Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century

Making War, Mapping Europe

Joseph Clarke, John Horne, Joseph Clarke, John Horne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319782287
• eBook ISBN: 9783319782294
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book explores European soldiers' encounters with their continent's exotic frontiers from the French Revolution to the First World War. In numerous military expeditions to Italy, Spain, Russia, Greece and the 'Levant' they found wild landscapes and strange societies inhabited by peoples who needed to be 'civilized.' Yet often they also discovered founding sites of Europe's own 'civilization' (Rome, Jerusalem) or decaying reminders of ancient grandeur. The resulting encounters proved seminal in forging a military version of the 'civilizing mission' that shaped Europe's image of itself as well as its relations with its own periphery during the long nineteenth century.

© The Author(s) 2018

Joseph Clarke and John Horne (eds.)Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth CenturyWar, Culture and Society, 1750-1850https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78229-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Peripheral Visions—Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century

Joseph Clarke¹ and John Horne¹

(1)

Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Joseph Clarke (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

John Horne

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Charles François’s career as a soldier seems a good place to start. Born and raised in Ginchy, a village of less than two hundred souls in Picardy, François enlisted as a teenager in the French infantry on 3 September 1792, and just over two weeks later, he saw his first action at the Battle of Valmy. It is impossible to say whether François shared Goethe’s sense that ‘a new era in the history of the world’ had begun that day, although he did remember it proudly decades later, but enlistment marked the start of a new career for the boy from the backwater by the Somme. That career would carry him across Europe and beyond over the next twenty-three years. In that time he campaigned, unsurprisingly for a Revolutionary soldier, in Holland, the Rhineland and Italy in the mid-1790s. But he also sailed to Egypt in 1798 where, like many later visitors, he carved his name on one of the pyramids. Taken prisoner in 1801, he was despatched to Damascus, where, having already mastered Arabic, he spent the next two years in service with the governor of Adrianople, travelling to Baghdad and Jerusalem, Athens and Constantinople along the way. In 1803, with the help of the French ambassador to the Porte, he returned home, re-joined his regiment and campaigned across Europe for another decade. He survived Ulm and Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau and Friedland; he was in Madrid for the Dos de Mayo in 1808, and he entered Moscow, or what remained of it, along with what was left of Napoleon’s Grande Armée in September 1812. Nearly three years later, in June 1815, François fought his final battle, at Ligny, and then returned to France to compile the twenty cahiers of campaign notes, which, quite remarkably, he had managed to maintain over a lifetime at war.¹

Admittedly, François’s career is unusual. The sheer breadth of his travels; his ability, and willingness, to record his experiences in writing; above all his survival, and surviving a war in which almost a million of his comrades died or disappeared, in which up to seven million lives were lost, was no mean feat: these all mark him out from most of his contemporaries.² And yet, Charles François is not exceptional. On the contrary, his career is emblematic, not simply of the generation that went to war in the 1790s and early 1800s, but of this book’s subject: the experience of the hundreds of thousands of French and British and German soldiers who retraced at least some of his footsteps in campaigns across and beyond Europe’s borders during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and again in the First World War, as well as at various points during the decades between. Over this period, Europe’s major powers established or re-established great empires that spanned the globe. That imperial impetus and its cultural consequences have been analysed extensively. But the same powers also mounted military campaigns closer to home, and these expeditions to Europe’s southern and eastern frontiers, around the Mediterranean, in the Balkans, the Middle East and over the uncertain borderlands with the Russian Empire, have received less sustained attention, certainly in terms of the soldiers who carried them out. In this sense, Charles François’s travels as a soldier encapsulate our focus: the experience of ordinary men uprooted from their ordinary lives who went to the borders of Europe and beyond, and who, in doing so, crossed the limits of what they considered to be ‘civilization’.

In order to examine this theme, we privilege the accounts of officers and soldiers themselves, like those of Charles François . Constantly expanding armies and rising literacy rates mean that the sheer volume of soldiers’ testimonies increased exponentially between the wars of the Revolution and the First World War.³ That transformation can be seen in the nature of the testimonies. As the conventions of military memoir writing and travel literature became more familiar over the nineteenth century, so the soldier’s sense of what was expected of him when he put pen to paper evolved. Yet the result is somewhat paradoxical. As Alan Forrest and others have observed, soldiers’ letters have always offered a more immediate insight into their experience of war than memoirs and autobiographies subsequently published in peacetime, and that immediacy may even be more intense during the earlier part of our period.⁴ Infinitely more soldiers’ letters survive from the First World War than remain from the Revolutionary or Napoleonic period. But if the latter are fewer in number, they are also a good deal freer in what they could express about the experiences of war. The Napoleonic grognard wrote home, if he could write at all, unencumbered by the contrôle postal, the military censorship that oversaw the twentieth-century poilu’s correspondence, and his accounts may be all the more unconstrained as a result. In addition to soldiers’ writings, we look at the reception by home society of those same accounts and to the sense of European civilization that they reflected. In an age marked by the increasingly mass production (and consumption) of images, from prints to film, we pay particular attention to iconography—for the encounters that concern us were constructed by image as well as prose.

