Ritter maintained that militarism first appeared during the French Revolution, when the revolutionary French state, later to be followed by Napoleon I's regime, began the total mobilization of society to seek "the total destruction of the enemy" [REF].
In Volume 2 of Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, Ritter commented that it was only after Bismarck's sacking in 1890 that militarism first appeared in Germany.