What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion 9780226493138

Citation preview

What Nostalgia Was

Ch i c a g o St u d i e s i n Pr a c t i c e s o f Me a n i n g A series edited by Andreas Glaeser, William Mazzarella, William H. Sewell Jr., Kaushik Sunder Rajan, and Lisa Wedeen Published in collaboration with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory http://ccct.uchicago.edu

Recent books in the series The Mana of Mass Society by William Mazzarella The Sins of the Father: Germany, Memory, Method by Jeffrey K. Olick The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano American Value: Migrants, Money, and Meaning in El Salvador and the United States by David Pedersen Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt by Hussein Ali Agrama The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–­1200 CE by William M. Reddy The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy by Andrea Muehlebach The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology by Nadia Abu El-­Haj Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua by Danilyn Rutherford Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism by Andreas Glaeser

What Nostalgia Was War, Empire, and the Time o f a D e a d ly E m ot i o n

Thomas Dodman

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of  brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­49280-­3 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­49294-­0 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­49313-­8 (e-­book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226493138.001.0001 Library of  Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dodman, Thomas, author. Title: What nostalgia was : war, empire, and the time of a deadly emotion / Thomas Dodman. Other titles: Chicago studies in practices of meaning. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of  Chicago Press, 2018. | Series: Chicago studies in practices of meaning Identifiers: LCCN 2017023896 | ISBN 9780226492803 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226492940 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226493138 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Nostalgia—History. | Nostalgia—France—History—19th century. | Nostalgia—France—History—18th century. | France—History—1789–1900. Classification: LCC BF575.N6 D63 2018 | DDC 302/.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023896 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Terry Bland and Martin Dodman

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Nostalgia as a Historical Problem  1 1 · Nostalgia in 1688 16 2  ·  The Reasons of a Passion  43 3 · The Lost Pays of the Patrie 63 4  ·  Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  93 5 · Golden Age 124 6  ·  Nostalgia in the Tropics  149 7 · Ubi bene, ibi patria: Nostalgia Fin de Siècle  172 Afterword: Nostalgia in History  191 List of  Abbreviations 197 Notes 199 Archival Sources 259 Index 263

Acknowledgments

This book has been over a decade in the making, and in writing acknowledgments for it I run the risk of eliciting a little (sic) nostalgia. Jan Goldstein and Bill Sewell have followed the project from beginning to end and guided me every step of the way, as rigorous scholars and as generous role models. Bill brought the manuscript before the editorial board of the Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning series and has devoted more time to reading chapter drafts than one could reasonably ask for. Leora Auslander and Moishe Postone were instrumental in framing the project in its early stages, ensuring that it grew in both scope and depth to actually become a book. That I should have become a historian at all, I owe to Rebecca Spang more than anyone else, for first setting the example and then constantly raising the bar. To you all, merci infiniment. From London to Paris and Chicago to Boston, many more people have offered precious help and priceless camaraderie—­all of  which seems terribly understated in a list of names. To Whitney Abernathy, Keith Baker, Ludivine Bantigny, Robin Bates, Michèle Baussant, David Bell, Venus Bivar, Julian Bourg, John Boyer, Bruno Cabanes, Paul Cheney, Jim Cronin, Denise Davidson, Quentin Deluermoz, Sean Dunwoody, Regan Eby, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Robin Fleming, Alan Forrest, Michael Geyer, Art Goldhammer, Jean-­Yves Grenier, Sébastien Greppo, Christine Haynes, Jennifer Heuer, Colin Jones, Dominique Kalifa, Kevin Kenny, Meredith Lair, Charlotte Ann Legg, Mark Loeffler, Susan Matt, Hervé Mazurel, Françoise Meltzer, Susan Morrissey, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Devin Pendas, Christy Pichichero, Jeffrey Ravel, Ginny Reinburg,  Jacques Revel,  Jessica Riskin, Sarah Ross, Dana Sajdi, Sylvia

x  Acknowledgments

Sellers-­Garcia, Owen Stanwood, Ronen Steinberg, Sylvain Venayre, Heather Welland, Alexia Yates, and Julia Young—­many thanks for many things in so many ways. Special thanks to Parker Everett, for everything from the Red Sox to Critical Historical Studies; and to everyone with whom I have talked and learned at the Social Theory and the Modern France workshops in Chicago, the Chicago Paris Center workshop, the Modern Europe Workshop at Boston College, and the Boston French history group. This book is the product of endless truffle hunting in archives and libraries, none of which would have been possible without the assistance of conserva­ tors and librarians. May they all be thanked for their thankless work, and in particular Camille Gargar, Marc Beaumelle, and Dominique Garric at the Archives du Musée du Services de Santé des Armées au Val-­de-­Grâce; Marie José Noël for granting access to her family archives; Emmanuelle Paulet Grandguillot at the Bibliothèque universitaire de Nantes (Collection Laënnec); Jean-­François Vincent and Henri Ferreira-­Lopez at the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé, Paris; and all the anonymous magasiniers whom I sent daily into the towers of the Bibliothèque nationale to hunt for uncataloged dissertations. I have received generous support over the years from the History Department and the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago; the History Department and Morrissey College of the Arts and Sciences at Boston College; the Marie Skłodowska-­Curie fellowships program; the Paris School of Economics; the Society for French Historical Studies; the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress; the Huntington Library; the Newberry Library; the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University; and, as I write these lines, the Mellon Foundation and the School of  Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. At the University of Chicago, Fadi Bardawil, Andreas Glaeser, Daragh Grant, William Mazzarella, Bill Sewell, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, and Lisa Wedeen helped frame the book’s larger picture within the series. Three anonymous reviewers provided essential feedback and suggestions for revisions. At the press, Priya Nelson, Dylan Mon­tanari, and Christine Schwab, along with Carol McGillivray, steered the manuscript safely into port. David Luljak expertly compiled the index. Earlier versions of material presented here have appeared in the Journal of Military History (chapter 4); Place and Locality in Modern France, edited by Patrick Young and Phil Walden (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) (chapter 5); and Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales and Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques (chapters 6 and 7).

Acknowledgments  xi

None of this could have been possible without the support and inspiration of my family—­Mum, Dad, and Ben—­who never said no but always asked why. My greatest debt of all is to Maïa Gabily, for your patience, encouragement, and that wide-­brimmed hat. Chiara and Paul have accompanied this project from the beginning, failing in repeated attempts at derailing the bandwagon but succeeding in ensuring that I will always look back upon these years with more than a hint of nostalgia. Princeton, October 2016

Introduction

Nostalgia as a Historical Problem It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings. sigmund freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

In the early nineteenth century nostalgia was less something one “felt” than something one “had,” in the way one might have tuberculosis, cholera, or a banal cold. It entailed seeing a doctor, who would examine the patient for a “melancholic expression,” or a “despondent physiognomy,” as well as a slew of physical signs including tachycardia, skin rashes, hyperhidrosis (excessive sweating), hearing difficulties, convulsions, heartburn, vomiting, diarrhea, and any rales or wheezing that a stethoscope might pick up in the chest. When satisfied with the diagnosis, the doctor could attempt to converse with the patient, prescribe an herbal infusion, or apply a dozen leeches to the anus, before deciding whether to recommend hospitalization or home care. The prognosis varied widely and could easily turn bleak in a matter of days, leading to severe emaciation, pulmonary edema, and other fatal complications. A routine autopsy might then reveal abnormal tissue inflammation and ulcerations in the brain, lungs, and intestinal tract—­all connected, so contemporary medical reports assured, to the original nostalgia.1 In short, the early 1800s was a time when nostalgia was a clinical disease (or a pathological condition with recognizable signs and symptoms), and when people not only had it, but also died of it. This book explains how this had come to be over the preceding hundred years and then ceased to be by the end of the century—­leaving us to indulge our nostalgic reveries without having to fear for our lives ever since. Despite its distinctly classical sound, nostalgia is a relatively recent thing, at least when measured against the deep history of humanity. Of course, the etymology of the word harkens back to the Greek root nostos, or homecoming, a theme that defines Homeric poetry—­whether in the Iliad or, most explicitly, the Odyssey—­and that can be found across ancient civilizations, from the Indian poem Mahabharata to the Epic of Gilgamesh and lesser-­known Egyptian tales. Figures of exile pervade the biblical tradition, and while longing for a home might not be a product of the fall, it may well be that of humankind’s

2  Introduction

sedentarization toward the end of the last glacial epoch (roughly 12,000 years ago, at the dawn of the Holocene).2 But tempting as they may be, these associations are equally deceptive, for the term “nostalgia” itself is of recent vintage, a neologism of the late seventeenth century. That it was an aspiring doctor who coined the word using Greek morphemes is indicative of the savant and medical matrix out of which nostalgia emerged. This is important, for while we may reasonably conjecture that humans have felt some kind of yearning at least ever since one of them decided “this is mine” and found others simple enough to believe him (to paraphrase Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s celebrated Discourse on Inequality), and while we can all agree that we long for a baffling array of things today, what we can’t reasonably say is that we have always been nostal­ gic (or, conversely, that nostalgia is some sort of hardwired “basic emotion”).3 In fact, we might well have never been “nostalgic” if only the term’s inventor had opted for “philopatridomania” or one of the other unwieldy neologisms he toyed with before choosing the more elegant one. Can we imagine our world today without nostalgia? Could we seriously go about our business feeling “philopatridomanic” for the good old days? The disposition to desire that which we no longer have (or have never really had) may well be a universal and transhistorical human trait—­a question fit for philosophers or psychologists. But for the historian this emotional disposition matters only in its changing forms of manifestation—­that is, within historically determinate contexts and logics specific to a time and place. It is only in the Rhineland in the late 1600s that a certain form of longing was deemed to be pathological and turned into a medical condition to be diagnosed, treated, and, if possible, prevented. Like depression in Japan in the 1990s, ADHD in the 2000s, or gluten intolerance today, this clinical form of nostalgia was symptomatic of an incipient medicalization of society, of the creation of treatable disorders where there previously were none.4 Conversely, its eventual disappearance from medical and coroner’s reports signaled a process of demedicalization whereby the longing was no longer deemed dangerous and instead became naturalized. As trite as it may be, we must reluctantly concede unwitting truth to the clever cliché that nostalgia “ain’t what it used to be.”5 This book is, precisely, about what it once was. * Viewed historically, nostalgia therefore appears as an example of what Ute Frevert has astutely called an emotion “lost and found,” that is, a particular kind of feeling that gained momentum and faded away in a dynamic historical

Nostalgia as a Historical Problem  3

economy of emotions.6 It was first identified in 1688 in the Swiss town of Basel, by a nineteen-­year-­old medical student from nearby Mulhouse. Johannes Hofer fused the ancient Greek words νόστος, or nostos (homecoming), and άλγος, or algos (pain or longing), to describe a violent “passion of the soul” (or what we might today call a mood disorder) caused by the “burning desire” to return home. As the etymology of the word and title of  his thesis—­Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe—­immediately reveal, this was a medicalized form of homesickness (Heimweh), a psychopathological response to displacement articulated primarily in space, as opposed to time. Hofer’s study succeeded in establishing a new diagnosis but has all but been forgotten since. It is available to us only in inadequate translation, and we know little about the circumstances in which it was written. This book begins, therefore, by navigating back to the upper Rhineland in its troubled, early modern age. To understand what drove Hofer to write about nostalgia, I seek clues both in a detailed exegesis of his surprising text and a sociopolitical contextualization of its medical imaginary. This clinical form of nostalgia was “lost” roughly two hundred years later, when most medical taxonomies dropped the diagnosis altogether. Isolated cases of nostalgia continued to be recorded thereafter, prompting the occasional call for a revamping of the disease entity. But to most people, the word itself had come to mean something quite different by the turn of the twentieth century: no longer a pathological form for homesickness but an innocuous, even comforting longing for the past—­an emotional disposition now tethered to time and memory. Few mourned the passing of clinical nostalgia in an age later to be known, fittingly enough, as a Belle Époque. We don’t even have a precise date to mark the end of its respectable medical career. In this book I have somewhat arbitrarily chosen 1884 as a reasonable proxy for a number of reasons, both general and that speak more specifically to my focus on France. The first reason has to do with changing conceptions of emotions in the Western world. The year 1884 was when the American psychologist William James published his landmark essay articulating a physiological conception of emotion that equated emotional experience with the perception of  bodily changes. (In short, we don’t cry because sad but are sad because made to cry.) Though it had nothing to say about nostalgia itself,  James’s article underscored a broader shift to an embodied, anticognitive (or anti-­intentionalist) understanding of emotion that, inter alia, helped transform nostalgia into an instinctual drive innate to human nature—­a process of naturalization that turned a pathological passion into a demedicalized emotion.7 As James’s colleague and correspon­ dent in Paris Théodule Ribot wrote a few years later, nostalgia had become an

4  Introduction

example of  “affective memory,” an innocuous “memory of the heart” best captured, perhaps, in the prose of Ribot’s contemporary Marcel Proust.8 The year 1884 also happens to be when the French army—­the single institution most familiar with clinical nostalgia up to that point—­officially recorded its last fatal case of  homesickness in the ranks. Over the previous two centuries, the condition had become a major occupational hazard for soldiers, wreaking havoc in armed forces around the globe and forcing military physicians to explore emotional breakdown decades before the discovery of psychogenic trauma (and the establishment of military psychiatric units) by the end of the century. As recently as the 1860s thousands of men were still being diagnosed with clinical nostalgia during the American Civil War, and only a few years before that up to 18,000 Sudanese conscripts were believed to have died because of homesickness in the Egyptian army. Swiss mercenaries were nostalgia’s first and iconic victims, but it undoubtedly was the French that paid the highest tribute to the disease, starting with lethal epidemics that allegedly decimated entire companies of conscripts at the outbreak of the revolutionary wars in the 1790s. At the time, this was blamed on the men’s indomitable attachment to the “pays” (an almost primal affection for home and place) and linguistic diversity that prevented them from integrating the revolutionaries’ new national army. By 1884, however, such debilitating atavism had apparently been overcome, at least according to official statistics. After all, these were the years when peasants supposedly became Frenchmen, trading localism for a newly imaginable national-­cum-­imperial community taught to school pupils as a collective “national novel” (roman national).9 This was a time for the Third Republic to un­­ veil newfound imperial ambitions overseas, not heed to its people’s “mal du pays” (homesickness). Except this was also the moment when the French—­like so many others elsewhere—­turned massively to invented traditions and renewed forms of regionalism, becoming, in the process, a nation of willful (and at times ardent) nostalgics (albeit in the demedicalized Belle Époque meaning of the word).10 Nostalgia was thus not simply “lost” in the late 1800s; it was also “found anew,” as it were, hollowed out of its pathogenic substance and plastered with a new meaning. In this respect it differs from what Ian Hacking has called “transient mental illnesses,” that is, meteoric psychiatric conditions (such as fugue syndrome) that come and go in a relatively short span of time, having briefly caught the popular imagination.11 For sure, clinical nostalgia had its own “golden age” in the 1820s and 1830s, when it outgrew medical discourse to reach a lay audience. Yet it remained in use for considerably longer than other fleeting nineteenth-­century conditions, such as monomania or neurasthenia, and did

