Warfare and the Changing Relations Between French Soldiers and Civilians, 1600-1789

FAIN: FT-248792-16

Julia Osman
Mississippi State University (Mississippi State, MS 39762-5227)

A book-length project on warfare and the changing relationship between French soldiers and civilians, 1600 to 1789.

My book project, “Disciplining War and the Civilian Imagination in France, 1600-1789” traces the relationship between soldiers and civilians over this two-hundred-year period in order to prove that attempts to distance civilians from war only makes them more susceptible to it in the long run. I will argue that war and military violence went from an everyday reality for people in the seventeenth century, to something experienced only in the imaginations of those living in the eighteenth century, when soldiers were isolated from the rest of the populace. The “imagined reality” of war, experienced through reading juicy, sensationalized, literature, may have paved the way towards mass citizen armies and “total wars” by the French Revolution of 1789. My project speaks to the NEH initiative ‘Standing Together: Humanities and the Experience of War’ and uses the humanities to help better understand the fluctuations and complications of soldiers’ relationships with the people they fight for.