Abstract
Pamphlets provide an overlooked corpus for understanding the demobilization of French soldiers in 1814 and 1815. Royalists particularly used the format to persuade combatants to return to civilian life, invoking the wartime suffering of French families to convince both soldiers and civilians to support an uneasy peace and a potentially unpopular ruler. Their writings reveal competing visions of the value and legacy of martial masculinity. Pamphleteers were torn between seeing soldiers as the quintessential victims or most enthusiastic agents of Napoleonic rule, and as wounded men ready for peace or as selfish and relentless warmongers incapable of domesticity.
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Cite this article
Jennifer Heuer, “Soldiers as Victims or Villains? Demobilization, Masculinity, and Family in French Royalist Pamphlets, 1814–1815,” The Journal of Military History 80, no. 1 (January 2016): 121–144.