Nostalgia as a Historical Problem  5

not simply disappear, phlogiston-­like, when it fell out of favor with physicians. Instead, it lived on to become a general cultural category, a universal—­if not quite a “basic”—­emotion that lies “at the very core of the modern condition,” in the words of one of its foremost contemporary scholars.12 Here the trajectory of nostalgia bears more resemblance with those of melancholy or hysteria, emotional syndromes with a long historical pedigree reaching all the way back to antiquity that have both entered our common lexicon following phases of medical interest (albeit with nothing like the currency that “nostalgia” has).13 If there undoubtedly is a certain transience to the history of nostalgia, it is a tortuous one drawn out over the longue durée. Nostalgia therefore confronts the historian as a historical problem, an emotional disposition at once historically determinate and one that outlived its own conditions of possibility, as it were, to become seemingly timeless. The same might be said for its geographical scope: born, as I will argue, out of a unique set of circumstances, it has become a global currency—­an example of cultural imperialism that paradoxically lays claim to an underdetermined form of subjectivity reproduced serially all around the world (and that we might therefore label “glocal”). The paradoxes go on, for what was once thought of as a longing for a lost authenticity has come to connote something thoroughly inauthentic, which smacks of ersatz emotion.14 In fact, the more we look at it, the more nostalgia perplexes. It always has: in the late 1700s the Scottish phy­ sician William Cullen dubbed it an “uncertain disease,” not being able to decide where, exactly, it should fit in the sprawling medical taxonomies that were the rage in his day. (He ended up placing it alongside bulimia and nymphoma­ nia.)15 Today psychologists assure us that this is a “positive emotion,” more sweet than bitter, which “soothes the self from existential pangs by solidifying and augmenting identity” (and which is therefore to be distinguished from a “genuine” disorder such as homesickness).16 For all those who still doubt, neuroscientists find answers aplenty in colorful brain neuroimaging, where Proust’s madeleine meets the MRI scanner.17 None of this is to say that the clinical form of nostalgia that interests me here was not really a disease, only an eye-­catching fad of some sort (although it was that too!). In this book I take seriously the historical ontology of nostal­ gia, an immaterial object “at once real and historical,” and that first “came into being” as an object of scientific enquiry, to paraphrase Lorraine Daston.18 In my reading nostalgia was neither “discovered” ready-­made, straight out of the box, nor was it “invented” ex nihilo, in a stroke of medical genius. Its “making” entailed a bit of  both, while also answering to abstract historical logics beyond any single person’s control. But was it truly ontos on, “really real,” and not

6  Introduction

another example of what is sometimes called “historical misdiagnosis”? The epistemological conundrums of retrospective diagnosis interest me only insofar as I seek to understand what clinical nostalgia actually meant to those who diagnosed it and those who were diagnosed with it. Whether or not the latter did in fact suffer from nostalgia, and not something else, is a moot point (as redundant as it is to ask today whether First World War soldiers actually suffered from “shell shock,” or as it might conceivably be one day to ask whether people really died of tuberculosis, or AIDS, in the same way as we suspect that thousands did not really succumb to the dreaded “English sweate” in late medieval Europe). What matters is that for roughly two centuries it made sense, for both medical and extramedical reasons, for doctors to diagnose their patients with something they called nostalgia and that the latter experienced as wrenching homesickness. It matters equally that nostalgia did not then just go away, but instead became something quite different, and yet so familiar it has been thought of as natural ever since. Chameleonlike, uncanny at times, nostalgia must be studied both empirically, as a historical object like any other (albeit an immaterial one), and reflexively, as a category of historical understanding itself. * Our nostalgia of today seems far removed from these metaphysical subtleties, a ubiquitous emotion seemingly triggered by the mere glimpse of a washed-­ out sepia-­tone photograph, but one singularly flattened in its meaning. In late 2015 a basic Google search produces roughly as many hits for the word as for “climate change,” “terrorism,” or the “Beatles” (and incomparably more than for any of the mental disorders it was once associated with). While promising salutary escapism from an unsatisfactory present (or a worrisome future), nostalgia has quietly conquered the past and colonized the most remote corners of our globalized world, becoming a household term in most languages and spawning a commercially successful aesthetic branded as “retro” or “vintage.” Impervious to crises, the “nostalgia industry,” as it has been called, means big business, and as each new hit historical TV drama reminds us, the past remains “the foreign country with the healthiest trade of all.”19 Among its best clients are academics, who turned to nostalgia starting in the 1970s and now discuss its merits at the four corners of university quads, from literature and philosophy to sociology and anthropology, and from psychology and media labs to business schools.20 First broached by cultural studies and postmodern-

Nostalgia as a Historical Problem  7

ism, nostalgia has found particularly prolific niches in interdisciplinary fields like media and memory studies and in relation to topical areas of interest such as consumption, migrations, heritage, and the environment.21 According to some, it is even emerging out of the shadow of trauma and the conservative politics it has long been associated with to reveal unsuspected self-­reflexivity and critical proclivities.22 For their part, and with a few notable exceptions, historians have successfully resisted the nostalgia bug. This shouldn’t surprise given the profession’s deep-­seated mistrust of anything pertaining to the fuzzy world of the human psyche and its careful policing of the border between “warm,” living memory and “cold,” dispassionate history. Despite the institutionalization of cultural history, the coming and going of memory studies, and recent interest for the history of emotions, Charles Maier’s pithy jab that “nostalgia is to memory what kitsch is to art” remains true for most historians.23 This is regrettable, and not only because any historical explanation of human action that is blind to feelings is worth as much as economic models based solely on rational choice theory, but also because by refusing to take nostalgia seriously, as a historical category (even in all its perceived oddities and deceptiveness), we tacitly allow it to prosper in its polished presentist form, as a naturalized, ahistorical, and universal feeling. A first goal of this book is thus to denaturalize nostalgia, to tell it like it isn’t (instead of  letting it tell the past “like it wasn’t” and shape our present accordingly).24 Three decades ago Malcolm Cross and Christopher Shaw bemoaned the one-­dimensional view most of their colleagues held about nostalgia, a “protean and pervasive” concept for which they sought to parse a preliminary typology and a set of core features.25 Tellingly, it took a literary scholar (and an émigré) in Svetlana Boym to insist that nostalgia was a “historical emotion, [ . . . ] coeval with modernity itself.”26 In a series of influential studies—­arguably the first sustained engagement with the topic by a cultural historian—­Peter Fritzsche has painted a vivid impression of how this came to be in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, a period of epic rupture and displacement that spawned a new historical consciousness pre­ mised on a linear conception of accelerating time and irretrievable loss. Fritzsche explains how ruins became a favorite object for this new historical sensibility and émigrés its archetypal subjects. He finds a kind of nostalgic Urform in the melancholy figure of the French romantic René de Chateaubriand (in spite of the fact that Chateaubriand only ever used the word once in his magnum opus, the Mémoires d’outre-­tombe, and in a strict medical sense at that).27 Once again, it is literary scholars who have continued this work of  historicization, mapping

8  Introduction

out an emergent nostalgic “structure of feeling” in relation to new understandings of memory, subjectivity, and aesthetics, particularly among German and British romantics.28 In this book I too seek to understand how an evolving nostalgic sensibility developed over time and in relation to momentous historical change. But my approach differs in two important respects: first, I argue for the necessity of reaching further back in time, to explore in detail nostalgia’s first, medical incarnation; second, I insist on looking beyond the purview of educated elites and literary sources in order to grasp this nostalgia as a social phenomenon grounded in everyday practices. To discern what nostalgia once was, our best guides remain medical historians Jean Starobinski and George Rosen, as well as more recent fellow travelers including Michael Roth, Sylvain Venayre, and Simon Bunke, all of whom have contributed to mapping out the term’s medical genealogy.29 Now sixty years old, Starobinski’s pioneering article still is the authoritative source on the subject, a durability we may in part attribute to its foresight in describing nostalgia both as an “emotion” (“sentiment”) and a “concept,” a case study for “historical semantics.” But while much has been written about what we might call nostalgia’s “conceptual history” (Begriffsgeschichte), we know a lot less about how its discursive construction relates to the concrete activities of those who first used the term and those who first experienced its effects. As Susan Matt has recently shown regarding homesickness in American history, teasing this subjective side to the story out from underneath set cultural representations brings to light a rich emotional life and psychic makeup that can challenge established narratives (notwithstanding all the necessary skepticism with which one must approach subjective experiences).30 We catch glimpses of what it felt like to have this nostalgia in a spate of recent studies of soldiers’ psychological breakdown during the American Civil War—­ the first and last conflict for which we have both relatively reliable medical statistics and extensive soldiers’ writings (letters and diaries) on the condition. Curiously, there is nothing comparable for earlier nineteenth-­century conflicts, nor for those people who allegedly suffered the most from nostalgia (and certainly wrote about it the most): the French. There are practical reasons to this, not least low levels of literacy and the absence of reliable medical statistics before the mid-­1800s. But as both Marcel Reinhard first showed in a largely forgotten article on nostalgia in the French army during the 1790s, and Alice Bullard has done for fatal homesickness among deported communards in New Caledonia, it is possible to unearth archival sources and ego-­documents on clinical nostalgia in the country where it became something of a national disease.31 These are, for sure, fragmentary and patchy sources; but this book

Nostalgia as a Historical Problem  9

makes no apology for drawing reasonable hypotheses from incomplete data sets and for relying, where necessary, on a conjectural paradigm. Insofar as the historian’s quest for objectivity was ever more than a noble dream, it is surely a fantasy to imagine actually getting at unmediated expressions of what dead people really felt.32 My expectations are more modest, but not trivial for as much: by putting personal writings and archival documents (including medical reports, hospital returns, military manuals, police files, and colonial settlement projects) into dialogue, I seek to both don the clothes of the ethnographer and approach clinical nostalgia with hermeneutic sensibility, while holding onto a steady empiricism unusual for a topic more readily thought of as poetic than coated in thick archival dust. Crucial to this dual approach are what I call the practices of clinical nostalgia, the semiotic (or meaning-­making) actions of all sorts—­linguistic, cognitive, gestural, both intentional and nonintentional—­through which a new historical object expressing a certain kind of subjectivity came into being. Following Monique Scheer, we might view these as “emotional practices,” that is, as performative acts and behaviors that mobilize, define, communicate, and regulate feelings that are at once embodied, cognitive, and socially embedded (and as such are anchored to a Bourdieuian notion of habitus).33 In this book, I argue that practices such as the therapeutic protocols and professional strategies of doctors, the daily maneuvering, longing, and letter writing of soldiers, or the construction of colonial settlements and lifeworlds are fundamental to understanding the historicity of nostalgia, for unlike culturalist notions of epistemic shifts, they can account for how nostalgia both appeared at a precise historical moment and came to be viewed as a benign, inherent feature of  human nature. This is because in the long run semiotic practices become habitual and, when aggregated, produce “anonymous” social structures that are reified and appear as given. In other words, what had once caused nostalgia as an ontological disease (an external thing) might eventually also make it into an instinctual (internal) drive, without there being a clear intentionality or awareness on behalf of its human agents. As William H. Sewell notes, this ongoing formation of “real abstractions” from congealed forms of practice becomes particularly pronounced with the development of capitalism, understood as a historically specific but dynamic social formation that hinges on a peculiar, dialectical form of temporality at once linear and cyclical. What makes nostalgia a particularly modern phenomenon is not simply that it is tethered to rupture and loss along a linear sense of “homogeneous empty time,” but rather that it is bound up in a contradictory logic of creative destruction by which “continuity and discontinuity are not categorically opposed states but mutually constitutive ‘moments’

10  Introduction

in an ongoing temporal process.”34 This, I suggest, is the key to understanding the contradictions and perplexing ambiguities of nostalgia’s historical trajectory. * This book is subtitled “War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion”—­a somewhat belabored way of defining its large scope of analysis. We start in the upper Rhineland in the late 1600s, a place of precarious living in times of change. Mulhouse was then an independent Protestant enclave coveted by its larger neighbors, the Holy Roman Empire and Louis XIV’s kingdom of France. It owed its continued existence to an old alliance with Swiss cantons (nearby Basel in particular), which regularly sent companies of soldiers to protect their ally throughout the wars of religion—­a fact that Hofer never lost sight of while researching worrisome stories of distressed Swiss pikemen wilting to a mysterious disorder far from their homes. Chapter 2 zooms out to the transnational networks of scientific knowledge in eighteenth-­century Europe, to follow competing explanations for this new disease entity. From Basel to Göttingen, Edinburgh to Montpellier and on to Philadelphia, nostalgia became a staple feature of Western medical nosology, one particularly associated to the plight of soldiers. With the outbreak of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–­1815), it spread like wildfire in the ranks, especially among “citizen-­soldiers” conscripted into the French republican armies. Chapter 3 examines how French military doctors and administrators confronted endemic nostalgia from Valmy to Waterloo and Egypt to Haiti, showing surpris­ing resourcefulness to define the first clinical protocols for treating war neuroses. In chapter 4, I adopt a more ethnographic approach and look at the condition from the perspective of the soldiers themselves, based on their own narratives of  illness. I argue that the experience of war brought soldiers to view their home­­ sickness as a coping mechanism as much as a disease, and veterans to look back upon their service with misty eyes. From a strictly empirical point of view, these were the first instances of a benign form of temporal “nostalgia” as we have known it ever since. In the short term, the extraordinary saliency of (fatal) nostalgia during the Napoleonic Wars prompted a flourishing of medical research on the condition in France—­the topic of chapter 5. Clinical nostalgia’s golden days were brief, however, and this relatively precise medical term gradually gave way to a looser concept available to vernacular usage as well (not least by romantic authors). But the naturalization of nostalgia into a “normal” piece of people’s emotional

Nostalgia as a Historical Problem  11

lives was a slow process laden with obstacles.35 At midcentury, Algeria was the biggest one confronting French soldiers and settlers who continued battling deadly longings (on top of Arab resistance and other diseases) in their quest to establish a colonial presence in North Africa. Chapters 6 and 7 follow nostalgia “in the tropics” and show the many surprising ways in which la nostalgie africaine shaped efforts to turn Algeria into a piece of France after 1850, long before the days of postcolonial nostalgérie. Paradoxically, it was the acceleration of European imperialism and triumph of “scientific” racism in those years (as well as radical changes in psychiatric taxonomies) that definitively undermined nostalgia as a viable medical diagnosis. By the time many more soldiers from all over the world marched to battle in 1914, few were those who worried about them succumbing to bouts of  homesickness. Though it was thought of primarily as a soldiers’ (and, to a lesser extent, sailors’) disorder—­almost like an occupational disease—­clinical nostalgia assembled a long cast of occasional victims over the course of its two-­century-­long existence. These included displaced people of all sorts (but not necessarily any sort), from permanent emigrants and colonial settlers to exiles and chattel slaves. Traveling far from home was not always necessary, and doctors also singled out seasonal migrant laborers, domestic servants, and boarding school pupils, as well as hospital (or asylum) patients and prison inmates as populations at risk. On the other hand, everyone agreed that peddlers, itinerant journeymen, and tourists—­a new phenomenon in the late 1700s and 1800s—­ rarely suffered from homesickness, if at all. What nostalgia’s victims all had in common, therefore, was not so much travel and displacement (though that certainly helped) as a shared sense of isolation and estrangement in a foreign place. In some respects, they resemble those “self-­mutilated” people (who have lost a sense of self) that the sociologist Erving Goffman identified within “total institutions” (that is, secluded places of both work and residence where individuals live a collective and rationally administered life removed from their families and relations). Perhaps even more striking is the overlap between this list of victims and the “docile bodies” that Michel Foucault identified as prime targets for modern institutions’ disciplinary powers. At the very least, it seems necessary to think of clinical nostalgia not only in terms of spatial displacement, but of social “disembedding”—­that is, as a medicalized, emotional reaction to the experience of being “lifted out” of a localized, dense network of social relations and exposed to new spatial and temporal regimes.36 But this was not necessarily how contemporaries viewed the condition: from its inception, nostalgia had multiple, competing explanations that vied for supremacy in the rapidly changing medical world of early modern Europe.

