H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-30
Christine Haynes. Our Friends the Enemies. The Occupation of France after Napoleon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780674972315 (hardcover, $39.95/£31.95/€36.00).
Contents
Introduction by Katherine B. Aaslestad, West Virginia University
The bicentennial of the Congress of Vienna in 2015 generated an occasion for conferences, scholarly reappraisals, and popular histories to re-examine the lasting settlement that was designed to solve territorial questions and ensure international stability following nearly two decades of highly destructive warfare.
[1] The expansion of the French Empire under Napoleon, including his system of satellite states across Europe, annihilated the Holy Roman Empire and a host of former states. Indeed, the vast human, economic, and social cost of these wars required the attention of all European leaders following Napoleon's abdication in 1814 and decisive defeat in 1815. Christine Haynes challenges the general historiographical narratives that situate the definitive end of the wars in 1815 and that argue that collaborative diplomacy among the great powers alone prevented a comparable conflict for another century. In her new book,
Our Friends the Enemies: The Occupation of France after Napoleon, Haynes argues first that the Napoleonic Wars did not end as neatly as is often presented, and second that Allied leaders in Paris, French administrators, and Allied occupying forces worked together to build stability and reconciliation on the local level during the Allied occupation of France between 1814 and 1818. Her study shifts the scholarly focus from crucial debates and discussions in Vienna to the day-to-day negations in occupied France. Haynes asserts that in order to ensure security in France, the Allies envisioned the multinational occupation as a peacekeeping force, an occupation of guarantee. Through her examination of the experiences and dynamics of the post-war occupation, Haynes seeks to add another layer to our understanding of how enemy states reconciled after years of destructive warfare.
Haynes explores the dynamic relations between French civilians and the British, Russian and German-speaking soldiers who were tasked to ensure stability and peace after 1814 and 1815, and who moved into French villages and towns. As she examines the military occupation of eastern France and Paris, Haynes demonstrates the enduring tensions between former adversaries and the ongoing exploitative practices of war that included acts of anti-French destruction and vengeance as well as burdensome military requisitioning and quartering. She moves beyond the conventional histories of this era that underscore the horror and humiliation of the occupation on the French, however, to reveal examples of negotiation, co-existence and understanding. She uncovers examples of shared harvesting and problem solving on housing soldiers and policing civilians that built social stability. Like Brian Vick’s emphasis on the sociability and festive culture at the Vienna Congress, Haynes describes the importance of clubs, dances, public events, fashion, common meals, and religious ceremonies in fostering amicable relations on the local level.
[2] If such scholars as Vick, Paul Schroeder, Mark Jarrett, and Wolfram Siemann highlight the collaborative diplomacy conducted at the Vienna Congress, Haynes underscores the collaborative practices on the ground in France that ensured social and economic stability in the defeated state.
[3]
Haynes’s emphasis on the intermingling between the French and their multi-national occupiers highlights the rise of cosmopolitanism, a responsive nationalism, and the shifting boundaries between enemy and friend. To gain perspectives from both the French and their occupiers, Haynes consulted national and local archives in France, Germany, and Britain. It is fitting that a work that underscores internationalism, therefore, would be reviewed in an H-Diplo Roundtable review by esteemed scholars of international relations from three different countries: Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States.
Robert Alexander from the University of Victoria in Canada highlights key themes in Haynes’s work; amid the grim reality of the occupation, the Allied presence in France was not characterized by brutal conquest but by reconstruction and reconciliation. In order to support the legitimacy of the Bourbon government and gain reparations, the Allied occupation of guarantee respected French civil authority, the rule of law, and protected private property. Plunder, as he points out, was not an expedient approach to secure stability within the new Bourbon monarchy. A scholar of the French Republic and Napoleonic Empire, Alexander points to two levels of interaction between the Allies and French: administrative collaboration and social cordiality which was manifest in mixing at banquets, balls, and civic associations. Alexander emphasizes the importance of cultural interchange, in particular in Paris, which Haynes argues fostered both cosmopolitanism and nationalism during the occupation. He comments on the extensive mutual borrowing between the French and foreign occupiers in fashion and cuisine. Alexander praises Haynes’s study on this neglected subject and its careful attention to a complex occupation, but also raises important questions about the extent of influence that the Allied Council of Ambassadors had on French legislation and reform.
Ido de Haan of Utrecht University points out that in contrast to the extensively studied military occupation of postwar Germany, the 1815 postwar occupation of France, which has been traditionally understood as humiliating, barbarous, and having provoked anti-Prussian sentiment, has received far less historical attention. Haynes, moreover, tells a very different story about a new constructive occupation of guarantee to support peace and political reconstruction instead of an oppressive Allied occupation characterized by hostility. A scholar of international politics, de Haan highlights Haynes’s argument that this attempt at “total peace” following a “total war” was pioneered in the occupation of guarantee. He compares Haynes’s book to the recent research of Beatrice de Graaf ,who also views the Allied occupation as a tool to support collective security through the mode of “mutual moderation.”
[4] Like Alexander, he wonders to what degree the Allied Council really influenced the developments of political reconstruction. He also questions Haynes’s brevity on the occupation of France after 1814 and her emphasis on the years after 1815. He raises the paradox of Haynes’s thesis that the Allied occupation of 1815 to 1818 was the first experiment that inaugurated a new approach to ending war with the point that she and others make on it being forgotten, a case of historical amnesia. In the end, he acclaims her attention to the French fraternization with foreign troops and the consequences it generated, in particular for the soldiers that occupied France once they returned to their homelands.
Haynes’s book represents an interdisciplinary approach drawing on social, cultural, military, and economic history, and Edward J. Kolla at Georgetown argues that this is one of the study’s strongest attributes. He especially acclaims the chapters that deftly move from an emphasis on cosmopolitan culture, to economic history, and then onto a solid study of political culture. He relates Haynes’s argument on “total peace” to David Bell’s 2007 study on “total war” to point out Haynes’s enemies to friends transition challenges Bell’s view of the wars as a totalizing ideological conflict necessitating the eradication of the enemy.
[5] As a specialist on European international relations and law, Kolla, however, emphasizes continuity in place of rupture by questioning the novelty of the occupations of 1814 through 1818 with an overview of the French occupation of sister Republics during the earlier years of the Revolution. His caution of overstating the innovative nature of the Allied occupation extends to a discussion of just war and the writings of Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. He also suggests that Haynes’s descriptions of elite socialization and mixing in salons, balls, associations, theater, and hunting among the officers and administrators indicate an eighteenth-century idyll more than a new effort at internationalism and peace-building. Despite his criticisms, Kolla concludes with high praise for Haynes’s rich and provocative study that covers many dimensions of the Allied occupation.
In Christine Haynes’s engaged response to her reviewers, she addresses the question of the novelty of the occupation of guarantee, emphasizing it as a crucial component of peacekeeping. She asserts that the Allied occupation in France was a key transitional moment of mixing older and newer approaches to the law of war and the practice of occupation. She references the Duke of Wellington’s view of occupation as a means of military security that could be expected to generate the bonds of peace. Readers of this forum will realize that Haynes’s work offers new provocative approaches to thinking about the importance of the daily interaction between former enemies in the towns and villages across France as well as the important collaborative work between Allied commanders and French administrators to build peace and security after 1815. This study will not replace the important research conducted on the Congress of Vienna, but it will enhance it and our understanding of the significant transition from decades of war to an enduring European peace during the nineteenth century. The contributions of Haynes and her reviewers point to the productive debates and research still required to better demonstrate the ideas and practices of international cooperation and law during this exciting era.
Participants:
Christine Haynes received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2001. Since 2002, she has taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she is now Professor of History. Her previous book is entitled Lost Illusions: The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France (Harvard University Press, 2010). With Denise Davidson and Jennifer Heuer, she co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Military History (Jan. 2016) on “Ending War: Revisiting the Aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.”
Katherine B. Aaslestad is a Professor of History at West Virginia University and a specialist on modern Germany. War and society in the nineteenth century is her primary research area and she is the author of Place and Politics: Local Identity, Civic Culture, and German Nationalism in North Germany during the Revolutionary Era (Brill Press, 2005) and co-editor with Johan Joor of Revisiting Napoleon's Continental System: Local, Regional, and European Experiences(Palgrave, 2014). She has also published in German History and collaborated on special issues on war and gender in Central European History and European History Quarterly and published articles on republican political culture in the Hanseatic cities and the Napoleonic Wars as book chapters in a variety of edited volumes. Her current research, “After the Wars: German Central Europe after Napoleonic Conquest, 1815-1848” is supported by DAAD research grants, a Fulbright Research scholarship and a NEH Fellowship.
R.S. Alexander teaches in the history department of the University of Victoria, Canada. He is the author of Bonapartism & Revolutionary Tradition in France: the Fédérés of 1815 (Cambridge: University Press, 1991), Napoleon (London: Arnold, 2001), Re-Writing the French Revolutionary Tradition: Liberal Opposition and the Fall of the Bourbon Monarchy (Cambridge: University Press, 2003), and Europe's Uncertain Path 1814-1914: State Formation and Civil Society (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). He is currently working on a study of French public debate over military intervention from 1820 to 1833.
