Circulation and Transnational Memory

This final chapter examines the international scope of the Napoleonic war memoir genre. Widespread and often illegal practices of reprinting and translating veterans’ autobiographies ensured that narratives of the Peninsular War circulated extensively across borders throughout the nineteenth century, not only within Europe but also across the Atlantic, to both the United States and Latin America. Peninsular War memoirs became a transnational genre, crossing national and linguistic divides. This did not, however, result in a peaceful shared memory of the war. Instead, the reprinting and translation of memoirs was unequal, with Spanish accounts rarely reaching British and French audiences, and hostile, with foreign soldiers’ tales being severely edited and disputed by translators. This nationalistic reaction to the circulation of military memoirs laid the foundations for enduring grand narratives about what is in British history the Peninsular War, in French history the War in Spain, and in Spanish history the War of Independence.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter provides a summary of the key points made in the book. It emphasises that a new methodology is needed for analysing Napoleonic war memoirs, and indeed war memoirs in general, one which includes a closer consideration of the active role of veterans as authors, the material history of the book, and a comparative, transnational approach. Seen through these lenses, Peninsular War veterans’ autobiographies and the commercial publishing industry that developed around them over the nineteenth century are responsible for shaping the modern war memoir, and for laying the foundations for the mass popular appeal of tales of soldiers’ war experiences today.

Before the Ink Dries

Peninsular War veterans often faced a difficult transition back into civilian society after the conflict, receiving inadequate pay and little official commemoration. This led to a common fear, expressed explicitly in their memoirs, that their stories had not been and would not be properly told. This chapter demonstrates that many soldiers-turned-authors deliberately used their autobiographies to take issue with the academic, historical record of the war. It reveals that, in Spain, the first official history of the Peninsular War was written by a group of veterans, who helped to choose the Spanish name for the conflict: la Guerra de la Independencia. It then shows how veterans’ memoirs contributed to the creation of distinct national narratives of the war in Spain, Britain, and France, examining different representations of the ‘Other’, depictions of the guerrilla war and its leaders, and praise or criticism for the regular army.

Introduction

The Peninsular War (1808–1814) was one of the most colourful and brutal campaigns of the Napoleonic period. It prompted hundreds of veterans from the armies of the participating countries (Spain, Portugal, Britain, and France) to write and publish autobiographies about their experiences. These war memoirs are well-known to historians as rich and compelling sources, but relying on them for direct eyewitness testimony about the experience of war poses significant methodological problems. Military memoirs, including those from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, tend to be written in hindsight and shaped to an unknown extent by selective or traumatised memory. They may be unrepresentative of the majority of experiences, written in very different styles and formats, published immediately after the war, or only made public decades after the author’s death. Taking these challenges as a starting point, this introductory chapter lays out a new methodological framework for ‘what to do with war memoirs’, including considering closely the identities and motives of the authors, tracing the material histories of the books themselves, and employing a comparative, transnational approach to the history of the military memoir genre. It also summarises the relevant historiography, emphasising the lack of attention so far given to Spanish and Portuguese wartime autobiography, and the long-term importance of Peninsular War memoirs as a precedent for the twentieth-century ‘soldier’s tale’.

The Language of War

This chapter provides an account of how Peninsular War memoir-writers depicted being a soldier in the early nineteenth century. It considers both positive and negative representations of the experience of war, covering themes such as daily life on campaign, comradeship, ideas of martial masculinity, the role of women, and descriptions of violence both on and off the battlefield. In doing so, it highlights the ways in which Napoleonic veterans innovated on previous war writing and contradicted broader, patriotic narratives of the conflict. In the last part of the chapter, the concept of the veteran as active, politicised author is introduced, with examples of soldiers who used their published memoirs to change or challenge national military policy.

Iberian War Writing

This chapter explores the roots of the modern war memoir genre. It debunks the enduring idea that in the early nineteenth century the Iberian peninsula did not produce military autobiographies, or any autobiographical writing at all, comparable to the output in north-western Europe. Making the argument for a broader definition of ‘war memoir’, it highlights the numerous ephemeral, polemical pamphlets (also known as manifiestos) written by Spanish veterans during the Peninsular War. It presents these military authors as ambitious, high-ranking career officers and shrewd guerrilla leaders, who used memoir-writing as a political tool to defend their actions on the battlefield, assert their suitability for command, and win popular support. In doing so, it emphasises the juridical and bureaucratic origins of Spanish life writing, dating back to colonial relaciones de méritos y servicios and an elite eighteenth-century service culture, as well as the shifts caused during the Peninsular War by the forced abdication of the king and the temporary declaration of freedom of the press.

Scribblomania

The end of the Napoleonic Wars coincided with a phenomenal rise in the number and variety of war memoirs being written by veterans of all ranks, yet historians have mostly argued that these books made little impact on the general reading public. This chapter overturns that idea. It uses research into publishers’ archives, library catalogues, and later editions of Peninsular War memoirs to demonstrate that these soldiers’ tales sold well, made significant profits for their editors and publishers, and became increasingly imitated and parodied as the nineteenth century went on (including by Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle). It argues that these books should be seen as part of a commercial genre of war writing, with the curated representations of conflict they contained being deliberately marketed to different readers via cheap or luxury editions, illustrations, and decorative bindings.

The Myth of the Accidental Author

This chapter explores the concept of soldiers as professional authors, confronting the enduring myth of ‘accidental’ military autobiography. In their prefaces, veterans of the Peninsular War frequently confessed their astonishment at having produced long, descriptive memoirs, professing not to have the slightest literary talent nor education, nor the least authorial ambition, claims that have largely been taken at face value by historians. Using evidence from publishers’ archives, this chapter reveals the immense editing, publishing, and marketing activity that in fact underlay the facade of the simple soldier’s tale. It shows the authors of many Peninsular War memoirs to have been actively involved in the publication of their books, knowledgeable about the industry, and eager for success in the literary rather than military world, raising questions for future historians about the tension between ‘authentic’ eyewitness testimony and edited accounts.

Editors and Afterlives

This chapter reveals the complex afterlives of Peninsular War memoirs, many of which outlived their authors and continued to be published and re-published in different formats over the long nineteenth century. It considers the many different groups of people involved behind the scenes in the production of a Napoleonic military memoir: family members, especially women; editors; publishers; indexers; printers; illustrators; archivists; lawyers; even luxury booksellers. It shows in detail the alterations that were made to veterans’ autobiographies over time, from omitting or adding sections of text to changing the title, inserting portraits of the author, or commissioning artist’s impressions of his battles. Along the way, some war memoirs underwent an almost total transformation, becoming dry family biographies, ‘boy’s own’ adventure stories, regimental histories, consumer objects, or, in the decades before the First World War in Britain and France, tools for national military education, targeted to children.