12  Introduction

In the early days, it was an atmospheric account based on air pressure differ­ entials that held sway. It was supplanted in the second half of the eighteenth century by a vitalist explanation that placed emphasis on nerves and sentiments. In the early 1800s, the pendulum swung back to deterministic models premised on organic lesions, physiological adaptation to new environments (seasoning), and, eventually, specious theories of racial degeneration. Throughout, the disease itself was likened not just to sociological groups of people, but also to national, regional, and racial characteristics as well. From the beginning, and despite repeated attempts at debunking the myth, nostalgia was labeled a Schweizerkrankheit, a specifically Swiss disease. In the nineteenth century it also became a “mal français,” at least according to French doomsayers worried about British imperial ascendancy. Most doctors felt that it was prevalent among isolated, mountainous communities, whether because unaccustomed to traveling far from home or because of a hereditary predisposition passed on from one generation to another. In the age of empire, nostalgia became a prerogative of  “primitive” people, unadapted (for better or worse) to the travel, speed, and anonymity of modern civilization. To account for clinical nostalgia’s conditions of possibility—­that is, to explain how it could be at once a general and specifically French phenomenon, shared by well-­drilled conscripts and plants that did not take to new climates—­is no simple task. At present, it will suffice to adumbrate five principal “axes” (or “vectors”) that undergird the condition’s tortuous historical trajectory.37 Inevitably, the first of these is medical: nostalgia appeared during a fluid, transitional period in Western medicine, as a result of competition between medical theories and taxonomies that vied to supplant receding humoral models. Dualists and monists, animists and materialists, Lockean sensationalists, vitalists, medical geographers, hygienists, alienists (early psychiatrists), phrenologists, anatomical pathologists, race theorists, even homeopaths—­virtually all medical schools and specializations that coexisted before the advent of bacteriology (and modern psychiatry) in the late nineteenth century had their own explanation (and cure) for the condition. Of them all, military doctors (physicians and surgeons of various stripes) were by far those that had the most experience of and things to say about clinical nostalgia. This was espe­cially true in the French army medical corps, the first and, for a long time, largest and most prestigious institution of its kind. Here we have a second axis, one that begins to account for the French focus over the following pages: throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, subordinate medical officers claimed expertise on nostalgia as a way of advancing their professional agenda and raising their stock in the army. Not that their

Nostalgia as a Historical Problem  13

intentions were exclusively instrumental: as products of the military enlightenment and the age of sensibility more in general, they were, for the most part at least, humanists also genuinely concerned with the physical and mental well-­ being of the men. Nostalgia was, and in many ways could only be, a product of this age of reason and passion. But this was also a time in which large standing armies became the norm in Europe, a trend that provides a third context for understanding nostalgia as a historical phenomenon. These rationalized military institutions have often been presented as laboratories of modern social transformations (from bureaucratization to division of labor) and the drilled, disciplined infantry automa­ ton as emblematic of a new kind of modern heteronomy. Less well known is the fact that they also were incubators for deadly outbreaks of nostalgia, which thus surely had something to do with the imposition of regimented lifestyles, the semipermanent separation from civilians (in all-­male, uniformed, and barracked environments), and perhaps even a new scale of mass destruction already discernible in this age of preindustrial warfare.38 But this doesn’t explain the particular propensity for outbreaks of nostalgia among Swiss mercenaries or among volunteers and conscripts in the French revolutionary armies and Union forces during the American Civil War. Convenient labels do a disservice here: as contemporaries already noted, Swiss hired soldiers had more in common with French and American “citizen-­soldiers” (whether volunteers or draftees) than they did with Renaissance condottieri, for whom an ideal like patriotism meant very little indeed, or relentlessly drilled Prussian serfs. There is, in fact, a fourth factor that seems to play into the frequency and severity of nostalgia epidemics in these armies: the moral paradox (and political challenge) of mobilizing free individuals and convincing them to submit to a form of domination in the name of an abstract goal (such as the “nation”). The homesickness of the citizen-­soldier was more than mere sadness and suffering; it was an experience of alienation from self as well as a test of motivation. That it came to be thought of so forcefully in spatial terms—­as a “home-­sickness”—­ is surely a consequence of the accrued mobility of early modern societies and particularly of early modern armies (the fifth and final vector for clinical nostalgia). This was, yet again, a general phenomenon; but it took on a distinctive saliency in a country like France, where limited emigration and deep-­seated belief in its people’s sedentarism somehow coexisted with grandiose imperial ambitions and paranoid fears about vagrants, workers, and draft dodgers on the move. Taken together, these parameters can account for clinical nostalgia’s coming into being as an object of medical interest and can help explain how it could

14  Introduction

be at once a generalized and a specifically French phenomenon (as opposed to, say, a British one, where qualms about citizen-­soldiers and unadventurous emigrants were unheard of). They can even help us understand the demise of nostalgia as a medical entity, with the disappearance of one or more of these vectors in the second half of the nineteenth century (a propitious medical con­­ text most importantly). But what they can’t address, is why the very word “nos­­ talgia” didn’t just disappear with the disease, but instead survived itself, as it were, to live on as something quite different. In this book, I argue that it isn’t sufficient to talk of nostalgia having been “interiorized” (with psychoanalysis, for example) or transformed by events and cultural movements (no matter how epochal), such as the French Revolution or romanticism. Instead, we need to think of nostalgia’s naturalization into a benign emotion as a protracted and contradictory process, inscribed within a dialectical logic of historical transformation. It is, strictly speaking, anachronistic to speak of clinical nostalgia in terms of “time” and “emotion.” No doubt would it have been more appropriate for the book’s subtitle to include the words “space” and “disease,” for that is what nostalgia was: a pathological condition thought of  in synchronic, spatial terms. Yet thinking clinical nostalgia in terms of changing “regimes of  historicity” (or the ways in which a given social group experiences past, present, and future) and emotional regimes and practices is necessary to understand how an occasional disease could become an (ostensibly) natural feeling.39 By looking at nostalgia not just as a disease or a cultural trope, but as an emotion—­that is, a performative act, a cognitive (if not always fully conscious) form of practice—­I seek to grasp both its epochal nature and its inner, temporal logics.40 Contrary to most discussions of nostalgia that single out a linear and runaway conception of time as its basic chronological blueprint, I emphasize its embeddedness in a dialectical temporality that is both linear and cyclical, punctuated by discontinuities and structural continuities. It is a temporality at once oriented to the future and that constantly dredges up the past, thus allowing for the experience of longing both as loss and imaginative recall (and eventually rather more concrete repetition as well).41 In chapter 4 I explore the crystallization of this peculiar kind of modern temporality as a subjective experience by looking both at how Napoleonic-­ era soldiers came to “own” their nostalgia as an emotional coping mechanism rather than a disease, and how veterans ended up longing for the very war­ time that had caused them to feel nostalgic in the first place. In chapters 6 and 7 I trace the objectified (concrete) manifestations of multiple, contradictory temporalities at play in the simultaneous imposition of a rationalized colonial

Nostalgia as a Historical Problem  15

modernity and the (re)discovery of “archaic” forms of belonging (traditional rural villages and built environments) in colonial North Africa in the late 1800s. By referring to nostalgia as an “emotion” throughout, I seek to engage both current psychological literature and the historical study of emotions, a subfield that has, in spite of the profession’s misgivings, successfully established itself in recent years.42 Eschewing specialized scientific debates on the nature of emotion itself, I use the terms “emotion,” “feeling,” and “structures of feeling” interchangeably—­as moments in a unique body-­mind-­society emotional complex—­but conversely avoid “affect” due to its heavily connoted usage in literary and neuroscientific research as a presemiotic, biological bedrock of emotional life.43 In this book, nostalgia is a resolutely historical emotion; but it is also what Jan Plamper has called a “meta-­concept,” that is, a transtempo­ ral category that allows for variation over time and place while recognizing suf­­ ficient shared characteristics to talk about the same thing throughout (thus avoiding both the false certainties of universalist perspectives and the paralyzing uncertainties of nominalism in social constructivist ones).44 This is, in other words, a social and conceptual history of an emotion over the longue durée, of how people’s lives and feelings were reconfigured over two hundred years and across three continents. While it therefore frequently zooms out to wide angles and fast-­paced narratives, this book also cautions against historians’ current itch to go deep and global at all costs, pleading instead for the continued necessity of narrower frames and “effects of scale” to adequately grasp a multilayered social reality in which people are sentient beings and not just data points.45 In our age of big data, it is all too easy to forget just how local history feels or how every “great” divergence and transformation is but an aggregate of smaller, even intimate, but no less vital ones. What Nostalgia Was is an attempt to show how the “birth of the modern world” played out overseas, across the valley, at home—­always in people’s heads.46

Chapter 1

Nostalgia in 1688 Home is where one starts from. t . s . e l i o t , East Coker (1940)

Johannes Hofer’s 1688 Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe was perhaps destined to never feature in medical history textbooks. This was, after all, but the work of a medical student who chose to write on a disease no one had then heard of, and that we would be hard pressed to find in any medical taxonomy today. An unlikely medical maverick, Hofer cannot be credited with any lasting contribution to the Western medical tradition, despite serving the profession diligently throughout his life as a general practitioner in his hometown of  Mulhouse. Nevertheless, he did bequeath to posterity a term that has, for better or worse, become second nature to modern life—­almost a “keyword” in its own right, but one with a little-­known medical genesis. The quest to understand where our modern infatuation with nostalgia comes from must therefore begin with the term’s unlikely inventor and the clinical hypotheses of a nineteen-­year-­old. As Jean Starobinski remarks, by providing a scientific name for and full clinical description of what had hitherto been a vernacular category, Hofer transformed “an emotional phenomenon [Heimweh] into a medical phenomenon [nostalgia].”1 Why he did so, and what this says about the time in which he lived, are the questions this chapter seeks to elucidate. Briefly put, my argument is twofold: that seventeenth-­century clinical breakthroughs and evolv­ing medical theories enabled Hofer to conceive of nostalgia in a way that closely resembled contemporary understandings of melancholia and other emotional disorders; but that medical transformations alone cannot account for the perceived need to devise a new diagnostic category (rather than use an existing one). As a detailed exegesis of Hofer’s remarkable text reveals, the

F i g u r e 1 . 1 . Johannes Hofer (1669–­1752) pictured in 1716, as Poliater ( junior town physician) and elected consul of the Republic of Mulhouse. Portrait by David Herrliberger, from his Schweitzerischer Ehrentempel, in welchem die wahren Bildnisse teils verstorbener, teils annoch lebender berühmter Männer (Basel, 1748–­58). Courtesy of the Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek, Bern.

F i g u r e 1 . 2 . Title page from Johannes Hofer’s Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe (Basel: Jacob Bertsch, 1688). Courtesy of the Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek, Bern.

Nostalgia in 1688  19

making of nostalgia did not proceed directly from an epidemiological revolution or one of the many discoveries that overhauled Western medicine in the age of scientific revolution. Rather, to grasp its conditions of possibility we must cast our net further afield, beyond medicine itself, to the broader social, political, and intellectual forces that shaped Hofer’s life and that of  his contemporaries. Nostalgia, it turns out, was born of a time of conflict and gener­ alized instability, a “General Crisis” that rocked much of Europe—­and the upper Rhineland in particular—­throughout the seventeenth century.

A n U n l i k e ly M e d i c a l M av e r i c k Johannes Hofer was born in the Alsatian town of Mulhouse on May 2, 1669, the last of twelve siblings in a prosperous family of prominent local pastors. We know little of his childhood, other than the fact of his father’s premature death when Johannes was only six years old. It certainly was stern and studious in keeping with Mulhouse’s official Calvinist piety. Most likely, it also taught the young man the proud history of his hometown, an independent and staunchly republican enclave within the Holy Roman Empire since the fourteenth century. Hofer would already have been well versed in humanist, moral, and civic traditions when, barely a teenager, he followed his ancestors’ footsteps to continue his studies in the neighboring town of Basel, home to the first Swiss university. He read philosophy and theology for three years and, in 1685, opted to heal bodies rather than souls by enrolling in medical school.2 As it turned out, he would end up curing both. Established by papal bull in 1459, the University of Basel emerged out of the wars of religion as a leading institution of higher education in Protestant Europe, attracting students from nearby Rhineland and German states. Its medical faculty courted controversy in 1527 when Paracelsus famously burned Avicenna’s Medical Canon (the main reference work of medieval medicine), but thereafter became a reputable center for learning, book printing, and the liberal humanism typical of reformed cities. For much of the seventeenth century, the dominant natural philosophy taught in Basel was an eclectic synthesis of Aristotelianism and Ramism, the iconoclastic body of thought developed by the Huguenot Petrus Ramus (who also lectured at the university before being murdered during the St. Bartholomew’s day massacre). Medieval scholasticism was therefore already on the defensive when Cartesianism was introduced into the classrooms in the 1660s, prompting a major curricular reorientation toward empiricism and new chemical and physical explanatory models.3

20  Chapter One

When Hofer matriculated in 1685, he therefore entered an institution and a larger medical profession undergoing unprecedented transformations. He found close mentors in two junior professors, both graduates of the medical school: Jacob Harder, who taught rhetoric and physics before claiming the chair of anatomy and botany in 1687 (the lowest of three full professorships, after those of medical theory and medical practice); and Theodor Zwinger, the scion of an important family of doctors from Basel, who held the chair of eloquence during Hofer’s studies, before also moving on to the chairs of anatomy and practical medicine thereafter. By the mid-­1680s Harder and Zwinger had become established experimental researchers and Basel’s leading advocates of the “iatromechanical” and “iatrochemical” challenge to orthodox humoral medicine.4 Based on the faculty’s course catalog, Hofer’s biographer has estimated that the young student spent the bulk of his training learning about brain anatomy, the organs of the senses, organic viscera, and experimental chemistry with his professors.5 It is almost certainly in these classes that he was exposed to Descartes’s mechanistic philosophy and to important discoveries in brain anatomy, physiology, and neurology—­all of which transpire in his written work. Hofer prepared his thesis on nostalgia under Harder’s guidance and defended it on June 22, 1688, in the manner of a “disputation” (disputatio), or a formalized debate with his professors (Harder, Zwinger, and the chairs of theoretical and practical medicine). This was only a preliminary requirement, submitted in preparation for the final examination and inaugural thesis, the disputatio medica inauguralis, which Hofer filed the following April on the somewhat less esoteric topic of uterine dropsy (De hydrope uteri). As is often the case with early modern medical dissertations, it is difficult to establish beyond all doubt that the text actually is Hofer’s work. Twenty-­first-­ century notions of authorship do not apply to a time when it was customary for professors and students to work collaboratively and share the honors. Typically, the former would write the text, whereas the latter would present and defend its claims in a public disputation. (This was especially useful for testing daring new ideas.)6 While it is, therefore, possible that Harder authored parts of the thesis, it does seem that Hofer was the primary authorial voice as he is clearly identified as “author” and not just as “respondent.” Moreover, he explicitly chose to present his research as a dissertatio—­then a relatively new term conveying research based on hypotheses and empirical observations—­rather than a more conventional disputatio (a codified recital of canonical knowledge).7 Whatever their exact contribution to the text itself, it is clear that Harder and Zwinger shaped Hofer’s medical training and helped him launch his career as a doctor through their connections. Harder made sure that his student’s

Nostalgia in 1688  21

thesis was published by a local printing press,  Jacob Bertsch (an unusual accolade for a preliminary work).8 The text was subsequently reissued in revised form in a collection of notable dissertations that Zwinger edited in 1710. In fact, multiple editions would continue to be reprinted periodically, long after Hofer had moved back to Mulhouse and bracketed his medical vocation for a highly successful career in municipal politics. Intriguingly, several of these circulated under modified titles and were more or less explicitly attributed to Harder. As we will see in the next chapter, the vicissitudes of this “uncertain disease” (as nostalgia would come to be described) may be attributed at least in part to the editorial innuendo that clouded the disease’s paternity for much of the eigh­ teenth century and beyond.

