'We have focused so intensely on issues of history and memory arising out of the world wars of the twentieth century that we have tended to lose sight of the huge transnational impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. This superb, stimulating and vivid collection of essays offers a welcome invitation to reconsider a major factor in the making of western modernity.' - Colin Jones, Queen Mary University of London, UK
What forged nation-states was not so much war as the cultural memory of war. Since nationalism was primarily a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon, the Napoleonic Wars played a vital part in shaping national cultures of remembrance and public history. This carefully-composed volume offers new and convincing perspectives on these processes and provides an impressive and truly European overview of the question. - Horst Carl, University of Giessen, Germany
The field of remembrance studies is now very crowded, but this book stands out as a wide- ranging compendium and showcase for the inventive, challenging work being done in this field for the Revolutionary-Napoleonic period. The editors have brought together a collection of uniformly fine essays, from some of the best scholars working in this genre, many of them young and emerging. This marks an important step in the ever burgeoning renaissance of Napoleonic studies. Yet another new, conceptual front has been opened here. - Michael Broers, Oxford University, UK
This fine addition to a splendid book series opens important new perspectives on the ways the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon have been remembered and commemorated in European culture. Ranging across genres from memoirs to novels to the visual arts and material culture, the essays collected here add significantly to our understanding of the wars' impact, and form a fascinating counterpart to the literature on war memories and culture in the twentieth century. - David A. Bell, Princeton University, USA
Drawing on a fascinating battery of concepts that originate in anthropology and sociology as well as in history, the editors have assembled a team of well-respected historians whose work emphasises the many links between experience and memory, the public and the private, history and fiction, violence and pacification, and between male values and a specifically feminine sensibility that helps to redefine gender difference. - Pierre Serna, Universite Paris 1 - Pantheon Sorbonne, France
This is a collection of original, first-class chapters that brings fresh and interesting insights to the French wars and their aftermaths with a depth of knowledge that easily cuts across regions and periods. It is a must for scholars of the Napoleonic era as well as cultural historians of Europe. - European History Quarterly