Abstract
AbstractThis article focuses on images of the wounded Napoleon in order to draw some broader conclusions about the sacrificial underpinnings of the French empire. The article considers how graphic representations of the wounded Napoleon Bonaparte helped to negotiate the complex relations between acknowledgements of corporeal vulnerability, ideas of military masculinity and assertions of national unanimity. Particular attention is paid to Pierre Gautherot's painting Napoléon blessé au pied devant Ratisbonne (1810) and to an anonymous graphic satire, Nicolas Philoctète dans l'îsle d'Elbe (1814‐15).
Highlights
I If, in one sense, sacrifice may be determined as ‘the destruction [...] of something valued [...] for the sake of something having [...] a higher or a more pressing claim’, 1 we should not be surprised when, in times of war, a rhetoric of sacrifice should emerge to legitimize the forfeiting of individual liberty, the renunciation of domestic comfort and the yielding of one’s own body for the greater good of the nation
For instance, at the ceremony of the Distribution of the Eagles on 5 December 1804, the Emperor Napoleon invited his army ‘to swear to sacrifice [their] lives’ in defence of his ‘throne’ and his ‘people’, and later, at the time of his first abdication in April 1814, attempted to convince himself and the world at large of his great ‘personal sacrifice’ in acceding to the ‘interest of France’, he demonstrated a keen awareness of the resonant force of self-denial.[2]
Personal loss and national interest are, euphemisms for the innumerable ways in which bodies can be put to work in the service of the state; yet, as Elaine Scarry has indicated, there is a wealth of difference between a call for sacrifice that assumes the brute facticity of death and wounding by means of sword, club, cannon, bullet, or flame, and one which serves merely to dignify a renunciation of power
Summary
I If, in one sense, sacrifice may be determined as ‘the destruction [...] of something valued [...] for the sake of something having [...] a higher or a more pressing claim’, 1 we should not be surprised when, in times of war, a rhetoric of sacrifice should emerge to legitimize the forfeiting of individual liberty, the renunciation of domestic comfort and the yielding of one’s own body for the greater good of the nation.
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