H e i m w e h t o N o s ta l g i a Authorial conundrums aside, Hofer’s De Nostalgia is, in and of itself, a puzzling text that defies easy categorizations.9 At first sight, it appears to be a rather conventional example of the research produced by seventeenth-­century European medical faculties. Its sixteen octavo pages of Latin prose are standard for the time, and its style is that of someone trained in the classical rhetorical and philosophical traditions. It bears formal similarities with countless other medical disputationes, including an elaborate dedication to the presiding professors and an annex (corollaria) of laudatory remarks and poems on the student by acquaintances. Its content is, likewise, straightforward enough: after providing a rationale for his choice of topic (Thesis I), Hofer defines his object of study by naming the condition (§II) and outlining its basic pathogenesis (§III). He subsequently presents two cases studies (§IV) and details the clinical picture with a discussion of predisposing factors (§V), the seat of the disease (§VI), its etiology—­both internal (§VII) and external causes (§VIII)—­and symptomatology (§IX). He concludes by revisiting the condition’s pathophysiology (§X), its prognosis (§XI), and therapeutic recommendations (§XII). Still, identifying a new disease is no ordinary feat, and it would be unfair to dismiss Hofer’s dissertation as wholly unoriginal. In more ways than one, he epitomized what Roger French has called the “learned and rational doctor”—­ namely, the university-­trained physician, mindful of tradition but increasingly versatile and at ease in the rapidly changing world of seventeenth-­century medicine.10 Hofer certainly was no iconoclast, but he showed a keen interest in the pioneering experimental work of his time and was savvy enough to couch his findings in tentative terms. He explained his original topic choice as a matter of curiosity about mysterious stories of youngsters who succumbed to ill-­defined

22  Chapter One

“fevers” and “consumption” far from home. The Swiss, Hofer noted, already knew the disorder by the vernacular term “das Heim-­weh,” literally “home-­ sickness.” The French also spoke of “la maladie du pays” to describe the “sorrow caused by the lost charm of the native land” among Swiss expatriates (§I). Neither of these terms, however, was scientific enough to properly define a disease (morbo). Hofer hesitated over the all-­important task of naming this new clinical entity, at one point considering other neologisms such as “nosomania” (literally “return-­madness”) and the more descriptive “philopatridomania” (“madness caused by yearning for the homeland”). His preference, though, lay with a third coinage, less precise but still sufficiently savant and decidedly more pleasing to the ear: “ΝΟΣΤΑΛΓΙΑ,” or “nostalgia,” from the Greek roots νόστος, or nostos (homecoming), and άλγος, or algos (pain or longing). Nostalgia, Hofer boldly asserted, would stand for the deep “sadness [tristem animum] arising from the burning desire to return to the homeland” (§II–­III). A counterfactual history could fruitfully speculate on what the term’s trajectory—­and, perhaps, modernity’s course itself—­might have been had Hofer, or his professors, finally opted for a more unwieldy term. Be that as it may, the choice of “nostalgia” was crucial not only because more euphonic, but because it distinguished the condition from conventional forms of madness. For Hofer, homesickness did not affect one’s reason or intellect as a whole, and it was not a particular kind of “mania” or a “frenzy.” Although it clearly entailed psychological suffering and sometimes even showed signs of “melancholic delirium” (delirii melancholici) (§III), as far as he could tell, it only targeted discrete mental faculties. But whereas a twenty-­first-­century reader might expect him to have singled out a faulty memory as the source of the ill, Hofer had another mental operation in mind—­one that seemed most consonant with nostalgia’s ostensibly spatial, rather than temporal, coordinates. As he repeatedly made clear to his readers, nostalgia had to be understood first and foremost as the “symptom of a disordered imagination” (symptoma imaginationis laesae) (§III). Hofer described the pathogenic process at the heart of the condition in the typical language of late seventeenth-­century physiology. He posited that what troubled the imagination was the “constant movement of the animal spirits along the white tubules of the striate bodies and oval center of the brain” (§XI), where “residual impressions of the homeland [ patriae] adhere” (§VII). Sensory stimulation induced this vibration, soliciting the imaginative faculties to converge on mental images [ phantasmata] impressed in memory, and “excite in the soul [anima] a recurring and exclusive idea of returning to the homeland” (§III). Hofer viewed these vibrating spirits in corpuscular terms, as a quantifiable flow of fine particles that surged along nervous conduits setting

Nostalgia in 1688  23

in motion a chain reaction with both psychic and somatic consequences. The mind’s fixation on the idea of home blocked the actual flow of animal spirits, preventing them from sustaining the “vibration of the fibrils in the common sensorium [sensorio communi]” necessary to the proper functioning (multitasking) of the brain. Because of this hoarding, the spirits also could not flow in sufficient quantities “along the invisible channels that connect the various parts of the body,” thus affecting all other natural faculties. Hofer singled out loss of appetite and poor digestion due to diluted gastric juices, leading to an overly acidic chyle that would, in turn, yield viscous serum and thick lymph when mixed with blood. The end result was an overconsumption of animal spirits in the brain and lackluster regeneration of the same spirits in the blood, thus further slowing down all bodily and mental functions. In an advanced case, blood would begin to thicken and clot, hindering circulation and affecting the heart. At this stage the nostalgic patient might begin to develop aggravating somatic conditions, including bouts of anxiety, fever, and obstruction of the glands (§X). Hofer’s full symptomatology reads like a laundry list of morbid signs: “constant sadness [tristia continua], obsessive thinking about the homeland, insomnia and agitated sleep, general weakness, loss of appetite, heart palpitations, respiratory difficulties, [ . . . ] continuous and intermittent fevers” (§IX). His prognosis left little room for hope: if nostalgia was allowed to fester untreated, the “consumption of the spirits” and inexorable weakening of the body would hasten death by exhaustion (§XI). Hofer embedded this detailed pathophysiological explanation within a more tentative examination of nostalgia’s broader epidemiology based on personal and related observations in his entourage. He started by distinguishing between preexisting chronic and acute conditions that might predispose to nostalgia on the one hand, and the difficulties encountered when trying to adapt to a change in lifestyle or habits following expatriation on the other. The latter clearly interested him most, and he singled out unfamiliar customs and foods, a marked change in atmosphere, and insults professed in a foreign language as possible triggers. A “homebound education” with little contact with the outside world, he claimed, was certain to produce socially inept adolescents incapable of  “adapting to foreign ways of  life” or, for that matter, of “forgetting their moth­ er’s milk.” Hofer seems to have been uncomfortable with circulating rumors that Heimweh was a particularly Swiss malady—­a topos emphasized at the end of  his thesis, in a few short verses by the French Huguenot Charles Ancillon, who congratulated the author on having shown that a Swiss could cure what he described as a “national malady.” Despite only having Swiss examples at hand to rely upon, Hofer invoked the findings of other doctors across Europe

24  Chapter One

to recuse the idea that this was a Schweizerkrankheit (and one that targeted the Bernese in particular). Why they seemed especially prone Hofer wasn’t quite sure, although he recognized that the predisposing factors seemed to apply particularly well to isolated alpine communities. Most interestingly, he suggested looking further into the effects of missing out on hearty mountain breakfasts and cow milk when abroad, or of having to relinquish the cherished personal liberties the Swiss enjoyed in their home cantons (§V and VII). Although the prognostic outlook was bleak, Hofer insisted that nostalgia was not fatal and could be treated successfully. He recommended a two-­pronged, pharmaceutical and psychotherapeutic, approach to both “mitigate the symptoms” and “correct the disordered imagination.” Among the former, Hofer recommended administering purgatives (mercury or wine), emetics, and bleeding the patient’s brachial vein at the very first symptoms. In a more advanced case, he suggested balsams and emulsions to calm the patient, as well as pharmaceutical potions to strengthen the heart, lower the fever, and fluidify the blood. Medicinal remedies ( phisik) were not sufficient, though, and Hofer emphasized the need to both reassure the patient and distract him from the obsessive idea of home. He must be led to believe that he would be able to return there as soon as his health recovered. Meanwhile, he should be entertained and provided with company so as to forget the cause of his illness. Ultimately, though, Hofer was under no illusion as to the efficacy of these measures. Should they fail at dislodging the obsessive idea at the heart of the condition, the physician had no choice but to prescribe the one and only trusted remedy against homesickness: to “send [the patient] home at once, no matter how sick or frail, whether by carriage, stretcher, or whatever means available” (§XII).

B e t w e e n H i p p o c r at e s a n d D e s ca rt e s To modern readers Hofer’s original clinical sketch of nostalgia is striking in at least three respects: its adamant portrayal of a morbid and potentially fatal disease; the condition’s spatial form of manifestation and correlation with the imaginative faculties of the brain; and its elaborate psychophysiological pathology. Neither of these can be easily reconciled with our contemporary understandings of nostalgia, but of the three, the latter is perhaps the one that comes across as most baroque. To his contemporaries, on the other hand, it might well have seemed the least questionable. The late seventeenth century was a time of waxing and waning medical philosophies during which physicians made an art of epistemological bricolage. Like his peers, Hofer poured old wine into new bottles in an attempt to replace fading humoral precepts

Nostalgia in 1688  25

with an equally comprehensive system of pathology. His eclectic medical outlook is worth parsing out as it reveals both the holistic nature of his approach to health and uncovers tensions that would become increasingly irresolvable in the dualistic world of post-­Cartesian medicine, leading others to pursue divergent understandings of the disease. One of the most noticeable features of Hofer’s dissertation is undoubtedly the absence of any explicit reference to humors, biles, and vapors—­in other words, to the categorial arsenal of  humoralism and to the pathophysiology that European physicians had relied upon since the early Middle Ages. Instead, Hofer worked squarely within a physiology of spirits and embraced the new mechanistic theories and anatomical discoveries promoted in Harder’s and Zwinger’s classes. He took for granted the circulation of blood, demonstrated decisively in 1628 by the British physician William Harvey (and adopted in Basel by midcentury).11 His holistic, corpuscular psychophysiology and detailed descriptions of animal spirits dilating brain pores and altering moods suggests a familiarity with the Cartesian corpus, in particular the Treatise of Man (published posthumously in 1662). As Starobinski first noted, Descartes’s influence may well have been leavened through the writings of the British physician Thomas Willis, whose pioneering research in brain anatomy and the neurochemical basis of mental disorders (first published in the 1660s and 1670s), Hofer seems to echo in several instances.12 Undoubtedly, Hofer was fascinated by the medical advances of his century and saw his own research as a modest contribution to a new scientific era. One could, in fact, read into his dissertatio a physiology of fibers and the budding age of medical and literary sensibility that, per cultural historian George S. Rousseau, extends all the way back to the impact of  Willis’s neurological discoveries.13 We should not overemphasize, though, the “modernity” of Hofer’s training or his medical outlook. Medieval scholasticism did not disappear overnight, and the dual intellectual tradition of Aristotelianism and Galenism continued to cast its shadow over seventeenth-­century physicians.14 Hofer’s symptomatological description of nostalgia draws heavily from preexisting literature on mental illness, including medieval acedia and early modern melancholy. His therapeutic recommendations echo Galenic precepts, not least the time-­tested doctrine of contraries—­“contraria contrariis contrantur” (contrar­ ies are cured by contraries)—­exemplified perhaps most emphatically by the summation to repatriate the homesick patient.15 Indeed, Hofer’s use of terminology reveals how a new understanding of “psychology” gradually emerged in the late 1600s from within the bedrock of late scholastic natural philosophy and the “scientia de anima” that continued to dominate early modern

26  Chapter One

European universities (but that was increasingly placed under scrutiny in German Protestant circles in particular).16 At first sight, his tripartite map of the soul—­divided between the faculties of reason, memory, and the imagination (to which a fourth element, the common sensorium, was typically associated)—­ has a distinctly Aristotelian flavor. However, Hofer uses the “soul” (anima) interchangeably with “mind” (mens), indicating that he no longer views it to be the living principle of all forms of life (including animal and vegetative), but rather a disembodied, immaterial concept unique to humans—­a “soul-­mind” rather than a “soul-­form,” in the words of Fernando Vidal.17 The same can be said of  his interest for the “common sensorium” (sensorio communi), which he uses in the manner of a pineal gland, connecting otherwise distinct body and soul, and which he attempts to locate within the striate bodies of the basal ganglia (a task that one medical historian has aptly called the seventeenth century’s “quest for the Grail of cerebral physiology”18). There are further Cartesian overtones to Hofer’s hydraulic understanding of the ancient medical doctrine of “spirits” ( pneuma) and “mental images” ( phantasmata), and to his theory of the passions. Ultimately, Hofer’s basic approach to disease appears to retain the pragmatic and psychosomatic hallmarks of Hippocratic medical practice precisely by embedding these within new psychological and physiological theories. These posited at once a fundamental distinction and a necessary interaction between body and soul—­the unity of soma and psyche that Descartes stressed in his last work published during his lifetime, The Passions of the Soul (1649).19 It may come as no surprise, therefore, that his holistic clinical description did not survive untouched in the increasingly dualistic, post-­Cartesian world of the eighteenth century. To strict materialists, the psychological side of Hofer’s clinical picture rang rather fanciful; instead, they championed a wholly mechanistic approach, grounded in anatomical, physiological, and especially climatic explanations. Hofer’s almost casual observation that a change in air could cause nostalgia—­by altering the “disposition of the blood and the spirits” as he suggested (§VII)—­provided them with a simple but empirically sound basis upon which to establish what they saw as a rigorous understanding of the condition. Conveniently for some, it also happened to elucidate why the Swiss seemed particularly vulnerable, but out of no constitutional weakness or fault of their own. In the early 1700s the notion that one could explain nostalgia with hydraulics and atmospheric pressure differentials made many devotees among advocates of a materialist “homme machine.” Partly in reaction to this, a rival, vitalist understanding of the disease that emphasized its emotional causes and psychological effects crystallized in the second half of the century. To followers

Nostalgia in 1688  27

of sensationalist psychology, the nostalgic sufferer would instead come to epitomize that most recognizable ideal type of the High Enlightenment: “l’homme sensible.”20

Symptoms of Disorder But where does this leave us as to the origins of nostalgia? From a strictly medical perspective, they are difficult to identify amid the mosaic of overlapping influences one finds in Hofer’s study. Paradoxically, what this “internalist” approach ultimately reveals is that there was no groundbreaking anatomical or physiological breakthrough, no clearly identifiable clinical or epidemiological discovery that might warrant such a new nosological category. The momentous transformations in medical knowledge of the seventeenth century certainly inflected Hofer’s clinical description and determined the shape(s) that nostalgia would subsequently take. But they do not by themselves explain its “coming into being” as an object of scientific interest. To answer the question “why nostalgia in 1688?” we must look beyond medical texts and anatomical theaters to consider what might have been the wider cultural resonance and social significance of those curious stories about young men succumbing to bouts of Heimweh that Hofer heard in Mulhouse and Basel in the 1680s. Hofer’s justification for his choice of topic was largely circumstantial: having heard the stories he simply saw an opportunity to write something original. This may well have been the case, and we can certainly speculate on the extent to which he too felt a touch homesick as a student in Basel (a reaction that was probably quite common among medical students at the time given the tradition of embarking upon a peregrinatio medica around the best European universities at the end of their studies).21 It is even quite possible that he observed and treated one of the case histories he relates in his dissertation (about a young peasant girl hospitalized and diagnosed with nostalgia in Basel). But this tells us little as to why these instances suddenly became worthy of medical attention. We may find clues to this problem in Hofer’s decision to model his description of nostalgia on seventeenth-­century medical studies of melancholia. Though often still couched in Galenic terms, these increasingly tended to explain melancholic states in terms of a faulty imagination and unruly “passions” that mediated, among other things, anxieties about social change and political unrest. From a symptomatological point of view, there was little to distinguish nostalgia from melancholia, and although Hofer insisted the former was not a form of madness, he readily conceded that a melancholic temperament (si

