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Jennifer Heuer, professor of history, is the author of the new book “The Soldier’s Reward: Love and War in the Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon,” which will be published by Princeton University Press on Dec. 3. A launch party celebrating the book’s publication is planned for Wednesday, Dec. 4 at 6:15 p.m. at Amherst Books.
“The Soldier’s Reward” is a sweeping history that examines French soldiers’ relationships to family and domestic life during the period of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Heuer reveals how prolonged warfare transformed family and gender dynamics and gave rise to new kinds of citizenship.
Combining social, cultural, gender and military history, the book describes how men fought for years with only fleeting moments of peace. Combatants were promised promotion, financial gain and patriotic glory. They were also rewarded for their service by being allowed to return home to waiting families and love interests, and with marriages that were arranged and financially supported by the state.
Heuer explores competing ideas of masculinity in France, as well as the experiences of the men and women who participated in such marriages. She argues that we cannot fully understand the changing nature of war and peace in this period without considering the important roles played by family, gender and romantic entanglements.
Casting new light on a turbulent era of mass mobilization and seemingly endless conflict, “The Soldier’s Reward” shows how, from the Revolution through the Restoration, war, intimacy and citizenship intersected in France in new and unexpected ways.
“In this groundbreaking study, Jennifer Ngaire Heuer reassesses the importance of war, gender and citizenship in the portrayal of soldiering during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars,” historian Alan Forrest, of the University of York, says in praise of the book. “Drawing on an impressive range of pamphlets, plays, and prints, she shows how the images of military masculinity and civic virtue so prevalent in the 1790s were gradually replaced by portrayals of a world without war, playing to the soldiers’ hopes for the future, their dreams of female company, marriage and family life.”
Heuer previously authored the book “The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830,” and co-edited “Life in Revolutionary France.”
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