Review of A. Forrest's "Beyond the Edge of the Battlefield. The life of the military during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars"

Galyamina Anna Georgievna Postgraduate of Department of World Economy, International Relations and law, Novosibirsk State University of Economics and Management, 630099, Russia, Novosibirsk region, Novosibirsk, Kamenskaya str., 56 galiamina.anna@yandex.ru

Modern humanitarian knowledge pays close attention to the individual experience of a person who, as a rule, previously remained aloof from the interests of researchers, which is why traditional historical writing, focused on iconic figures and key events, could say little about the everyday life and way of thinking of an ordinary person of his time. This is also true of the history of the war with the first anti-French coalition and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars, which lasted a quarter of a century, affected the life of an entire generation and served as the basis for the creation of national legends in the future. Although battles are one of the main subjects of interest for the traditional historiography of the Napoleonic era, they make up only a small part of the military experience of their direct participants, which makes it completely logical to take an interest in the life of the military "beyond the edge of the battlefield".  An attempt to recreate it was a book by the British researcher, Honorary professor of York University, Alan Forrest, summarizing the results of the author's long-term study of the life experience of war participants and its comprehension by historical memory.

A. Forrest's book was published in the series "The World of the French Revolution", published by ROSSPAN Publishing House, which now publishes works on various aspects of the history and historiography of the Great French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. These are mainly the works of representatives of the so-called New Russian School ^[1], to which Forrest is ideologically close ^[2]. From 2018 to 2021, he even directed the Laboratory of Western European and Mediterranean Historical Studies at the State Academic University of Humanities, working in direct contact with representatives of the National Research School - therefore, Forrest's works are familiar to the Russian-speaking reader. This is one of the most actively published foreign authors in the "French Yearbook" (https://annuaire-fr.igh.ru/authors/36 ?locale =ru), but in the format of a separate book, his works are published in Russia for the first time. Especially for this purpose, the author collected, translated and edited articles previously published by him in English and French.

According to the content, the book conditionally splits into two parts. The first part, large in volume and main, is devoted to the daily life of the Republican and Napoleonic army. Here the author seeks to trace the typical fate of a soldier from the moment of entering the service to his demobilization after the final defeat at Waterloo. There is a long quarter of a century between participation in the draw during recruitment and the life of a veteran during Restoration. For a soldier of the revolution, and later a Napoleonic soldier, these years included correspondence with relatives, a clash with the policy of terror in the army, participation in foreign campaigns and a clash with local residents, possibly captivity. A. Forrest pays sufficient attention to each of the above-mentioned plots in a separate chapter.  Collected under a single cover, they recreate the image of an ordinary man of his era and the evolution of his worldview. Conscripted into military service most often from the rural French hinterland, he may not have initially imagined the scale of the historical event in which he was involved. It is the army, according to Forrest, that for the first time introduces the apolitical peasant to the revolutionary agenda and becomes a political school for him. Conscription means a break with the familiar rural world, which seems to both the recruit and his relatives to be final - the recruit is escorted away forever, without waiting for his return. The only possible connection is epistolary, as a result of which it is in the army that many former peasants understand the value of literacy and strive to learn to read and write. The brevity and ritualization of soldiers' letters noted by the author, their low informative value for the researcher, are a consequence of the lack of literacy of the writers, the growing alienation between soldiers and their relatives who stayed at home, as well as the consequence of military trauma, which caused the inability to talk about their real feelings and personal military experience. At the same time, Forrest emphasizes that for veterans who returned home, the Napoleonic Wars, nevertheless, remained the most vivid life period when they were directly involved in a significant historical event - and were aware of this involvement.

It is interesting to analyze the personal attitude of soldiers to what is happening in the case of their participation in military terror. The author draws attention to the dehumanization of the participants of the irregular military units of the enemy as a result of their use of "wrong", unconventional, excessively cruel means of warfare that neuroticized French soldiers, which as a result led to the use of cruel means by the French towards the dehumanized enemy. In the Jacobin period, this was observed in the Vendee, under Napoleon - in Italy and Spain.