28  Chapter One

naturâ ad melancholiam inclinent) and prolonged sadness (tristia continua) often revealed a brooding case of homesickness (§IX passim). Therapeutic recommendations were also virtually identical, with the significant exception that travel had long been encouraged to distract melancholics but presumably would not do for nostalgics. We can only guess at the sources of Hofer’s apprenticeship in the long-­standing tradition of medical thought on melancholia. He had undoubtedly read Felix Platter (who helped put Basel on the medical map in the late sixteenth century) and most likely was familiar with Robert Burton’s seminal The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) as well as Thomas Willis’s Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes (1672).22 Central to these texts was the notion of the “powers of the imagination” first systematized by Thomas Fienus’s De viribus imaginationis (1608), which afforded feelings and emotions—­or what were then referred to as those “passions” ( passiones), “movements” (motus), “affections” (affectiones), and “perturbations” ( perturbationes) of the soul that made up the sixth class of “things non-­natural”—­a mediating role between mind and body.23 As is evident in Willis’s writings, by the 1670s, the pathology of spirits had firmly integrated the imagination and the passions within the etiology of mental disorders such as melancholy. Hofer cited none of these landmark texts—­his only reference was to a relatively obscure physician from Liège, Henrich von Heers, known primarily for having researched the therapeutic virtues of the thermal waters at Spa—­but he clearly was familiar with the medical conversation they had initiated. He placed a disordered imagination at the very heart of nostalgia and readily identified a “perturbatum animum” (§II), a troubled soul, in its victims. When the imagination was corrupted by an overflow of mental images, it excited the appetitive faculties, producing a “burning desire” (§II) that tormented those who “cannot help longing for the homeland” (§VII). The victim eventually developed what psychiatrists would later describe as an “idée fixe,” namely, the obsessive and all-­consuming idea that fed neuroses such as melancholia and that Hofer identified in a patient’s hysterical cries: “Ich will Heim! Ich will Heim! ” (§IV). Hofer explicitly invoked the “powers of the imagination” (imaginationis viribus) to explain how such cravings and ideas could exert action on the body (§X). Paraphrasing the scholastic axiom “Fortis imaginatio generat casum” (A strong imagination begets the event), he located the seat of nostalgia in the striatum, home of the common sensorium (according to Willis) and therefore the very site where “the imagination produces action” (ubi imaginativae animae facultati in actûs deducendae occasion datur) (§VI). He further illustrated these effects by pointing to the remarkable curative powers that contemporaries also ascribed to the imagination and the passions (a staple

Nostalgia in 1688  29

feature of the medical doctrine of contraries). The goal of the treatment, Hofer maintained, was to alleviate the urge by “satisfying” it (§XI). In two of the three cases he related, the patients were cured not by actually returning home but on their way there, or even at the mere thought of being allowed to return there! This seemingly happened to a “sad and melancholic” Swiss domestic servant in Paris, who was able to “cast the fantasy out of his mind within a few days” ( phantasma hoc intra aliquot dies animo excussit) simply by being informed of his release from the house’s service. According to Hofer, he was “moved with joy” (gaudio multùm mutatus) by the news and scarcely needed to pack his suitcase (§XII). Medical concern about melancholy, the imagination, and emotions was nothing new in the early modern era. As one historian puts it, the latter constitutes no less than the “longest standing tradition of mind-­body (that is psychosomatic) speculation in Western medicine.”24 Nor, for that matter, was it exclusively medical in nature. Still, it is possible to speak of a “golden age” for each of these three objects at roughly the same time around the first half of the seventeenth century.25 As Angus Gowland has shown, when Burton diagnosed a frightful epidemic of melancholy from his Oxford study, he did so not because of an epidemiological revolution, but because of the reverberations of the Reformation.26 Within a context of heightened inner spirituality and guilt, the late humanist preoccupation with the passions of the soul projected onto the individual’s psychic well-­being rampant fears about a breakdown in social harmony as witnessed across Europe since the outbreak of the wars of religion. This widespread sense of anxiety thrived on popular beliefs in witchcraft, demonic possession, monstrous progeny, and other examples of imagination’s powers popularized by occult thinkers and humanists from Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno to Michel de Montaigne.27 Published two years apart, in the wake of the French parliamentary Fronde and the English Civil War respectively, Descartes’s Passions of the Soul (1649) and Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) may, in this sense, be seen as inner and outer reflections of a same apprehension that gripped European societies throughout the seventeenth century: how to manage unruly passions and tame unbridled imaginations in both individuals and the masses.28

Psychologies of Unease It is possible to elucidate the genesis of nostalgia similarly as the product of an era of instability known to historians as the “General Crisis” of the seventeenth century. Although its labeling as a “crisis” is disputed, few deny that a

30  Chapter One

prolonged period of economic stagnation, war, epidemics, and population decline affected much of the European continent from the late 1500s to the early 1700s.29 Economic historians have shown how this period produced structural transformations in what were still largely agrarian societies, generalizing a monetized market economy favorable to both rural “industrious” (or protoindustrial) activity and to significant urban migration to fast-­growing capital and port cities in northwestern Europe, while also sowing the seeds of a “Great Divergence” between Asia and Europe through the latter’s turn to a predatory, land-­grabbing, and exploitative “war capitalism” in colonial outposts.30 Similarly, intellectual historians have come to view the turn of the seventeenth century as a moment of “crisis [in] the European mind,” an age of ferment that gave birth to the Enlightenment in its early and ostensibly “radical” phase.31 Rhinelanders were no strangers to the political, religious, and economic convulsions of the era, and Hofer must have been particularly aware of his hometown’s precarious situation in the 1680s as an autonomous, Protestant enclave along the porous border between Habsburg and Bourbon spheres of influence. Situated at the southern tip of the Vosges, the town of  Mulhouse occupied a strategic position in the fertile agricultural plains of the Sundgau and Alsace, within easy reach of the Rhine. Despite its modest size—­barely 3,300 inhabitants in 1699 according to the first available census—­it had been an autonomous republic run by an oligarchy of burghers and trade corporations since the Middle Ages. It owed its independence to its close ties with nearby Basel and the alliance it struck in 1515 with the Swiss Confederation. (By virtue of this agreement, Mulhouse also found itself in an uneasy pact with the kingdom of France, after the Swiss cantons signed a treaty of perpetual peace with François I following their defeat at the Battle of  Marignano.) These diplomatic efforts threatened to be undone, though, at the onset of the Reformation, when Mulhouse adhered to Ulrich Zwingli’s Protestant league, provoking the ire of Swiss Catholic cantons and of the Holy Roman Empire, and placing the town in a difficult position between warring Catholics and Huguenots in nearby France. (The Prince de Condé successfully recruited men there after taking refuge in Basel in 1575.) Throughout the Thirty Years War (1618–­48) a garrison of several hundred infantrymen from Bern and Zurich remained stationed in the city, eying off marauding bands of imperial, Spanish, Swedish, and French troops. Miraculously, Mulhouse was spared the destruction visited upon neighboring areas and that left Alsace a smoldering land, amputated of half its population when it was absorbed into the kingdom of France at the Treaty of  Westphalia in 1648.32

Nostalgia in 1688  31

Of course, Hofer did not directly experience the Thirty Years War, and he would have been too young to remember the renewed violence of the Franco-­ Dutch War of 1672–­78. Nevertheless, he would undoubtedly have learned how a brash Louis XIV used the latter conflict as an excuse to occupy nearby Franche-­Comté and submit recalcitrant Alsatian towns, razing their walls and billeting French troops throughout. Most embarrassingly for the Swiss and their allies, Louis showed no hesitancy in mobilizing 25,000 Swiss hired soldiers—­including a company of two hundred militiamen from Mulhouse—­to fight against fellow Protestant Dutch forces, in spite of treaty terms forbidding such interfaith combat.33 Mulhouse was as dependent as ever on Swiss protection, and by 1681 Hofer would have been old enough to understand the significance, for his hometown, of  Louis’s decision to besiege the independent imperial city of Strasbourg—­also an ally of Swiss cantons—­with 30,000 men, forcing it to surrender, recognize Bourbon authority, and return its cathedral to Catholic Mass. But the Sun King’s muscular “politique des réunions” was not all: by the time his famed military engineer Vauban had laid siege to the city of Luxembourg as well, a steady stream of Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in France had started arriving in Mulhouse, often en route to larger Protestant communities in Swiss and German towns. They spread frightful stories of dragonnades, the horror of which would not have been lost on the Hofers, who offered shelter to refugees within the city and negotiated their safe passage to Basel with French authorities.34 In the mid-­1680s, Mulhouse’s inhabitants must have kept a watchful eye over their outdated medieval walls, wondering what other ominous portents might appear on the horizon. Seventeen miles farther south, residents of Basel cannot have been any more reassured at the sight of Vauban overseeing the construction of the fortress of Huningue, an imposing military structure that spanned across the Rhine less than two miles downstream, ostensibly for “defensive” purposes. In his lonely student quarters, Johannes Hofer no doubt pondered at what an unstable time he lived in. His decision to become a doctor rather than a pastor may well have had something to do with a sense of urgency about worldly affairs. Spiritual matters, though, were never too far away: by the time he had settled into the routine life of a medical student in the autumn of 1685, word would have reached him of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. As the streams of Protestant refugees swelled, driving up to 200,000 Huguenots out of France, fears of Catholic conspiracies in Britain and elsewhere on the continent reached fever pitch. Soon gunfire would echo once again as a coalition of European powers decided to take on Louis XIV once more in the

32  Chapter One

F i g u r e 1 . 3 . Matthäus Merian, map of Mulhouse in 1642. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Mulhouse.

War of the League of Augsburg (1688–­97). By the time he was finalizing his dissertation on nostalgia in the spring of 1688, Hofer could probably see from his window companies of Swiss soldiers marching off to defend Mulhouse yet again. Like Descartes in the wake of Fronde, and a year before John Locke felt similarly about the Glorious Revolution, we may conjecture that Hofer too internalized the instability of his time as a “psychology of uneasiness.”35

Motion Sickness But why nostalgia? Why take a gamble at coining a new disease when he could have just as easily written yet another study on melancholia or other existing emotional disorders such as lovesickness (as his hesitation on naming the condition suggests)? After all, there was little to distinguish these conditions in terms of symptomatology or pathophysiology. We may find clues to answer these questions in the three medical cases and other examples of nostalgia that Hofer discusses in his thesis. As in the case of the Swiss domestic servant in Paris, miraculous cures highlighting the healing “powers of the imagination” also feature in Hofer’s other two case histories. The first one, which he obtained from a nonspecified “trustworthy source,” relates of a young male student from an affluent Bernese family—­probably a fellow medical student—­who developed a severe fever and bouts of anxiety while living in Basel. Bleedings brought little comfort, prompting his physician to diagnose a case of nostalgia and order immediate

Nostalgia in 1688  33

repatriation on a stretcher. At hearing the news, the patient started feeling better, and he arrived in Bern perfectly restored to good health. In the final case history, which Hofer may well have observed firsthand, a young peasant girl who had been hospitalized unconscious in Basel fell “prey to nostalgia” upon coming to her senses and realizing that she was surrounded by “quarrelsome old ladies” (presumably elderly patients whom the young girl could not understand). Her parents were summoned to take her home, and, despite her desperate condition, the young girl recovered within a few days without needing any further medication. Hofer claims he could have added to these three cases, but only makes a passing allusion to the many more examples one might get from conversations with “French and Swiss army captains” (§IV). Apart from involving Swiss people, it is not immediately obvious what ties these cases together. Identity categories such as age, gender, or class don’t help much as the patients seem to come from all walks of  life. What they actually share is precisely this fact that they have “come” (traveled) from somewhere and that their occupation entails geographical mobility. As a condition premised on longing for home—­Heim-­we, home-­sickness—­nostalgia presupposed physical displacement and commanded prompt repatriation (or at least a promise thereof). It was, as Kevis Goodman has recently shown about eighteenth-­century sources, both a disease of mobility and a motion sickness within the body: stray too far from home, and the movement of the spirits would become irregular, eventually grinding to a perilous halt; turn around to make the journey back, and the physiological “machine” would start pumping life back into the body’s organs again.36 In a sense, the very creation of the diagnosis marks a partial rupture in the history of the so-­called apodemic arts, or the long standing humanist tradition that promoted travel as essential to both a well-­rounded education and good health, and that would continue to spur young adepts of the “Grand Tour” in the eighteenth century.37 Until then, and despite the odd warning against too much dreamy wandering, medieval and early modern doctors had by and large recommended purposeful voyages as a remedy to acedia, spleen, and all manner of melancholic temperaments.38 Nostalgia, on the other hand, called into question the wisdom of traveling far from familiar environs. Moreover, unlike melancholia, it did not seem to target idle scholars and men of  letters whose voyaging was restricted to mental daydreaming; instead, it affected peasants, domestic servants, students, and soldiers—­in other words, a sampling of society’s laboring and increasingly mobile lot. Of course, population movement was nothing new in the late 1600s: a generation of scholars has successfully debunked the image of a sedentary and autarkic population, shedding light on the widespread mobility of preindustrial

34  Chapter One

Europe, particularly along vibrant commercial arteries such as the Rhineland corridor. The circulation of people, goods, and ideas was an integral feature of rural and protoindustrial societies, central to land ownership, work, and trade, and also family life cycles and forms of interpersonal sociability. Whether merchants, peddlers, apprentices, brides, students, or soldiers, early modern Europeans were frequently on the move, albeit for the most part within limited radii and circular (or seasonal) flows.39 By the late seventeenth century, though, these patterns of mobility had begun to change as the development of a market economy promoted new forms of wage labor and facilitated the northwestern drift of Europe’s economic heartland to the Atlantic seaboard. Malthusian checks and prolonged agricultural depression in the wake of the Thirty Years War drove landlocked Europeans to seek new opportunities farther afield, feeding the growth of magnet cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, and London.40 Hofer’s case histories speak to these new networks of rural-­urban migration, and we may speculate that the homesick peasant girl was in Basel to seek employment (probably as a servant in a house) or that the domestique in Paris may have recently seen his status drop from integral member of the “maison”—­comparable to an apprentice journeyman within a corporation “family”—­to mere employee in a foreign environment.41 This shift was also evident at the level of representations of mobility: economic arguments in favor of a mobile workforce clashed with moral cautioning against the perceived corrupting effects of uprooting, stigmatizing poverty and vagabondage, as well as soldiers on the march and deserters hiding in the bush, as the visible hazards of occupational mobility. Soon, passports, highway patrols, and recruitment agents would become the new arbiters of a so-­called great confinement.42 The conditions of possibility for nostalgia begin to appear more clearly from within this context of  heightened anxiety about mobility—­about its growing scope, dislocations, and policing. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Mulhouse became fully integrated within a slowly recovering regional economy, loosening its rigid corporate regulations to become an important trade point in the upper Rhineland.43 In his youth, Hofer undoubtedly saw many people on the move: merchants, peddlers, migrant workers, and students, ferrying back and forth between Mulhouse and Basel. He must also have witnessed many more on the run: soldiers marching to battle and deserters, vagrants, or refugees scurrying along the roadsides. By emphasizing the nostalgic’s loss of  bearings and difficulty to adapt to foreign ways—­exemplified in an inability to understand foreigners or cope without traditional breakfast and milk (whether of dairy or maternal origin)—­Hofer suggested that increasingly far-­flung and long-­term migration flows were straining the networks of

Nostalgia in 1688  35

kinship and solidarity within which much of local and circular mobility had typically occurred up to that point. His allusion to the individual liberties that the Swiss forfeited when leaving their home cantons further underscored the element of coercion often involved in such travels—­whether in an economic impetus to depart, a legal impediment to return, religious persecutions, or seemingly endless warring that caused some to flee, others to march at the time.

