Dead Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808–1914

Abstract

Dead Men Telling Tales is a clever and ironic title for a book that examines how Napoleonic-era veterans (those who survived the war) wrote memoirs that strove to be legitimate histories and not just personal tales. Matilda Greig has assembled an impressive corpus of up to three hundred autobiographical texts from the Peninsular War (1808–14), in which Spanish guerrillas successfully repelled French invaders with the aid of British forces, dealing a decisive blow to Napoleon’s imperial ambitions. Her sources include French and British memoirs as well as lesser-known Spanish ones and a smattering of Portuguese works published throughout the nineteenth century. These provide an original and comparative angle on a familiar topic. By also integrating archival research on the publication of these books, Grieg is able to address broader questions about war memoirs as a genre and war veterans as their enterprising authors.Like others before her, Greig notes the unprecedented outpouring of autobiographical writings among veterans of the Napoleonic wars; unlike others, she is less interested in their reasons for writing than in the outcome, and in particular the material conditions in which war memoires were produced. Her central argument is that, for the first time, the experience of war was commodified and successfully sold to a large audience. This, she suggests, made war memoirs into a genre and turned soldiers into legitimate authors. To support these claims, Greig turns to book history and what she nicely calls “the secret lives of books”—all that had to happen behind the scenes for these texts to find their publishers and a growing readership. For sell they would, as publishers soon came to understand, enticing veterans to write and to take an active role in the production and marketing of their memoirs. What some disparagingly dubbed a bout of “scribblomania” developed, over the course of the century, into a vast repertoire of autobiographical writings with solid print runs, changing formats, new and enriched editions, imitations and parodies, and more or less successful spin-offs in travel and history writing (among other genres). The lives of these books lasted well beyond their authors’ deaths, implicating widows and descendants interested in keeping memories and royalties flowing. Whether these developments actually amount to the forging of a literary genre—and, moreover, one that “made a deep impression on nineteenth-century culture, memory, and literature, shaping the way multiple generations of readers imagined war” (3)—is something that this particular book cannot fully answer. To do so would have required more analysis of reader reception and, especially, of the formal qualities of these and subsequent writings. Greig is quite justified in not wanting to examine these sources purely for their factual content (as soldiers’ writings often are); but in failing to look closely at the texts themselves she glosses over significant differences between, for instance, letters, diaries, and memoirs drafted at various moments during and after the facts. If a genre’s form has a content, so does its content have a form.Dead Men Telling Tales is most convincing when studying Spanish war memoirs alongside better-known French and British ones. This is a significant contribution to the literature on Napoleonic-era memory. Greig shows how these autobiographical manifiestos developed a style of their own, influenced by petition-like juridical models handed down from the eighteenth century but equally polemical and argumentative in their postwar intent. Most were written in the immediate aftermath of the conflict and had to navigate a rapidly evolving political landscape and censorship laws. Little wonder, therefore, that Spanish veterans—whether aristocrats or guerrilleros—sought to frame the historical events they had taken part in, if necessary engaging in historiographical debates with accredited historians and official institutions. Here we see most clearly how veterans became true authors and not just war witnesses. Greig’s comparative analysis is often tentative, but the transnational approach does yield some important findings, not least a common willingness among veterans to document, for the first time, war’s more gruesome aspects and confront their participation in scenes such as those depicted in Goya’s celebrated Disasters of War. Some memoirs—French and British ones especially—circulated across borders, often in unofficial translations and publications that proliferated freely before the advent of international copyright legislation. Paradoxically, this circulation tended to solidify nationalist frames and different ways of interpreting, even naming the conflict: Peninsular War, Guerre d’Espagne, Guerra de la Independencia. Each had its particular narratives and stereotypes: lazy or savage Spaniards, evil French, perfidious Brits, a heroic “people’s war.” Greig reminds us that if the Napoleonic wars gave birth to what George Mosse famously called the “myth of the war experience,” this myth came in various shapes, sizes, and fonts. Specialists on this pivotal moment in the history of total and asymmetric warfare, and on veterans’ writings in general, will find Greig’s analysis of these texts very stimulating.