ABSTRACT
The crippled, limping, gun-laden protagonist, dependent on begging, in Harlequin Returning from the Wars, a mid-eighteenth-century work by the Florentine painter Giovanni Ferretti, was as realistic an image of war as the triumphal celebrations, mingling thanks to God and man, that greeted victory. If, for most people, the state was more peripheral than the harvest and the unending struggle to safeguard crops and flocks or the incessant conflict with accidents and disease, nonetheless the most significant impact of political society was war, the damage it could create and the need to support it, through finance, recruitment and supplies. All societies were militarised, in the sense that armies were a significant government preoccupation, their financing, directly or indirectly, a major problem for both state and subject. As a consequence, war had an impact on all civilians.