The Sorrows of War It is, in fact, surprising that Hofer did not dwell on the last of these: the military recruit who perhaps epitomized best early modern mobility and who would soon be universally singled out as the archetypal victim of nostalgia.44 Of course, Hofer did refer readers to French and Swiss army captains for more examples of the disease. He added, almost casually, that the French spoke of Swiss people suffering from “maladie du pays,” at a time when the vast majority of Swissmen in France were mercenaries enlisted in Louis XIV’s armies (up to 25,000 men in 1688). Indeed, the stories of Heimweh that first prompted him to study the phenomenon were most likely also military ones, dating back to the French Wars of  Religion.45 So why be so coy about the cases of nostalgia among Swiss soldiers? Hofer was probably not able to observe one himself and perhaps felt hesitant at speaking without evidence at hand. More likely though, he expressly chose to not focus his study on military subjects and instead present a condition that could affect anyone, of all origins and in all walks of  life. In doing so, he may have sought to provide nostalgia with a larger audience than army physicians; it seems equally plausible, though, to suggest that the omission also belied unease at rumors of Swiss soldiers unable to hold their nerve far from home. The hiring out of large numbers of soldiers to European partners had, over the course of two centuries, become a central feature of the Swiss Confederation’s domestic and foreign policy. For Hofer, it also represented Mulhouse’s insurance policy against larger, predatory neighbors. But to his contemporaries, this was a system in decline, an outmoded form of recruiting an increasingly outdated fighting force; and tales of homesickness didn’t do much to improve its image. It had not always been so. Swiss cantons had sold the services of highly skilled militiamen to foreign monarchs since the late Middle Ages, and it is estimated that one million men served under foreign banner (some 700,000 for the French) by the time the practice ceased definitively in the mid-­1800s.46 The cantons developed a unique military tradition based on universal service in local militia forces. These acquired a halo of invincibility as fearsome,

36  Chapter One

disciplined soldiers when their infantry squares of pikemen and halberdiers recorded a string of emphatic victories against Burgundian and imperial armies in the late 1400s. French monarchs soon started recruiting men from the confederation, particularly under the impulse of Cardinal Richelieu, whose opinion of  French soldiers was notoriously unflattering. Emissaries negotiated directly with cantonal authorities the recruitment of companies of 200–­300 men for fixed terms of duty. Everyone found something to like in the system: excitement and adventure for young Swiss males without many prospects at home;47 a measure to manage chronic overpopulation and secure protection and trade deals for cantonal authorities; and a cost-­efficient way to man steadily growing armies—­up from 40,000 men at the Battle of Marignano in 1515 to over 400,000 by the mid-­1690s—­for the French ones.48 Swiss regiments typically provided one-­fifth of French forces on the battlefield and were used to anchor the infantry line with dependable, well-­drilled pikemen who could quickly maneuver between attacking and defensive formations in the heat of battle. Swiss militiamen enjoyed much prestige both at home, where local communities viewed them with pride, and abroad, where elite companies were entrusted with the personal protection of foreign monarchs (the French royal family and the pope most famously). They were appreciated in humanist circles ordinarily ill-­disposed to the use of mercenaries and, by the eighteenth century, in Enlightenment ones averse to standing armies but equally fascinated by republican militias of “citizen-­soldiers.” From Machiavelli to Condorcet, Swiss soldiers were viewed as having more in common with ancient Spartan warriors and American revolutionary volunteers than other “mercenaries” or professional soldiers.49 In addition to their ferocity and skilled use of the pike, they were particularly praised for their unusual esprit de corps, nurtured from valley community to the battlefield by a native captain. Swiss soldiers maintained a tight-­knit sociability among them and were allowed to preserve unique identities and privileges—­such as confessional freedom—­ while on campaign. Veterans served as drillmasters, and discipline was enforced through peer pressure rather than punishment. Although many never returned, home remained the horizon of these men, who rarely lost touch with their countrymen and could expect to be welcomed back by their families once their service was completed.50 But all this had begun to change in the last third of the seventeenth century, with adverse consequences both for the Swiss soldiers and “mercenary” system as a whole. While recent work has nuanced the extent of absolutism’s reach and tended to view the transition to the large, centrally managed

Nostalgia in 1688  37

standing armies of the early modern era as a matter of military evolution rather than revolution, no one questions the extent to which the organization of the French army itself changed under the leadership of Louis XIV’s war ministers Le Tellier and Louvois.51 Starting in the 1660s, sweeping measures were adopted to centralize military command and extend civilian oversight over officers (through the appointment of intendants and commissaires). The army was expanded by increasing domestic and foreign recruitment, fighting desertion, and extending the duration of service (officially to three years, but in effect almost indefinitely). It was also professionalized, with the introduction of regular, year-­round training camps and army-­wide drill regulations in 1683. These had become necessary to coordinate complex maneuvers in increasingly thin and extended line formations made possible by the introduction of superior flintlock muskets equipped with plug and eventually socket bayonets. Soldiers’ daily life also changed, as ordinances imposed draconian discipline, introduced standard uniforms, initiated the construction of barracks to phase out billeting in civilian homes, and drastically reduced the presence of women in the army. In 1688, barely a few months after Hofer defended his thesis, Louvois created a provincial militia with which to supplement the regular army, thus introducing compulsory enlistment for the first time in France. As André Corvisier remarks, it is possible, by the time of the War of the League of the Augsburg, to speak of the “first modern form of military service in France.”52 Swiss regiments could hardly escape reforms designed specifically to stan­ dardize Louis’s disparate forces. Starting in 1670 they were among the first to adopt new discipline and drill regulations developed by Jean Martinet, the infantry’s first inspector general (and unwitting eponym for the infamous punitive whip used thereafter in French schools). The Swiss were also forced to begrudgingly abandon their cherished but increasingly obsolete pikes in favor of the flintlock musket (a process only completed by the turn of the century), and many found themselves spending winter months in training camps alongside regular French units for the first time. Most symbolically, they too were ordered to put on standardized uniforms and by 1688 had adopted the recognizable red coats. (Recruits from Mulhouse started wearing uniforms as early as 1671.)53 But the reforms didn’t only remove the physical signs of Swiss particularity; they also indented their unique esprit de corps and undermined the very premises of the mercenary system as it had existed for almost two centuries. Ever in need of more troops, the colonel of the Swiss Guards, Pierre Stuppa, started recruiting clandestinely out of the Jura region in 1668, to form “free companies” of mixed origins and with less favorable rates and terms. Three years later he bullied the cantons into raising permanent Swiss

38  Chapter One

regiments of the line, garrisoned in France and named after a commissioned colonel. By 1690 Louis XIV had at his disposal eight new Swiss regiments of the line (15,500 men), as well as some sixty free companies (8,000 men).54 In the space of two decades, then, Swiss units had not only lost many of their prerogatives—­the only one they maintained was free practice of their faith—­ but had also become a less distinguishable and more heterogeneous force where hierarchy and rule-­book discipline had replaced camaraderie and peer pressure. Their dues were paid erratically, if at all, by an increasingly cash-­ strapped French crown, and for the first time demand for new recruits outstripped offer in the cantons. Frustrated and increasingly concerned about French expansionism, Swiss authorities began hiring out growing numbers of troops to Dutch, Spanish, and even Austrian armies. But for many observers the writing was on the wall, and despite continuing to provide European armies with expendable manpower throughout the eighteenth century, the Swiss mercenary system had entered irreversible decline. To Hofer this must have been a distressing prospect. Louis’s reforms were flattening those bonds of camaraderie that had enabled Swiss soldiers—­ including ones from Mulhouse—­to survive during periods of service spent abroad. The growing noise about Heimweh was a direct consequence of this, and it is quite possible that Hofer first heard of it from his mentor’s brother, Johann Rudolf Zwinger, who was a chaplain in Stuppa’s Swiss companies. But soldiers’ estrangement was not all; the disproportionate growth of French armed forces cast a menacing shadow over Mulhouse itself, undermining its ability to both raise troops and call upon Swiss reinforcements. For the past twenty years Stuppa and his acolytes had been combing the region for avail­ able men, and when, in 1688, Bern and Zurich dispatched a company to protect their Alsatian ally, Hofer must have wondered what a few hundred men could do against the hundreds of thousands amassing farther north in the Palatinate. At least these cantons were still honoring the old allegiance; others, such as Basel and Schaffhausen, had decided to stop lending their troops in 1676 for fear of weakening their own defenses.55 Now cantonal authorities were having to reconsider the terms of their relation to France itself, and if the fate of Strasbourg a few years earlier was anything to go by, the citizens of Mulhouse can hardly have slept soundly at night. These were, indeed, anxious times that Hofer lived through, ones that were surely responsible for—­if not a direct cause of—­his interest for Heimweh. His dissertation drew attention to a medical problem with both wide-­reaching ram­ ifications and a specific implication: nostalgia was not only the symptom of a society undergoing major structural transformations; it was also the front line

Nostalgia in 1688  39

in a battle to defend Mulhouse’s independence, by finding a “cure” of sorts for a military system under siege. Military psychology, let alone psychiatry, was as yet an unknown thing to Hofer and his contemporaries. Yet he seems to have intuited that saving his city implied saving Swiss soldiers from the homesickness they now felt when on duty abroad, and it is no coincidence that the three cases he presented to his readers all ended with successful, even miraculous cures. Nostalgia, in other words, had both a real content and an instrumental raison d’être: it needed to be invented precisely insofar as it could be cured. Hofer would live on to see Mulhouse maintain itself and even prosper in the first half of the eighteenth century. (His decedents would eventually vote for reunion with the newly born French Republic in 1798, half a century after Hofer’s death.) Although he was unable to reverse the decline of the Swiss mercenary system itself, his medical coinage stuck, and in decades to come nostalgia became the accepted measure of soldiers’ psychological well-­being—­ and not only among the Swiss.

Chronotopic Complexities I have argued in this chapter that the appearance of the disease “nostalgia” may be seen as what Jan Goldstein calls a “discursive marker of socio-­cultural unease”—­in this case as a symptom of the dislocations experienced by Rhinelanders in the late seventeenth century, and in particular those felt by Swiss soldiers stationed abroad.56 The making of nostalgia proceeded not from a medical revolution but from the convulsions of a society in the grips of war and uprooting. Mechanistic medical models based on the movement of animal spirits enabled Hofer to project onto the body and psyche the troubling volatility of his era, just as the movement of humors had for Burton earlier in the 1600s, and that of nervous fibers would for Enlightenment physicians thereafter. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that he framed the original iteration of nostalgia explicitly in spatial terms: this was both a disease of mobility—­of moving people and bodily parts—­and one that could only be cured if viewed in synchronic terms, with the subject and object of longing inhabiting one same historical plane. Arguably, though, Hofer also identified less overt diachronic implications to his age’s instability, ones that imparted an implicit temporal dynamic to nostalgia. Like many other psychopathologists before and since, he resorted to a familiar comparison with the illusory effects of dreams (and hypnotic states of meditation) to illustrate the misleading powers of an overheated imagination such as that found in a nostalgic person (§VII). It was a very hypermnesic dream that he had in mind, one where “residual impressions”

40  Chapter One

stored in memory were revived by animal spirits gushing through the brain’s inner tubules, thus providing the imagination with the raw data it needed to weave all-­consuming mental images (§VI–­VII). On the one hand, the dream analogy reasserted a long-­standing belief dating back to antiquity in the basic affiliation of the two mental faculties of memory and imagination.57 On the other, though, it also seemed to open up a rift between them, as the object of the dream/ longing—­home—­survived in memory but no longer found corroborating validation in its imaginative form. By projecting physical mobility as a marker of social disembedding onto the psyche, Hofer was, as it were, almost mapping out a new geography of the mind whereby memory and imagination came together only to underscore their growing incommensurability. The appearance of nostalgia as a social problem in 1688 signals a slow change in the way Europeans viewed the interconnectedness between psyche and outer world through evolving concepts of memory and imagination. Not long after Hofer’s intervention, fretting about fanciful daydreaming and perilous unruly imaginations would reach uncharted new heights in the writings of Enlightenment philosophes, belying deeper anxieties about social mobility, fragmentation, and individualism that threatened to undo the corporative prerevolutionary order. The Encyclopédistes’ answer to these worrisome symptoms was to distinguish between active (or sovereign and male) and passive (or subjugated and female) forms of imagination on the one hand and, on the other, to draw a clear line between these imaginative faculties and memory, so that the latter might exert its objective, stabilizing effects on both the psyche and on society, untrammeled by the former’s proclivity for hazardous chimeras. With this parting, what had been intimately related and often overlapping mental faculties since the time of Aristotle were definitively torn asunder and placed in opposition to one another.58 In marking an initial split in this time-­honored contiguity of memory and imagination, the coming into existence of nostalgia therefore appears as a tan­ gible manifestation of the overhauling of notions of time and space that Rein­ hard Koselleck has described in terms of the “spaces of experience” and “horizons of expectation.” According to Koselleck, the linear “temporalization” of history in the modern era is a product of the tension generated by the growing divergence between experiences and expectations that no longer coincide and instead proceed to frame the concept of historical progress. 59 As others have similarly noted, this new “regime of historicity,” or configuration of how past, present, and future relate to one another, crystallized in the late seventeenth century and during the famous quarrel of the ancients and moderns.60 Nostalgia—­which coincidentally appeared just as the querelle

Nostalgia in 1688  41

was getting under way in Paris—­may be seen as a symptom of this newfound historicity and temporalization, as an expression of spatial and temporal disjuncture in a society increasingly shaped by what Koselleck calls the “contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous”—­that is a society undergoing uneven transformation in the early phases of capitalist modernity.61 It had, in other words, a chronotopic quality from its inception. * Johannes Hofer, for one, did not dwell upon nostalgia’s dizzying metaphysics, preferring instead steady medical empiricism. Having completed his studies and obtained his MD in 1689, he made the seventeen-­mile journey back home to Mulhouse, seemingly for good. Aged twenty, he became the town hospital’s resident physician, a position he occupied for almost three decades before succeeding his father-­in-­law as the town’s official “First Doctor” (the Stadtarzt, at once a liberal practitioner, coroner, and medical inspector). We know little about his practice, which he conducted in the shadow of yet more dynastic conflicts that continued to mar the region in the first half of the eigh­ teenth century. Miraculously, Mulhouse escaped major destruction once again, surviving a two-­year blockade during the War of the League of Augsburg and continuing to elude Louis XIV right to the monarch’s death in 1715. A devout and well-­connected citizen, Hofer entered the city council in 1702 and was elected Bürgermeister in 1716. He became the longest-­standing chief magistrate in the five-­century-­long history of the Republic of Mulhouse, retaining his office until 1748, when poor health brought him to resign four years before his death. He was replaced by his eponymous son—­also a doctor by training—­ who, together with his nephew,  Josué Hofer, ensured Mulhouse’s indepen­ dence right up to the French Revolution through tireless diplomatic shuttling between Versailles and the Swiss cantons. Johannes Hofer was seventy-­nine years old when he retired from public office. The Treaty of Aix-­la-­Chapelle had just put an end to the War of Austrian Succession and, many hoped, to incessant quarreling between Europe’s crowned heads. Religious intolerance appeared to be on the wane in France, and Louis XV showed more interest for French possessions overseas than he did for Alsace. Hofer’s descendants were busy cultivating Mulhouse’s continued ties with the Swiss Confederation and obtaining from the French commercialization privileges for the city’s newly created manufacture of indiennes, the cotton textiles that would spearhead the city’s spectacular growth in the industrial age. Indeed, perhaps for the first time in two centuries, citizens of

42  Chapter One

Mulhouse looked over their crumbling medieval walls with a bit more confidence in the future. At any rate, Hofer could hardly be blamed for feeling that he left his town in a better political and economic situation than what he had found it in. As things turned out, though, peace was yet again to be of short duration, this time paving the way to a new era of conflict between nations, fought on a global scale and in an increasingly “total” way—­an era rife in cases of clinical nostalgia, as well. But Hofer did not know that. He died peacefully, surrounded by his four surviving children and extended kin. As far as we know, he had had no reason to feel homesick ever since his student days in Basel and had never written a word about nostalgia again.

