The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were the first in history to be written about in great numbers by the common soldier. This article, which focuses on French reminiscences of the wars, examines a variety of memoirs published from the late eighteenth through to the twentieth century. During this time we see a different approach to war and how it was recalled and remembered, more personal, more experiential than ever before. This article argues that the historical accuracy of these veteran narratives is unimportant. Instead, they reveal much more about how the wars were portrayed, and how they were remembered. Important too is what these narratives reveal to historians about the (inner) lives of soldiers during the wars, and what veterans in hindsight thought and felt about particular events. Here too the reality of the 'experience of war' is not as important as the cultural construct that is presented. As such, war narratives are an important source for the ways in which veterans and French society preferred to remember and process the past.Keywords death and suffering, memory, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, war culture, war memoirs Although often used by historians, memoirs, whether political, military or autobiographical, are generally discounted as unreliable. We know the tricks that memory can play, and we know that people can recount events in which they never took part, or repeat stories heard elsewhere and which they incorporate as their own.
This article looks at a number of French testimonies of massacres during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars committed by combatants, for the most part against civilians. Much of what we know about massacres is based on personal testimonies that are invariably from the perspective of the perpetrator, in this case, troops of the Grande Armée. Just as important as understanding why massacres occurred is to understand how they were represented, recalled and remembered by those who witnessed them. In this, memoirs become an indispensable tool for what they tell us about how the killings were justified, either from the individual or the state's point of view, and for the insights one can glean into the minds of those that either committed or witnessed the atrocities taking place. Descriptions of massacres are commonly used to highlight the horror of war rather than the horror of the event itself. Massacre was also a means of underlining the difficulties encountered by the French in conquering, that is, in 'civilizing', Europe. Massacre, the article concludes, was an accepted if not an acceptable part of eighteenth-century European warfare. This, however, did not attenuate the horror; it was something that many veterans had difficulty recalling, even decades after the events described.
Violence has evolved over the past few decades into one of the leading interpretive concepts in history. And yet there few critiques of it to speak of, and no clear‐cut methodology on how to do the history of violence. This article takes a more critical view of violence as a field of historical research by questioning some of the approaches and methods adopted until now. It examines some meanings of violence and the difficulties involved in defining it, discusses some of the trends that have emerged from the history of violence, and offers some suggestions about how to approach the topic from a different perspective. It argues for a cultural, constructed interpretation of violence that not only involves understanding behaviors, but also narratives and discourses of violence that help both define and shape people's attitudes.
Historians generally discount the advent of the First French Empire as the result of Napoleon's personal ambition. Napoleon, however, could not have brought about the transition from republic to empire without wide support, not only among the political and military elite, but also among the French people. This article re-examines the reasons why, a little more than ten years after the execution of Louis XVI, moderate-conservative elements in the political elite opted for a monarchical-style political system, and why it was so widely accepted by ordinary people across France. It does so by examining the arguments in favour of empire in three ‘sites of ideas’: the neo-monarchists in Napoleon's entourage; the political elite, preoccupied with many of the same concerns that had plagued France since 1789; and the wider political nation, which expressed a manifest adhesion to Napoleon as emperor that was marked by an affective bond. The push to empire, it is argued, was an expression of a dominant set of political beliefs and values. Napoleon, on the other hand, only reluctantly came to accept the notion of heredity.
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