Ido de Haan is professor of Political History at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His fields of study include the history of democracy and the welfare state, the history of political ideologies, and the history and memory of large-scale violence such as the Holocaust and the Napoleonic Wars, as well as the political and cultural reconstruction of postwar states and societies in modern Europe. Among his publications are, co-editor with Paul den Hoed and Henk te Velde, Een nieuwe staat. Het begin van het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden A New State. The beginning of the Kingdom of the Netherlands]. (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker 2013); co-editor with Beatrice de Graaf and Brian Vick, Securing Europe after Napoleon. 1815 and the New European Security Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2019); and co-editor with Mathijs Lok, eds., The Politics of Moderation in Modern European History. (London: Palgrave, forthcoming).
Edward J. Kolla is Associate Professor, History, at Georgetown University in Qatar and the author of Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is currently writing a book on the history of the passport.
Review by Ido de Haan, Utrecht University
The story told by Christine Haynes is at the same time familiar and surprising. Much of what she has to say in her deeply researched, rich, and engaging book about the Allied occupation of France between 1814 and 1818 resonates with the many things we know about that other postwar occupation, of Germany after 1945. The establishment of an occupation regime after the military victory of the Allied armies, the subjection of pockets of resistance, and the division of the country in zones of occupation for each of the partners in the international coalition, all evokes very familiar challenges: how to punish the imperial aggressor and make it pay for its assault on international peace and order (as well as for the cost of raising an army to counter-act the aggressor) without permanently wrecking the economy and perpetuating the hatred of the defeated nation? How to manage the tension between stability and order versus the goal of regime change and ideological conversion; between the punishment of leaders and supporters of the previous regime versus the need for a functioning state; between permanently neutralizing a former enemy and reintegrating the defeated nation into the international community? And given that these questions have various answers: how to maintain unity within a coalition of powers with very diverse interests and ideas? These were not only challenges for the occupying powers, but also for the defeated nation, torn between its longing for peace and order, and the fear of the looting and abuse by the occupation forces; between hatred for the enemy and the opportunities for wealth, status, and power that fraternization with the occupation regime seemed to promise; between older political loyalties and new ideological commitments.
Yet while the post-1945 occupation of Germany has been studied extensively, the occupation of France by the Allied powers that finally beat Napoleon at Waterloo has received substantially less attention from historians. That is not to say that it has altogether been disregarded. The familiar historiographical trope of a ‘forgotten history’ sounds somewhat worn out after the rediscovery of the post-Napoleonic era as a topic of historical investigation.
[6] Moreover, the more recent studies on the specific theme of the Allied occupation of France build on a respectable number of older French studies of the period. The dominant perspective of these older studies is that of the humiliation of France after the demise of the Napoleonic Empire. Henry Houssaye, in the third volume of his study of 1815, discussed the occupation under the heading of “La France crucifiée,” mainly as a result of “la Terreur prussienne.”
[7] His colleague Pierre Rain described the period as one of turmoil and abuse that ended with the “liberation” of France in 1818. Similar accounts of humiliation and exploitation are presented by Max Bruchet and Roger André, who, like the previous authors, mention as ultimate proof of the barbarity of the Allied troops the sacking of the Louvre and the (failed) attempt of the Prussian Fieldmarshal Gebhart Leberecht Blücher to blow up the Pont d’Iéna, which had been built to celebrate the French victory that Blücher had been forced to accept in 1806. The traumatic nature of this history is most clearly illustrated by Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny, who discussed the occupation in no more than two pages of the 650 pages of his classical study of the French Restoration, depicting it as an assault by primarily Prussian soldiers, “devouring, drinking, pillaging, sacking, raping” the French nation.
[8]
This lachrymose and anti-Prussian perspective is in part still present in the most recent French study, by Yann Guerrin, who reproduces the tropes of humiliation and national tragedy by arguing that the defeat of 1814-1815 and the occupation by foreign troops opened the way for the invasions of 1871, 1914, and 1940. But a similar perspective is present in the study of Marc Blancpain, who emphasizes the French popular mentality of resistance against foreign, notably German, rule across a series of occupations of the North of France, and in the study of Jacques Hantraye, who focuses on the Prussian rule in the department of Seine-et-Oise. The question as to whether the vengeful Prussian occupation fueled more persistent anti-German feelings is a main question for Wacker’s German-language study of the occupation. Even the work of Thomas D. Veve on the important role of the Duke of Wellington, the commander of the occupation regime, confirms this perspective in reverse, by emphasizing how Wellington promoted a policy of restraint and discipline in his command of the British troops—in contrast to that of the unruly Prussians.
[9]
Recently Beatrice de Graaf published in Dutch a wide-ranging account of occupation regime as an instrument to create collective security, not just in France but in all of Europe, by imposing a balance of power, no longer as a equalization of force, but as a mode of mutual moderation.
[10] De Graaf’s approach shares with the analysis of Haynes a focus on the Conference des Ministres Alliés (also called the Council of Allied Ambassadors or Allied Council) that ran the occupation regime between 1815 and 1818. De Graaf and Haynes also work from the same methodological premises. Both books testify to a definite departure from much of the literature on international relations in Restoration Europe, which for a long time has been dominated by discussions of the Congress of Vienna within the (neo-)realist framework of great power politics. Even if the diplomatic negotiations and formal treaties play an important role in the arguments of De Graaf and Haynes, emotions, experiences, and beliefs, or, more generally, political culture are the main engine of historical transformation. While De Graaf follows the direction of research previously explored by Matthias Schulz and Brian Vick, by focusing on the ideas, feelings, and motives of leaders and second-tier policy makers, Christine Haynes follows the contributions of Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann, and others, by paying more attention to popular opinion and to the interaction between soldiers and civilians.
[11] Her sources are of course military, diplomatic, and police records, yet she also reconstructs public opinion on the basis of reports of stagecoach drivers to the French police, private letters and memoirs, pamphlets, plays, pictures, prints, plays, and songs. The title of the book is derived from the latter genre, namely the popular song by Pierre-Jean de Béranger, predicting in March 1814 that “Even if there are a few burned houses,/A few people slain,/That’s the least of our worries./But I’ll laugh well if I am violated./Long live our friends,/Our friends the enemies.” (1)
As Haynes argues, her book is a contribution to the study of the ‘sortie de guerre,’ in this case an event that happened twice. After the coalition armies invaded France in January 1814, they entered Paris on 31 March, led by Czar Alexander I, who saw himself as a peaceful liberator and protector of the French nation. Even if the terms of the peace agreement signed in Paris on 30 May 1814 were considered mild—leaving the French not only with most of its territory but also with a Bourbon king to rule the country—the presence of, and care for, hundreds of thousands enemy soldiers were experienced by many French as a very unwelcome burden. Yet it lasted only for a short while, as the Allied had started to evacuate France by 5 June 1814. But within a year they were back, after Napoleon´s Hundred Days ended in Waterloo. This time, the occupation was much more oppressive. Some 1.2 million troops swarmed over the north and east of France, with the remnants of the Grande Armée retreated below the Loire River. It was the beginning of a three-year occupation of a victorious coalition that was adamant to reap the spoils of war, to force the French into submission, and to take revenge and make the French pay for Napoleon’s repeated assaults on Europe’s tranquility.
The core of Haynes’s argument is that with the Treaty of Paris of 20 November 1815, the Allied oppressive “occupation de guerre” transformed into a more constructive “occupation of guarantee,” established to ensure the much more substantial indemnification that was now demanded from the French, but also to stabilize the French government and to secure Europe. As such, it was the “first modern occupation” (2) in that it was no longer the outcome of dynastic wars, which left the occupied territory for the troops to plunder or at least to live off the land without any further political aim of institutional change, ideological transformation, or regime change. This was “a novel attempt at ‘total’ peace” in which the “purpose of peacemaking and political reconstruction was pioneered in the occupation of guarantee” (2-3). It was enforced by a strongly reduced occupation force of only 150,000 troops in the northern part of France, stationed in the small band of land ranging from the department of the Somme, via the Marne to the Swiss border—remarkably similar to the later frontline of the First World War. The occupied territory was divided into a British, Russian, Prussian, and Austrian sector, each with 30,000 men, and smaller pockets for the minor partners in the alliance with Bavaria contributing 10,000 men, while Denmark, Saxony, Hanover, and Württemberg each contributed 5000 men. These troops, but indirectly France as a whole, were directed by the Allied Council, which met daily—and later on twice a week—in Paris between 12 July 1815 and 5 December 1818.
