth, using ‘myth’ in the sense of being false. Indeed it was a myth, but in the anthropological sense, and as the rest of the nineteenth century was to demonstrate, a myth of immense power.