Joseph Clarke

Encountering the Sacred: British and French Soldiers in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Mediterranean

Clarke explores the attitudes British and French soldiers expressed when they came face to face with unfamiliar religious cultures around the Mediterranean world. Focusing on their encounters with Islam in Egypt and the Catholicism they confronted in Italy in the 1790s and Spain during the Peninsular War, this chapter examines how these soldiers drew on a range of preconceptions and personal experiences to make sense of the religious diversity they experienced abroad and how that diversity in turn influenced their conduct during these campaigns. It also examines how these soldiers used the idea of religious difference to define and refine what they understood modernity to be.

Introduction: Peripheral Visions—Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century

Clarke and Horne introduce the range of military expeditions and campaigns that embarked to the edges of Europe and beyond over the long nineteenth century between the Revolutionary wars and the First World War. These expeditions were unprecedented in scale and brought increasing numbers of Western European soldiers into contact with unfamiliar societies and alien cultures around the Mediterranean, in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe. By focusing on the experiences of ordinary soldiers, and the representations and memories they generated, this chapter surveys the creation of new images of Europe and its ‘others’ during this period and explores the diffusion of new discourses of civilization and colonial authority across Western Europe during the long nineteenth century.

‘Valour Knows Neither Age Nor Sex’: The Recueil des Actions Héroïques and the Representation of Courage in Revolutionary France

The outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars prompted the production of wartime propaganda on an unprecedented scale. In France state-sponsored publications such as the mass-produced Recueil des Actions Héroïques et Civiques des Républicains Français reached an exceptionally wide audience throughout the Terror and inspired a variety of patriotic prints, plays, and paintings in the years that followed publication. This article argues that works such as this radically redefined the representation of courage in combat and left a lasting legacy on the representation of warfare well into the nineteenth century.