I posted a similar question to this in one of the "Friday Free-for-All" threads and didn't get an answer, so I figured I'd try again.
I recently read David Bell's "The First Total War." Is there any validity to his claim (or maybe my interpretation of what he's saying) that the works of the philosophes of the Enlightenment Era were one of the most influential factors in how the public perceived warfare?
The book covers the shift from the idea of war as an adventure for the nobility and crowned heads of Europe to a much more cynical take on it, which most would recognize and sympathize with today. This all leads up (not saying it's causal) to the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars.
But there seems to be a resurgence in the idea of war as a noble cause just prior to World War I. And then the death toll of that war (which is hard to grasp even today) stomps this idea out again.
I realize that war has an enormous impact on literature, but is there much evidence of the inverse being true?
^ These answers I've given should be pertinent
But there seems to be a resurgence in the idea of war as a noble cause just prior to World War I.
This is a hoary myth at this point. Socialist writers like Engels and Jaures, Liberals like Bloch and Angell, and pacifists like Bertha Suttner had written extensively before WWI about how terrible future wars and conflicts would be. They were almost mirrored by military writers, such as General Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, who wrote of how modern wars would be Volkskrieg or People's Wars, and would last years and drain their societies resolve. Their was a futurist milieu that saw war as a progressive force, but this was very much a fringe idea.
Further Reading: