‘Valour Knows Neither Age Nor Sex’: The Recueil des Actions Héroïques and the Representation of Courage in Revolutionary France

I

The first edition of the Annales du Civisme et de la Vertu set the tone for what was to follow, and despite acquiring its new title in February 1794, its format remained essentially unchanged until it ceased publication. That format was brisk, anecdotal, and invariably hyperbolic. Each issue raced through between two and three dozen tales of private virtue and patriotic endeavour, all chosen to exemplify a particular aspect of the Republican ideal and ‘to engrave its principles on the [reader’s] soul’. ²¹ From the sans-culottes who, for want of horses, hauled supply wagons for the army themselves to the citizens who risked all to rescue drowning children, these stories were an object lesson in the selfless civisme that made good Republicans. ²² As the year II progressed, however, the Recueil’s editorial policy evolved to reflect the increasingly martial ethos of Revolutionary culture. The fourth edition featured only a handful of sketches from civilian life, and under Antoine Thibaudeau’s editorship from June it focused exclusively on the armies. ²³ However, if the Recueil’s content reflected the steady militarization of the Republican ideal, its editorial approach remained constant. This report of an encounter between 8 French dragoons and 40 Austrian hussars is typical of its breathless style:

At the sight of such a superior force, prudence seemed to command a retreat; but Frenchmen flee before Austrians! Abandon their mission! Frenchmen cede to mere numbers! Confident in their superiority, the enemy advanced at great speed. The dragoons closed ranks and charged like lightning, their horses hardly touching the earth; they broke through the Austrian line, sowing disorder among the enemy’s ranks: victory came quickly; several slaves bit the dust; the others fled at full tilt; with the eight victors pursuing them, disdaining to take any prisoners. ²⁴

This was stirring stuff, but the ‘daring and sang-froid’ that Pierre Chassot displayed in putting five uhlans to flight in Brumaire year II effectively embodied the same optimistic assessment: one free Frenchman was equal to any number of despotism’s ‘slaves’. ²⁵

Tales of French troops triumphing in the face of overwhelming odds were the Recueil’s stock in trade, but if numbers scarcely mattered in this instance, they counted enormously when it came to quantifying the soldiers’ courage in other contexts. The Recueil rarely flinched from representing the potential cost of courage in combat, and inspiring accounts of French troops fighting on despite an extraordinary array of injuries were a regular feature. Every issue contained its own macabre inventory of eyes lost and limbs amputated, but, for all the diverse forms of dismemberment the Recueil recorded, each of these ‘glorious scars’ told essentially the same story. ²⁶ From the cannonball that tore an arm off ‘the brave Georges’ in Vendémiaire year II to the 26 wounds that Lieutenant Bouvet was reported to have received at Arlon, the seriousness of the Republic’s situation was writ large in every one of these wounds. ²⁷ The injured soldier incarnated France’s fate in these pages, in part because his wounds were so many proofs of the counter-revolution’s ‘criminal outrages against the patrie’ but also because the magnanimity with which he faced mutilation was a mark of Republican righteousness. ²⁸ Throughout these pages, the epic resolve that defined the true révolutionnaire was embodied in the rousing ‘Vive la République’ or the stoic ‘I still have one arm left to avenge the patrie’ that inevitably accompanied the loss of a limb. ²⁹ The record for Republican endurance ultimately belonged to the chasseur Dandurand, whose sole response to receiving 43 wounds in one encounter in the Vendée was to fight on to renewed cries of ‘Vive la République’, but if Dandurand’s injuries were exceptional, his example was not. ³⁰ Suffering on this scale was testimony to the troops’ devotion to duty, but the ordinary soldier’s extraordinary determination to defend the patrie was just as effectively embodied in stories of soldiers, like Sergeant David, carving bullets out of their own bodies with a sardonic ‘I’ll send it back to them’ (see Figure 1). ³¹

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

L.F. Labrousse, ‘La voila! je vais la leur rendre’, J. Grasset Saint-Sauveur, Les fastes du peuple français … édition ornée de gravures d’après les dessins du citoyen Labrousse (Paris, 1796). Courtesy of Trinity College Library, Department of Early Printed Books.

Dandurand lived to fight another day, but if the Recueil revelled in these tales of apparently indestructible soldiers performing incredible feats of daring, it openly acknowledged that death awaited many of the Republic’s defenders as well. In a publication intended to encourage enlistment, these graphic accounts of death in combat seem surprising. However, in a political culture where the motto ‘Liberty or Death’ was emblazoned across Revolutionary space and where the cult of Republican martyrs dominated civic ceremonies throughout the Terror, it becomes more comprehensible. ³² The ‘good death’, in Revolutionary terms, was a recurring theme in these reports, and, like latter-day Spartans, the soldiers of the Republic were always seen to embrace death heroically and invariably died thinking of the patrie. Whether this took the form of the officer solemnly choosing suicide rather than surrender or the touching tableau of a dying infantryman urging his brother ‘leave me, return to your piece and avenge my death’ with his last breath, these reports did not just celebrate the soldier’s courage in confronting death: they sanctified it as the ultimate expression of Republican citizenship. ³³ Here the common soldier always displayed the same determination, and the same dignity, in death as his commander, not because he had been inured to war by discipline or experience but because he was inspired by devotion to the patrie.

The overwhelming majority of these exploits involved enlisted men. However, the frontier between soldiers and civilians was a fluid one in the year II, and the Recueil reflects this ambiguity clearly in its idealization of ordinary citoyens enthusiastically joining their brothers in arms. Like the Savoyard blacksmith who ‘left his anvil to fly into battle’, the Recueil’s heroes embodied the universalism of the levée en masse and its ideal of an entire nation in arms:

Accustomed to beating iron with his hammer, he could not imagine a better weapon to smash the satellites of the Sardinian despot … and threw himself into the fray. After the victory he returned with his hammer stained with blood like Hercules carrying his club still steaming with the entrails of the monsters he had crushed. ³⁴

Even more radically, this ideal extended to women and children as well. As Olympe de Gouges concluded in a patriotic melodrama in 1793, ‘Valour knows neither age nor sex,’ and the Recueil offered its readers ample evidence to support this dictum. ³⁵ Boy soldiers such as Bara, Viala, Sauvestre, and Latour, or women who enlisted as men, such as Rose Bouillon or Liberté Barrau, featured prominently in its reports. ³⁶ While some women, like the heroine of Saint-Milhier, were celebrated for defending their homes against counter-revolutionary assault, others, like Barrau, who enlisted alongside her husband, were lauded for assuming a much more aggressive role. ³⁷ Indeed, Barrau’s resolve in pursuing an attack against the Spanish before tending to her wounded husband was represented as the ultimate expression of Republican virtue. ³⁸ In these relentlessly propagandistic pages, this readiness to sacrifice life and limb, this willingness, even among women, to place France before all else was the measure of a true citizen and a mark of the Revolution’s regeneration of mankind.

The Recueil, as these examples will have suggested, was pretty unsophisticated propaganda, straightforward to read and self-consciously colloquial. And yet, for all its apparent simplicity, its crudity even, it actually signals an extraordinarily ambitious and, in many ways, influential attempt to rethink what constituted courage in a Revolutionary context that was unprecedentedly democratic, fiercely patriotic, and increasingly martial. In all of these respects, the Recueil’s refashioning of courage was repeatedly represented as a radical rupture with the recent past, a point its editors were only too keen to emphasize. For Grégoire, for instance, courage had always been considered a socially exclusive virtue, a quality conceived in terms of chivalric codes and aristocratic honour, two principles that ‘insolently repulsed the ordinary soldier from the temple of glory’, and the Republic had to repair this affront to its citizens. ³⁹ The Recueil was, in this light, imagined as a vast act of recompense, and Bourdon reiterated this point when he presented the first copy to the Convention in Frimaire year II. The courage of the common soldier, he declared, had always been overlooked under the old order, and the Convention was duty-bound to undo this ‘injustice’ in the name of equality. ⁴⁰ That the Recueil’s editors should present it in this light is scarcely surprising, but contemporary commentators viewed its egalitarian agenda in very similar terms. The radical Révolutions de Paris echoed this argument empathically in Pluviôse year II when it noted that ‘in the past … after a battle won, the high command alone had all the honours … the wounded soldier had only the Invalides while the commander who never left his tent was feted by the Court’. ⁴¹ More tellingly, this agenda also resonated with ordinary revolutionaries, and the Jacobins of Bergues in the Nord, for example, applauded the recognition it afforded ordinary soldiers after ‘so many centuries’ of neglect. ⁴²

The Recueil’s celebration of the common soldier was represented as a radical break with the elitism of the ancien régime, and in many respects it was just that. And yet, if the Republicans of the year II sought to distance themselves from the recent past they were also heirs to the eighteenth century’s complex and often contradictory attitudes towards the army. At once averse to the carnage of combat but also acutely interested in military reform, enlightened public opinion was profoundly ambivalent in its attitude towards the ordinary soldier, although in one critical sense Grégoire was right to emphasize the radicalism of the Recueil’s rejection of the past. In celebrating courage in its most carnal form, the Recueil did represent a dramatic departure from one important strand of enlightened thought, the pacifism espoused by many philosophes. From Fénélon’s condemnation of warfare as ‘the shame of the human race’ to Voltaire’s denunciation of the entire army as ‘murderers’, few philosophes saw much to admire in military life. ⁴³ For Marmontel, in the Encyclopédie, the ‘false glory of the conqueror’ was a perversion of true greatness, while the Enlightenment’s leading elegist, Antoine Thomas, casually dismissed courage in combat as a ‘wild and savage’ affair. ⁴⁴ Even Rousseau, whose celebration of the Spartan spirit was much cited in the 1790s, had little time for physical courage per se. While his Discours sur la vertu la plus nécessaire aux héros grudgingly conceded that ‘courage is something’, it concluded that ‘outside of combat valour is nothing. The brave man proves himself only on the day of battle; the true hero does so every day.’ ⁴⁵ This very downbeat assessment echoed across a public sphere that preferred its heroes to wield the pen rather than the sword, and for many in the republic of letters, physical courage paled in comparison to the encyclopaedic achievements of the philosophes themselves. It is a crude enough measure of any idea’s importance, but the four-line entry Diderot afforded ‘Bravery’ in the Encyclopédie’s 17 volumes of text is as good a guide as any as to how little the Enlightenment prized physical courage. ⁴⁶

If the Recueil owed little to the philosophes’ devaluation of courage in combat it was more obviously heir to two other currents in eighteenth-century opinion: the emerging cult of the nation and the campaign for military reform. In many respects the impetus for both of these developments came from France’s increasingly lacklustre performance on the battlefield. As Bien, Chagniot, and Blaufarb have argued, the disaster of the Seven Years War provoked an unprecedented degree of soul-searching within military circles and prompted some very creative thinking in the process. ⁴⁷ While much of this soul-searching revolved around the poorer nobility’s anxieties about advancement, it also produced an increasing willingness to contemplate the idea of a citizen army. Both de Saxe’s Rêveries of 1756 and de Guibert’s Essai générale de tactique of 1772 raised this as one possible solution to France’s military decline, but Joseph Servan’s Le soldat citoyen brought it centre stage in 1780. However, the creation of such an army inevitably raised the question of how to prepare a reluctant citizenry for military service, and Servan’s answer displayed a typically enlightened faith in patriotic education: ‘Let Henri IV, Sully, du Guesclin, Bayard, Turenne, Condé be [your pupils’] heroes, and in celebrating the immortal acts of these great men, they will come to desire to imitate them.’ ⁴⁸ Servan’s aim to mobilize the army of the future by enlisting the heroes of the past clearly anticipates the Recueil’s ambitions in important aspects, but as both Jean-Claude Bonnet and David Bell have demonstrated, this confidence in ‘the canon of great Frenchmen’ was already a commonplace by 1780. ⁴⁹

