Days of glory? : imaging military recruitment and the French Revolution

Author(s)
    • Mainz, Valérie
Bibliographic Information

Days of glory? : imaging military recruitment and the French Revolution

Valerie Mainz

(War, culture and society, 1750-1850)

Palgrave Macmillan, c2016

  • : [hardback]

Search this Book/Journal
Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 267-286) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

This book examines a range of visual images of military recruitment to explore changing notions of glory, or of gloire, during the French Revolution. It raises questions about how this event re-orientated notions of 'citizenship' and of service to 'la Patrie'. The opening lines of the Marseillaise are grandly declamatory: Allons enfants de la Patrie/le jour de gloire est arrive! or, in English: Arise, children of the Homeland/The day of glory has arrived! What do these words mean in their later eighteenth-century French context? What was gloire and how was it changed by the revolutionary process? This military song, later adopted as the national anthem, represents a deceptively unifying moment of collective engagement in the making of the modern French nation. Valerie Mainz questions this through a close study of visual imagery dealing with the issue of military recruitment. From neoclassical painting to popular prints, such images typically dealt with the shift from civilian to soldier, focusing on how men, and not women, were called to serve the Homeland.

Table of Contents

List of figures.- Preface-. 1. Introduction.- 2. Signing up before the Revolution.- 3. Transforming gloire and military sign up.- 4. Recruitment and Revolution before Thermidor.- 5. Fighting Women.- 6. Fame's two trumpets.- 7. Conclusion.- Notes.- Works Cites.- Index.

by "Nielsen BookData"

Related Books: 1-1 of 1
Details
Page Top