Haynes tells the story of this occupation of guarantee in three parts. In the first part, entitled “Enemies,” she sketches in much detail the tense relations between the occupation army and the French nation. The first period, from June to December 1815, was very violent. This was due first of all to the vindictive and abusive actions of foreign soldiers, but also because of a general lawlessness, which even in the areas not occupied by the Allied armies resulted in violent confrontations between supporters of the previous regime and the radical royalists who longed for a full-fledged restoration of the Ancien Régime. The ‘White Terror’ the latter unleashed targeted the revolutionaries and Bonapartists, whom they deemed responsible for France’s demise, but also the Bourbon King Louis XVIII, who was considered too moderate and too liberal to restore French grandeur and aristocratic privilege.
After most of the foreign troops had left, the remaining occupation force was a substantial burden, given both the continued abuse of power and physical violations and the material costs. On top of the indemnification costs, all of the lodging, forage, and provisioning costs of the occupation force were to be provided for by the French, including 50 million francs annually for equipment, clothing and payment of the troops. This burden, combined with the failed harvest after the eruption of the volcano Tambora in April 1815 led to a year without a summer, meant that the French suffered so many shortages that by the second half of 1816 they were unable to meet the demands made on them. Even if this situation led to an increase in the level of violent interactions between French civilians and foreign troops, it is indicative of the constructive and pragmatic nature of the ‘occupation of guarantee’ that Wellington proposed a reduction of the occupation army—and thus the costs of occupation—of 30,000 men by 1 April 1817, and in the Treaty of Aachen of 9 October 1818 agreed to a complete withdrawal on 30 November 1818.
In the second part, “Friends,” Haynes depicts the other side of the coin: the occupation was not all bad. There were also more friendly encounters, of fraternization and intimate and sexual contact. This had already started with the public display of gratitude with which the message of peace of Czar Alexander I was received. What was called ‘good intelligence’ and mutual aid were rooted in a perhaps uneasy, yet constructive, form of power-sharing between the French and Allied authorities, and in shared Christian and humanitarian values. In a wonderfully illustrated chapter, building on her previous experience with French cultural history, Haynes demonstrates how fraternization with foreign troops paradoxically contributed to both cosmopolitanism and nationalism.
[12] The presence of people from so many parts of Europe created an interest in foreign languages, national literature, fashion, and dance, which helped to express a cosmopolitan awareness of cultural diversity, even if some saw it as “xenomania” (196) that demanded a more explicit nationalist response. The high point of this cultural confrontation—at the time, and in the book—was the battle in 1817 over the “montagnes russes,” amusement park roller coasters embellished with national items, initially only Russian, but soon competing—culturally, commercially, but also politically—with installations with a Swiss, Egyptian, Illyrian, and ultimately also French theme, and even with the “Niagara Falls,” which, according to Haynes, was the first water ride in history (199).
In the third part, Haynes discusses the ways in which the occupation period contributed to a “regeneration.” The term is borrowed from a pamphlet by “William, the Straight Talker” who argued “It is not a Restoration we need, it’s a Regeneration”. (247) It provides a contemporaneous prefiguration of the recent historiographical shift to see the post-Napoleonic era not as a restoration of the Ancien Régime, but as a period of political and cultural experimentation and innovation. Haynes emphasizes first of all the economic rebound: after an initial downturn, the occupation soon stimulated the resurgence of commerce, while the new regime initiated a series of economic reforms that quickly restored public trust and financial solvency. Notably after Wellington’s proposal to reduce the burden of 30,000 men, the foreign bankers Baring Brothers of London and Hope of The Hague were eager to purchase French bonds which enabled the state to meet the huge reparation demands. Even if the massive debt hampered investments, by 1819 a national industrial exposition at the Louvre became a showcase for France’s economic recovery.
Yet the regeneration of France was also of a political nature. French historians have for some time emphasized how the Restoration was the cradle of modern France, characterized by a parliamentary regime, constitutional government, and the creation of liberalism, socialism, and progressive nationalism.
[13] On this point, Haynes claims to that her book corrects historians who “have missed the extent to which political reconstruction was shaped by foreign occupation” (247). Notably, she argues that the “foreign trusteeship” of the Allied Council “was critical to the development of parliamentary government in France” (256). This is not an altogether new observation: Haynes quotes Pierre Rain, who, in his 1908 study of the occupation, argued that the European oversight of French politics was both “the supreme humiliation” and “the greatest aid to its regeneration.”
[14] But it still turns out to be difficult to convincingly connect domestic and international politics. Haynes’s sketch of the French political laboratory, the resurgence of public debate, and the emergence of oppositional Bonapartism is interesting, but it remains unclear how the policies of Allied Council impacted on these developments. In this respect, De Graaf’s treatment of the Allied Council is much more extensive, even if her account suffers from the reverse
malheur of largely disregarding the domestic political dynamics.
The difference between the accounts of Haynes and De Graaf of the Allied Council draws attention to a more general point of concern: despite the presence of an international occupation army, this remains a very French history. Haynes pays relatively little attention to the ways in which the policies of the Allied forces hung together with wider concerns about European security. Notably, the Austrian foreign minister Klemens prince von Metternich had ambitious plans to create a European-wide network to police revolutionary and Bonapartist terror. Even if the British were reluctant to transform the Council into “an European Council for the management of the affairs of the world,” as De Graaf demonstrates, the Allied Council gradually expanded its scope of action and transformed itself into a platform for deliberation on, and coordination of, a wide variety of security issues within and even beyond Europe.
[15]
Next to the geographical confinement to France, Haynes’s account is also limited in a temporal sense. Her story starts in January 1814, but after four pages (15-19) jumps to June 1815. There is little reflection on the fact that there was an earlier occupation regime, of a Zentralverwaltungbehörde led by Prussian Heinrich Friedrich Karl baron vom Stein, initially set up to manage the supplies of the invading army, yet from January 1814 responsible for the governance of the occupied territory in the bilateral committees of Allied and French civil administrators. Stein’s plan for a rational government met with resistance from generals and leaders who wanted to end the occupation (and the costs it implied) as soon as possible, and therefore pressed for a Bourbon king. His dependency on foreign support, of course, fed the suspicions against him; all of these factors added to the instability of the French Restoration regime. If Haynes had developed an even longer-term perspective, it would also have been possible to reflect on the impact of the reverse experience, of a French occupation regime ruling much of Europe between 1795 and 1813, enforcing regime change, institutional and ideological transformations, with similar problems of oppression and fraternization, resistance and collaboration.
The limited time-horizon of Haynes’s analysis also becomes visible in the final chapters of Our Friends the Enemies, where Haynes outlines how after the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, France was invited to join the meetings of the four powers (even if the latter secretly renewed their agreement to remain vigilant against the French threat) and the troops were quickly evacuated. Their departure once more demonstrated French ambivalence about the occupation, leading to celebrations that expressed both relief about the final liberation, and respect or even gratitude for the foreign soldiers who, in many cases, had become good friends. The moment was celebrated once again in a song by Béranger that forms the concluding vignette of Haynes’s cultural analysis of the occupation regime: “Yes, free at last, let the world breathe;/Over the past throw a thick veil […]/Peoples, form a saint alliance,/And give each other your hand” (323). As inspiring as it is, the quotation draws attention to a problematic aspect of Haynes’s claim that the alliance of nations forged by the occupation of guarantee between 1815 and 1818 was a first experiment of “total peace” in which “the use of occupation for the purpose of peacemaking and political reconstruction was pioneered” and which “inaugurated a new approach to the age-old problem of how to end war” (3). This claim is hard to reconcile with Béranger’s observation that the past needs to be forgotten. In a sense, he was right, and this idea is confirmed by Haynes’s concluding remarks, in which she argues that the history of the French occupation is a case of “historical amnesia” (320). Of course, this claim also underlines Haynes’s originality in unearthing this history. Yet precisely because it was forgotten, it is hard to understand how this experience still exerted influence over posterior generations.
But perhaps in another way, the occupation of France was not forgotten. As Haynes demonstrates, the soldiers who had occupied France returned to their homelands with experiences and expectations of status, respect, and often also political liberty, which turned out to be much less self-evidently acknowledged by their fellow-citizens and rulers in Prussia, Russia, Austria, or even the United Kingdom. As a result, the end of the French occupation did not mean that the threat, or at least fear, of an international revolutionary conspiracy had disappeared. Many of the issues of the postwar political and economic order, cultural accommodation, and international security remained a major concern, in France and beyond, in the next century, and they continue in our present time.
Review by Edward J. Kolla, Georgetown University
Most books communicate their subject or content in the title. Few achieve what Christine Haynes has done with Our Friends the Enemies: The Occupation of France after Napoleon—succinctly transmit something of the thesis and strength of the work, too. In this superb study of the presence of Allied troops in France, after the First and Second Treaties of Paris (30 May 1814, and 20 November 1815, respectively) and during the ‘occupation of guarantee’ that followed, Haynes explores the tensions inherent in the relationship between post-Napoleonic France and its erstwhile-enemies-turned-speedily-into-Restoration-friends. I applaud her forbearance in never once using the buzzword ‘frenemy.’