Eighteenth-century France’s ‘infatuation’ with the image of the ‘Great Man’ has been extensively analysed elsewhere. ⁵⁰ It inspired an explosion of academic éloges, patriotic art, and collective biographies of great Frenchmen, popular publications such as François-Henri Turpin’s La France illustre, ou Le Plutarque français or Antoine-François Sergent’s Portraits des grands hommes. ⁵¹ Like Servan’s plans for a patriotically motivated citizen army, this canon was designed to promote national pride in the face of apparent international decline, and in many ways the Recueil’s editors built on this well-established tradition of enlightened exemplarity. Indeed, in 1793, Grégoire’s Rapport openly took its cue from Thomas’s Essai sur les éloges of 1773. ⁵² However, if Revolutionary propaganda owed an obvious debt to enlightened pedagogy, it also departed from it in important ways, and these may explain why contemporaries shared Grégoire’s sense that the Recueil represented such a radical rupture with the past.

At its most obvious, the Recueil’s catalogue of wounds suffered and enemies eviscerated marked a real departure for an eighteenth century that had steadily turned its back on the celebration of bloodshed. Certainly, enlightened eulogists embraced generals such as Turenne and Catinat, but only to emphasize their less bellicose qualities, their genius in command or generosity in conquest, rather than their courage, let alone anything as uncivilized as their ability to annihilate the enemy. ⁵³ When the patriotic instincts of the enlightened elegists collided with the philosophes’ critique of war, the elegists responded by redefining ‘greatness’ in conspicuously civilian terms, and royal officialdom apparently concurred. In 1765 Louis XV’s chief artistic adviser, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, urged artists to shun ‘warlike actions’ in favour of more pacific themes, and his successor, the marquis d’Angiviller, lent this advice the full weight of royal patronage from 1775 on. ⁵⁴ Indeed, just as Servan seemed more inclined to describe his citizen-soldiers engaged in public works than on campaign, so the eulogists preferred to celebrate soldiers such as Jumonville as the incarnation of France’s civilizing mission and the victims of (generally English) violence rather than its perpetrators. ⁵⁵ The republic of letters could never celebrate conflict with the same ardour that the Recueil would later display, and, just as importantly, it rarely honoured the same kind of heroes. With occasional exceptions, the ancien régime canon of great Frenchmen was a socially exclusive one, populated principally by kings, princes, and aristocratic servants of the state. Admittedly, as Bell argues, the elect expanded to meet market demand in the 1780s, but if the addition of some savants leavened the social mix slightly, the Enlightenment pantheon remained an overwhelmingly elitist one. ⁵⁶

Revolutionary propaganda, by contrast, revelled in the obscurity of often unnamed exemplars and the everyday nature of their achievements on the battlefield. In so doing, works such as the Recueil democratized the concept of courage and uncovered true heroism, for the first time, in the lives of common soldiers and ordinary civilians. In extolling these men, women, and children as the real role models of Republican virtue, the Recueil radically redefined courage as a commonplace, an attribute that every citizen could, and should, aspire to. No longer the monopoly of an aristocratic officer class genetically predisposed to gallantry by generations of good breeding, courage was reshaped in these pages as the physical apotheosis of Revolutionary citizenship, the realization of Dubois-Crancé’s ambition that ‘every citizen should be a soldier and every soldier a citizen’. ⁵⁷ Through the very anonymity of these heroes and the sheer carnality of their suffering, heroism was stripped of its social exclusivity and reinvested with a physical presence in the Recueil. Like the wounds that manifested it, courage was transfigured as something tangible, comprehensible: at once an ideal that all citizens should aspire to emulate and a norm they should expect to attain.

II

For all its simplicity, the Recueil represented a radical attempt to redefine what courage could be. It was also, however, very short-lived. In August 1794 the draft of a sixth edition was approved in committee but it never appeared in print. ⁵⁸ We can only speculate as to why the Recueil suddenly ceased publication after Thermidor. Perhaps the Convention no longer felt quite the same need to galvanize the nation after the tide of the war turned at Fleurus. Perhaps, more cynically, the Recueil carried too many echoes of a Robespierriste past that most revolutionaries had already resolved to forget. It is impossible to say for certain because its end is, paradoxically, shrouded in silence. No final decision on its fate was ever made, and as late as November 1794 the armies were still submitting stories to a project they evidently assumed would restart after a brief hiatus. ⁵⁹ Without ever being officially abolished, the Recueil was simply abandoned by a Republic that no longer wanted to be reminded of the reign of virtue that had so recently defined it. It was an abrupt and rather unseemly end to an extraordinarily ambitious experiment in egalitarianism, but that very egalitarianism doomed the Recueil once the Terror ended. After Thermidor, as the Republic cast off the radicalism of the year II and embraced the reaction, the Recueil’s repertoire of courageous sans-culottes and heroic housewives simply seemed out of place.