Chapter 2

The Reasons of a Passion Qui patriam quaerit, mortem invenit. (He who seeks his homeland will find death.) b e r n a r d o r a m a z z i n i , De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (Diseases of  Workers) (1700)

The story of nostalgia could have both started and ended on June 22, 1688. By all accounts,  Johannes Hofer’s defense with his professors went well, but it can hardly be said to have sent shockwaves around a medical world already awash with groundbreaking “discoveries” of all sorts. As Hofer completed his studies and retired to medical anonymity in Mulhouse, his dissertation would have been filed away along with countless other more or less significant contributions to the Western medical canon. Indeed, it is conceivable that the very word “nostalgia” may then have been forgotten to posterity. After all, few of us today are aware of what “lypemania” meant only a century and a half ago. We may, in other words, have forgotten all about being, let alone feeling, “nostalgic.” That we didn’t must be attributed in no small part to the efforts of Hofer’s mentors, Jacob Harder and Theodor Zwinger. The former saw to it that his student’s thesis be published, an established practice in Basel but mostly reserved for inaugural dissertations, not preliminary ones. Twenty-­two years later, Zwinger reprinted the text as part of a collection of notable works presented by medical students in Basel but revised it in several places and even replaced “nostalgia” with a neologism of his own. None of this was particularly unusual at the time; more surprising, though, is the fact that very soon after the first edition was published, it was reprinted identical to the original but with its publication antedated to 1678 (when Hofer was only nine years old!). This 1678 edition appears to have become the standard one available throughout the eighteenth century, causing considerable confusion as to its authorship. But the plot thickened even further when a third edition appeared under both Harder’s and Hofer’s names in 1745, it too replacing “nostalgia” with another

44  Chapter Two

coinage in the title. Finally, in 1757, the eminent Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller restored the original title and included the 1678 edition in yet another multivolume compendium of medical theses published in Lausanne, attributing the work this time to Harder rather than to his student.1 In a very concrete sense, then, the story of nostalgia after 1688 is that of the death of its author(s) and the wondrous afterlife of a text.2 The editorial vicissitudes of  Hofer’s Dissertatio ensured that the manuscript was not filed away and forgotten. Instead, it was brought to the attention of an international medical audience and simultaneously shrouded in mystery. In this chapter I follow the diffusion of a text(s) and of a new disease entity across what has been called the “medical Republic of Letters” of early modern Europe. Like other international networks of scholars that provided the backbone to the Enlightenment, this was a cosmopolitan community of medical researchers and academies that built upon a well-­established tradition of academic travels and correspondence.3 Along these transnational channels of communication, nostalgia and its avatars slowly but surely became a topic of interest in medical faculties across Europe, eventually across the Atlantic as well. Thanks to the relaying effects of printed books, learned societies, and salons, it even reached beyond the medical world, strictly speaking, to a broader audience of Enlightenment figures intrigued by astonishing stories of “death by nostalgia.” Over the course of the century separating Hofer’s dissertation from the outbreak of the French Revolution, two rival explanations for the disease emerged in competition with one another. Both drew from Hofer’s original description, and while they pointed in different directions and leaned upon seemingly incompatible medical epistemologies, they would eventually come to complement one another in the eyes of most medical practitioners. The first of these offered a wholly mechanistic view, typically rooted in theories of environmental determinism, and was most popular during the heyday of medical materialism in the early eighteenth century. By contrast, the second grasped nostalgia as an emotional disorder with a sprawling list of both internal and external causes, and gained the ascendant in the mid-­1800s. Its proponents ranged across the board—­from Stahlian animists to Parisian “sensationalists,” and from Montpellier “vitalists” to Edinburgh “solidists”—­but they all shared a view of the condition as a mild mental disorder (a neurosis in our vocabulary) with potentially fatal somatic effects. Like other fashionable diseases of the Georgian era, including hysteria and hypochondria, nostalgia came to be thought of primarily in neurological terms, as a disorder of the nervous system—­that is, of sensations, sentiments, and the paradigmatic notion of  “sensibility.” By the late eighteenth century, the etiology of nostalgia thus continued to revolve around

The Reasons of a Passion  45

familiar Hoferian themes, including disturbed imaginations, unruly passions, and changing lifestyles, as well as environmental determinants such as air quality and the dreaded “miasmas” made popular by the emergence of  hygienism.4 A loose consensus it was, and as if to underscore its fragility, the most esteemed nosologists of the day simply could not find any satisfying way of classifying nostalgia in their sprawling taxonomies of diagnoses, prompting some to question whether it should even be considered a real disease at all. But what increasingly seemed less questionable to late eighteenth-­century physicians was who suffered from nostalgia (whatever it actually was). This chapter does not only provide an intellectual biography of a trending medical term. Whatever its merits, such a task would remain confined to what I will call the medical “prehistory” of nostalgia—­that is, to the period when it by and large sustained abstract debates of medical theory, without intervening in pressing questions of clinical practice. The history of nostalgia proper, I submit, begins on the one hand with the crystallizing awareness of its effects and epidemiological grounding—­in other words, of its social conditions of existence—­and, on the other, with the extramedical functions that the diagnoses came to acquire to medical practitioners in search of professional recognition within the increasingly unregulated and diversified medical market of the eighteenth century.5 During the High Enlightenment, nostalgia did not only tickle the curiosity of physicians and philosophers then engaged in a collective quest to define a medical “science of man”; it also acquired a more pressing urgency for a limited group of physicians employed in the relatively new specialization of occupational medicine. Nowhere was this most evident than among those entrusted with the thankless task of  keeping soldiers alive and combat-­worthy. Long thought of (and for various reasons) as a disease specific to Swiss mercenaries, nostalgia increasingly came to be associated to the plight of all men under arms, whatever their origins, prompting both the concern of military authorities and the interest of those who stood to capitalize from the condition: military doctors. Neither a “discovery” of the scientific revolution nor an abstract Enlightenment concept (let alone a romantic “mood”), nostalgia came into being upon the rapidly expanding and ever-­more-­gruesome battlefields of eighteenth-­century Europe.

V a r i a t i o n s o n S w i s s “A i r s” In 1710 Theodor Zwinger was at the apogee of a successful medical career in Basel and a celebrated correspondent for learned societies and the odd European crowned head as well. His admirers included the likes of Frederick I of Brandenburg-­Prussia, to whom he dedicated a collection of notable theses,

46  Chapter Two

including Hofer’s—­now revised to his former teacher’s liking and augmented with three extra theses, a new case history, and a whole new name. What Hofer had put his finger on, Zwinger felt, was best described as a case of  “pothopat­ ridalgia,” or the ache (algia) caused by longing ( pothos) for one’s homeland ( patria). The change in terminology was no trifle matter for it made explicit what Hofer’s “nostalgia” had not—­namely, the disease’s connection to patriotic sentiment. Zwinger underscored this by explicitly mentioning the sorry fate of Swiss soldiers who succumbed to the malady while serving in France and the Spanish Netherlands. “Pothopatridalgia,” he must have felt, was more attuned to an age of dynastic rivalries and imperial wars increasingly fought in the name of patriotic ideals, and by armies ever more “national” in their composition.6 The new case history added little to Hofer’s original clinical picture, but Zwinger did make two major revisions to the etiology of pothopatridalgia, both of which promised to explain the particular susceptibility of the Swiss but in radically different ways. The first of these he heard from Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, a correspondent of  his and esteemed naturalist from Zurich who, equipped with walking stick and barometer, had set out to prove that the Swiss suffered from Heimweh through no fault of their own (§X, 99–­101). Rather, it was the abrupt change in atmospheric pressure that followed from their descent to low-­lying lands that caused the disease, by compressing the body and disturbing organic functions responsible for bouts of anxiety. If the Swiss were particularly prone, then, it was because of the difference between rarified mountain air and the denser atmosphere of valleys (something that Hofer had admittedly already hinted at in passing in 1688). Scheuchzer’s mechanical etiology of nostalgia admitted a similarly concrete treatment: if homesick patients could not be consoled or sent back up familiar slopes, they should be confined atop nearby hills or even towers—­anything that might expose them to lighter air. As a last resort, saltpeter and young wine could be administered to help compress air within their body and thus counteract the atmosphere’s oppressive pressure.7 Although he acknowledged his debt to Hofer and Harder, Scheuchzer therefore went much further than his predecessors in espousing his day and age’s fascination for scientific empiricism and medical materialism. His hydraulic model of the body was a staple of experimental physiology at the time, and, like others, he showed blind faith in the barometer’s capacity to unlock the secrets of both meteorology and environmental medicine.8 Scheuchzer’s motivations for elaborating a wholly deterministic, environmental explanation for nostalgia were not purely scientific though; he acknowledged wanting

The Reasons of a Passion  47

to “defend [the Swiss] national honor” by vigorously refuting any claims to constitutional frailty in its people (and, most importantly, its hired soldiers).9 Ironically, though, his intervention only served to reinforce the stigma, by un­ derscoring a perceived link between the disease and mountainous people. Thanks to both Scheuchzer’s popularity and Zwinger’s gloss, the atmospheric interpretation of nostalgia traveled widely and within a few years appeared in medical dissertations defended in the Hessian town of Gießen (1707) and in Avignon, France (1713).10 By the late 1720s, it also featured prominently in Albrecht von Haller’s youthful botanical explorations of the Bernese Oberland, which he wrote upon returning home after a seven-­year peregrinatio medica across northern Europe.11 But medical students were not the only ones intrigued by Scheuchzer’s claims, and in the following decades these reached a broader literate public across the continent thanks to the burgeoning interest for Swiss travel literature.12 By midcentury they had become especially popular in France, where they found a receptive audience already acclimated to Cartesian dualism and environmental theories popularized by Jean Bodin and Montesquieu (whose celebrated thesis of climatic determinism appeared in the Spirit of Laws in 1747). In 1719 a Gallicized “hemvé ” briefly entered the French lexicon through the Abbé Dubos’s widely read Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la pein­ ture. According to Dubos, hemvé only became a form of sorrow ( peine de l’esprit) because it had previously affected the body ( peine du corps) via the atmosphere.13 Two years later, the expanded second edition of the Diction­ naire universel françois et latin (better known as Dictionnaire de Trévoux) reported a summary of research on “maladie du païs” by the medical student Gastaldy (the author of the 1713 dissertation from Avignon mentioned above), who also blamed a change in air for this chronic disorder.14 Scheuchzer’s views on nostalgia suited the many students of the great clinician and iatromechanist Herman Boerhaave, including fellow travelers of  Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s radical materialist circle. One of these, the polymath physician and prolific en­ cyclopédiste Louis de Jaucourt was even entrusted by Diderot and d’Alembert with the drafting of a short article on hemvé for their Encyclopédie. A convinced mechanist,  Jaucourt simply paraphrased Dubos’s fifty-­year-­old observations, presenting homesickness in organic terms, as the direct consequence of climate change on a “frail machine” ( frêle machine).15 But “l’homme machine” was not the only one to suffer from nostalgia in the mid-­1700s. By the time Jaucourt’s article on hemvé appeared in 1765, its Cartesian overtones must have seemed rather dated to most readers, and not only because the term “nostalgie” had meanwhile started to be used in French

48  Chapter Two

(probably in 1761 for the first time).16 By then the condition was increasingly ascribed to a rather different kind of patient: an “homme sensible,” or man of feeling, which physicians dissatisfied with mechanistic medicine had begun to weave around the body’s central nervous system. As the “heroic age of iatromechanism” ebbed and a new, monistic theory of  human nature premised on the structuring principle of “sensibility” emerged in its stead, the Swiss propensity to homesickness was no longer explained in terms of an atmospheric quirkiness but in relation to a more musical kind of Swiss “air.”17

the

r a n z d e s va c h e s

In accounting for the peculiarly Swiss nature of the nostalgia, Theodor Zwinger pointed readers not only to Scheuchzer’s writings, but also to some extraordinary measures taken to combat the disease in Swiss regiments stationed in the Low Countries. Officers had apparently been forced to forbid the playing, singing, or even whistling of a certain “cantinella Helvetica” within the ranks, for fear that it would provoke outbreaks of deadly homesickness by “stimulating [the men’s] desiderium patriae.” The pathological melody in question was the “Kühe-­Reyen,” a “rustic” musical air typically used by Swiss herdsmen to call their cows from Alpine pastures. There existed dozens of re­ gional variations, each strongly associated to local folklore (§XII, 101–­5).18 That music could both cause illness and help to heal had been widely accepted since the Middle Ages. In the early 1700s, “associationist” psychological theories premised upon John Locke’s sensationalist philosophy (which ascribed knowledge to sense perceptions rather than innate ideas) reinforced the belief, explaining how familiar melodies could reawaken involuntary, affective memories.19 Like Scheuchzer’s singular recommendation to quarantine homesick people atop towers, the image of burly Swiss mercenaries being brought to their knees by a shepherd’s hymn spread quickly, so much so that by the 1770s American revolutionaries were complaining of it when in Europe.20 By then it had also come to the attention of a Genevan philosopher with a distinctly musical ear. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau appears to have first mentioned what he called the “ranz des vaches” in a 1763 letter to his patron and savior, Charles François de Montmorency. For him, the effects of the melody illustrated nicely the contrast between the idyllic, natural lifestyle of Alpine communities and the corrupting influence that urban civilization had upon the French (a theme that Rousseau had already expounded a decade earlier in his two Discourses). When the Swiss hear the ranz abroad, Rousseau told

The Reasons of a Passion  49

Montmorency, they “burst into tears” (torrents de larmes) and become sick from “hemvé.” Their French neighbors, on the other hand, are incapable of such genuine displays of feeling, as their senses have already been numbed by commerce and luxury.21 A few years later, Rousseau revisited what he now described as “the famous Rans-­des-­vaches, a cherished air of the Swiss,” both in his Dictionnaire de musique (1768) and in the plate volumes of the Encyclo­ pédie (1769). He provided a musical score and reemphasized the song’s connection to the Swiss’ simple manners and proximity to nature (despite some worrying signs of encroaching corruption for them too). Rousseau rejected the idea that the melody’s effects had any concrete physical basis, instead pointing to their capacity to revive “habits” and “customs” in those who heard it. “The music,” he concluded, “does not therefore act properly as music, but as a mnemonic sign (signe mémoratif  ).”22 Rousseau’s analysis of the ranz des vaches signals a partial rupture, or fork, in the historical trajectory of nostalgia as an occasional disease, and it is worth delving into its implications. By highlighting the Swiss’ earnest expressions of feeling upon hearing the ranz, Rousseau placed them squarely within the “cult of sensibility” that pervaded Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. Contemporaries defined sensibility as a property of the nervous system, one’s capacity to “perceive impressions of external objects” and consequently be “moved” by internal “sentiments.”23 They championed effusive displays of feeling in public (in both women and men) and found prototypical sentimental characters to emulate in Samuel Richardson’s novels from the 1740s or, across the channel, in Rousseau’s hugely successful La Nouvelle Héloise (1761) and Jean-­Baptiste Greuze’s moral paintings from the 1760s. But this all-­pervasive “culture” of sensibility always had one foot in medicine and another in the arts (the Encyclopédie’s main article on the topic was written by a doctor and tagged “médecine,” to distinguish it from a much shorter one tagged “morale”). Eighteenth-­century intellectual life in Europe was not split into “two cultures” as is our own; rather, it fostered dialogue among polymaths across what was a very porous border between the sciences and humanities.24 Rousseau’s intervention reveals the extent to which the question of nostalgia (or hemvé, as he called it) was itself, by the 1760s, increasingly viewed through the prism of sensibility—­that is, of a holistic view of the body that rejected Cartesian dualism in favor of a more diffuse interaction between body and mind, mediated by the nervous system and relations of  “sympathy” between organs. This medical outlook harked back to Thomas Willis’s neurological works and flourished in Georgian Britain thanks to distinguished doctors and medical popularizes

50  Chapter Two

such as Robert Whytt and George Cheyne. By the mid-­1700s, it had attained paradigmatic status on the continent as well, turning nostalgia into one of many “nervous distempers” that seemed to afflict Europeans at the time. But Rousseau’s intervention also hints at another trajectory for nostalgia, one that would, in the long run, push it beyond medicine’s purview altogether. His description of the Swiss as âmes sensibles speaks to his contemporaries’ infatuation with pastoral landscapes. By far the dominant way of perceiving and of  “feeling” nature throughout the age of  Enlightenment, the pastoral tradition had recently been reinvigorated and given a decidedly Alpine twist by Salomon Gessner, whose Idylles (1756) famously spurred Rousseau into idealizing the inhabitants of the Haut Valais, setting off a veritable cult of Swiss virtuous rusticity.25 Simply put, the Swiss were the closest to a prelapsarian people of “noble savages” that one might find on the European continent, proof being that they “felt” the ranz in a way the sophisticated and already corrupted French could not. But Rousseau was not content with explaining the effects of the ranz solely in terms of modern man’s loss of innocence. By subsuming these under the question of affective memory, he also pointed to the individuals’ loss of childhood—­in other words to an internalization of the object of nostalgic longing that points beyond pastoral tropes altogether and toward ones more readily recognizable as “romantic” to us today. In the last third of the eighteenth century, the ranz featured prominently in what can be described as a slowly shifting and increasingly benign structure of feeling. It became an object of musicological interest, sparking a wave of publications.26 In France, it continued to adorn increasingly stylized pastorals, such as those of Jacques Delille.27 Elsewhere, in Britain and Germany most especially, it caught the ear of romantic poets, including Wordsworth and Brentano, as well as a who’s who list of nineteenth-­century composers (Beethoven to Wagner) in search of more rousing emotions in wild landscapes and ancient folklore.28 Summing up the change in tone, the Swiss novelist and devout follower of Rousseau, Senancour, challenged his mentor’s interpretation of the ranz, arguing instead that in conjuring the sounds and sights of awesome mountaintops it expressed no less than the true “romantic character.”29 Such was the fascination with the ranz by the turn of the century that one would have been forgiven for overlooking its pathogenic precedents among Swiss mercenaries. For even this might be called into question as the demystifying ethos of the late Enlightenment met a more introspective romantic sensibility. Writing from Koenigsberg in the 1790s, an aging Immanuel Kant dismissed stories of a specifically Swiss Heimweh on the basis that the ailment had been reported elsewhere, among Westphalian and Pomerian soldiers. He described homesickness in familiar

F i g u r e 2 . 1 . Ferdinand Huber, “Der Herden-­Reihen—­Ranz des Troupeaux,” in Les délices de la Suisse, ou choix de ranz des vaches (Kuhreihen) et autres chants nationaux suisses avec ac­ compagnement de piano et guitare (Basel: Ernest Knop, 1835?), 33. Note the soldier’s classic melancholy pose. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University, HD 788.594 D35.