While the French Revolution and Napoleon are two of the most-studied topics in European history, surprisingly, the occupation of France that came thereafter “has been overlooked by historians” (2). Haynes’s rejoinder to this gap in the literature is a paragon of good organization. It is divided into three parts, with three chapters in each, and has clear and cogent sub-sections to boot.
The first part, “Enemies,” begins by examining the invasions of 1814 and 1815 and the initial military occupation that gave way to the protracted Allied presence, envisaged in the Second Treaty of Paris, and that lasted until 1818. The next two chapters describe the various requisitions, humiliations, and violence visited upon the French during this period. “Friends?” is the heading for Part II, with chapters on how the French and Allies divided responsibility for questions of law and order; other forms of more casual, social, even romantic interaction; and finally how cosmopolitanism bloomed in the soil of the multi-national occupation. Part III, “Regeneration,” looks at how the occupation concretely helped French reconstruction, economically and politically, before a final chapter on France’s long-sought liberation.
Haynes deploys comprehensive, even exhaustive evidence to support her story—and contextualizes these details well, in, for example, chapter two where she makes comparisons between the rations accorded to Allied soldiers and what the average French person ate (57-59). She regularly illustrates her points with colorful anecdotes. She also has a knack for highlighting curious or counterintuitive facts. Some of my favorites were that the Duke of Wellington’s expertise in occupation came not only from Spain but also India (37); or that violence between the French and Allied soldiers did not decline over time but, in fact, peaked in 1817 (75) and was most common not where the occupiers and occupied spoke different languages but, rather, where the language was the same (86). There are excellent, illustrative pictures throughout the text.
In his blurb for the book, Rafe Blaufard characterizes it as “an exemplary blend of social, cultural, financial, and economic (as well as military and diplomatic) history” and, indeed, this is one of the work’s strongest points. I found chapters six through eight some of the most intriguing, made all the more impressive by their variety. Six is a masterwork in cultural history, showing the assorted “linguistic idioms, foods, fashions, dances, and literary styles” (169) that comingled in France during the occupation. From there, Haynes moves deftly to a meticulous economic and financial history of postwar France in chapter seven. Chapter eight is solid political and political-cultural history.
I have four points of discussion to raise with this effective, erudite work—two minor and two that are more major. The first relates to precisely one of its greatest strengths and the idea communicated so pithily in the title: were the occupiers enemies or friends? At its best, Haynes’s work sits perfectly balanced on the tension in the relationship between the two—but there are times when I wished she would come down categorically, one way or the other. I wondered if, after researching and writing such a profound and nuanced book (too nuanced?), even she could not decide whether her story was about the perpetuation of “a state of war” (6) or “a context for more amicable relations” (7). I suppose the answer is ‘both.’
My second minor point relates to the concept of “total war,” which Haynes addresses early and was the subject of a book by David A. Bell.
[16] She extends “this logic into the postwar period” and characterizes the occupation as “a novel attempt at ‘total’ peace” (3). Central to Bell’s argument is that elegant, aristocratic, eighteenth-century warfare gave way to the sort of totalizing ideological conflict that necessitates the eradication of one’s adversary. The accommodation Haynes describes between enemies-turned-friends is, I would think, antithetical to the total war paradigm, in which peace is an elusive construct on which violence-to-the-end is predicated. What is more, Haynes analysis, rather than representing an innovative ‘total peace,’ nuances Bell’s original premise.
For all the out-of-date and clichéd history that claims that the Restoration era aimed to ‘turn the clock back’ to the Ancien Régime status quo ante bellum, in many places, Haynes describes precisely a return to the eighteenth-century idyll in which gentlemen warriors fought as honorable opponents, and socialized as peers, a world which Bell claims was lost. The Duke of Wellington, commander-in-chief of the occupation, and the Duc de Richelieu, French foreign minister, could cooperate and work “together” to find “resolutions” to problems (123) precisely because they hailed from the same elevated social station. “Positive interaction was most common among the upper classes,” Haynes writes (137), with elites eating, drinking, and dancing together (149); hunting and theatre-going together (150); and mixing in “reading rooms, philosophical societies, and salons” (151)—she makes allusions to the eighteenth-century “Republic of Letters” (195)—and even Masonic lodges (152). Illustrative of her knack for fascinating insights, Haynes delineates which occupiers were most and least friendly (Russians the most, Prussians the least) but reiterates that, most important of all, friendliness depended on class (153).
More substantively, and related to the aforementioned point about the tension between friends and enemies, one of Haynes’s principle aims is to distinguish between “a universal tale of military conquest” (75) and the creation of what she terms, “new developments in the international law of war” (76). Her historical actors, themselves, sought to differentiate “this sort of occupation from the ‘plunder and war’ undertaken by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies” because of their (friendly?) objective, to quote Wellington, “of genuine peace and tranquility” (4).
But in fact how different, how new, was the occupation of 1814-1818?
Haynes herself writes that the epithets ‘friend’ and ‘ally,’ used to designate an erstwhile foe, did not originate with the Allied occupation of France but, rather, earlier in the Revolutionary Wars—by France itself in areas it had annexed or made into ‘Sister Republics’ (4). She then claims that French behavior degenerated into “Old Regime forms of conquest,” but this neglects the fact that the tension between the old and the new—and between allies, enemies, and liberators—was just as pregnant during the Revolution as it was for the post-revolutionary occupation. Haynes admits that much of the violence of the Allied occupation, especially in 1814, was typical of “the ‘military punishment’ traditionally inflicted by occupying armies” (24) and “[h]arkened back to the brutality of the Thirty Years’ War” (26). However, to bolster her claim of novelty, she writes that “[i]n contrast to previous contributions exacted by conquering armies, [the Allied] requisitions were regulated by treaties” (52-53). And yet, the treaties France negotiated with/imposed on its ‘Sister Republics’ did exactly the same. They detailed precisely requisitions and other financial impositions, troop levies, as well as territorial changes—just like the treaties codifying the Allied occupation of France—all the while using the same beneficent language of liberation and friendship.
[17] As Haynes mentions, the so-called “rape” of the Louvre (94) was merely the replication of and revenge for what France had done—again, with some legal authorization—in pilfering artistic treasures from across Europe.
[18]This is, therefore, a story with much continuity between the Revolution and after, rather than one of rupture that set the “imperial conquests of the Old Regime and the Napoleonic Empire” off from “the modern era” (109).
Last, I would like to continue with this idea that the Allied occupation of France after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was “[u]nprecedented in the law of war” (39). Here and elsewhere, Haynes calls these events, “the first modern ‘peacekeeping mission’” (2, 109, 113, 132, 134, 320). Such terminology surprised me, given that she admits it is “anachronistic to speak of ‘collaboration’ in this period” (136). If collaboration à la Vichy is anachronistic, why not modern peacekeeping? Overall, I am not certain that the occupation can truly be characterized as inspired peacebuilding given the contingency of the fact that it was imposed only after Napoleon’s return, the ‘Hundred Days,’ and his second abdication (6-7 and 19).
More critically, Haynes argues that the occupation “constituted a key—if heretofore unrecognized—transitional step between the early modern aim of ‘just war’ (
jus ad bellum) and the more modern goal of humanity in warfare (
jus ad bello), to limit the brutality of a conflict and to speed its resolution” (3) and she makes similar claims again in chapter four (114-115). I am not certain I agree. Haynes is right that much of the historiography posits natural law, with its obvious links to just war theory, as forming “the dominant—if not unchallenged—theory of morality and politics” from the early seventeenth century, according to David Armitage, but that “by the third quarter of the eighteenth century its ascendancy…was beginning to wane…the gradual transition away from naturalism and toward positivism became especially evident.”
[19] This is a particular bugbear of mine. I do not believe in any such neat “transition.”
For example, the question of
jus ad bellum was hardly limited to early modern times, and it has seen a
modern efflorescence in everything from the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 to the Charter of the United Nations.
[20] What is more, it was the early modern theorist, Hugo Grotius, whom Haynes mentions briefly, and not the ‘occupation of guarantee,’ that is generally and more appropriately credited with emancipating the law of war from questions of interpersonal morality in favor of a more formalistic approach, which reached its high watermark in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Stephen Neff calls this
Grotian change “a momentous one—perhaps the single greatest conceptual leap that has ever occurred in the history of international law.”
[21] Haynes again claims that “the positivist approach to peacekeeping” used in France between 1815 and 1818 “initiated a shift, which would come to fruition in the nineteenth century,” precisely the
jus ad bello high watermark I just mentioned. She also briefly cites this moment’s two most famous accords, the Geneva and Hague conventions (115). However, I would hesitate to conflate—even to connect—the positivist, scientific ethos of international law circa 1864-1907 with that of the Restoration era.
[22]
Haynes also claims that the indemnity that France was made to pay “constituted something new in the history of war termination” (219) because “it was intended as a general punitive ‘reparation’ for past suffering and a guarantee against further aggression” (220). She may well be right, in practice, but here again I would caution against theorizing too much novelty. This retribution was envisaged by the eighteenth century’s greatest international law scholar, Emer de Vattel:
A conqueror who has taken up arms, not only against the sovereign, but against the nation herself, and whose intention it was to subdue a fierce and savage people, and once for all to reduce an obstinate enemy,— such a conqueror may with justice lay burthens on the conquered nation, both as a compensation for the expenses of the war, and as a punishment.