In this sense Bourdon’s biographer, M.J. Sydenham, is right to claim that ‘the Recueil proved as ephemeral as the Republic of Virtue itself’. ⁶⁰ And yet, this verdict underestimates the Recueil’s legacy. It overlooks the fact that it remained required reading in the Republic’s schools, and it ignores the artists and authors who still looked to it for subject matter long after it had ceased publication. ⁶¹ Within the visual arts, the Recueil continued to inspire prints and paintings well into 1795, as ambitious artists such as Louis-Francois Lejeune, Jacques Sablet, and François Vincent turned to its pages for suitable subjects for the artistic concours launched in Floréal year II. ⁶² Vincent’s prize-winning entry is now lost and the images that have survived from this contest leave a lot to be desired as art, but that was hardly their point. As propaganda pieces, works like Sablet’s painting of the Savoyard blacksmith returning from battle, or the six entries that depicted the heroine of Saint-Milhier, embodied the confident sans-culottisme of the Recueil while simultaneously investing their heroes with all the gravitas of a Hercules or the dignity of a Cornelia (see Figures 2 and 3).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

J.L. Sablet, ‘Le maréchal ferrant de la Vendée’. Engraving by J.L. Copia (Paris, 1794). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Estampes, coll. Hennin, no. 12264.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

J.-F. Cazenave, ‘Trait de courage héroïque’. Engraving by Jean Thouvenin (Paris, 1794). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Estampes, coll. Hennin, no. 11858.

Painters and printmakers mined the Recueil for material long after the Terror had ended, and the same could be said for the stage where it continued to exert an influence well into the year III. Short propagandist pieces, often incorporating patriotic songs, were the lifeblood of the Revolutionary theatre, and the Recueil, with its extensive repertoire of larger-than-life heroes, pantomime villains, and stirring last words, proved a godsend to the Republic’s aspiring authors and impresarios. Bara and Viala were the most popular subjects for this profusion of patriotic pieces, but the Recueil furnished the dramatis personae for an immense variety of ‘historical dramas’, ‘patriotic tableaux’, and even ‘historical pantomimes’. ⁶³ At least three dramatists adapted the heroine of Saint-Milhier’s story for the stage, while Villeneuve’s dramatization of Liberté Barrau’s exploits was still running a year after its debut in early year III. ⁶⁴ Predictably, adapting a paragraph from the Recueil into a one-, two-, or even three-act piece frequently meant playing fast and loose with the available facts. In Briois’s La mort de jeune Barra, for example, the 13-year-old Bara has already acquired a fiancée, Aimée, whose virtuous example encourages the young hero to enlist. ⁶⁵ Even more imaginatively, Vée and Barral’s L’héroine de Mithier relocated the Recueil’s hammer-wielding Hercules from his Savoyard smithy to become their Vendéen heroine’s husband in an especially heavy-handed attempt to exemplify the ideal Revolutionary couple. ⁶⁶

Playwrights went to extraordinary lengths to adapt the Recueil’s heroes for the stage, but this transformation generally followed clear conventions. However crudely didactic these plays were, most authors were sufficiently sensitive to their audiences’ expectations to at least try to leaven their moralizing message with a little light relief. Comic interludes, energetic fight scenes, and elaborate special effects were all employed to thrill the audience with the sights and sounds of battle, and the curtain customarily closed with a patriotic chorus or triumphal march. ⁶⁷ Above all, these plays seized on the pathos of couples separated by the call of the patrie to engage the audience with a sentimental love story or the promise of a romantic reconciliation as the curtain fell. In many cases the potential conflict between patriotic duty and private sentiment provided what little dramatic tension these melodramas ever managed to muster. ⁶⁸ More importantly, these sentimental subplots underscored these plays’ political purpose, and for this reason female characters were centre stage in many of these productions. Despite their relative under-representation in the Recueil itself, women played a crucial part in many of these plays as a host of fictitious wives, mothers, and lovers were enlisted to ease the recruiting officer’s task with a stirring call to arms, the stoic acceptance of a loved one’s loss, or even the promise that ‘nothing is as pleasing in a beautiful girl’s eyes as a warrior’s courage’. ⁶⁹

If the latter sentiment seems like little more than a crude attempt to associate a military career with the prospect of sexual conquest, the part women played in this propaganda was, as a rule, much more dynamic than this. Belying the scholarly consensus that condemns the Jacobin Republic for having consigned women to a depoliticized, essentially passive existence in the private sphere, these prints and plays point instead towards a real willingness to probe the possibility that civic virtue and personal courage were qualities that transcended gender. ⁷⁰ At its most radical, printmakers and playwrights seized on the Recueil’s report of Liberté Barrau’s ‘prodigious valour’ on the battlefield to rethink the gender politics of the Republic of Virtue (see Figure 4). ⁷¹ Barrau’s example was, of course, an extraordinary one, and, as Dominique Godineau notes, fewer than fifty women are known to have served openly during this period. ⁷² And yet, as David Hopkin suggests, the female soldier had long been popular on the Parisian stage, and for that reason these plays resonated with the public. ⁷³ Villeneuve’s three-act Liberté-Barreau, ou Les héroines républicaines, for example, evidently interested theatregoers enough to be revived repeatedly throughout 1795, and the heroine of Saint-Milhier’s readiness to sacrifice herself and her children rather than yield to counter-revolutionary brigands proved even more popular. ⁷⁴ The subject of three plays and six paintings in the concours of the year II, she became, alongside Bara, the inspiration for the most widely reproduced images to emerge from the Recueil. ⁷⁵ In part her appeal lay in her success. Whereas Bara and the Revolution’s other martyrs had died gloriously, she prevailed over her foes, and by the Recueil’s grim standards her survival was, relatively speaking, a good-news story. However, if playwrights seized on her story to depict a happy ending, it was the stark simplicity of her choice between surrender and self-destruction that attracted most artists, a choice that captured the moral clarity of the ‘significant moment’ that eighteenth-century artists craved. Even if her actions remained confined within the domestic sphere, her determination in the face of death constituted an object lesson in the moral and physical courage true citizenship called for.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

L.F. Labrousse, ‘Leyrac et Barrau, son épouse, tous deux grenadiers’, J. Grasset Saint-Sauveur, Les fastes du peuple français … édition ornée de gravures d’après les dessins du citoyen Labrousse (Paris, 1796). Courtesy of Trinity College Library, Department of Early Printed Books.

