The Womanly Face of War

Abstract

This review offers a detailed analysis of the monograph “A terrible tragedy. A new perspective on the war of 1812” written by the famous French historian, Professor of the Sorbonne, Marie-Pierre Rey. The author of the book declares in the introduction that she has written “a global history of the Russian campaign”, claiming that historians are not particularly interested in people. It appears that the monograph is not entirely consistent with the stated global scale. Despite a careful analysis of the humanitarian aspects of the war, the book is concise with regard to military-political problems. Assessing the activities of politicians and servicemen, exploring their motives, the author almost always refers exclusively to memoir literature, and sometimes to very dubious pseudo-scholarly arguments, although there is a vast array of simultaneously published papers that give voluminous and truthful picture of the period. It is disappointing that the author who had the opportunity to work in the best archives of France practically didn’t introduce new sources to scholarly circulation. Moreover, there are unfortunate inaccuracies casting doubts on the depth of the study. For example, the author confuses the number of regiments with the numbers of divisions and brigades, shows little competence in the matter of armaments, troops and their tactics. Finally, the translation of the book into Russian contains unacceptable errors in terminology, which does not do justice to the ambition of the book to blaze a trail in the historical science.