Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture 1766-1870

Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture 1766-1870. By David M. Hopkin. Woodbridge and Rochester, N.Y.: The Boydell Press and The Royal Historical Society, 2003. 393 pp. 45.00 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 0-86193-258-7

The relationship between armies and society has become a rich area of scholarship in recent years. The French army of the ancien regime and of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods has been particularly well studied and we now know a great deal about how Frenchmen were recruited, how they functioned in peacetime as well as in battle and--thanks in particular to the work of Alan Forrest--what they thought about their leaders and their service to the state. David Hopkin's publication is a welcome addition to this body of scholarship, although, as he clearly states in his introduction, he is less concerned with the army per se and more with peasant perceptions of the army and peasant attitudes towards soldiers. The study focuses on Lorraine, Alsace, Champagne and Franche-Comte, and covers the period from the reunion of Lorraine to France in 1766 to the end of the reign of Napoleon III, when part of this area was incorporated into the German empire.

The book addresses five major issues: the image of the soldier in popular prints and woodblocks; oral literature relating to soldiers (and the soldier as a storyteller); the ceremonies surrounding the selection of recruits by lot; the popular perception of the soldier, both native and foreign; attitudes towards the veteran or returning soldier. Hopkin's analysis throughout is based on impressive unpublished sources including pictorial images, songs, folktales, stories and archival records. The result is an important insight into the mentalite of rural society and the way that it dealt with the most invasive activity of the French state, namely conscription and the presence of soldiers within the community.

The book covers both the representation and perception of the soldier--in prints, popular engravings and woodblocks, and in stories and songs--but also the reality of the soldier within the community--be he pedlar, storyteller, or returning veteran. The ambivalence of the community towards the soldier is well illustrated in this account. Soldiers could be depicted as the brave heroes in prints, songs, and tales, but the reality was that soldiers could also be the villains who stole from the peasants and tricked or raped their daughters. The most significant effect on the peasant household, however, was the loss of a son to the army, albeit not necessarily forever. This must explain the elaborate ceremonies that surrounded the conscription lottery (or tirage au sort). Hopkin describes these rites in great detail, and in the process gives an insight into village entertainments, courtship customs, rituals of passage into manhood, and magical practices, which the young men hoped might spare them the dreaded "ticket" for conscription. This study also vividly illustrates peasant attitudes towards the "outsider," whether this be the returning soldier, the neighbouring villagers or true outsiders--Cossack troops billeted in the countryside after the Napoleonic wars. There are some further aspects of the impact of soldiers on the countryside that could have been tackled, in particular the issue of deserters and the fate of soldiers' wives, widows and dependants, but this is a thorough and scholarly analysis of peasant perceptions that greatly enriches our understanding of rural customs and rural attitudes.

It may seem churlish to criticise a book based on such impressive scholarship for what it fails to do, but the reader should be aware that Hopkin is concerned mainly with peasant mentalites and not with the impact of major political change on the country. There are a few tantalising references to the French Revolution and Napoleon--some comment on the censorship of popular prints, the depiction of Napoleon I in popular woodcuts, a shift in emphasis in the late eighteenth century to represent the returning soldier as someone who had served the "nation" with "honour'--but no attempt to chronicle the impact on popular culture and peasant attitudes of these the most traumatic events of the period under review. It is not without significance that there is no index entry for the French Revolution. This neglect of what most historians would regard as a central issue is a pity because it would be fascinating to learn from a local study of this nature whether the Revolutionary ceremonies that accompanied the dispatch of soldiers to fight for "liberty, equality, fraternity" or "the nation," so well described by Jean-Paul Bertaud in his study of the Revolutionary army, were in fact adaptations of local rites and to what extent therefore they were perceived to be "alien" or new by the peasants. The importance of local flags, for example, which Hopkin notes for the conscription ceremonies may explain why the tricolour featured so prominently in conscription ceremonies in the Revolutionary period. Nor does Hopkin attempt to make distinctions between popular perception of French soldiers serving the ancien regime, the Revolutionary state, Napoleon I, the restored Bourbons, or Napoleon III. It may be that the impact of the Revolution and the Napoleonic era on popular perception was less significant in practice than the authorities of all these regimes believed, but if that is the case then Hopkin should say so and speculate on the reasons for this. In fact, it seems to me that his material on ceremonies, excellent though it is, is drawn entirely from the period of the empire of Napoleon III, and it may be that the type of source materials which he is drawing upon are better suited to an analysis of mid-nineteenth-century France than to a whole century that the book attempts to cover.