This woman’s courage in confronting the counter-revolution in her own kitchen conveyed the unmistakable message that the claims of the patrie superseded personal considerations, and artists and authors brought this ideal before the widest possible public. Her popularity also exemplifies the tensions and contradictions at the heart of Jacobin thinking about gender. At the very point when the Jacobin Republic was purging the politicized woman from public life, these painters and playwrights brought her centre stage once more, not simply as the love interest of the departing volunteer or the grieving widow of the fallen soldier, but as a hero in her own right. Admittedly, some struggled to find the right words to describe these exemplary citoyennes, and authors and artists repeatedly referred to their heroines’ ‘courage and manly countenance’ without any trace of irony or impropriety. ⁷⁶ Indeed, the very incongruity of this idiom suggests the extent to which the radicalizing logic of the levée en masse drove Revolutionary discourse, and those who used it, in often unanticipated directions. Just weeks after the Convention applauded Amar’s claim that women could never match ‘the moral and physical strength’ required of real Republicans, its own propaganda acclaimed Liberté Barrau’s devotion to duty and insisted, just as emphatically, that the Revolution had engendered ‘heroes in France … of every sex and every age’. ⁷⁷

The representation of women in the Recueil exemplifies the ambiguity of Republican attitudes towards gender. More importantly, it also illustrates just how dramatically the experience of Revolutionary warfare had forced French men and women to redefine how they represented courage and who was capable of it. In this respect the contrast with recent conflicts is especially striking. A handful of writers and artists had celebrated women warriors during the American war. However, the criticism heaped on Le Barbier’s portrait of the fifteenth-century heroine Jeanne Hachette at the Salon of 1781 ensured that few painters risked returning to this theme after that. ⁷⁸ On the contrary, for most artists, and even the avant-garde such as Sergent and Jacques-Louis David, women’s place in the ancien régime iconography of courage was rarely an exemplary one. Certainly, Sergent’s Portraits des grands hommes did include a few ‘femmes illustres’ alongside the collection’s 84 ‘great men’, but this scattering of medieval queens and saints scarcely suggested any confidence that contemporary Frenchwomen could achieve true ‘greatness’, and David, the most influential painter of his generation, was even more dismissive. ⁷⁹ In his Oath of the Horatti and Brutus women were defined by their inability to comprehend, let alone share, their menfolk’s heroic sense of duty, and his profoundly gendered portrayal of courage was the norm. The tearful mothers, sisters, and fiancées who populate so many patriotic paintings in the wake of the American War (and Pierre-Alexandre Wille’s Le patriotisme français, ou Le départ of 1785 is typical of this genre) shared essentially the same vision. A decade later, the women represented in the Recueil and the art that it inspired were, by contrast, citizens in every sense. Like the virtuous veuve Bara, these women knew what it meant to be a citizen of the new Republic – ‘To set aside every particular interest, to forget oneself and identify one’s fate with that of the great family of the nation; that is virtue, that is patriotism, and only those who can do this are worthy of the name of Republican’ – and like Liberté Barrau or the heroine of Saint-Milhier, they were willing to die in its defence. ⁸⁰ For all their clumsy design and creaking dialogue, these works represent the logical conclusion of the radical reimagining of courage that the Recueil had commenced. Just as the Recueil had opened with the assertion that political integrity and personal courage were no longer the preserve of an aristocratic caste, so these prints and plays proclaimed that those same qualities, the very substance of Republican citizenship in effect, were no longer male prerogatives. ⁸¹

III

The problem, of course is that Revolutionary plays were rarely successful, and despite the odd commercial hit, few of the plays that took their cue from the Recueil were any exception. However, the Recueil’s influence on the visual arts proved much more enduring. A genuinely popular market for martial images thrived after the Terror, and collections of cheap military prints such as Grasset de Saint-Sauveur’s Les fastes du peuple français owed a very explicit debt to the Recueil, both in their overblown style and in their egalitarian choice of subjects (see Figure 5). ⁸² However, the egalitarianism of Saint-Sauveur’s anthology was rapidly overtaken by events. Throughout 1797 and 1798, the armies’ successes in Italy and the exoticism of the Egyptian campaign proved an irresistible attraction for artists, and increasingly these images came to focus on one man. And yet, even as artists extolled Napoleon as the nation’s saviour, the Recueil’s influence endured, and art historians such as Susan Siegfried and David O’Brien have argued that it left a lasting imprint on painting throughout the Napoleonic era. ⁸³

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

L.-F. Labrousse, ‘François Lavigne, âgé de 17 ans, volontaire du b.^on de la Somme’, J. Grasset Saint-Sauveur, Les fastes du peuple français … édition ornée de gravures d’après les dessins du citoyen Labrousse (Paris, 1796). Courtesy of Trinity College Library, Department of Early Printed Books.

After decades of stagnation, the battle scene having been widely derided since the 1760s, Napoleon’s coming to power prompted a remarkable renaissance in French battle-painting. ⁸⁴ The Salons of the early 1800s, critics later complained, looked like nothing so much as ‘armed camps’ and ‘troop reviews’. ⁸⁵ And yet, if a generation of artists flocked to the Napoleonic colours, they did not simply revert to the classical conventions of battle painting as established by Raphael or Lebrun in order to celebrate the first consul’s conquests. Rather, painters such as Louis-François Lejeune and Antoine-Jean Gros revolutionized the genre by incorporating echoes of the Recueil’s ethos into the painting of Napoleonic propaganda. In a succession of epic battle scenes from 1801 onwards, these artists injected new energy into a moribund genre by making the common soldier’s experience, his courage and his sacrifice, command the viewer’s attention alongside his general. Whether this took the form of the detail devoted to individual soldiers in Lejeune’s Battle of Marengo in 1801 or the even more radical displacement of the viewer’s gaze away from General Junot in Gros’s Battle of Nazareth that same year, these paintings stressed the common soldiers’ contribution to victory in a manner that would have been inconceivable under the ancien régime. ⁸⁶ Even Girodet’s extraordinary Ossian Receiving the Spirits of the French Heroes shared this vision. Its outlandish conflation of national history and Ossianic myth was widely criticized, but the presence of pipe-smoking cannoneers and teenage drummers alongside renowned generals such as Desaix exemplifies the ordinary soldier’s ubiquity in Napoleonic art. ⁸⁷ While the demands of the imperial personality cult became increasingly exacting after Eylau, even here the ordinary soldier was afforded a kind of dignity, if only in death. ⁸⁸

