Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture, 1766-1870 (review)

David M. Hopkin's Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture, 1766-1870, not only offers a penetrating reinterpretation of popular attitudes toward military service, but also a model for a cultural history of military practice. Examining peasant views of military service from the aftermath of France's humiliation in the Seven Years' War until the even greater disaster of the Franco-Prussian War, Soldier and Peasant says little about the army itself. Hopkin's focus is on what people thought about the military and this allows him to pose new questions. As he puts it, "I am less concerned with the army's ability to fill its ranks than with what the peasant thought about his son becoming a soldier" (p. 1).

The question of popular attitudes toward soldiering is especially important in the field of French history because it has implications for the debate over the integration of peasants into the national community. Hopkin's contribution is provocative. Arguing that the opposition between "peasant" and "French" rests on an older distinction between "peasant" and "soldier" (p. 14), Hopkin lends support to historians such as David A. Bell who are seeking the origins of French nationalism in the early modern period. By focusing on peasant understandings of the army, Hopkin has not only positioned himself to intervene in this debate, but also provided a demonstration of what military history (of a culturally informed kind) can contribute to "mainstream" historiography.

Although his principal sources are images, Hopkin avoids the pitfall of sloppy impressionism. He begins his book with a sophisticated treatment of the production and distribution of the images he analyzes. His opening chapter, "Images of the Soldier," treats these questions in depth; indeed, this is a chapter of great value to scholars of popular culture. This chapter—indeed, the entire book—illustrates how the methodology of cultural history can be applied to military studies.

Hopkin's contextualized analysis of popular imagery advances many surprising findings. Representations of soldiers were highly ambiguous; neither hero nor marauder, the imagined soldier incorporated self-contradictory features that simultaneously attracted and repelled. Rootless and marginal, yet enjoying a freedom unknown in the tight-knit village community, the soldier elicited both fear and admiration. This ambiguity remained fairly constant throughout the period under examination. Other insights—for example, about how state-sponsored rituals of conscription gradually replaced older rites of passage—make Peasant and Soldier an important book for students of the French peasantry.

This excellent book is not flawless. It suffers from a limitation common to most works of cultural history. While carefully tracking change in attitudes, it does not explain why these changes happened. For example, we learn that military service, originally seen as a bar to marriage, was gradually refigured as an experience essential to acquiring manhood and becoming marriageable (pp. 192-214). Why did this reversal occur? We learn that criminal inclinations once attributed to soldiers indistinctly became associated with foreign soldiers alone (p. 246). How did this telling shift happen? Questions of causality remain unanswered and even unasked. This is not a fault specific to Hopkin's exemplary work, but a feature of most works of cultural history, a drawback seemingly inherent in that approach.