The last three chapters, which make up the conditional second part of the book and tell about the formation of the image of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in historical memory, stand somewhat apart. Forrest analyzes the creation of the Napoleonic legend based on the image of the "glorious defeat" as a result of the campaign in Russia and in the Battle of Waterloo. In addition, the issue of the formation of the French republican identity during the Third Republic is considered in detail on the basis of the cultivation of the official republican myth and equating the Napoleonic soldier with the soldier of the Revolution and the formation of a positive role model from them in a society traumatized by the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

It should be noted that the author pays more attention to the Napoleonic wars. On the one hand, this is logical, since they were significantly longer than the revolutionary war with the first anti-French coalition and, accordingly, had a greater impact on the life experience and personality of their participants and on the formation of a national legend. On the other hand, the realities of the Napoleonic era by default can be extrapolated by the reader to the previous period, which is not always true. Nevertheless, the author often fixes the difference between the realities of the war with the first coalition from the subsequent time and establishes the Thermidorian coup as a fundamental boundary.  Thus, Forrest writes about a decrease in revolutionary propaganda in the army, a change in the ideological goals of the war, moreover, about a decrease in social support for veterans and invalids of wars in the post-Termidorian period. Nevertheless, he does not focus on the moment of transition, the transformation of the Republican revolutionary army into the Napoleonic imperial army and the change in the nature of the war. In addition, it should be noted that the author often contrasts the Jacobin and Napoleonic periods with each other. The Directory also falls into the Napoleonic era. As for the Jacobin period, it is not always clear whether the author also includes the time from the declaration of war on April 20, 1792 and before the uprising on May 31 - June 2, 1793, or whether it simply falls out of consideration. Perhaps a separate analysis of these two periods would allow us to highlight new interesting details about the evolution of the nature of the war and the worldview of its participants.

It is worth noting that A. Forrest, as a representative of the historiographical tradition that does not consider itself the heiress of the Great French Revolution ^[3-4], is extremely skeptical of the French revolutionary myth, which he calls "the empty Republican rhetoric of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries." The revolution in his image, as well as in the image of his Moscow colleagues, is the result of the activities of representatives of the "enlightened elite" far from the bulk of the French ^[5], activities incomprehensible and alien to the ordinary Frenchman. As a result, he pays considerable attention in his work to the discrepancy between official statements and what was observed in reality. For example, considering the reasons that prompted young people to enlist in military service, the author, in contrast to the officially proclaimed revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses, focuses on the opposition of the peasantry to recruitment, caused both by the economic value of future recruits for the peasant economy and by a lack of understanding of the meaning and goals of the war in regions far from it. In the case of volunteers, he pays primary attention to personal motives that are far from a sincere desire to fight for revolutionary values, such as family troubles, lack of prospects for further life in the countryside, romantic ideas about military service as an opportunity to put on a beautiful uniform and escape from rural routine. Without denying the importance of all the motives indicated by the author, especially in departments far from Paris, it should still be noted that he does not seem to be fundamentally interested in whether there really existed at least in the Jacobin months a conscious volunteer who went to defend revolutionary values. But how true is Forrest's thesis about apolitical peasants in principle? In his classic work translated into French and published twice in France ^[6], A.V. Ado provides data on the armed actions of the peasantry from 1789 to 1794, and the scale of the work did not allow Ado to include counter-revolutionary peasant uprisings in consideration. Although, in general, the history of political and social conflicts in the countryside is not the most popular problem of the historiography of the Revolution today, nevertheless, there are later studies that supplement the overall picture of the Ado with specific data on individual regions ^[7]. The peasants both opposed the measures of the revolutionary government and radicalized the decisions and actions of the capital's revolutionaries with their armed demonstrations. Therefore, the image of a politically naive rural recruit drawn by the author seems somewhat simplified.

The author asks the question of whether the type of soldier-citizen whose existence was postulated by official propaganda has been formed in the chapter "Citizenship, honor and masculinity: qualities of the military during the revolution and empire", devoted to the characteristics of the type of soldier created by the Revolution. He does not agree with those researchers who believe that he existed in reality, noting in confirmation of his point of view that despite the desire prescribed to a citizen soldier to serve not for the sake of awards and personal honors, but for the public good of the Republic, even under the Jacobin dictatorship there was a practice of military triumphs for distinguished officers and promotion for distinguished soldiers. Nevertheless, A. Forrest avoids answering the question posed at the beginning of this chapter, considering for the most part the masculinity of the formed image of a soldier and, by contrast, the presence of women in the active army and their participation in the war, which can serve as an indirect confirmation of the desire to defend the Republic. He also notes a decrease in the number of volunteers after the Thermidorian coup compared to the Jacobin months. Forrest speaks of a decrease in the politicization of soldiers' letters during the same period, but he cannot answer to what extent the politicization of the Jacobin period was a repetition of official rhetoric and a manifestation of loyalty to the authorities, and to what extent it was an expression of sincere Republican feelings. Thus, the actual existence of a soldier-citizen in the conditions of the II year of the Republic does not seem so impossible, as the author writes. It also remains an unanswered question to what extent the citizen soldier and the spirit of the army played a role in the formation of the Republican army and its victories, which is questioned by Forrest as a myth formed by the Third Republic.

The accessible language and entertaining presentation, as well as the subject of the study - the personal life experience of the participants of the historical event - makes the book interesting not only for a specialist historian, but also for a wide range of readers.