Heroism and the Nation during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the Age of Military Reform in Europe

Abstract

According to a common understanding, European wars in the period from the French Revolution to the mid-twentieth century were national wars. One nation attacked another and war was fought for the sake of the nation. Things seem to have completely changed today: not only has coalition warfare become the rule and wars of one nation against another much less frequent, it even appears that ‘nation-building’ — for instance in a country like Afghanistan — became part of a ‘peace building’ strategy. Thus the reference to the nation has completely changed its meaning: from a motivation for war, and even for total war, to a ground on which peace is to be built. In order to understand this apparent paradox, it is necessary to enquire what historical actors were actually talking about when invoking the nation as a motivation for fighting, for heroism and for self-sacrifice. Many scholars of the nation and of nationalism have underlined that it is quite difficult to define the nation. However, a basic understanding today seems to involve a definition of the nation as people sharing a territory, a common language and culture, as well as some community of ethnic descent. It is immediately clear that processes of globalization and of migration have effectively challenged this meaning today. However, it is the contention of this chapter that the nation was right from the onset an unstable ground for a motivation to fight and that the concept carried multiple and partly contradictory meanings that have always been incompatible with the above-outlined understanding of the nation and of nationalism.