In terms of campaigns, for the first great upheaval we take the French expedition to Italy and the French and British expeditions to Egypt, the fighting by both British and French in Spain and Portugal during the Peninsular War and the experience of German members of Napoleon’s Grande Armée as it invaded Russia in 1812. For the parallel epoch of the First World War, we consider German involvement (notionally as advisors) in the Ottoman Empire; the Anglo-French campaign in Greek Macedonia against Bulgaria, Germany and Austria-Hungary; the initial failure of the British and Indian campaign in Mesopotamia, with its defeat at the siege of Kut-al-Amara by Ottoman forces in 1916; and the invasion of Ottoman Palestine and occupation of Jerusalem by a mixed army of British, Indian, Australian and New Zealand troops in 1917–18. In order to explore the trajectories linking these two major periods of global warfare, we consider how the memory of German involvement in the 1812 campaign took literary and popular form across the nineteenth century, helping to shape Germany’s military involvement on its own account in the same region during the Great War. We also look at Egypt under permanent British occupation from 1881, and especially at how the British exacted retribution on the Sudan, which, under the Madhi, had revolted against British control from Egypt, leading to the assassination of the Governor General, George Gordon , in Khartoum in 1885. In 1898, a British expeditionary force under General Horatio Kitchener defeated the Sudanese rebels at Omdurman, site of the Mahdi’s new capital, which it destroyed in symbolic revenge for Gordon’s ‘martyrdom’.

The encounters between expeditionary soldiers and the societies in which they campaigned of course played out in different frameworks, and we have selected some of these in order to structure this book. In the first section, ‘Encounters’, we give primacy to the soldiers’ own written accounts of what they met—from Napoleonic Egypt to Allied Macedonia. Conscious that limitations in language and sources prevent us giving the view from the other side, we nonetheless show in ‘Counter-Encounters’ that, by definition, such encounters could never be unilateral. If power relations were asymmetric, the indigenous were far from passive, as Zeinab Abul-Magd shows in the case of Napoleonic-dominated Egypt. They had their own views of foreign incursion into their lives, which shaped and limited what the intruders could achieve. The European expeditions to the Levant also involved colonial soldiers from elsewhere (as well as metropolitan troops), especially in the period of the First World War. This gave rise to ‘lateral encounters’ between the indigenous inhabitants and imperial soldiers for whom the peripheries of Europe were far more remote than they were to Europeans.

The meetings of Europeans (and their more distant subjects) on the margins of their own continent were not just with other human beings but also an alien physical environment. This prompted attempts at ‘Capturing Landscapes’ (our third section) by graphic means, from drawing to film. Finally, force lay at the heart of the interaction between European armies and the peoples over whom they had temporary or long-term control. It shaped the work they undertook to reorganize them, including the question of what to do with civilizations that not only had ancient roots but were also perceived to be central to European identity. The final section of the book thus examines the ‘Power and Patrimonies’ on which the ambitions and success (or failure) of the expeditions turned beyond their immediate role in the wars of which they were part.

Our hope overall is that we may better understand what these soldiers and their expeditions experienced as they went to their own continent’s peripheries, encountering exotic landscapes and peoples in the context of war and military occupation, and what they did there and remembered of it afterwards. We also hope at least to pose the question of whether their attitudes and activities were set in essence from the start, and merely amplified by a century of colonialism between two major periods of war, or whether the nature of their encounters changed in substance. What coherence (if any) does the long nineteenth century have in the history of this military mapping of Europe’s relationship with itself via its proximate margins? The reader will judge whether what follows lives up to these ambitions. By way of introduction it seems worth sketching what seem to us some conclusions of the book and the three-year research project on which it is based.

The accounts from the margins of Europe are fundamentally self-reflexive. They not only describe what the soldiers experienced but also define (implicitly or explicitly) the selves that underwent that experience. As such, they offer an insight into what it meant to be modern, to be European, to be ‘civilized’. In the process they also reveal much about the changing nature of warfare. The conflict that engulfed Europe for a generation from 1792 onwards may or may not represent a rupture in the way that war was waged; it may or may not constitute ‘the first total war’ as David Bell has argued.⁵ Indeed, historians debate whether the even greater conflagration of the First World War, which closed the long nineteenth century, was ‘total’ compared to its successor twenty years later. Some of the authors in this book have engaged directly with these issues. But it is clear from the contributions of all of them that these expeditions radically transformed Europeans’ experience of travel and, with it, their sense of both themselves and the world around them. They also placed soldiers at the heart of that movement. Whereas comparatively small professional forces conducted earlier colonial campaigns, in the Americas or India, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Peripheral Visions—Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century
• Part I. Encounters
• Part II. Counter-Encounters
• Part III. Capturing Landscapes
• Part IV. Power and Patrimonies
• Back Matter