The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars devastated Europe for nearly a quarter of a century. In The Soldier鈥檚 Reward, Jennifer Ngaire Heuer recovers the stories of soldiers and their relationships to family and domestic life during this period, revealing how prolonged warfare transformed family and gender dynamics and gave rise to new kinds of citizenship.
How did you become interested in love and war in the era of the French Revolution?
JH: I first became curious about connections between revolution, war, gender, and family when I stumbled across a series of petitions from men and women seeking to dissolve their marriages. These were couples who had wed during the Napoleonic empire in hopes that married heads of household would be less likely to be conscripted than single men. Theirs were often wildly mismatched marriages; young men wed partners in their 70s or even 80s, while young women were pressured by their parents into rescuing neighbors鈥� sons from the draft. Most of these arrangements only existed on paper, and couples anticipated getting divorced once peace arrived. Lasting peace, however, came with a restored Catholic government which outlawed divorce in 1816, leaving couples desperate to prove that their liaisons had never been truly legitimate.
These petitions (and related court cases and other records I subsequently unearthed) led me to think about how more than two decades of warfare intersected with revolution to affect love and family life鈥攁nd how contemporary changes in gender and family could be used to both critique and legitimate warfare. I soon discovered that these paper marriages were only one piece of the puzzle. If marriages could help men avoid military service, marriage was also a means of rewarding taking up arms. The most dramatic example of this came in 1810, when Napoleon鈥檚 government sought to arrange six thousand simultaneous weddings across France between veterans and poor but virtuous young women, in conjunction with the Emperor鈥檚 own wedding.
The tension between these two functions of marriage鈥攁s a means of both avoiding and rewarding military service鈥攊ntrigued me. More generally, I realized that while historians have thought a lot about war, gender, and family in other moments, especially the World Wars, we haven鈥檛 done so much for the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. But there were all kinds of connections. I found clues in documents ranging from broadsheets celebrating the extraordinary deeds of women soldiers to postwar pamphlets urging veterans to abandon a quest for personal glory and commit themselves instead to helping their impoverished families.
So why think about revolution, war, love and family together in this period?
JH: Exploring these intersections helps us think about questions historians have rarely addressed in depth: how did people experience the warfare that lasted more than two decades (from 1792 to 1815), with only short-lived peace treaties? Why did they support continued fighting? War in the period is often analyzed in terms of battle tactics, military reforms, diplomatic alliances, and Napoleon鈥檚 own famous or infamous actions. These factors are critical for understanding the course of events. But we get different insights by looking at the relationships between civilians and combatants, especially at moments of soldiers鈥� departures and homecomings. Changing governments strategically invoked love and family bonds as a means of recruiting soldiers or rewarding them for their service, and to persuade civilians to accept the costs of war.
Conversely, looking at these dynamics helps us to understand how people moved on after years of fighting. Peacemaking was not an instant process, a transition simply instituted with the formal end of war. War had lasting effects on personal life, not only for veterans, but also for those far from the battlefield, in cases ranging from couples trying to end paper marriages to people desperately trying to learn the fates of husbands, sons, or siblings missing in action. Peacemaking also entailed cultural challenges, especially after 1814, when contemporaries sought to undo two decades of militarized culture.
Because this period bridges the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, it also helps us think about the meanings of citizenship for both men and women. We often talk about the Revolution as creating new rights, most famously in the 1789 Declaration of Rights and Man and Citizen. But it also created new duties for citizens, duties that were sometimes in conflict with one another.
What did citizenship and military service actually mean for men?
JH: Late eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century France was a world of mustachioed soldier-heroes. The French Revolution promoted the idea that all male citizens owed military service to their country, and Napoleon鈥檚 government relied on permanent conscription. Boys increasingly grew up believing that becoming adults required taking up arms, while young women were admonished to save their affections for men who had proven their courage on the battlefield. Popular culture, including plays, paintings, and festivals, reinforced these messages. In looking at these developments, I wanted to uncover the connections between citizenship, masculinity, and arms-bearing that have had long-lasting, and often damaging, effects around the world.
But I also discovered repeated challenges to models of virility and martial masculinity. In the early Revolution, soldiers understood themselves to be responding to national emergency; they expected to return home after a battle or a campaign. Many were still in the troops years later. Among other sources, I read thousands of petitions from veterans begging to be discharged, insisting that being good men and citizens depended not just on doing their military duty, but at least as much鈥攊f not more鈥攐n devotion to family, economic productivity, and sensitivity to suffering.
Tensions between different models of masculinity and citizenship would continue to surface in many contexts, sometimes even when rewarding military valor. For example, the wounds that made veterans compelling candidates for state-sponsored marriages also called into question their ability to become productive civilians and heads of households. The limits of martial masculinity were particularly apparent after 1814, when Napoleonic veterans were associated with a newly discredited regime.
The book thus explores the legacies of new models of virility and of soldiers-citizens in an age of unprecedented mass mobilization, but also the development of alternatives and challenges to those models.
