War for sale : Peninsular War veterans' memoirs in the long nineteenth Century (1808-1914)

Abstract

This is a study of the development of war writing in the nineteenth century, showing how the authorial impulses of veterans from the Napoleonic Wars interacted with a booming publishing industry across Europe to forge a new relationship between ex-soldiers, the book market, and the cultural representation of war. Focussing on the hundreds of military memoirs written by British, French, and Spanish veterans of the Peninsular War (1808-1814), I propose a new methodology for the study of these sources, departing from the current state of literature with a deliberate emphasis on their public, political, and commercial aspects. Beginning with the political aims of the old soldiers who wrote these books, I examine their attempts to re-write history, reform the army, and defend themselves from controversy. Using evidence from the archives of publishing houses, I reveal the immense and frenzied editing, printing, and marketing activity which was concealed behind the facade of a simple soldier’s tale, challenging us to start thinking about soldiers as professional authors, aiming to influence the broader writing of the story of war. I then explore the afterlives of these war memoirs, following the books once they outlived their authors. In the hands of later editors, family members, and commercially-minded publishers, many memoirs changed dramatically, selling an updated idea of the experience of war. I also consider the widespread phenomenon of reprinting and translation, which carried soldiers’ tales far beyond their home countries and into new languages, appropriating them into the memory-making processes of other nations. Throughout, the comparison with Spain acts as a counterweight to the more heavily-studied France and Britain, allowing me to challenge prevailing ideas about the origins and format of military autobiography in Europe, as well as to explore the development of still-persistent divisions between the different ‘national’ narratives of the same war.