Veteran Culture and the Military memoirs of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Reseracher: Dr Philip Dwyer

Australian Research Council - Discovery Project - $91,098

Project Summary
This study looks at one of the principal ways in which veterans of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars publicly remembered and celebrated those wars. It does so by analysing how war memoirs shaped contemporary perceptions and understanding of the wars, and established a place in the French political landscape. War memoirs have not been the subject of a study of this kind before. Expected outcomes include a significant conceptual advance in the understanding of European cultural, social, and political history. The project will result in the organisation of an international symposium, refereed articles in international journals, and the publication of a scholarly monograph.

National and Community Benefit
This project contributes to an understanding not only of veteran culture in early nineteenth-century France and Europe, but also of the ways in which veterans across western cultures assimilate, process and reconstruct memories of war. This necessarily will lead to a better understanding of role story-telling in the construction of national histories. In addition to offering new insights that will inform scholarship and teaching in the field history, it will also redress a significant gap in the international literature. The findings of this study thus assist in establishing Australian historical scholarship at the forefront of international research initiatives in memory, auto-biography and memoir writing.

Progress on the Grant
The ARC funding was used to buy out teaching loads in semester I, 2008, of this year as a result of which I was able to spend two months in Paris in the French national library (the Bibliothèque nationale) and the French national archives, collecting enough material to enable me to draft and then write three articles that have been submitted to refereed journals, all touching on war memoirs and veteran culture in early nineteenth-century France. Research is progressing according to plan.

Outcomes

• Submitted for consideration in 2008:
  • ‘Private Reminiscing, Public Remembering: Military Memoirs and Veteran Culture during the Restoration and the July Monarchy’, submitted to the Journal of Modern History (A*).
  •  ‘Military Memoirs and the Experience of War during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Eras’, submitted to French Historical Studies (A*), and
  •  ‘It Still Makes me Shudder’: Memories of Massacres and Atrocities during the Napoleonic Wars’, submitted to War in History (A).
• Seminar Papers
  • The Frankreich Zentrum at the Freie Universtität, Berlin,
  • The School of History, University of Canterbury, Christchurch