Travel Writing and Encounters with National ‘Others’ in the Napoleonic Wars

Abstract

AbstractStudies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars have generally focused upon the military dimension or the political consequences of the conflict. Although recent scholarship has broadened to consider the cultural aspects of the wars, the travel experiences of those that fought have been neglected. Histories concerned with state‐building or languages of patriotism and nationality generally focus on elite groups, while the concentration of military history upon the battlefield has occluded other aspects of the soldierly experience. On the other hand, historians of travel writing have ignored the extent to which many war narratives were also travelogues. But Napoleonic soldiers’ letters, diaries and memoirs are full of ethnographic observations on the foreign peoples and cultures they encountered while campaigning. The role of eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century travel literature in shaping images of the foreign ‘other’ and hierarchies of civilisations has been recognised. However, much of this existing work concentrates on famous travel writers. It is only relatively recently that soldiers’ accounts from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars have been approached as a form of travel writing and one that did much to shape understanding of Europe. Indeed, soldiers appropriated the travelogue style to construct their own accounts.