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Introduction
- University of New Hampshire Press
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introduction Napoleon Wept Napoleon wept. On the eve of the battle of Wagram, during his Austrian Campaign in the spring of 1809, the Emperor received word that his longtime friend Marshal Jean Lannes had been gravely wounded on the battle- field at Essling. Following the gruesome amputation of his shattered left leg, Lannes had been evacuated to a safe position on Lobau, an island in the middle of the Danube river, six kilometers east of Vienna. Rushing to his side amid the carnage of a rudimentary field hospital, Napoleon embraced his friend of sixteen years as Lannes lay in agony. An eyewitness report by General Marcellin de Marbot, the marshal’s chief-of-sta√, explains how ‘‘The Emperor, kneeling at the foot of the stretcher, cried while embracing the marshal, whose blood soon stained his white cashmere coat.’’∞ Despite his rough military exterior and almost twenty years of battle experience, Napoleon was overcome by emotion at the sight of Lannes. In an e√ort to comfort his bleeding friend, he embraced Lannes and covered him with tears. Ten days later, after a week of excruciating pain, infection, and gangrene, Lannes died. Once more, Napoleon rushed to his friend’s side where, despite the overwhelming odor of putrefaction caused by Lannes’s gangrenous wounds, Napoleon ‘‘moved towards the marshal’s body, which he kissed while bathing it in tears, saying several times, ‘What a loss for France and for me!’ ’’≤ Napoleon’s public grief at the death of Jean Lannes represented a new model for social relations between soldiers in early nineteenth-century France. Weeping over his friend’s broken body, Napoleon demonstrated how the Revolution and Empire had made it possible not only for an emperor to grieve openly for a fallen marshal, but for a soldier to love his comrade. This uncharacteristic expression of a√ection between Napoleon and Lannes was echoed in similar relationships between o≈cers and foot soldiers in Napoleon’s armies. Military memoirs of the First Empire bear witness to a wide range of intimate relationships among generals, colonels, and captains as well as sergeants, corporals, and grunts (grognards), the infantry soldiers who made up the majority of the imperial armies. Napoleon’s love for Lannes might thus be said to represent a broad spectrum of masculine a√ection and intimacy in the ranks of the Grande Armée, or what could be called Napoleonic friendship. 2 Introduction In the larger scope of French military history, the friendship between Napoleon and Lannes reflected both the past and the future. Recalling the classical model of the Iliad, the chivalric model of the Song of Roland, and the fraternal model of the Revolution, their friendship set the tone for new kinds of social relations between soldiers during the Empire and in post-1815 France. At the beginning of a century overwhelmed by military conflict—from the Napoleonic Wars (1796–1815), to the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), and the decades preceding the First World War (1914–18)—Napoleon and Lannes provided an abiding model of military friendship. By the end of the nineteenth century, when universal conscription required every able-bodied Frenchman to be a soldier, this early model of Napoleonic friendship would persist on a more uniform level. As France prepared itself for another century of brutal warfare, the Napoleonic origins of modern military friendship may have been forgotten, but their e√ects remained embedded in the institutionalized notion that to serve one’s country was to live and die in the care of other men. Combat Companions and Warrior Lovers from Antiquity to Medieval France Antiquity’s earliest oral tales, epic poems, and literary texts celebrate the central role of combat companions and warrior lovers. This ancient tradition stretches back to Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 bc), David and Jonathan in the biblical Book of Samuel (c. 625 bc), Achilles and Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad (c. 800–750 bc), Nisus and Euryalus in Virgil’s Aeneid (19 bc), and the historical Sacred Band of Thebes (378–338 bc) inspired by Plato’s Symposium (c. 385 bc) and later described in Plutarch’s Life of Pelopidas (c. 75 ad).≥ In the Symposium, Plato proposes his idea for an ‘‘army consisting of lovers,’’ in which men would fight with greater courage since it is ‘‘only lovers who are willing to die for someone else.’’∂ Plato’s proposal represents an early homoerotic theory of e√ective combat: ‘‘The last...