[23]
In conclusion, there is a great deal in Vattel that echoes Haynes’s excellent depiction of these practices in action. He counsels conquerors to employ “principles countenanced by reason, and conformable to humanity.” He also says they are “bound to govern [the conquered people] according to the laws of the state.” He empowers victors to “erect[] fortresses to keep [the vanquished] in awe,” something Haynes describes the Allies imposing on France. Vattel even foresaw the restoration of Louis XVIII: “others, again, confining their quarrel to the sovereign alone, have left the nation in the full enjoyment of all her rights,—only setting over her a new sovereign, of their own appointment.”
[24]
About ten years ago, Randall Lesaffer noted that “the history of international law has–until the ‘boom’ of the last two decades—been one of the least developed fields of legal history,” and, moreover, that “the Revolution and, even more, the Napoleonic Ages, are among the most neglected periods” in that history.
[25] It is hard to say, today, that this area is entirely deserted—but Haynes has still done double-duty in writing this excellent book. She has systematically covered the many dimensions of the occupation of guarantee, including in international law, and provided a convincing if at times provocative interpretation.
Review by R.S. Alexander, University of Victoria
In her elegantly written, handsomely illustrated, and highly informative Our Friends the Enemies: The Occupation of France After Napoleon, Christine Haynes provides a major contribution to study of the early years of the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830) and the process of peacekeeping during the occupation of France by the Allied powers following the Napoleonic Wars. In doing so, the author addresses significant lacunae in both the historiography of France and of international relations more generally. Focusing particularly upon the efforts of French and Allied officials to create a stable regime that would respect the Vienna Settlement, the author views the ‘occupation of guarantee’ of 1815-18 as the first modern peacekeeping mission, and concludes that the mission’s success helped lay the groundwork for largely peaceful relations among the great powers until 1914.
While direct experience of the occupation is a central component of the work, the theme of friends and enemies leads Haynes into a much broader consideration of relations between the French and foreigners during the period. We learn a great deal, for example, about cultural interchanges between the French and the tens of thousands of tourists who descended, mostly upon Paris. Thus Our Friends the Enemies covers an exceptionally broad swath of types of history, and it will be of interest to a diverse range of scholars.
Before considering the author’s main arguments, it helps to rehearse the dimensions of the occupation and the context in which it occurred. During the prior invasion of France in 1814, the First Empire had fallen and the Allied Powers (principally Austria, Britain, Prussia, and Russia) had backed the restoration of the French Bourbon Monarchy. Influenced by the powers, King Louis XVIII had granted France a constitutional Charter, and the relatively lenient First Treaty of Paris had been signed in May. Napoleon then wrecked these arrangements by returning during the Hundred Days of 1815, thereby renewing war between France and the other powers. Shortly thereafter, defeat at Waterloo on 18 June heralded the second fall of Napoleon and triggered a virtual civil war in parts of the south and west of France.
[26] Meanwhile, over a million Allied troops invaded. After negotiation of the much harsher Second Treaty of Paris in November, the vast majority of troops evacuated, but a multi-national force of roughly 150,000 remained to compose an occupation of guarantee, to be funded by the French, in eight departments along the north-east frontier. In combination with a Council of Allied Ambassadors based at Paris, the occupation would seek to stabilize the rule of the Bourbon regime and assure that France fulfilled its treaty obligations. Foremost among the latter was payment of 700 million
francs in war reparations, in addition to the claims of foreign nationals, which ultimately amounted to 320 million
francs. As the regime stabilized and payments were made, the number of occupying troops was reduced to 150,000 in 1817, and the remainder were quickly evacuated after the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle of November 1818.
As the author states, the occupation was subsequently largely erased from French official public memory and national history, and hence
Our Friends the Enemies is the first “comprehensive examination of this episode as experienced by both the occupiers and the occupied” (3). Especially in terms of the zone of occupation, Haynes’s analysis is enriched by very deep archival moiling. Moreover, what previously remained by way of perception of the occupation, mostly in local histories, was overwhelmingly negative.
[27] A characteristic of Hayne’s approach, however, is to provide a scrupulously balanced account of the effects of the occupation. Given the historiography, it is her underlining of the positive aspects that appears most original, but it is also true that Hayne’s highly detailed examination of the negative aspects surpasses previous studies. Ultimately, a meaningful cost-benefit analysis cannot be conducted, but the reader is left with a strong impression of the complexity of the impact of the occupation.
The grim material reality of the occupation at the ground level is starkly portrayed in two early chapters (51-109). Initially the occupation of guarantee looked very much like the occupation of 1814—a continuation of warfare wherein civilians and conquering forces acted as enemies rather than friends. Instances of plunder, property destruction, insult, physical aggression, rape, and murder frequently enflamed relations in the eight occupied departments. Elsewhere, forced seizure of art treasures, most notoriously at the Louvre, was viewed by the French as an act of subjugation, akin to rape. Although the French government undertook to indemnify French citizens for the extraordinary taxes and requisitions levied to support the occupation, payment was slow and far from sufficient to cover costs. Worse still, the trauma of occupation was exacerbated by late and poor harvests triggered by volcanic ashes from the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, and France fell into a subsistence crisis marked by malnutrition, starvation, and civil unrest.
In contrast to her depiction of the despair of daily life, in the following two chapters the author demonstrates that the occupation included silver linings (113-208). Haynes emphasizes that, unlike previous occupations, the occupation of guarantee was one of reconstruction and reconciliation, rather than conquest. If one asks why this momentous change came about, the answer would seem to lie in a combination of considerations. The Allied Powers did not want to see a return of the French revolution, which they considered contagious, subversive of other regimes, and inherently bellicose. They also wanted payment of reparations. The best means to achieve their objectives was to establish a regime that could establish order in France, fulfill treaty obligations, and maintain peaceful relations within the emergent Concert of Europe by accepting the Vienna Settlement.
[28]
Plunder was not the way to secure a Bourbon Monarchy desperate to establish its legitimacy in the eyes of the French public. Hence the terms negotiated for the occupation of guarantee included respect for French civil authority and the rule of law, and protection of property. While the Allied Council of Ambassadors would monitor developments and, in effect, assume a tutelary role over the government at Paris, the sovereignty of the French monarch would be respected, and limits would be placed on the powers of the occupying forces.
Treaty provisions are one thing; interpretation and implementation are another. Gradually, however, Allied officers and French administrators, often in cooperation, imposed control over fractious elements and by mid-1816 relations between occupiers and occupied began to improve. Preventing Allied forces from conducting requisitioning and ignoring the authority of French officials were critical steps. Building barracks so that troops were not billeted with French citizens also helped, as did agreement that both sides would prosecute and punish their own accused. Complaint never ended, but it could be alleviated by at times harsh punishment of soldiers by Allied courts martial, and of French citizens through prosecution by the royal courts.
It was in the interests of Allied officers and French officials to reduce hostility between soldiers and citizens. Haynes presents a wealth of evidence of private and public engagements designed to give an example of cordiality - family dinners, banquets, balls, and the like. Especially at elite levels, the French and Allied officers or statesmen often mixed in ceremonies, spectacles, festivals, theaters, reading rooms, philosophical societies, and salons. Signs of accommodation could also be discerned at lower social levels - peasants took note when allied troops helped harvest crops or put out fires, and the French could prove generous in caring for sick or wounded Allied soldiers. Given the number of occupiers and the duration of their stay, there was extensive intercourse, sexual and otherwise, and as a sense of normalcy increased, relative harmony emerged. Gradually understanding increased and hatred dissipated. However, it is difficult to assess whether these trends constituted widespread reconciliation. As the author argues, there was a wide spectrum of response between the poles of collaboration and resistance, and it worth noting that violent incidents spiked in 1817 as the number of occupying troops diminished, and again in 1818 at the time of the liberation. Much good work was done, but the subsequent peace also resulted from Allied firmness. The Duke of Wellington, commander of the occupying forces, threatened to increase the number of occupying troops when the French government fell behind in a payment, and the French were given little cause to doubt Allied unity if confronted by French expansionism.
Roughly at the center of Our Friends is a chapter entitled ‘Cosmopolitanism’ (167-208). Based largely on developments in Paris, the chapter typifies the work as a whole in that the author argues that both cosmopolitanism and nationalism were fostered by the occupation. Superficially, the argument might seem contradictory, but it does make sense that encountering large numbers of foreigners would reduce parochialism on both sides. While the revival of international travel produced a resurgence of elite sociability and renewed the role of Paris as a European capital, cross-cultural contact also produced anxiety. Elite and common people alike were fascinated by foreign attire (especially military uniforms), music, and dance. Critics often satirized or caricatured foreigners, but there was extensive mutual borrowing in fashion and cuisine. When foreigners returned home, they spread French cookbooks, and meanwhile Paris experienced an explosion of foreign-language publication. A budding generation of French writers would be profoundly influenced by their introduction to the British Romantics, but French desire to reassert cultural ascendency then gave rise to the notorious battle of the classics versus the romantics.
