Days of Glory?

Imaging Military Recruitment and the French Revolution

Valerie Mainz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137542939
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137542946
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

This book examines a range of visual images of military recruitment to explore changing notions of glory, or of gloire, during the French Revolution. It raises questions about how this event re-orientated notions of 'citizenship' and of service to 'la Patrie'. The opening lines of the Marseillaise are grandly declamatory: Allons enfants de la Patrie/le jour de gloire est arrivé! or, in English: Arise, children of the Homeland/The day of glory has arrived! What do these words mean in their later eighteenth-century French context? What was gloire and how was it changed by the revolutionary process? This military song, later adopted as the national anthem, represents a deceptively unifying moment of collective engagement in the making of the modern French nation. Valerie Mainz questions this through a close study of visual imagery dealing with the issue of military recruitment.  From neoclassical painting to popular prints, suchimages typically dealt with the shift from civilian to soldier, focusing on how men, and not women, were called to serve the Homeland.

© The Author(s) 2016

Valerie MainzDays of Glory?War, Culture and Society, 1750-185010.1057/978-1-137-54294-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Valerie Mainz¹

(1)

University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

End Abstract

Allons enfants de la Patrie

Le jour de gloire est arrivé!¹

The opening words of the Marseillaise, the French national anthem, ring out today with patriotic exhortation to the children of la Patrie (the Homeland or land of the father) to set off, the day of glory has arrived. In what did glory, or gloire, consist? In this book I shall be examining visual imagery of military recruitment in the light of changing notions of gloire that, at the time of the French Revolution, became tied to new concepts of nation.

Composed at great speed by an enlightened, moderate Captain of Engineers, Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle, when he was garrisoned in the border town of Strasbourg soon after the Legislative Assembly’s declaration of war of 20 April 1792 against the King of Bohemia and Austria, La Marseillaise was, in fact, originally a marching song with the title of Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin (War Song for the Army of the Rhine).² It was initially taken up by an auxiliary battalion of National Guardsmen, or fédérés, from Marseilles on their march to Paris in July 1792 in a movement which, for a time, had strongly radical and republican connotations.³ The song was first made into the French national anthem by the National Convention on 14 July 1795 (26 messidor an III) and it was again to be officially so nominated by the deputies of France’s Third Republic, on 14 February 1879 before Bastille Day, or le 14 juillet, was proclaimed the French national holiday on 6 July 1880.⁴

It is worth considering the verses of this hymn in some detail for its words can be read as constituting a shift away from a peace-loving rhetoric of enlightened, philosophic debate and towards a much more overt warmongering in the making of, and campaigning for, a new French Republic. The anthem’s words, which were sung to the strains of martial music, mix the slogans of a campaign song with the grandiloquent rhetoric of revolutionary fraternity: ‘Lead on sacred patriotism/Support our avenging arms/Liberty, cherished Liberty/Join the struggle with your defenders!’⁵ The hybrid nature of this secular hymn/war song/rallying cry to a nation in arms sets up a Manichean struggle between us, the forces of good, and them, the forces of evil who threaten us. The lines shift backwards and forwards between the vocative and the accusative, drawing the audience in as performer and participant, dramatising the running battle between life and death. On one side of this bloody, heroic struggle that is yet to be won are we, implying the French people, who are perpetually regenerative and united in principled resistance to the other side, the foreign enemy, the kings, tyrants and despots who threaten to kill us.

The opening verse, announcing to the children of the nation that the day of glory has arrived, is ostensibly, but deceptively, universalising and generalising in scope. Glory is no longer held to accrue to one individual hero; it is there for all French offspring to acquire. Against the positive forces of the nation, the destructive, murderous, bloodthirsty soldiers of the enemy’s tyranny then come to be ranged, as imminent and to hand, threatening to destroy the country’s families, in the forms of sons and their [female] companions.⁶ The anthem’s refrain urges citizens to take up arms, to form battalions and to march off so as to spill the enemy’s impure blood over the ploughed fields. These are processes of purging and of purifying and they are evoked in quasi-mystical language. Subsequent verses set up a supposed community of the French as proud, magnanimous warriors who defend liberty in the face of invading, foreign, mercenary hordes and the potential enslavement of conspiring kings and despots. Mindful of posterity, the hymn first closed with the entreaty that the expiring enemies of liberty see the triumph of the French: ‘Under our flags, let victory/Hurry to your manly tones/So that in death your enemies/See your triumph and our glory!’⁷ The mix of pronouns here proclaims that the glory belongs to us as the nation but also, compellingly, attributes the triumph to the manly who have come together to defeat enemies on our behalf. Military sign-up in defence of nation has begun to take on common cause while also engendering a Frenchness that was being marked out as specifically male.

