Napoleon's Men: The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire (review)

The surviving letters of soldiers from the revolutionary-Napoleonic era are precious artifacts but difficult to use by virtue of their essentially random character. Alan Forrest is extremely well versed in the period's military and civil experience, having given us an important study of draft evasion and desertion (1988) and a deft interpretive synthesis entitled Soldiers of the French Revolution (1990). Having long gathered such letters he has now harvested them in a balanced and sensitive book about the general experience and outlook of revolutionary and imperial soldiers from 1791 to 1814, although it has relatively little to say about actual combat and "the fog of war."

"Napoleon's Men" is a decidedly misleading title since the account incorporates a good deal specific to the revolutionary mobilizations, from the volunteers of 1791-92 to the levée en masse, as well as the protracted slogging of Napoleonic conscripts. Thus Forrest evokes "the voice of patriotism" in many of these letters, but suggests that it dimmed over time, replaced to some extent by a more professional outlook, including the hope for promotion. Eventually a respect for and loyalty to Napoleon did indeed surface in many of these letters. One way or another, a persistent motif, then, was a sense of pride or honor in what one was doing, miserable as it might be, which no doubt helped reassure anxious families back home.

Forrest rightly emphasizes that these surviving letters represent one side of a conversation with the soldier's family (the other side being implicit or explicitly referenced in the son's letters). In the main, they underscore the importance of family ties to young men wrenched out of their familiar surroundings and subject to great geographic displacements, countless privations, and chronic dangers. Forrest suggests how on the one hand soldiers serving far from home and for long, open-ended terms constituted a society or sub-culture separate and apart, but on the other remained mentally embedded in their own family, village, and pays. With great skill he makes palpable how much it meant to these soldiers both to communicate with their families and in turn to receive news and encouragement from home (including in some cases desperately needed funds to settle debts), despite the maddening vagaries of the postal system. At the fascinating extreme is correspondence to and fro over whether or not a son should desert.

The stuff of these letters is daily life in the army. There are few surprises, but many evocative illustrations. The positive side of the experience is amply evident: adventure, exposure to new places, womanizing, food and drink in the presence of one's comrades, the bravura of a victorious campaign, the intense male bonding of the small group. The dominant motif, however, is privation: desperate shortages of food from time to time, the unrelenting cold, the taxing tedium of constant drilling, the brutality and even horror of occupying territory in places like Italy or Spain, the overwhelming boredom during the long hiatus between campaigns, and the calamity of falling ill and entering a hospital. But the truly unwelcome guest lurking around these battalions was nostalgie or home-sickness, at its extreme a debilitating condition that worried many commanders and took an unknown toll on military effectiveness. The letters to and from home were, in a sense, the best available treatment for this pitiful malady.