What about women?
JH: I found traces in the archives of at least a hundred women who took up arms, mostly in the early Revolution. In April 1793, the government banned 鈥渦seless鈥� women from the troops; this included not only women soldiers, but also soldiers鈥� wives, camp followers, and all but a limited number of laundresses and women who provided troops with basic foodstuffs. Some women, however, continued to fight or even enlisted later, sometimes in disguise. Repeated governments sought both to honor and domesticate them. Their dramatic stories help us understand both how the Revolution inspired women to act as citizens, and how war combined with political changes to limit their citizenship.
But war also involved and affected other women long after 1793. Historians often see the radical revolution as the moment that shut down 飞辞尘别苍鈥檚 claims to citizenship, or they trace a story of growing misogyny through the Civil Code, when Napoleon鈥檚 government re-instituted a deeply patriarchal legal system. Looking at the experiences of war, in conjunction with revolution, shows us how much women continued to engage with the state in new ways, from petitioning for financial aid to seeking help tracking down loved ones. Military service often separated men from home, but it also placed civilians, especially women, in new relationships with the state and shaped their own claims to citizenship.
You seem to combine a lot of different kinds of materials, what led you to do so?
JH: To connect themes that have rarely been considered together, I realized I also needed to bring together diverse materials and use different methods of historical research. These included military history records, from troop rosters to soldiers鈥� memoirs, but also tools of cultural history, including popular theater (especially plays celebrating peace treaties), artwork, and music. I also turned to sources associated with social history, including letters between combatants and their families; meetings of town councils; and police reports of 飞辞尘别苍鈥檚 involvement in anti-conscription riots.
Considering different kinds of materials helped me to uncover unexpected connections and comparisons. For example, both popular plays celebrating peace treaties in the late Revolution and accounts of state-sponsored marriages in the Napoleonic empire centered on veterans鈥� weddings. But in one case, marriages appeared as a joyful means of celebrating peace, linking individual homecomings to a national end of violence; in the second case, they were imagined as a means to produce a new generation of warriors.
Your book also crosses a number of regimes, which are often written about separately. Why take such a broad chronological scope?
JH: I have long been interested in bridging different regimes; the first book I wrote, The Family and Nation, used the lens of nationality and citizenship to explore developments from the Old Regime through the Bourbon Restoration of 1814/1815. In this case, the long view allowed me to consider how war intersected with changing political regimes to affect gender and family, and to see patterns and shifts that I might have missed if I had focused on narrower moments.
I became particularly interested in a process I ultimately came to term 鈥渃ultural recycling.鈥� I discovered that even as people sought to break with the past, they often quietly repurposed familiar references and rituals in a new political order. People in the late 1790s, for example, used strategies for promoting military recruitment that had been tried earlier in the Revolution; while playwrights celebrating the peace that followed Napoleon鈥檚 surrender actually reprised plots that had heralded short-lived peace treaties under Napoleon. Paying attention to these quiet continuities helped me discover hidden assumptions that shaped people鈥檚 experiences and expectations, as well the challenges of re-using familiar models when they no longer quite fit. While many specific aspects of these dynamics were unique to the period, others were not; I hope that considering processes of cultural recycling may help us to understand overlooked dynamics of historical change in other contexts.
Your title invokes love; how do love and other emotions relate to revolution and war? What can people interested in the history of emotions learn from your book?
JH: The French Revolution was a pivotal moment for connecting emotions to politics. War similarly generated strong feelings, including excitement, pride, frustration, fear, loneliness, and grief. Looking at this era reveals how authorities sought simultaneously to use displays of emotions for particular purposes and to control popular reactions; doing so was often challenging.
Popular culture sometimes depicted soldiers as aggressive lovers, conquering both on the battlefield and in the boudoir; these images hinted at the realities of sexual violence. But I was surprised to see how many other works of popular culture portrayed them as caring and romantically loyal. Such depictions of warriors as humane, generous, and embedded in familial networks sought to counterbalance fears of soldiers鈥� violence and emotional distance or trauma.
I was also surprised to discover just how much revolutionary and post-revolutionary regimes found it useful to specifically display 飞辞尘别苍鈥檚 emotional responses to war, whether as stoic figures who insisted that menfolk leave to fight, or after 1814, as mothers tearfully grateful to a returned king who had ended conscription.
Did anything else surprise you?
JH: I was often surprised, and even moved, by unexpected glimpses of individual lives in the midst of revolution and war, like a nine year boy who had joined up as a drummer, without his parents鈥� consent, clean socks or a hat, or a young woman who hid in an oven to escape an unwanted marriage to a fellow villager threatened with conscription.
More substantively, I was surprised by how much war, revolution, and family were intertwined in this period鈥攁nd how much we can learn by following these connections. When I first came across a few petitions from unhappy couples, I had no idea quite how far they would lead me.
Jennifer Ngaire Heuer is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789鈥�1830 and the editor (with Mette Harder) of Life in Revolutionary France.