Even as the Empire atrophied, the ambition to paint common soldiers in heroic style is still evident in Géricault’s Charging Chasseur of 1812 or Vernet’s (immensely popular) portraits of returned grognards in the 1820s. No longer reduced to the lines of anonymous infantrymen receding into the distance that had characterized Parrocel’s canvases of Louis XIV’s campaigns and that still defined Lenfant’s Bataille de Fontenoy in 1761, the common soldier emerged from the shadow of his commander in these paintings and remained in the foreground of French battle-painting for the rest of the nineteenth century. Almost a century later, the Recueil’s celebration of Republican heroism still resonated across the school textbooks, paintings, and prints of the 1880s and 1890s. As the Third Republic readied its youth for la revanche, educators and artists such as Jean-Joseph Weerts resurrected the memory of Bara and Viala as worthy models for another generation of French schoolboys. ⁸⁹

Bara and Viala arguably achieved a greater renown in the République des Instituteurs than they ever had in the Republic of the year II. More immediately, however, it is hard to gauge what impact this kind of Republican propaganda had upon its intended audience, the ordinary Frenchmen of the 1790s. Were these relentlessly didactic tales of Republican heroism ever as inspirational as their authors intended, and were the examples they offered internalized in any meaningful sense by their readers? It is, of course, very difficult to say. Napoleon, for one, was sceptical of the Revolution’s influence upon his soldiers’ attitudes. When establishing the Légion d’Honneur in 1802, he insisted that ‘the French are not changed by ten years of revolution … They have but one sentiment: honour, it is therefore necessary to encourage this sentiment; they need distinctions.’ ⁹⁰ However, this was scarcely a disinterested verdict: the First Consul had his own agenda to pursue in 1802, and reintroducing the idea of distinction was part of a much wider political plan. Despite Napoleon’s somewhat self-interested opinion, it is still possible to see traces of this all-pervasive language of patriotic devotion and selfless courage in the personal testimonies of the soldiers who went to war in 1793.

Works such as the Recueil were designed to teach the French how to live like good Republicans and how to die in defence of the patrie. Their purpose was unapologetically propagandist and their methods were unashamedly crude. And yet there is reason to believe that their idealization of Republican valour also reflected a kind of reality on the battlefield. Writing from the northern front in October 1793, a doctor Febvrel recalled treating an officer of the 16th Chasseurs, adjutant major Cornet. As Cornet bled to death, he repeated the same sentence over and over again: ‘I don’t mind dying; I am content to have shed my blood for the salvation of the Republic.’ ⁹¹ By late 1793 these words were already familiar ones. That January, the Montagnard deputy, Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, had been murdered in retaliation for his regicide vote. According to official accounts, his last words were a stoic: ‘I am content to have shed my blood for the patrie.’ ⁹² Since then, those words had been repeated endlessly in the press and at funeral festivals throughout France and in the armies, and Cornet’s dying words echoed them uncannily. If Febvrel’s letter is to be believed, Cornet’s conduct when confronting his own death seems to have been shaped by the already well-established conventions as to how a good Republican should die. If the terms of Cornet’s courage seem somehow codified in this account, then the conclusion of Febvrel’s description of this soldier’s death is more significant still. As a military surgeon he was well used to seeing soldiers die, and he ended his letter with the causal comment, and it is little more than an aside, that ‘it is far from unusual to hear such sentiments on the battlefield’. ⁹³

It would be easy to dismiss Febvrel’s letter as an idealization, perhaps even an invention. However, that would be to ignore the soldiers’ letters and diaries that bear witness to very similar scenes, and record almost identical sentiments, among their comrades. Jacques Fricasse’s journal for 5 Prairial year II, for example, recounts the deaths of several soldiers he fought alongside near Mons. From the rhapsodic report of a wounded rifleman’s refusal to surrender that opens his account of the day’s fighting to the grenadier’s last words – ‘leave me, my friends, leave me to die: I am content; I have served my patrie’ – that end that day’s entry, Fricasse’s first-hand account of his comrades’ conduct under fire seems to bear Febvrel’s claim out. ⁹⁴ The same might be said for the soldier Pierre Cohin, overheard telling his comrades ‘Don’t lose heart, lads, Ça ira, Vive la Nation’ as he died at Valenciennes, or the infantryman Charles François, recalled boasting that he still had one arm ‘left to exterminate the enemy’ after losing a limb. ⁹⁵ Similarly, Pierre Girardon’s letters home describe the injured ‘forgetting their wounds and crying Vive la République’ on the battlefield, while Louis Bricard’s Journal recalls an artilleryman in his unit ordering his comrades to return to their posts rather than tend to his wounds in Germinal year II. ⁹⁶ His selfless ‘Go on, my friends, this is nothing’ after his leg had been all but torn off by cannon fire might easily have been drawn from the pages of the Recueil rather than an ordinary soldier’s experience, but that, in a sense, is the point. ⁹⁷ The details obviously differ between these personal testimonies and the official publications of the Republic’s vast propaganda machine, but the heroism these letters and diaries depict, the stoicism and self-sacrifice they describe, and, above all, the language, the very words and phrases they use, are essentially the same.