Such cultural developments were the more-or-less spontaneous result of contact among differing peoples, but, as Haynes elucidates, the occupation also affected the French state and economy in more direct ways (211-243). The price of liberation was fulfilment of the Second Treaty of Paris, and sheer necessity forced the French to undertake extensive fiscal reform. To secure the legitimacy of the Bourbon Monarchy both at home and abroad, the state had to pay debts accumulated by Napoleon, war reparations, the claims of foreign nationals, and occupation costs. Moreover, in the budget of 1816 the state undertook to indemnify victims of the invasions of 1814-1815, rejecting the demands of ultra-royalists that Imperial debts be repudiated, and compensating individuals who had been subjected to often partisan extraordinary taxes. All of these obligations put French public credit under enormous pressure. Tax increases, bond issues, and loans from international financiers in exchange for government securities met costs, but public debt tripled between 1815 and 1818. Public credit would be restored, but the cost of financing the debt would then consume from one-fifth to one-quarter of public revenues over the next decade.
Ultimately the state emerged in improved financial shape, and in some regards the occupation contributed to economic recovery. Allied forces spent much of their pay in France, French suppliers of goods and services were kept busy, and some foreigners introduced new technologies. France experienced economic growth rates of 3.7% between 1815 and 1820 as governments adopted a mix of liberal and protectionist policies designed to encourage what the French did well (212-213). After the collapse of Napoleon’s Continental System and Blockade, British commerce posed major challenges to the economic reconstruction of all continental states, and French governments responded with initiatives ranging from investment in transportation and communications, creation of the école des mines, and preferential tariffs designed to encourage the textile and steel industries. To what extent these measures can be attributed directly to the occupation, however, seems unclear. Perhaps the answer lies in the role of the occupation in contributing to peace and stability, rather than to Allied advice. Still, the extraction of wealth from France remains striking. In 1821 foreign investors held perhaps half of the 4,174 billion francs of French debt, and French gross domestic production would lag in the 1820s as public debt left little room for private investors (223).
The provision of stability also appears to have been the essential contribution of the occupation to French political reform (244-312). Drawing upon the correspondence of the Allied Council of Ambassadors, Haynes demonstrates that Russian ambassador Pozzo di Borgo and Wellington grew increasingly apprehensive over the ultra-royalist promotion of reaction in 1815, and were particularly displeased by ultra-royalist demands that Imperial debts be repudiated in debates over the budget of 1816. Allied pressure on the duc de Richelieu, foreign minister and leader of the government, and Louis XVIII certainly contributed to the dissolution of the Chambre introuvable in the summer of 1816, although there were domestic forces, centered around the ducDecazes, Minister of Police and personal favorite of the King, which were also involved. The support of Allied officers for moderate royalists in the elections of October 1816 was also helpful, and the elections yielded a moderate royalist majority in the Chamber of Deputies. The Allies thus helped to establish the context in which liberal reform subsequently occurred. It is difficult to discern to what extent the Allied Council of Ambassadors actually expressed support of the electoral law of February 1817, the military reform law of November 1818, or the press law of 1819, or to what extent they directly influenced the legislation, but it is fair to conclude that “out of the occupation emerged a more liberal compromise between the Old Regime and Revolution” (258).
It is also instructive to note that the constitutional role of parliament and representative government remained tenuous in the 1820s, until the return of revolution in 1830 cemented the Charter while jettisoning the Bourbon monarch. In that regard, regime change had been only half successful.
[29] Haynes herself points to the gathering forces of reaction that was apparent at the time of the liberation. Wellington was already expressing alarm at the advance of the French Left in elections, and Richelieu ultimately resigned over the liberal reforms. From this perspective, the progressive character of the occupation of guarantee appears to have derived from a scenario in which the Russians and British saw in reform a means to prevent revolution. The influence of Prince Metternich over the occupation of guarantee appears to have been limited, but he was gradually gaining influence over Prussian King Frederick William III and, more importantly, Tsar Alexander I of Russia. Judging by the reactionary character of Austrian regime change in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1821, it was well for the French that the occupation ended when it did.
In sum, Our Friends greatly enhances our understanding of not just the occupation of guarantee, but also of the era in which it occurred. The occupation set important, largely positive, precedents for the future, partly due to its negotiated terms, but especially due to the efforts on the ground of French administrators and Allied officers to exit from a state of war and enter one of durable peace. Moreover, by bringing so many people into contact for an extended period of time, it promoted awareness of other cultures, sometimes stirring national resentment, but also stimulating cosmopolitanism and a sense of being European. Due to Haynes’s work, we can view the occupation from a much more balanced perspective, seeing that while the immediate consequences of the occupation were harsh, positive developments also occurred. Necessity forced French governments to undertake financial reform and economic reconstruction, and the occupation contributed to stability, enabling French governments to secure liberal reforms of enduring consequence. By revisiting a neglected subject, Haynes thus brings significant advances in our understanding of the period, and of the nature of peacekeeping generally. This is a great accomplishment.
Response by Christine Haynes, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
I am grateful to Thomas Maddux for organizing this roundtable, to Katherine Aaslestad for introducing it, and to Edward Kolla, Robert Alexander, and Ido de Haan for their deep, thoughtful, and probing readings of my new book. I am thrilled to see this book featured on H-Diplo. Having started my career as a cultural historian, focused on publishing and authorship in nineteenth-century France, I was forced to re-tool considerably for this project on military occupation in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. In addition to exploring new archival materials, I had to familiarize myself with other historiographical fields, particularly military and diplomatic history. While I am still a newcomer to these fields, I think that the resulting book does offer a number of insights regarding the ‘new’ diplomatic history, peacemaking, and international law, in the still relatively understudied period of the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.
In writing about the largely forgotten ‘occupation of guarantee’ that followed these wars, I aimed above all to understand how it re-shaped relations between ordinary French and their former enemies. Inspired by John Dower’s magnificent book on the American occupation of Japan after World War II, I sought to understand the cross-cultural ‘embrace’ between occupiers and occupied.
[30] At the same time, I strove to analyze how this occupation fit into the broader transition from war to peace, or what the French term
sortie de guerre (“exiting from war”).
[31] In contrast to traditional diplomatic and political histories of the period after 1815, which focus on the Congress of Vienna and the resulting Concert of Europe, I wanted to highlight the way in which this transition from war depended on a variety of other institutions, practices, and actors, including not just the multinational army of occupation and its commander, Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, but also war reparations and the international bankers who financed them, an international border-fortress rebuilding program, and the newly established Council of Allied Ambassadors.
[32] Like the ‘new,’ more cultural diplomatic history exemplified by the work of Jennifer Mori, for instance, or the recent analysis of the origins of modern ‘security culture’ that Beatrice de Graaf, Ido de Haan, and Brian Vick were developing independently at the same time, my book tries to show how new ideas about peacemaking were implemented on the ground after 1815.
[33] Of course, as these three insightful reviews point out, the resulting narrative raises a number of questions about this occupation’s place in the broader history of international relations.
First of all, as Ido de Haan suggests, is the question of how and why the ‘occupation of guarantee’ against revolution in France was forgotten, not just among scholars, but also by the French people themselves. As de Haan notes, citing a number of works that all appeared in my book’s footnotes, the occupation of 1815-1818 has not been entirely neglected. However, as he admits, many of these histories are infused with an anti-Prussian perspective, which was exacerbated by subsequent conflicts between France and Prussia/Germany. Moreover, as I emphasize in the book’s introduction, these studies have focused on a particular national force or French locality, rather than on the role of the multinational occupation as a whole in post-war reconstruction and reconciliation. Outside of the region that was occupied, until very recently this occupation had been largely forgotten. In his review, de Haan suggests, more explicitly than I did in the book, why this might be the case. The song by Béranger with which I end the book indeed called for this episode, which perpetuated divisions between the nations of Europe, to be forgotten, in the interest of peace. Over the following century, it was so well forgotten (except in moments of renewed French tension with Prussia/Germany) that it failed to be considered seriously as a model for peacekeeping after the Great War. Only after 1945, in an effort to avoid the problems of a punitive peace like the Treaty of Versailles, was this approach to peacekeeping reinvented, but without recognition of this earlier model.
