Fear and Loathing in Early Modern France: The History of Emotions in French Soldiers

The History of Emotions in French soldiers Historians have long assumed that we would never know how an early modern soldier thinks or feels, as soldiers seemed to have left few sources in the archive. Based on soldiers’ reputation for cruelty to civilians and brutality in warfare, historians have imagined soldiers to be rough, fearsome men, who may have joined the army in the first place because they were outcasts from their families and communities. Letters discovered recently at the British National Archives, however, present a different picture. Not only did soldiers write letters—in their own hand or with the help of a scribe—but in them, they poured out their hearts to family and friends whom they missed tremendously while on campaign. These letters, which date from the 1770s and 1780s, showcase a whole range of emotions: guilt, longing, sadness, and most of all, love. Many soldiers addressed letters to their “very dear mother”, or their father, sisters, cousins, uncles, and friends, whom they wished to see again. Those who had been ostracized from their communities, in fact, tended to be the higher-born soldiers who now repented their “libertine” actions and longed for forgiveness. In this paper, I will use methodologies of the “history of emotions” to examine soldiers’ feelings as well as their relationships with their fellow soldiers and the families they left behind. In addition to using the letters now at the British National Archives that come from the later eighteenth century, (1778-1783), I will examine emotions found in soldier-authored published pamphlets over a century earlier, during the Fronde civil war. In their “verses burlesques”, soldiers found a perfect genre for expressing their fear at the inevitability of combat and their loathing for the violence they visited against civilians.