A Military History Without the History of Battles

Abstract

The emergence of military-historical anthropology as an independent trend in historiography has changed the traditional image of war. In place of the history of strategic operation plans, battles, marshals and generals, and casualty counts, came the story of the everyday life of soldiers, front-line life, and the emotions of the civilians and servicemen embroiled in the conflict. The “human dimension” of the war has become a topical subject, as evidenced by the publications of Russian and international researchers on the history of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars over the last two decades. An example of this is a book by Alan Forrest, Professor Emeritus at the University of York, Napoleon's Men: The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire, recently published in Russian. This work, like an Art Nouveau gallery in its day, is a peculiar collection of examples of new approaches and problem formulations in the field of military history. The Revolutionary and Imperial Wars are viewed as the first experience of “total war” in modern history, affecting all sections of society and serving as a catalyst for processes of national self-identification. This approach allows one to answer a number of questions which are new to military history: how perceptions of manhood, civic duty, and patriotism were formed, what role women played in these processes, what was the “war culture” in relation to prisoners of war, how attitudes to recruitment changed, what the fate of veterans was after the war, etc. As the analysis of contemporary historiography demonstrates, the turn from purely positivist approaches to constructivism, from the history of battles to presentations of personal life experiences, is accompanied by a desire to link the study of the past with the study of the collective memory of that past.