Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Suffering, Reconciliation and Values in the Seventeenth Century
- Part II The State, Soldiers and Civilians
- Part III Who is a Civilian? Who is a Soldier?
- 10 Conflicted Identities: Soldiers, Civilians and the Representation of War
- 11 ‘Turning Out for Twenty-Days Amusement’: The Militia in Georgian Satirical Prints
- 12 Insurgents and Counter-Insurgents between Military and Civil Society from the 1790s to 1815
- Part IV Contradictions of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Conflicted Identities: Soldiers, Civilians and the Representation of War
from Part III - Who is a Civilian? Who is a Soldier?
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Suffering, Reconciliation and Values in the Seventeenth Century
- Part II The State, Soldiers and Civilians
- Part III Who is a Civilian? Who is a Soldier?
- 10 Conflicted Identities: Soldiers, Civilians and the Representation of War
- 11 ‘Turning Out for Twenty-Days Amusement’: The Militia in Georgian Satirical Prints
- 12 Insurgents and Counter-Insurgents between Military and Civil Society from the 1790s to 1815
- Part IV Contradictions of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
JOSEPH WRIGHT'S The Dead Soldier (frontispiece) highlights the issues addressed by the chapters in this section. First exhibited at the Royal Academy in May 1789, a few weeks before the dramatic inception of the French Revolution, Wright's painting depicts the corpse of a British soldier, his grieving widow and their newly orphaned child. Most likely a recollection of the recent war against the American colonies, the legal, political and social distinctions between civilians and combatants are blurred in this image. As the circle of suffering extends beyond the immediate scene of devastation, the message of the painting appears insistent to the point of banality: it is one thing for a soldier to lay down his life in defence of his country, but what of the effects of war on ordinary men, women and children?
The question prompts some further reflections on the relations between war, critical debate and the nature of citizenship. Writing in 1767 in An Essay on the History of Civil Society, the social philosopher Adam Ferguson announced that ‘he who has not learned to resign his personal freedom in the field [with] the same magnanimity with which he maintains it in the political deliberations of his country, has yet to learn the most important lesson of civil society, and is only fit to occupy a place in a rude, or in a corrupted state’. Not only the soldier but the citizen too must learn to renounce his personal liberty so that the nation, considered as a whole, may be free. Some years later, Immanuel Kant argues along related lines that only one who is ‘enlightened […] and at the same time has at hand a large, well-disciplined army as a guarantee of public peace […] can say what a republic cannot dare: argue as much as you want and about whatever you want, only obey! ’, the point being that freedom of expression, or enlightenment, is dependent on the recognition of necessity. Thus, as Kant goes on to argue,
it would be very destructive, if an officer on duty should argue aloud about the suitability or the utility of a command given to him by his superior; he must obey. But he cannot fairly be forbidden as a scholar to make remarks on failings in the military service and to lay them before the public for judgement.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Civilians and War in Europe 1618–1815 , pp. 147 - 156Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012