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chapter 9 Neo-Napoleonic Friendship Maupassant, Zola, and the War of 1870 Deep in the woods, wrapped in his comrade’s arms, the soldier kissed his corporal. Newly escaped from a German prison camp, these euphoric French soldiers hold one another and exchange a passionate embrace. Fleeing for their lives but thrilled to be free, they are overwhelmed with emotion. After months of shared su√ering, both in combat and captivity, this brawny corporal and his beloved soldier cling to one another, in a gesture of gratitude and mutual a√ection. In the aftermath of France’s greatest military defeat since Waterloo, Jean and Maurice have become an inseparable pair, sharing their meager rations, caring for one another’s wounds, and warming each other’s frozen bodies. When they kiss in the woods in the fall of 1870, these neoNapoleonic soldiers take military friendship to a new level of homoerotic intimacy . Locked in an ardent embrace, they represent both the legacy and new possibility of Napoleonic friendship in late nineteenth-century France. The invasion was swift and merciless. Less than seven weeks after the declaration of war, the German armies had crossed the Rhine, occupied AlsaceLorraine , and overwhelmed the French in a crushing and decisive defeat. In September 1870, at the small town of Sedan on the edge of the Ardennes forest, Napoleon III personally led his army and empire to defeat before surrendering himself to General Helmuth von Moltke and Wilhelm I of Prussia. Despite the fall of Napoleon III’s Second Empire, the French armies of the new Third Republic continued to fight the German invasion, as cities from Strasbourg to Metz capitulated to enemy occupation in the face of superior German artillery. Two weeks after Sedan, the Germans lay siege to Paris—starving its imprisoned citizens for over four months and thus forcing them to eat rats and animals from the Paris zoo—before taking the city in January 1871. By the time the German armies finally marched on Paris, under the Arc de Triomphe, and down the Champs-Élysées, half a million soldiers and citizens lay dead in the fields and forests of eastern France, a million and a half French civilians now found themselves on annexed German territory in Alsace-Lorraine, and more than one hundred thousand French soldiers had been captured by the enemy.∞ The War of 1870 is a forgotten war. Eclipsed in French military history by the Napoleonic and First World Wars, the events of 1870 have become a minor subject for history exams, rural museums, and inconspicuous monuments.≤ For 230 restoration to second empire late nineteenth-century France, however, the War of 1870 marked the fall of Napoleon III and the Second Empire, the rise of the Commune and the Third Republic, and the origins of a new century of military hostility leading to the First World War. Known alternately as the Franco-German or Franco-Prussian War, the War of 1870 pitted France against the armies of several German states under the leadership of Prussia, whose victory led to the declaration of a unified German Empire with the Prussian King Wilhelm I as Emperor and his Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck as Chancellor. In addition to altering the balance of power in Europe, the War of 1870 bears the sad reputation as one of the first modern military conflicts, supported by major innovations in industrial technology including the train and telegraph, as well as deadly new developments in mechanized warfare such as the machine gun, the Krupp cannon, and other long-range artillery. The Franco-Prussian War also inspired an extraordinary amount of literary production, including Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘‘Sleeper in the Valley’’ (1870), Victor Hugo’s The Terrible Year (1872), Alphonse Daudet’s Monday Tales (1873), Guy de Maupassant’s ‘‘Boule de suif’’ (1880), and Émile Zola’s war novel The Debacle (1892). As the penultimate novel of Zola’s twenty-volume RougonMacquart : A Natural and Social History of a Family during the Second Empire (1871–93), The Debacle dramatizes the War of 1870 and the Commune of 1871 as the inevitable decline and symbolic purification of a diseased and degenerate France. Building on the military fiction of Stendhal, Hugo, and Balzac, Zola recounts the epic French defeat through the intimate friendship of two soldiers, Jean Macquart and Maurice Levasseur. As the war’s mechanized modernity gives way to unprecedented violence, Jean and Maurice protect one another and grow in intimacy. Recalling the bedfellows, buddies...

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