Abstract
Thomas Cardoza, Intrepid Women: Cantinières and Vivandières of the French Army. Indiana University Press: Bloomington, IN, 2010; 312 pp.; 9780253354518, $39.95 (hbk)
Female soldiers have long fascinated historians. Thomas Cardoza opens with an account of a pregnant woman expertly wielding a sword to fend off the Cossacks in 1805. But Intrepid Women focuses on another group of military women, whose stories have largely been forgotten. While many of the women profiled in this book brandished swords or muskets on occasion, their presence in the army was defined not by their ability to fight, but by their role in provisioning the troops. Cardoza introduces us to some of the tens of thousands of vivandières or cantinières – the English word sutlers is scarcely better known – who followed armies and sold food, drink, and other critical goods. In so doing, he recreates a lost world and reshapes our understanding of military life.
The book is organized chronologically, moving from the eighteenth century, when women were a crucial if controversial part of the French Royal Army, to 1906, when vivandières were eliminated. In Chapter 1, Cardoza describes the difficult supply logistics of Old Regime armies and the fear that soldiers would desert, not only to escape injury or death, but also to find basic necessities. Each regiment thus had male vivandiers (usually non-commissioned officers) who sold goods that soldiers needed. Their wives played a critical business role, in part because they could leave to acquire provisions without being deserters. Cardoza traces the ambivalent attitudes of authorities who needed the services of such women but also associated them with debauchery.
Chapter 2 argues that the French Revolution limited the rights of women in some respects, while advancing them in others. The infamous law of 30 April 1793 criminalized military participation for most women. But it also formalized and expanded the roles of laundresses and especially, of vivandières, who were seen as essential for the military in wartime. In some ways, laws now treated them as independent businesswomen. While the new regime eliminated male vivandiers, women applied directly to the Minister of War for positions. They were, however, still expected to be married to soldiers in their unit. As such, they became entitled to widows’ pensions – a radical change from Old Regime policy, where a few women had received one-time gratifications as recognition for their services but most went unrecompensed after they ceased working. But they could only claim pensions as widows, not in their own right.
Chapter 3, ‘Expanded Opportunities’, looks at the prospects for women in Napoleon’s armies, as well as the hardships they faced. In part because Cardoza was able to unearth rich sources for the period, this chapter provides some of the most compelling accounts of vivandières’ lives (now increasingly referred to as cantinières), especially during the retreat from Russia. The subsequent chapter is more heterogeneous. Cardoza explores the reputation of cantinières as loyal Bonapartists and their difficulties in obtaining pensions under the Bourbons. He then briefly addresses their role in the French invasion of Algeria and subsequent colonial conquests. He also pays particular attention to cantinières’ unsanctioned adoption of military uniforms, while noting that such symbolism was at odds with the government’s continued desire to treat the women as civilian, not military, employees.
Though some scholars have assumed that the growth of railroads and the telegraph vitiated the need for cantinières by the mid-nineteenth century, Cardoza shows in Chapter 5 that their numbers actually doubled during the Second Empire, in part because of the conditions of war in the Crimea and Italy. But Cardoza also suggests that cantinières’ symbolic roles outweighed their practical utility. Emperor Napoleon III used them as part of the Napoleonic legend he sought to cultivate. Uniformed women often led military parades and artists produced popular lithographs of them. The image of the professional military family of a cantinière, drum major, and enfants de troupe – children who lived in the camps – also became increasingly bourgeois, even as cantinières were understood to live in a separate world, with different rules, from that of civilian women.
Cardoza concludes by addressing the gradual disappearance of vivandières after 1875 and their formal elimination in 1906. He attributes this partly to a desire within the army for increased efficiency and uniformity after defeat by the Prussians, including changing regulations on provisioning the troops. He also emphasizes changes in the nature of recruitment, and the association of cantinières with the dangers of alcoholism. In a more speculative vein, he postulates a growing fear of liberated women.
Cardoza’s focus on the vivandières is both the strength and the limit of this book. He accurately characterizes his methodology as a mixture of social and institutional history. This allows him to illuminate the experiences of individual women, more general patterns in their recruitment and activities, and changing military policies and attitudes. But he sometimes leaves the reader wanting to know more about the context of different developments. For example, he observes that the government sought to avoid lowering the morale of French soldiers in Algeria by encouraging their wives and children to accompany them, and that the conditions of guerrilla warfare meant that cantinières were often in the thick of battle. But he does not engage with other literature about the particular violence of colonial conquest or the extent to which civilian colonists in Algeria were, or were not, part of separate ‘French’ families. Overall, however, this is a well-researched and innovative account. The ‘intrepid women’ of the French army have found their historian.