Napoleon, inheritor of the armies of the French Revolution, transformed inter-state warfare into a pan-continental system of conquest on a scale not seen since Alexander the Great and the Romans. The French Revolution had shown how a country's whole population and resources could be mobilised in the service of an ideal, and Napoleon extended this to embrace Europe itself. His model of a military superpower, though eventually defeated, set a pattern which was to be revived by totalitarian states, and their opponents, in the 20th century.