Abstract
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.
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Cite this article
Thomas Dodman, “1814 and the Melancholy of War,” The Journal of Military History 80, no. 1 (January 2016): 31–55.