Napoleonic Wars

Reference

5 million casualties; [Smithsonian, p. 478]

Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia

"For all practical purposes the list of campaigns and land battles between 1794 and 1812 is one of virtually uninterrupted French triumph. . . . In six major and eight minor naval engagements between the British and the French, the French losses in men were something like ten times those of the British. But where improvised organization, mobility, flexibility and above all sheer offensive courage and morale counted, the French had no rivals. . . . On the sea, however, the French were by this time completely defeated. After the battle of Trafalgar (1805) any chance, not merely of invading Britain across the channel but of maintaining contact overseas, disappeared." [Hobsbawm: Revolution, p. 85-7] "The Revolution and the consequent wars abolished a good many of these relics, partly from revolutionary zeal for territorial unification and standardization, partly by exposing the small and weak states to the greed of their larger neigbours repeatedly and for an unusually long period. Such formal survivals of an earlier age as the Holy Roman Empire, and most city-states and city-empires, disappeared." [Hobsbawm: Revolution, p. 89]