[34]
Another question, raised by Edward Kolla, is whether in the end the occupiers were enemies or friends. In response to his concern that my account of the relationship between occupiers and occupied is too balanced, I can say only that, yes indeed, the answer is ‘both.’ This may be an unsatisfactory answer, but as in most other occupations, especially peacekeeping (as opposed to war-time or imperial) ones, there was a wide range of relationships between a state of war and one of reconciliation. Throughout the book, I was careful to show how the experience of both occupiers and occupied varied with a number of factors, including class, nationality, language, region, and chronology. As in virtually all other military occupations, the occupiers remained ‘enemies’ to many of the occupied, long after they departed in 1818. However, what makes this occupation particular, if not unique, and modern is the way in which both sides (especially elite Allied officers and civil authorities, but also ordinary soldiers and French inhabitants) worked to accommodate each other, even if they did not become true ‘friends,’ toward the new goals of national reconstruction and international reconciliation.
De Haan and Robert Alexander both raise questions about the connection between the occupation of guarantee and the economic and political reconstruction of France, which I detail in Chapters 7 and 8. In my effort to re-examine the early years of the Restoration in France through the lens of the occupation, I certainly do not mean to suggest that the occupation was a direct cause of all economic trends or political developments in the late 1810s. However, I do think it was a key part of the economic and political context, which has heretofore been overlooked in most surveys of this period of French history. To take just political reconstruction, while the Allies did not play a direct role in legislative reform of the electoral process, the military, and the press between 1816 and 1819, they did (in conjunction with particular French ministers, such as Richelieu and Decazes, as Alexander notes) force the dissolution of the Ultraroyalist Chamber of Deputies in mid-1816, which was critical for the passage of more moderate legislation and more open public debate.
As Alexander emphasizes, this relatively liberal moment was soon followed by a conservative reaction, not just in France, but across Europe. This reaction would provoke another revolution in France, a little more than ten years after the Allied troops evacuated. However, even if the regime change was only “half successful” in France, as Alexander suggests, it was successful enough to solidify a parliamentary system which, despite repeated challenges, would survive across the nineteenth century. Arguably, this “half successful” regime was even more successful than other contemporary constitutional governments, including in the United Kingdom, where reform movements (often led by veterans, some of whom had participated in the occupation of France) were violently suppressed. Here, I should note that while I did indeed err in situating Pierre Rain in the era of World War II, his comment in 1908 (during similar anxiety about national inferiority vis-à-vis Germany) that France’s “supreme humiliation” in 1815 was “the greatest aid to its regeneration” was very similar to the view of historians writing during that later conflict, such as Félix Ponteil, who marveled at how “France, crushed, trampled, mutilated, in 1815, raised herself up with a magnificent spirit in just a few years.”
[35]
Given my main questions and sources, this is indeed a Franco-centric story—a critique, raised here by de Haan, that I had fully anticipated. Focused on the implementation of peacekeeping on the ground, I do give short shrift to “the ways in which the policies of the Allied forces hung together with wider concerns about European security,” including Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich’s plan for a European police network, described in a piece by Beatrice de Graaf, which I was able to read only in the final stage of my project.
[36] De Graaf’s complementary work on the Allied Council of Ambassadors will certainly help us to understand the critical role it played in reconstructing politics, not just in France, but also across Europe in the years after 1815. Like my own discussion of how Allied support for the restored monarchy paradoxically fueled Bonapartism, such new work is illuminating how the post-war ‘security culture’ was challenged by the persistence of revolutionary sentiment. As Stella Ghervas has noted, there was a distinction in this post-war settlement between (international) ‘peace’ and (domestic) ‘security,’ and, as de Haan suggests in his conclusion, by stationing foreign soldiers in France for three years, the occupation actually helped to spread revolutionary ideas—a side-effect which deserves further investigation in records regarding those soldiers after they returned home.
[37]
De Haan also faults me for limiting the temporal scope of the book so tightly. While I do mention the earlier French occupations in satellite republics during the 1790s and the bilateral committees organized by the Prussian Baron vom Stein as Allied armies ‘liberated’ the French Empire from Napoleon in late 1813 (3-4), I plead guilty (at the behest of my editor, who insisted on limiting the page count) to focusing on the period of the occupation of guarantee itself. However, although they were outside the scope of this book, these precursors—and particularly the bilateral committees of 1813-1814—certainly deserve additional research to trace the origins of the post-war ‘security culture’ in the preceding decades.
Ultimately, the many salient issues raised by all three reviewers boil down to one key question: How new was the occupation of guarantee in the history of military occupation, peace-keeping, and international law? In the book, I argue that it represented a significant shift in all three realms. The reviewers, especially Kolla and de Haan, question whether this was really the case. As evidence, they cite the earlier French occupations of satellite republics; the persistence of aristocratic traditions of war and peace; and early modern theorists of the law of war, particularly Hugo Grotius and Emer de Vattel, as well as later incarnations of jus ad bellum in the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the United Nations Charter.
Regarding the earlier French occupations of neighboring territories such as the Rhineland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy in the 1790s, while these ‘sister’ republics were justified by the new theory of ‘popular sovereignty,’ they were treated in practice as vassals or ‘client states,’ not fully sovereign entities, as I asserted in my book and Kolla himself acknowledges in his book
Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution.
[38] In contrast, the post-war ‘occupation of guarantee’ against revolution in France was designed to ensure the stability and independence of the new (restored) regime. While the occupying forces did extract reparations and requisitions (and art) from the defeated, as allowed by treaty, they respected the sovereignty of the occupied government, at all levels.
In terms of peacekeeping and international law, the occupation of guarantee was one tool of what de Graaf terms a “masterpiece of change management” after 1815.
[39] Like other mechanisms for managing this change such as the Council of Allied Ambassadors, it mixed new and old practices, including the aristocratic sociability emphasized by Kolla in his second minor point. However, elite fraternization was now employed in the interest of reconciling whole peoples, rather than just dynastic sovereigns. In other words, it was designed to ensure a more ‘total’ peace, an idea which originated in the Enlightenment but did not come to fruition until the return of Napoleon in March of 1815 forced the Allies to develop a new approach to pacifying and rebuilding the twice-defeated nation. Although in some ways this new approach to peace resembled the old aristocratic style of international relations, it was motivated by fear of the new style of revolutionary ‘total’ war. Kolla questions whether the term ‘peacekeeping’ is anachronistic to characterize the occupation of guarantee. But that is in fact how its architects conceived of it. Realizing that the return of Napoleon necessitated a different, more ‘total’ settlement than the peace treaty of the previous year, the Duke of Wellington nonetheless argued for a temporary occupation (and, compared to more punitive Allied leaders, a more reasonable financial indemnity) rather than a permanent cession of territory. In a letter to the British foreign minister Lord Castelereagh, on 11 August 1815, he wrote:
In my opinion, then, we ought to continue to keep our great object, the genuine peace and tranquility of the world, in our view, and shape our arrangement so as to provide for it…With this view I prefer the temporary occupation of some of the strong places, and to maintain for a time a strong force in France, both at the expense of the French Government, and under strict regulation, to the permanent cession of even all the places which in my opinion ought to be occupied for a time. These measures will not only give us, during the period of occupation, all the military security which could be expected from the permanent cession, but, if carried into execution in the spirit in which they are conceived, they are in themselves the bond of peace.
[40]
In his conception of the use of occupation (and reparations) for peace-making, Wellington was informed by earlier legal norms developed by Grotius and Vattel, whom he had most certainly read.
[41] Moreover, he anticipated later norms regarding occupation and the transition between war and peace more generally. In suggesting this, I am neither conflating the positivist settlement of 1815 with the Geneva and Hague conventions nor suggesting that the line from ‘natural law’ to positivist approaches to war was neat or linear; I am just insisting that this settlement constituted a key, transitional moment—mixing older and newer approaches—in the history of occupation and the law of war, which (aside from recent work by Peter Stirk) has been overlooked between the early modern period and the late nineteenth century. As Stirk has noted, the distinction between conquest and occupation was codified in 1819 by Jean Louis Klüber, who himself participated in the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle where it was decided to end the occupation of guarantee in France, in
Droit des gens moderne de l’Europe.
[42] But more research is needed to understand how ideas and practices of non-belligerent occupation spread and evolved between the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and later nineteenth-century codifications, beginning with the Lieber Code of 1863.
As Kolla notes in his conclusion, the French Revolution and Napoleonic era remain relatively neglected in the history of international law. One might add, in the history of occupation and peace-making, if not diplomacy, too. I hope that my book—along with the seminal work of the team of scholars investigating ‘security culture’ in this period—will provoke new research on this key historical moment.
Notes
[1] Several conferences took place in 2014 and 2015, including “The Congress of Vienna and Its Global Dimension,” University of Vienna 2014; “Vienna 1815: The Making of a European Security Culture,” Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, 2014; “The Power of Peace: New Perspectives on the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815),” Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, 2014; and “The Congress of Vienna 1814-1815: Making Peace after Global War,” New York City, Columbia University, 2015.
UN Chronicle, the magazine of the United Nations, dedicated the December 2014 volume
Conference Diplomacy 1815–2015 to the bicentennial of the Congress of Vienna; see
http://unchronicle.un.org/issue/conference-diplomacy/. See also Katherine Aaslestad, “Serious Work for a New Europe: The Congress of Vienna after Two Hundred Years,”
Central European History 48:2 (2015): 224-237.
