Citizenship, Mass Mobilization, and Masculinity in a Transatlantic Perspective, 1770s–1870s

Abstract

Abstract The chapter explores the interrelationship between the emergence of new ways of mass mobilization with volunteers, militias, and universal conscription; the rise of notions of gender as a universal, natural binary opposition; and the rise of men as universal male political subjects in the periods of the wars of revolution and wars of nation-building and nation-keeping from the 1770s to the 1870s. One important theme is the nexus between male military duties and citizenship rights. This nexus was introduced in the French Revolution and later used and transformed in several other contexts. Where it was rejected, it nevertheless made its presence felt in what became a conscious refusal of the French model of the modern citizen-soldier. Always controversial and never fully implemented, even in contexts where it was supposedly fully endorsed, the model of universal conscription loomed large in the background of all nineteenth-century debates over military reform and political citizenship.