Western attitudes toward soldiers’ death: from the early modern period to the present

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article provides a reconstruction of how western attitudes towards soldiers’ deaths have changed throughout history. By relying on the analytic lenses offered by Kantorowicz’ concept of ‘the king’s two bodies’, the narrative told in the present study develops through three main stages from the end of the fifteenth century until the present era. In particular, an age in which soldiers’ death was accepted as a socially meaningless cessation was followed by a period when death in war was regarded as a glorious sacrifice to end up with the sensitivity towards casualties typical of the current era. I shall refer to these epochal shifts as a transition from bare death to sacrificial death and, finally, to irrecoverable death. By offering a narrative of how the soldier has evolved from an expendable fighting tool into a precious individual, the article sheds light on some of the distinguishing traits of contemporary warfare.