[2] Brian E. Vick,
The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
[3] Paul W. Schroeder,
The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Mark Jarrett,
The Congress of Vienna and its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014); Wolfram Siemann,
Metternich, Strategist and Visionary, (Cambridge: University of Harvard Press, 2019).
[4] Beatrice de Graaf, “The Allied Machine: The Conference of Ministers in Paris and the Management of Security,” in Beatrice de Graaf, Ido de Haan and Brian Vick (eds),
Securing Europe after Napoleon 1815 and the New European Security Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019): 130-149.
[5] David A. Bell,
The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
[6] There are by now a series of studies that testify of the rediscovery of the Restoration period. A good introduction is Martin Lyons,
Post-Revolutionary Europe, 1815-1856 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). An interesting collection of articles on the domestic dimension of post-Napoleonic Europe is David Laven and Lucy Riall, eds.,
Napoleon's Legacy: Problems of Government in Restoration Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000).
[7] Henry Houssaye,
1815. La Seconde Restauration–La Terreur Blanche (Paris: Perrin, 1905), 403 and 490.
[8] Pierre Rain,
L’Europe et la Restauration des Bourbons 1814-1818 (Paris: Perrin, 1908); Max Bruchet, “L'invasion et l'occupation du département du Nord par les Alliés (1814-1818),”
Revue du Nord 6:24 (1920): 261-299 and 7:25 (1921): 30-61; Roger André,
Occupation de la France par les Alliés en 1815 (juillet-novembre) (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1924); Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny,
La Restauration (Paris: Flammarion, 1955): 161.
[9] Marc Blancpain,
La vie quotidienne dans la France du Nord sous les occupations (1814-1944) (Paris: Hachette, 1983); Thomas D. Veve,
The Duke of Wellington and the British Army of Occupation in France, 1815-1818 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992); Volker Wacker,
Die alliierte Besetzung Frankreichs in den Jahren 1814 bis 1818 (Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac, 2001); Jacques Hantraye,
Les cosaques aux Champs-Élysées. L'occupation de la France après la chute de Napoléon (Paris: Belin, 2005); Yann Guerrin,
La France après Napoléon. Invasions et occupations, 1814-1818 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014).
[10] Beatrice de Graaf,
Tegen de terreur. Hoe Napoleon veilig werd na Napoleon (Amsterdam: Prometheus 2018); see for part of her arguments in English: Beatrice de Graaf, “The Allied Machine: The Conference of Ministers in Paris and the Management of Security,” in: Beatrice de Graaf, Ido de Haan and Brian Vick (eds.),
Securing Europe after Napoleon 1815 and the New European Security Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019): 130-149.
[11] Matthias Schulz,
Normen und Praxis. Das Europäische Konzert der Großmächte als Sicherheitsrat, 1815-1860 (München: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2009); Brian Vick,
The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See various contributions to the Palgrave series War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850, notably Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann and Jane Rendall (eds.)
Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians. Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790-1820 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Alan Forrest, Étienne François and Karen Hagemann (eds.),
War Memories. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Modern European Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Michael Broers, Peter Hicks and Augustín Guimera eds.,
The Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012); Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann War and Michael Rowe (eds.),
War, Demobilization and Memory. The Legacy of War in the Era of Atlantic Revolutions(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Graeme Callister,
War, Public Opinion and Policy in Britain, France and the Netherlands, 1785-1815 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Katherine Astbury and Mark Philp (eds.)
Napoleon's Hundred Days and the Politics of Legitimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). See also the special issue “Ending War: Revisiting the Aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars,” edited and introduced by Christine Haynes, Denise Davidson and Jennifer Heuer,
Journal of Military History 80:1 (January 2016): 1-192.
[12] Christine Haynes,
Lost Illusions: The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
[13] See Emmanuel de Waresquiel and Benoît Yvert,
Histoire de la Restauration 1814-1830. Naissance de la France moderne (Paris: Perrin, 1996); Alain Laqyuièze,
Les origines du régime parlementaire en France (1814-1848) (Paris: PUF, 2002); Pierre Rosanvallon,
Le moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985) ; Pierre Rosanvallon,
La monarchie impossible. Les Chartes de 1814 et de 1830 (Paris: Fayard, 1994).
[14] Rain,
L’Europe et la Restauration, 476. Haynes’s claim that Rain was “writing during another occupation in World War II” (256), while it was actually in 1908, is one of the few slips of the pen in her otherwise meticulously edited book.
[15] Castlereagh to Stuart, 22 July 1817, quoted in De Graaf,
Tegen de terreur, 259.
[16] David A. Bell,
The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
[17] See for example the 3 March 1795, treaty between the French and Batavian republics, described in Edward James Kolla,
Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 219.
[18] Kolla,
Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution 255-256.
[19] David Armitage, “The Declaration of Independence and International Law,”
William and Mary Quarterly 59:1 (2002): 54-55.
[20] Although problematic, see Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro,
The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017).
[21] Stephen C. Neff,
War and the Law of Nations: A General History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 85.
[22] See Martti Koskenniemi,
The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2.
[23] Emer de Vattel,
The Law of Nations,
Or, Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns (1758), book III, “Of War,” chapter XIII, “Of Acquisitions by War, and particularly of Conquests,” §201 “Conquest of the whole state.”
[24] De Vattel,
The Law of Nations.
[25] Randall Lesaffer,
“In the Embrace of France: An Introduction,” in Beatrix Jacobs, Raymond Kubben, and Randall Lesaffer, eds., In the Embrace of France: The Law of Nations and Constitutional Law in the French Satellite States of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Age (1789-1815): Acts of the International Conference Held at Tilburg University on 27 & 28 April 2006 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2008), 1.
[26] Due to the nature of her subject, Haynes does not say much about developments in the south or west. For a recent work on the latter, see Pierre Triomphe,
1815: La Terreur Blanche (Toulouse: Privat, 2017).
[27] For an example, see Yann Guérin,
La France après Napoléon: Invasions et occupations, 1814-1818 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014).
[28] For a recent discussion of Allied objectives, see Mark Jarrett,
The Congress of Vienna and its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon(London: I.B. Tauris, 2013).
[29] See Robert Alexander,
Re-writing the French Revolutionary Tradition: Liberal Opposition and the fall of the Bourbon Monarchy (Cambridge: University Press, 2003).
[30] John Dower,
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton and The New Press, 1999).
[31] See, for example, Antoine Prost,
In the Wake of War: “Les Anciens Combattants” and French Society, 1914-1939, trans. Helen McPhail (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002); Bruno Cabanes,
La victoire endeuillée: La sortie de guerre des soldats francais, 1918-1920 (Paris: Seuil, 2004); Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Christophe Prochasson,
Sortir de la Grande Guerre: Le monde et l’après-1918 (Paris: Tallandier, 2008); Bruno Cabanes and Guillaume Piketty, eds.,
Retour à l’intime au sortir de la guerre (Paris: Tallandier, 2009).
[32] See, for example, Henry Kissinger,
A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problem of Peace, 1812-1822 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957); Paul W. Schroeder,
The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Michael Howard,
The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Adam Zamoyski,
Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007); Mark Jarrett,
The Congress of Vienna and Its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013); Brian E. Vick,
The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Maartje Abbenhuis,
An Age of Neutrals: Great Power Politics, 1815-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
[33] Jennifer Mori,
The Culture of Diplomacy: Britain in Europe, 1750-1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Beatrice de Graaf, Ido de Haan, and Brian Vick, eds.,
Securing Europe after Napoleon: 1815 and the New European Security Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
[34] For a longer discussion of the way in which the memory, or really forgetting, of the occupation was shaped by subsequent conflicts between France and Germany, see my article “Remembering and Forgetting the First Modern Occupations of France,”
Journal of Modern History 88:3 (2016): 535-571.
[35] Félix Ponteil,
La Chute de Napoléon 1er et la crise française de 1814-1815 (Paris: Aubier, 1943), 5.
[36] Beatrice de Graaf, “The Allied Machine: The Conference of Ministers in Paris and the Management of Security, 1815-18,” in De Graaf, De Haan, and Vick, eds.,
Securing Europe after Napoleon, 130-149.
[37] Stella Ghervas, “The Long Shadow of the Congress of Vienna: From International Peace to Domestic Disorders,”
Journal of Modern European History 13:4 (2015): 458-463.
[38] Edward Kolla,
Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 6.
[39] De Graaf, “The Allied Machine,” 148.
[40] Wellington to Viscount Castlereagh, K. G. Paris, 11 Aug. 1815,
The Dispatches of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, ed. Lt. Col. Gurwood, 12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1836-1839), 12:596-600.
[41] On Wellington’s development as a “political general,” see Huw Davies,
Wellington’s Wars: The Making of a Military Genius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
[42] Peter M. R. Stirk,
The Politics of Military Occupation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 11. Oddly, in a more recent book,
A History of Military Occupation from 1792 to 1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), Stirk gives short shrift to the occupation of France between 1815 and 1818.
