Thomas Hippler

Conscription in the French Restoration: The 1818 Debate on Military Service

The article analyses the parliamentary debate in the French Chambers of Deputies and of Peers on the Gouvion-Saint-Cyr law. Conscription having been abolished by the restoration, its re-establishment confronted the monarchy with ideological trouble, and the law gave rise to one of the most remarkable debates in French parliamentary history, because virtually all modern political ideologies - conservatism, liberalism, constitutional monarchism, republicanism - confronted each other in theoretically very elaborated speeches. The debate is thus both a summary of the revolutionary experience and a look towards the nineteenth century.

Images of Peace

CYNICS HAVE ARGUED THAT IF TOLSTOY WERE TO PUBLISH HIS NOVEL War and Peace today, he would probably have chosen “Peace-Restoring and Peace-Keeping Missions” as a title. The notion of war is increasingly banned from the official political vocabulary, andwe aremore andmore using expressions such as “restoring peace” when talking about the use of armed force in conflict. To put it even more clearly, we are using the word “peace” when meaning “war” (Hippler and Vec 2014). It would be an error, however, to presume that this inversion ofmeaning is just amatter of intellectual dishonesty. There is good reason to believe, on the contrary, that this semantic confusion has to be understood as being part of a particular conceptualization ofwhat “peace” actually is. This paperwill address some evolutions in the conceptual history of peace, admittedly in a fragmentary form. In a first step, I will point out some features ofmedieval peace concepts, before turning, in a second step, to earlymoderndevelopments of “internal” and “external peace.” The last section will address Enlightenment concepts of peace, including

Volunteers of the French Revolutionary wars : myths and reinterpretations

In 1822, Goethe published an autobiographical account of the Campaign in France in 1792, which he had eye-witnessed from the camp of the coalition troops waging war against revolutionary France.1 Even if it was written 30 years after the events,2 Goethe’s narrative nevertheless gives an excellent insight into the construction of the volunteer of the French Revolution as a mythical figure.3 The French military was, in fact, the subject of many publications during the time of the revolutionary wars, and Goethe’s account can be said to correspond with general interpretative tendencies among those writers who were moderately favourable to the revolutionary achievements.4 The Prussian defeat in Valmy on 20 September was commented on by Goethe with the famous dictum “here and now a new era of world history has begun.” The success of the French had proven the inefficiency and the anachronism of both the military and the political system of the Ancien Regime. But how did Goethe and his contemporaries view the volunteers of the French Revolution? The vision was actually quite contradictory. The volunteers embodied indiscipline, and thus the brute animalistic force of the rabble, since soldiers were identified with disciplined behaviour.5 However, a heroic sense of honour was also recognized in their behaviour6 as the consequence of their “political enthusiasm”.7 It was exactly the ambiguous combination of these two characteristics — heroic enthusiasm and indiscipline — that was considered to constitute their particular power.