Until the Thermidorian reaction after the coup d’état of 9–10 Thermidor an II/27–8 July 1794 had set in, this hymn was adopted by the army and sung at the frontline, in theatres, at festivals, during fraternal dinners, on the streets of Paris and in the countryside.⁸ Besides being forms of cheap, easily accessible and patriotic entertainment, performances of its rousing lyrics, which were accompanied by the martial strains of the marching song, were experienced communally and could be said to serve in and for the causes of the Republic. The words, addressed to the citizens of France render active those citizens who are the male soldiers of France and who fight for the freedom of the Homeland.⁹ The Marseillaise appears as the voluntary expression of a whole nation’s self-conscious patriotism. In its severe, spare and unsparing militancy, it conflates, for the service of French glory, the duties of the soldier, defined in gendered terms as heroically masculine, with those of the citizen of the French nation.¹⁰

This book challenges assumptions about the enduring nature of French military virtues and the accrual of gloire. It seeks to show that notions about war, heroism and patriotism, about fighting for France and about what constituted a soldier’s true glory underwent radical transformations during the Enlightenment. The linking of military virtues to concepts of gloire has served, in cultural remembrance, to promote myth and to mask facts for the purposes of making war. This association functioned in the visual imagery of the early modern period in ways quite different from those of the propaganda of the twentieth century. Gloire has never been a single, uncontested concept and the French soldier’s patriotism and courage have not always been taken for granted.

At the heart of this enquiry are the multifarious and even contradictory connotations that have accrued to the concept of gloire, what might have pertained to it in the past and how it was used, in a moment of radical change, to inspire service in the military and a concomitant self-sacrifice in combat for the sake of La Patrie/the Homeland. Ways of imagining the soldier, or the citizen soldier, belong to the understanding of the modern French State. Yet it becomes clear from a close analysis of visual imagery dealing with the topic of military recruitment at the time of the Revolution that the words of the Marseillaise did not prompt all eagerly to take military action in defence of the French nation.

During the eighteenth century, the theme of joining up to serve in the army and the concomitant moments of passing from civilian to soldier, from private subject to armed defender of the Patrie, were frequently treated in visual imagery. They also featured in French satirical fiction, plays, essays and other literary forms. Processes of recruitment were, furthermore, of serious concern to writers of military treatises wishing to reform the army.¹¹ Some of this textual material will be studied here for its intrinsic merit and significance. Some of it will provide relevant historical contexts for this study of visual imagery. Some of it will also be addressed for what it can reveal about the significance, or otherwise, of relationships between verbal and visual forms of communication in this period. Whether as an abstract concept or taking the form of concrete reward, notions of gloire complicate this imagery and, at times, undermine, from within, established institutions, authorities and conventions.

Mentalities, Visualities, Imagery and the Structures of Representation

There is no transparent relationship between a social reality and its given representation. What an image can, or might, tell us has to be addressed in conjunction with what it does, its formal elaboration, its conditions of production and the nature of historically changing systems of mediation. The Revolution may well have disturbed long-established habits of mind and expression to direct people to new cultural horizons. The reading of visual imagery dealing with the more or less ordinary details of daily life in the light of a tension point in society—the French Revolution in this study—is to be undertaken here according to the internal workings of single representations. In addition, any single image must also be located and understood with reference to extrinsic sets of circumstances that make up a given configuration’s external logic.

In considering the history of mentalities, Michel Vovelle has fused social and political history with cultural history to explore values, symbolic systems, shared myths and perceptions of the everyday. He has noted, furthermore, that the move from social structures to collective attitudes and representations involves the problem of the complex mediations between lived human life and the ways in which that human life is represented and experienced.¹² It is my contention that gloire provides us with just such a mediating concept. The analysis of the semiological systems this concept has generated can unmask apparently similar forms of collective sensibility to reveal anticipations, inertias, latencies and culturally different ways of seeing, feeling and understanding.¹³

Addressing the problem of whether literature can be suitably used as evidence to inform us of collective attitudes, Vovelle maintains that literature offers the reader several levels of meaning.¹⁴ It can be used as elementary evidence at a primary level of source material to offer up reflections of a lived social reality from within a whole system of written, archaeological and iconographical sources. As our own times are approached, this primary reading cannot, however, be easily isolated from latent meanings and more complex discourses that are charged with ulterior motives: ‘Certainly, the more we proceed in time, the more difficult it becomes to isolate this primary reading, which sees the literary text as a simple reflection of contemporary social practice, and here our task is to decode the latent meanings.’¹⁵ A second level of the direct reading of literary sources involves the acknowledgement of what, for Vovelle, is a stylistic exercise. The stylistic exercise for his own study of death in the West belongs to the domains of religious literature and ranges from collections of sermons, apologetic tracts, artes moriendi, funeral orations and wills, to the deviant discourses of heretics and freethinkers which, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were to encompass the different discourses of humanism and philosophy.¹⁶ Beyond the two levels of interpretation of the reading of the historical context as of the understanding of the internal conditions of representation, there is also, for Vovelle, a whole series of ruses, maskings and evasions which are the products of the collective imagination, be it within the realms of clear thought or those of behaviour, of attitudes or of the collective ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Signing Up Before the Revolution
• 3. Transforming Gloire and Military Sign-Up
• 4. Recruitment and Revolution Before Thermidor
• 5. Fighting Women
• 6. Fame’s Two Trumpets
• Backmatter