Returning Veterans to Civil Life in the Era of the French Wars

Continuing the recent trend to examine the post-war lives of soldiers in different wars and the efforts of nation-states to demobilize and reintegrate soldiers into civilian life, Jennifer Heuer makes a noteworthy contribution with The Soldier’s Reward. What is particularly innovative is her use not only of archival sources on the post war lives of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic soldiers in several of France’s Departments, but also important works of art depicting French veterans in the 18th and 19th Centuries, and what she calls “The Theatre of Peace,” the depiction of the French soldier in French theatre during the period.

Heuer takes the reader through the changing perspectives of the French soldier, veteran, the women they had relationships with, and how gender relations changed from the Ancien Regime, through the Bourbon Restoration. Under the Ancien Regime, military service was seen negatively, with the general view being that the King’s subjects were tricked or forced into the army. Soldiers were essentially stolen from their families in this view. However, some military theorists (most prominently, Jacques Guibert) began to consider the idea of reforming the army based on a citizen-soldier who would fight for their country. So, from the beginning of this pre-revolutionary period, there were competing perspectives regarding the soldier.

The French Revolutionary Armies of course implemented this idea of the citizen-soldier, including a system of conscription. In order to implement conscription (especially with the enactment of the Loi Jourdan, which set up the administration of and the rules and laws for conscription), the French government crafted narratives to get French men to serve in the military for reasons of patriotism that stressed the idea of the soldier sacrificing himself for la patrie and his family. The martial masculinity and virility of the conscript was emphasized in contrast with the Ancien Regime that associated masculinity with domestic, civilian life. Military service was depicted as honorable. A common plot throughout the era was the sweetheart of a soldier bereft after hearing that her love had been killed or disabled in combat proving to have been an incorrect rumor (sometimes spread by a romantic rival to the soldier to trick the sweetheart into marriage by a coward who had remained at home), but leading to a happy reunion and marriage at the end of the play. Draft dodgers were of course depicted in contrast as effeminate cowards, in several popular plays.

Heuer notes a limited number of cases in the archives of women who joined the French army. Some followed a lover or family member into war, and some even joined in the belief that had a duty to serve as much as any man. The Revolution used some of the more famous examples of women serving in their propaganda, but after 1793, any woman discovered in the military was forced to leave. One interesting side note are the efforts of some women to obtain a government pension based on their military service, with a variety of results. A 1793 law forbade women to serve in the military.

Despite the emergence of nationalism in France, this did not prevent soldiers and their family members from undertaking efforts to convince the government that soldiers should be allowed to be demobilized. Heuer identified over 16,000 petitions to the French government during the 1790s alone.

The introduction of the Loi Jourdan in 1798 with its provisions for paying a substitute led to further modifications of the idea of the French soldier. The send-off of new conscripts for the front became a public event in many towns. Conscripts were “bound together in a common enterprise,” to the home front, protecting both their families and France. To be a substitute was treated as an honorable profession. Several plays of the era depict the thanking of the substitute by the man he replaced and provide a noble justification for the decision to pay such as not wanting to abandon their mother who needed them to run a farm or business.

The French Directory made specific use of the murder of two French diplomats at Rastadt in 1798 (probably by the Austrians) to stir up support for conscription and the war. Allegations that one of the diplomats died in the arms of his wife were spun into a grand story of Austrian treachery. The assassination was blown up as a crime unparalleled in history in its depravity and deceitfulness, stoking French emotions. An emphasis was made on the presence of women at the place of the attack, invoking a threat to all French women by the Austrian enemy. There was debate within the government over whether to display the bodies of the dead diplomats in public (ultimately the decision was made not to make a display of them). Prints were made of the attack and a number of plays were produced. At the same time the proposal for the Directory to fund a painting of the Assassination of Rastadt did not go anywhere.

With the wars of the Revolution dragging on in the late 1790s, plays increasingly represented the end of war when the soldier would be able to return home to the bosom of their family, and to return to civilian life. Whether under the Directory or under Napoleon, the French government made use of these sentiments, holding out the hope that peace would come soon and the soldiers would return home. The Peaces of Campo Formio, and later, Amiens were extoled in the government press, the theatre, and vaudeville shows. The sweetheart of the soldier always remained loyal to her missing beau in these plays, and he usually remained faithful until the happy reunion.

One other area Heuer covers is the state-sanctioned marriages that Napoleon introduced for veterans. This was a marked change from earlier bans on marriage for soldiers under the Ancien Regime without the permission of one’s commanding officer. The intent was to reward wounded veterans, and increase the population of France to provide the nation with future soldats. The state provided dowries in these cases, though according to Isser Woloch’s research, only 15-20% of state-sanctioned weddings ultimately took place.

Parallel and in contrast to the Revolutionary/Napoleonic portrayal of the soldier was Royalist propaganda that stressed the war-mongering nature of the French state under Napoleon which would be ended by a Bourbon Restoration that would finally bring peace and would actually return the veterans back to their homes. Bourbon propaganda before and after the Restoration connected the Napoleonic regime to tyranny and the unnecessary deaths of French men (claims were made of up to 6 million killed, with the real numbers being around 1 million French killed in the wars, 1792-1815). Soldiers were victims of the bad father, Napoleon, now replaced by the good father, Louis XVIII. To back up the propaganda, the Restoration government repealed the Loi Jourdan and ended conscription, though it would ultimately be reintroduced in a more limited form by the Saint-Cyr Law of 1818. A shift in the treatment of soldiers under the Bourbons came with a stress on the superiority of civilian life, with the soldier considered separate from their fellow citizens. Proposals were even made to deny soldiers any political rights during their service. Of course, this may have been a result of Bourbon fears that Napoleonic veterans posed a grave political threat against the restored monarchy.

Heuer finishes off the book with a discussion of marriages that were arranged (often between older women and younger men) to avoid conscription. Under the Bourbons there were many petitions by those who sought to annul such marriages as being conducted under duress or never consummated. In general, the Bourbon monarchy decided not to allow divorce in such cases, even when the spouse might have already had children with other women, out of desire to maintain the sanctity of Catholic marriage.

During the rest of the 19^th Century, the image of the soldier in French culture continued to evolve into a from the Revolutionary-Napoleonic ideal. The Soldat Laboureur, a Soldier-Farmer, became a regular character in some plays. Overall, The Soldier’s Reward is a good example of integrating military history with social and cultural history. Heuer is particularly original in her use of plays and art to bring out how the image of the French soldier changed between the Ancien Regime and the Restoration. It is a very academic text, though not too laden with theory, so probably not for the grognard.

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Our Reviewer: Dr. Stavropoulos received his Ph.D. in History from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2013. Currently an Adjunct Professor at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, his previous reviews include Prelude to Waterloo: Quatre Bras: The French Perspective, Braddock's Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution, Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies, In the Name of Lykourgos, The Other Face of Battle, The Bulgarian Contract, Napoleon’s Stolen Army, In the Words of Wellington’s Fighting Cocks, Chasing the Great Retreat, Athens, City of Wisdom: A History, Commanding Petty Despots, Writing Battles: New Perspectives on Warfare and Memory in Medieval Europe, SOG Kontum, Simply Murder, Soldiers from Experience, July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta, New York’s War of 1812, The Philadelphia Campaign, 1777, The Spear, the Scroll, and the Pebble, The Killing Ground, The Hill: The Brutal Fight for Hill 107 in the Battle of Crete, The Lion at Dawn: Forging British Strategy in the Age of the French Revolution, Stalin's Revenge: Operation Bagration and the Annihilation of Army Group Centre, and The Farthest Valley.

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Note: The Soldier's Reward is also available in e-editions.

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