By a circular process of communication, Revolutionary war culture – and the Recueil represents the climax of that culture – took incidents like these from the everyday experience of the soldiers and relayed them back to the armies, and the public as a whole, in order to inspire emulation and reinforce morale. In its earliest form, in 1792 and early 1793, Revolutionary war culture had offered the troops heroic officers such as Beaurepaire and martyred deputies such as Lepeletier as exemplars of courage, but after the levée en masse that war culture was radically democratized. ⁹⁸ With the Cordeliers club claiming that ‘the virtue of the soldier always surpasses that of officers’ and the conventionnels insisting that ‘true genius is always sans-culotte’, publications such as the Recueil embodied this radically democratic ethos and amplified it for a mass audience. ⁹⁹ Setting aside the more elitist exemplars of the early war, Jacobin propaganda now looked to the everyday heroism of ordinary soldiers and celebrated their devotion to duty and their disregard for death. In this context, if the men described in these diaries chose to die fighting rather than surrender or perished, like Febvrel’s officer and Fricasse’s grenadier, with the patrie on their lips, then this was at least partly because this was how the radical war culture embodied in publications such as the Recueil had taught them to behave. This image of the unerringly valiant citizen-soldier was the cornerstone of patriotic propaganda in the year II, but beyond the myth-making the evidence of these eyewitness accounts of life on the battlefield suggests that many ordinary soldiers internalized this ideal and fought and even died according to its precepts. Admittedly, fervently politicized soldiers like these probably represented a minority within an army of almost a million men, and both Jean-Paul Bertaud and Alan Forrest sensibly caution against overestimating the enthusiasm of the ordinary conscript. ¹⁰⁰ And yet, for those who did describe what courage meant in their diaries and letters home, the formulaic, even clichéd, quality of the language they used suggests that this language was a learnt one, a product of the intensive cultural mobilization that these men had undergone in the Revolutionary public sphere.

The army of the levée was, in Bertaud’s words, a vast ‘école du jacobinisme’, an army politicized by the presence of willing volunteers alongside more reluctant recruits and radicalized by unrelenting propaganda from Paris. ¹⁰¹ After the Terror, with the armies at full strength and the Republic on the offensive, the need to muster an entire nation lost some of its urgency, and this campaign of cultural mobilization was progressively dismantled. The Directory did continue to celebrate its armies with spectacular state funerals and extravagant festivals, but these invariably exalted the Republic’s victorious generals, Hoche, Joubert, Desaix, rather than its ordinary troops. ¹⁰² The Recueil’s abrupt abandonment signalled this shift in the politicians’ priorities, but even after it ceased publication, its influence in the classroom continued. For those too young to serve in 1794, texts such as the Recueil remained required reading in schools long after the Terror, and from there the Republic’s patriotic propaganda left an imprint on the generation that came of age in the 1790s, the generation that went on to fight for Napoleon throughout the following decade. ¹⁰³

Jean-Baptiste Marbot’s recollections of growing up in the mid-1790s are a case in point. Marbot despised the politics of the Terror, but his memoirs nevertheless illustrate both the ubiquity of its propaganda and the influence it exerted on young minds. A schoolboy in the former Benedictine college of Sorèze from 1793 to 1799, he recalled classroom walls plastered with patriotic texts, the constant singing of ‘national hymns’, and the acting out of plays ‘inspired by the purest patriotism’. Marbot was educated in an environment saturated with the sights and sounds of martial propaganda, and, predictably, ‘the exploits of our armies formed the chief subject of conversation’ among his classmates. ¹⁰⁴ None of this impressed Marbot with any love for the egalitarianism of the year II, but this unrelenting patriotic propaganda did fire his imagination and, like many of his classmates, he volunteered at the age of 16. The Baron de Marbot’s memoirs are, of course, exceptional: in part because of their author’s standing but also because few other soldiers’ testimonies devote so much attention to their educational experiences, let alone mention the texts that may have influenced their decision to enlist. Some, like Jean-Roche Coignet, sent to work from infancy, had no schooling to speak of, and the political turmoil of the 1790s almost seems to have passed him by. ¹⁰⁵ And yet, in the absence of explicit references to the Recueil or the Republic’s other propaganda pieces, soldiers’ autobiographies and letters home do offer other, indirect evidence to suggest the influence that this type of propaganda exerted on how some soldiers conceived of courage and cowardice.

Marc Desboeufs’s reflections on the battle of Wagram are telling in this regard. Having just seen his unit almost wiped out and having narrowly escaped death himself, Corporal Desboeufs reflected on his apparent indifference to the prospect of death or injury on the battlefield. The former, he boasted, would be a respite after so many years’ campaigning, while the latter seemed a mere ‘bagatelle’. ¹⁰⁶ In part, Desboeufs had clearly been brutalized by almost a decade of continuous combat and the loss of all his close friends. By 1809 he no longer feared death and freely admitted that the sight of fallen comrades left him cold, though, paradoxically, the spectacle of a wounded horse still moved him to tears. ¹⁰⁷ And yet, his seeming insensitivity to death cannot explain the personal daring on display throughout his account and, even allowing for the inevitable bluster of the military memoir, Desboeufs was clearly a courageous soldier. Rather, his reflections closed on a more general note. In fighting courageously, he concluded, the soldier could rest content in the knowledge that he ‘had done his duty, served his country well and acquired the esteem of his comrades’. ¹⁰⁸ In this desire to win the respect of his brothers in arms, Desboeufs was like any seasoned campaigner in any early modern war. The camaraderie of camp life, the example expected of an NCO and the appeal of bragging rights in an exclusively masculine world were all critical components of this courage. However, in his anxiety to prove himself worthy of the patrie he was very much the product of the new politics of the 1790s as well. Desboeufs had been a teenager in Perpignan, an ‘assiduous spectator’ at the town’s Jacobin club, and an enthusiastic volunteer at the age of 18, and his sense of himself as both a citizen and a soldier had been forged in the Revolution’s most radical phase and by life in the army itself, an army still dominated by the men of 1793. ¹⁰⁹ These were the formative experiences that conditioned so much of his later willingness to brave death in the name of the patrie.

Politics can only go part of the way towards explaining as personal a choice as that between courage and cowardice, but the impression left by radical Republican politics can still be traced in the personal testimonies of French soldiers long after the Jacobins’ crusade to mobilize the nation had ceased. It can be heard in François Joliclerc’s insistence to his mother in 1795 that ‘I prefer my patrie to my family … and I must always be ready to sacrifice myself for it,’ and read in Charles François’s reverential account of Marceau’s dying words at Altenkirchen in 1796: ‘I am content since I die for the patrie.’ ¹¹⁰ Even as the army’s disenchantment with the Directory increased, this same willingness to defy death in the name of the patrie remained embedded in many soldiers’ view of the war and their part in it. Despite his disdain for the Directory’s ‘grands diseurs de rien’ and notwithstanding repeated injury, Dominique Dupuy remained firmly committed to this Republican ideal, and though he complained constantly about conditions in the ranks, Sergeant Fricasse still held, as he returned to the front after injury in 1798, that he was working towards ‘the salvation of all France’. ¹¹¹ The same certainty can also be seen in Gilbert Favier’s admission, after a near fatal encounter in 1799, that he would gladly leave the army ‘if it were not for my love of the Republic’. ¹¹² John Lynn may be right to say that ‘after 1794, Revolutionary Virtue gave way to Napoleonic Honour as the official, and to a significant degree, real basis of martial motivation’, but for these soldiers much of the old patriotic fervour evidently remained. ¹¹³ As these troops tried to come to terms with a war that would not end or struggled to make sense of the hardships they endured, the language of patriotism and self-sacrifice, the language that they had first learnt in 1793–4, still inspired them.

Foreign observers sensed this too. For Frederick Laukhard, who had personal experience of both the Prussian and French forces, it was this cultural mobilization that distinguished the two armies above all else. Imbued with an ‘ardent love of the patrie’, the French, Laukhard claimed, ‘knew what they were fighting for’, and this conviction inspired an ‘exaltation’ and a personal courage rarely seen among the allied troops. ¹¹⁴ There is clearly an element of idealization here, but if Laukhard romanticized the Republic’s troops, Carl von Clausewitz did not, and his recollection of campaigning as a young cadet shares something of Laukhard’s insight, if not his naive admiration. Clausewitz’s memory of ‘the colossal weight of the whole French people, unhinged by political fanaticism … crashing down on us’ left a lasting impression on many Prussian officers and did much to inspire the reforms that later made victory in the Wars of Liberation imaginable. ¹¹⁵ As Karen Hagemann has argued, the Prussian military reform movement that emerged out of the ashes of Jena and Auerstädt ‘adopted forms of political propaganda and action as well as symbols and rituals developed during the French Revolution’ in order to galvanize German resistance against France. ¹¹⁶ Certainly, this propaganda was predicated on celebrating the uniquely manly virtues of the ‘German Kulturnation’ against the godless perfidy of the French foe. And yet, despite these very pronounced differences in accent, works such as Arndt’s Kurzer Katechismus für teutsche Soldaten or Jahn’s popular anthology of patriotic verse, the Deutsche Wehrlieder für das Königlich-Preussische Frei-Corps, employed many of the techniques and echoed many of the themes that had first been used in Republican France. With massive print runs – Arndt’s Kurzer Katechismus ran to 80,000 copies – and a relentless stress on the virtue of self-sacrifice for the fatherland, these publications aimed to arm Prussia’s new conscripts both ‘mentally and morally’ in the same way that the Recueil had preached patriotism to the French two decades before. ¹¹⁷ Where discipline and drill had once seemed the essential attributes of the Prussian soldier, von Clausewitz’s realization that ‘courage above all things is the first quality of the warrior’ found its propagandist echo in poems such as the Lützow volunteer’s stirring call ‘to German youth’ in 1813: ‘Come on, come on, to victory or death! Young men heed the fatherland’s distress!’ ¹¹⁸ Just as the levée en masse inspired the Recueil and its attendant art, so the Prussian Erhebung fuelled a very similar outpouring of propagandist publications, patriotic paintings, and rituals. ¹¹⁹

By 1813 the vast campaign of cultural mobilization that had begun in France in 1793 had been internationalized. In the process the creation of new mass armies to fight a new kind of war had revolutionized the representation of courage. In choosing to celebrate the sacrifice of the common soldier rather than extolling the honour of the aristocratic officer, works such as the Recueil democratized the meaning of courage in every sense. In making heroism appear almost unexceptional it remade courage as a commonplace, an attribute that was at once accessible to everyone and an ideal that could inspire a mass audience. Obviously the reality of Revolutionary soldiering was a far more complex matter than this kind of propaganda ever admitted, and the responses this refashioning of courage provoked were equally varied. For every ordinary soldier like Joliclerc or Fricasse or Desboeufs who appears to have internalized the ideals embodied in works such as the Recueil, there were many more whose time in the army was defined by fear, fatigue, homesickness, and frequently desertion. ¹²⁰ And yet, for those who did volunteer or even for those who merely acquiesced in the Revolution’s successive levées, the cultural campaigns of the mid-1790s informed how many in the generation that fought under Marbot or alongside François and Desboeufs conceived of courage and cowardice. It furnished the ideals they believed they were fighting for and the examples they aspired to emulate. It also, perhaps more importantly, equipped many of these soldiers with the very language they used to make sense of their own experiences in combat. However ephemeral the Recueil and the art that it inspired might appear, it contributed to the creation, in sum, of a model for what constituted conduct becoming of a soldier and a citizen in the new France.