The Decay of Nature and Birth of Total War, 1798–1815

Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, (1867), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), and Charles Minard’s map-graph Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'armée française dans la campagne de Russie, 1812–1813 (1869) contextualize the historical geographies and environmental dimensions of the era in which Total War emerged from the period of the French Revolution in 1789, to the demise of the Napoleonic Era in 1815. Total War combat environments generated their own industrialized atmospheres, microclimates, and weather. The thunder, smoke, and fire of exploding shells and shrapnel, hails of bullets, fogs of burning gunpowder, kerosene, and coal–oil subjected soldiers to battlefield conditions only previously experienced by human beings during geo-hazard such as forest fires, avalanches, landslides, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions.