Thomas Dodman, “1814 and the Melancholy of War,” The Journal of Military History, 80:1 (January 2016): 31-55

What does it feel like to witness the collapse of a regime? This article explores this question by looking at the end of the First French Empire as seen through the eyes of state officials, soldiers, and military doctors among others. I follow retreating French forces from 1814 through to the subsequent reconstruction of wartime memories in order to grasp an “inner life” of defeat dominated by related lethal epidemics of typhus and melancholy moods known to contemporaries as “nostalgia.” I argue that these experiences and sensibilities force us to rethink how the Napoleonic wars affected understandings of time and space.

*

Jacques Hantraye, “The Silence of the Woods: The 1815 Murder of a Prussian Soldier in Western France,” The Journal of Military History, 80:1 (January 2016): 57-76

At the end of the Napoleonic Era, France experienced three years of invasions and occupations that increased collective and inter-individual violence. This article analyzes an affair that occurred around Unverre, near Chartres, during the summer of 1815. While we still don’t know whether it constitutes an exception in a stream of receding violence or shows the persistence of deep-seated violence in rural France, this case illustrates the complications of the “end” of war within France.

*

Stéphane Calvet, “The Painful Demobilization of the Napoleonic Grande Armée’s Officers,” The Journal of Military History, 80:1 (January 2016): 77-92

The former officers of the Grande Armée have often been seen as die-hard supporters of Napoleon, with the government of the Bourbon Restoration viewing them with particularly acute suspicion. An in-depth study of the careers and trajectories of officers from the Charente (a department in western France known for its Bonapartism) shows how little these former combatants resemble the clichés painted by legend. In many ways, they were a heterogeneous group whose demobilization was complex and difficult. They nonetheless often shared both a desire to prove their loyalty to France and a continued hope that the state would recognize, both materially and symbolically, the sacrifices they had made in the name of the nation.

*

Christopher Tozzi, “Soldiers without a Country: Foreign Veterans in the Transition from Empire to Restoration,” The Journal of Military History, 80:1 (January 2016): 93-120

Despite the French state’s long history under the Old Regime and during the Revolution of favorable treatment toward foreign troops who served it, many of the foreign veterans present in France at the Napoleonic wars’ conclusion were ignored by the Restoration government. Meanwhile, some foreign troops were proscribed in their native countries for serving Napoleon. The experiences of these foreigners highlight three trends: the exclusion of foreign veterans from the program of social healing that the Restoration Bourbons undertook, the limits of the modern French state’s care for veterans, and the ambiguity of national identity after the revolutionary era.