For over twenty years historians have taken advantage of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic bicentennials to publish anthologies that bring certain themes to public attention. In a similar vein, this book takes the ending of war and the subsequent sorting-out of European social and political issues as its organizing principle. The editors have chosen essays that deal with the impact and legacy of war in a time of peace. The majority of the essays deal with European topics, though several address issues in the postwar Americas. As the editors nonetheless concede, they are describing “a European world, in cultural terms” (7).

Of all the belligerents in the Napoleonic Wars, Russia probably changed least socially, economically, and politically during this period. Janet Hartley's essay outlines the staggering cost of the war in human and economic terms, as well as the regime's attempt to restore growth by sponsoring internal military colonies. These communities were explicitly intended to strengthen the bond between civilians and the military, which served as the direct representatives of the Russian state in far-flung regions. In a sense, Russia sought to preserve something like a wartime social model in peacetime—not in anticipation of conflict, but rather because the hierarchy and loyalties fostered by wartime were useful to the regime.

In contrast to Russia, the Italian states had a turbulent post-Napoleonic experience in which veterans and the memory of militarism played a role in resistance to the Restoration. John Davies explains that this happened despite (or perhaps because of) the restoration regimes' efforts to erase the memory of the Napoleonic period. Far from being considered a heroic episode in national history—as in Russia, where the state encouraged remembrance—censors in Italy went so far as to ban references to Napoleon's empire. The Romantic and nationalist movements of the 1840s in Italy were, in many ways, a reaction against the suppression of such feelings in the 1820s and 1830s.

Christine Haynes describes the allied occupation of France in 1815 as a sort of mirror image of previous French occupations elsewhere in Europe. Civilians were made to pay, literally as well as figuratively, for the cost of enemy soldiers, who took what they pleased and abused local people. The victorious occupiers also went about altering France's political structure and culture, just as the French had sought to do in their own occupied territories the previous decade. The subject of vengeance against the French invaders is also at the center of Alexander Martin's superb essay about the destruction and restoration of Moscow after 1812. The scale of damage and loss to individuals was far beyond the state's ability to redress. Martin points out that a conservative estimate of damages, just in the city of Moscow, was more than 50 percent greater than the entire national budget. Vigilantism by civilians against French prisoners was often encouraged and likely served as a way to channel anger and grievances toward the foreign outsider, not against the inequalities of the restored social order. This clearly served the interests of both nation and church.

In an essay that is frustrating in its brevity, David Bell touches upon the most subtle long-term issue regarding demobilization: the echoes of militarism and the impact of a military mentality upon the transition of civilians to soldiers, and vice-versa. This topic is too interesting and important to stop, as it does here, with the ascent of Napoleon. Demobilized soldiers returned, throughout Europe, to undemocratic and hierarchical regimes. The aristocrats who had been their officers in the military returned to being their superiors in civil society. Bell's focus is primarily upon France, where these questions were always tinged with the political and ideological considerations of a post-revolutionary society, but in terms of everyday life, one wonders if the transition was really that noticeable?

The question of remembrance and the juxtaposition of history and memory are themselves topics worthy of their own anthologies, and they comprise a bit more than a quarter of the essays in this volume. Alan Forrest offers an interesting contrast between the postwar images of the Duke of Wellington and Admiral Horatio Nelson. The former went on to a political career and became “a divisive figure” (358), using up much of the goodwill he had earned by 1815. Nelson had the advantage, by contrast, of dying at the height of his career, heroically in the national service, and thus never had the chance to offend anyone. Karen Hagemann contextualizes the postwar German festivals and commemorations of victories, such as the anniversaries of the Battle of Leipzig each October. She points out that these celebrations were at the mercy of prevailing social and political trends in Germany; their utility was not simply official and nationalistic but could just as easily be coopted by movements opposed to the status quo.

It is difficult to organize a volume like this. Essays do not always fit neatly into one thematic category. Leighton James's discussion of the experiences of German veterans is grouped with essays about occupation and demobilization, when it just as easily could have been grouped with the later section on remembrance. A separate section on gender might have been useful, and could have included Kit Candlin's and Cassandra Pybus's essay on female war profiteers in the Caribbean and the rise of independent female entrepreneurs; Gregory Knouff's essay on New Hampshire Tories after the American Revolution and the suspicions about seditious women; and Catherine Davies' essay on gendered depictions of military glory and heroism in Spain. This is not so much a complaint as an acknowledgement that the editorial task in a collection such as this is always challenging. That issue aside, this is a welcome volume that usefully illuminates the connections between wartime and peacetime across the breadth of the European world.