Alan Forrest
Remembering the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in France and Britain
France and Britain were almost continuously at war between 1793 and 1815. But if their experience of war was shared, their memories were very different. France emerged territorially diminished, and many looked back on the Revolution and Empire as a glorious age when they had inspired reforms and brought justice to peoples across Europe. They saw Napoleon as a liberator, a man of the people who had risen through talent and led France to honor and glory, and his memory quickly became part of the country’s national mythology. In spite of all the repressive efforts of the Restoration monarchy, the myth of the Savior would survive, together with the republican legend of the invincibility of the nation-in-arms, into the early twentieth century. In Britain, of course, Napoleon was widely reviled, though the romantic spirit of the age ensured that his remarkable career still dazzled many in the next generation. For Britain the war had brought not just victory at sea—and a true national hero in Nelson—but that rarest of achievements, victory on land, first in the Peninsula, then, most incisively, at Waterloo. British official memory focused on this battle and on its victor, the Duke of Wellington. It tapped patriotic sentiment, yet it never quite succeeded in turning the rather aloof figure of Wellington into a popular hero. This paper compares the different memory constructions in France and Britain after 1815.
Alan Forrest is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of York, UK. He has published widely on French Revolutionary and Napoleonic history, on military experience in the Napoleonic armies, and more generally on the history and memory of war. His books include Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire (1989); The Revolution in Provincial France: Aquitaine, 1789–1799 (1996); Napoleon’s Men: The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire (2002); Paris, the Provinces and the French Revolution (2004);The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory (2009); and Napoleon: Life, Legacy and Image(2011). He is also co-author, with Jean-Paul Bertaud and Annie Jourdan, of Napoléon, le monde et les Anglais: Guerre des mots et des images(2004); and has co-edited several works on the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, most recently, with Etienne François and Karen Hagemann, War Memories: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Modern European Culture (2012). He is currently working on the decline of the French Atlantic in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and is preparing, with Matthias Middell, an edited collection on the French Revolution in World History.