52  Chapter Two

terms—­as an example of the “power of the imagination”—­but added, crucially, that it manifested itself as a delusion, an example of “inventive” as opposed to “recollective” imagination. Unlike Hofer a century earlier, Kant and his contemporaries distinguished between these two forms of imagination, warning against dangerous fantasies and adepts of building “castles in Spain.” As these illusions went, Heimweh was a relatively harmless one; yet delusional it was, and as the homesick soldier realized upon returning home, what he truly longed for was not the place itself but a forever-­lost childhood. Thus, Kant concluded, was he cured of both his deception and his so-­called illness.30

A Passion in the Nosological Maze Before providing a recurrent musical leitmotif for a nascent romantic movement, the ranz des vaches echoed from one medical faculty to another, spreading the nostalgia diagnosis across the medical republic of letters. From Halle to Leiden and Edinburgh to Montpellier, physicians dissatisfied with both resilient humoral models and dualistic, iatromechanical explanations began formulating rival ones informed by the new science of sensibility. These tended to view the body as a holistic system dependent, for its well-­being, on a complex equilibrium of vital forces (likened either to an immaterial essence or nervous fluids) set in motion by both internal and external forces. As early as 1724, Johann Juncker, a professor at Halle University in Prussia, examined nostalgia according to the animist doctrine of his mentor and collaborator, Georg Ernst Stahl, who postulated the existence of an immaterial principle—­the anima—­at the source of all living beings. Juncker eschewed atmospheric and mechanical explanations, instead describing nostalgia in purely psychogenic terms, as an “immoderate desire” that “vitiated the imagination” and hampered the organism’s “vital movements” (motus vitales). Most importantly, he distinguished between two forms of nostalgia: an “idiopathic” (or essential) one that resided “solely in the vitiated imagination of the soul” and a “symptomatic” one that affected bodily organs as well.31 Although few other physicians openly embraced the metaphysical overtones of Stahl’s teachings, many welcomed his challenge to mechanistic medicine and sought to develop psychosomatic explanations for nostalgia that brought external sensations and inner sentiments into dialogue with empirical findings in physiology. One of these was the Swiss naturalist and “father of modern physiology,” Albrecht von Haller, whose trajectory is emblematic in this regard. A student of Herman Boerhaave in Leiden in the 1720s, Haller became acquainted with Scheuchzer through their common passion for Alpine ex-

The Reasons of a Passion  53

cursions and botany. Echoes of the latter’s atmospheric explanation for nostalgia are visible in Haller’s youthful poems written while abroad, and whose eloquent titles—­“Longing for the Fatherland” (Sehnsucht nach dem Vater­ land, 1726), and the ode “The Alps” (Die Alpen, 1729)—­count among the first protoromantic celebrations of mountainous landscapes. Often homesick, Haller never missed an opportunity to travel to his native Bern throughout his sixteen-­year stint as a professor at the University of Göttingen (1736–­53), and, aged forty-­five and at the pinnacle of a pathbreaking career in muscle and nerve physiology, he turned down the most prestigious medical faculties in Europe to return home definitively. His interest for nostalgia did not wane, though, and in 1755 he included a short discussion of the condition in his medical dictionary, the Onomatologia medica. By then Haller had abandoned the condition’s atmospheric etiology, and although he still saw it as prevalent among the Swiss—­he called it a “Schweizerkrankheit”—­he now believed it was essentially caused by an emotional disposition: the “passionate longing for the fatherland” that consumed the body’s vital forces. If the patient’s “most ardent desire” was not satisfied, he indicated, homesickness would “degenerate into a kind of melancholia.”32 Two years later Haller reprinted the original 1678 (sic) edition of Hofer’s dissertation, attributing it primarily to Harder and removing Zwinger’s revisions (nomenclature, atmospheric, and acoustic etiologies).33 As an old man, he had one last opportunity to grapple with the illness that had tormented him throughout his youth, in the pages of the Supplément to the Encyclopédie (published in 1777, the year of his death). By then Haller had come full circle to positing a social epidemiology to nostalgia. He rejected lingering atmospheric explanations on the basis that the condition had been reported among Greenlanders and Danes (hardly mountainous people) and that he had himself successfully cured a case while in Göttingen without ever having to actually send his Swiss patient back up the Alps. Instead, Haller was now convinced that the essential pathogen lay exactly where Hofer had placed it almost a century earlier—­namely, within family relations and affects. He defined nostalgia as a “melancholy caused by the desire to see one’s parents” and attributed any Swiss predisposition to the prevalence of close-­knit, rural communities in the Alps: “The more the village is isolated,” Haller concluded, “the more the Swiss is accustomed to living with the same people, the more they are vulnerable to nostalgia.”34 Haller’s mature view of nostalgia speaks to a growing consensus in the 1760s and ’70s to view the condition through the prism of sensibility—­that is, as a nervous disorder grounded in the impressions of  both external objects and internal movements (passions and affections). Its Rousseauian overtones

54  Chapter Two

had already been underscored by a pupil of Haller’s in Göttingen, the Swiss polymath physician  Johann Georg Zimmermann, who acquired considerable notoriety across Europe in the 1750s thanks to popular essays on solitude and national pride. Like his mentor, Zimmermann dismissed Scheuchzer’s “singular idea” about nostalgia’s origins and instead attributed the condition to an “extreme desire to see one’s relatives.” Yet he also sought to rebut the very notion that this was an embarrassing malady for his compatriots. If there was any truth to claims of a particular Swiss predisposition, he suggested, this ought to be seen as a positive thing, a sign of attachment to a natural lifestyle and to the confederation’s republican political system.35 As Roy Porter has argued about George Cheyne’s “English malady”—­perhaps the archetypal nervous disorder, also popularized in the mid-­1700s—­such “national diseases” did not only reveal growing anxieties about the medical toll of “civilization” during the eighteenth century; they also belied a new sense of national pride (in the English case, at ostensibly being the most civilized people, as evidenced precisely by their susceptibility to chronic nervous distempers).36 Zimmerman’s description of nostalgia evinced pride for Swiss liberties and the natural sensibility of his compatriots; but it didn’t skirt around the condition’s dangerous implications for their health. Nor did most other European physicians at the time. In Georgian Britain—­where the Scottish physician Robert Whytt famously observed that “in almost all disease, the nerves are more or less hurt”—­ nostalgia was frequently likened to a subform of melancholia (and thus almost a kind of madness).37 In Leiden, Boerhaave’s last (and renegade) pupils had also come round to viewing the conditions in terms of psychosomatic monism and the new pathological centrality of the nervous system.38 Over in Montpellier, home to the largest and most important medical faculty in France at the time, nostalgia was discussed by leading figures of vitalist medicine such as Paul-­Joseph Barthez and his students.39 In the words of the English physician William Falconer, it had, by the 1780s, come to be “perhaps the most remarkable instance of the effects of the passions of the mind upon the body.”40 But if there thus emerged a loose consensus on the condition’s basic pathogenic course, disagreement persisted on how exactly to classify nostalgia amid the proliferation of medical taxonomies that saw the light of day in the second half of the eighteenth century. Enthusiasm for a “natural history” of disease species reached back to Thomas Sydenham’s seventeenth-­century cataloging of fevers and received fresh impetus in 1735 with the publication of Carl Linnaeus’s systematic taxonomy of the natural world, the Systema Naturae. In 1763 the Swedish botanist sought to replicate his classificatory scheme of classes, orders, genera, and species for medicine as well. His Genera morborum

The Reasons of a Passion  55

identified nostalgia as a mental disorder (a morbo mentales, or the fifth class of disease), but rather than place it alongside melancholia in the order of the Ideales, or hypochondria in the Imaginarii, Linnaeus followed the new consensus in presenting nostalgia as an affect-­related state (Pathetici), on a par with other psychosomatic disorders, such as bulimia, erotomania, or its male variant, satyriatis.41 The same year that Linnaeus tried his hand at nosological classification, his correspondent and former professor in Montpellier, François Boissier de Sauvages, published the results of his own lifelong quest to place medicine on an empirical footing with a rigorous classificatory scheme. The resulting Nosologia methodica was a multivolume magnum opus that immediately went through multiple editions and translations, setting the bar for a generation of nosologists.42 Like his Swedish friend, Sauvages viewed nostalgia in now familiar terms, as a “violent desire to see again one’s parents and homeland.” He classified it as one of the Morositates, or the erroneous passions that constituted the second order of the Vesanie (mental disorders). Once more, nostalgia was thus likened to eating and sexual disorders as opposed to cognitive ones listed under the Hallucinationes or Deliria (which included melancholia and mania). Echoing  Juncker’s animist stance, Sauvages—­who taught Stahl’s doctrine in Montpellier—­also distinguished between two variants of the condition: a “pure” form affecting only the mind, which he named “Nostalgia simplex,” and a “Nostalgia complicata” that reached sympathetically to bodily organs (and thus required physical as well as moral treatment).43 Physicians across Europe continued to debate the nosological where­ abouts of nostalgia in the last decades of the century. In Vienna, Johann Sagar followed Sauvages’s classification to the letter, but in Edinburgh William Cullen—­best known for coining the term “neurosis”—­didn’t seem quite so sure what to do with the condition.44 He agreed with Sauvages that this was, at heart, a frustrated desire, that it could come in simple or complicated forms, and that it should therefore be included in what he called Dysorexiae (or “false appetites”). However, he went further than his predecessor in dissociating nostalgia from mental illness, by separating the Dysorexiae from the Vesanie and placing them in two separate classes of disease: the Locales (or diseases affecting only a specific part of the body) for the former and the newly created class of the Neuroses (disordered “motions and sensations” of the nervous system) for the latter.45 Cullen did not seem entirely satisfied with his simplified taxonomy, though, and he voiced his doubts in a revealing footnote: “I have formerly observed that the Morositates of Sauvages are improperly referred to the class Vesaniae. I have therefore brought them under the Locales, as almost

56  Chapter Two

every species of Dysorexiae is evidently an affliction of a part, rather than of the whole body. Nostalgia alone, if it be really a disease, cannot properly come under this class, but I could not well separate this uncertain disease from the other Dysorexiae.”46 Nostalgia did not quite fit Cullen’s classificatory scheme because, while it shared functional symptomatologies with neuroses such as melancholia and hysteria, it seemed to depend far more than these on frustrated passions; but unlike other Locales such as bulimia and erotomania, it also lacked an obvious organic referent. The doubts that he and his many students continued to harbor about the disease’s actual existence seemed to be confirmed a few years later, when the physician and founder of French psychiatry, Philippe Pinel, tried one last time to put some order in the nosological house with his Nosog­ raphie philosophique. Although this would change in subsequent editions (for reasons that will become apparent in the next chapters), when first published in 1798, Pinel’s two-­volume summa of eighteenth-­century medical taxonomies did not have a word to say about nostalgia.47

A Clinic of Sorts By the late eighteenth century, then, medical research into nostalgia was argu­ ably no more advanced than it had been a century earlier, when Hofer first coined the term. For sure, the disease entity had established itself across Eur­opean faculties, attracting the attention of medical researchers and students. But their largely abstract theorizing seemed to have achieved little other than cornering the condition into a nosological cul de sac. Still, it would be reductive to present eighteenth-­century medicine as a static world of “library” medicine squeezed between the heroic discoveries of the seventeenth century and the “birth of the clinic” with its army of scalpel-­wielding practitioners in Napoleonic Paris.48 As the medical historian Toby Gelfand has argued, this birth of the clinic was preceded by an equally important period of “gestation” reach­ ing far back into the 1700s, and whose midwives of sorts were surgeons.49 The rise and professionalization of surgery as a reputable branch of medicine was the driving force in a broad institutional reorganization of the medical world that affected much of Europe and was particularly pronounced in France, where it culminated in sweeping reforms during the revolutionary era. Underscoring these developments was the pioneering surgical work and growing self-­esteem of army surgeons and medical officers more broadly, a small but increasingly important group of practitioners for whom nostalgia came to signify far more than a hesitant nosological category.

The Reasons of a Passion  57

Old Regime medical practice was a decentralized and complex patchwork of official and unlicensed healers, overseen by local corporations, guilds, and medical faculties jealous of their privileges. In theory official practitioners were divided between physicians—­traditionally a liberal calling for faculty graduates, who were the only ones allowed to practice physic, that is, to diagnose and prescribe cures—­surgeons, and apothecaries, both of whom had artisanal training and were restricted in their tasks to executing the physician’s orders. In practice barber-­surgeons were often the only qualified practitioners avail­ able in most rural areas, where they had to compete with a sprawling penumbra of folk healers (despised as “charlatans”) in a crowded medical marketplace.50 In urban areas surgeons gradually emancipated themselves from barbers’ guilds, putting forward their trade as an example of the practical art mécan­ iques championed by the Enlightenment. Thanks to royal patronage, Parisian surgeons were able to raise their social and institutional status and establish the Royal Academy and the College of Surgery (in 1731 and 1750). Possessing a medical degree became a prerequisite to practice surgery and surgeons’ medical training was homogenized with that of physicians, leading to the establishment of small teaching hospitals attached to medical schools.51 Though hardly felt alike in all places—­these were by and large still urban developments—­the rise of surgery in France and elsewhere in Europe prompted institutional changes that reflected a broader social turn to forms of professionalization avant la lettre and to centralized administration typical of eighteenth-­century absolutism. Reformist organizations such as the Royal Society of  Medicine (established in 1776) challenged the medical faculties’ monopolies on training and research, facilitating both a de facto amalgamation of physicians and surgeons, as well as the development of nonhierarchical forms of specialization in areas of technical expertise.52 As Thomas Broman has argued about the German case, these developments in turn spurred eighteenth-­ century physicians as well to view themselves as healing practitioners rather than learned gentlemen, thus facilitating a professionalizing shift to bedside medical practice.53 The simultaneous extension of state patronage all but destroyed the corporative structure of medicine (before the revolutionaries finished it off  by legislative fiat, at least in France), paving the way to a new political economic approach to population health and the first hygienic measures of so-­called medical police.54 Speaking with reference to the birth of psychiatry in particular, Jan Goldstein has further suggested that these twin processes of professionalization and medicalization of eighteenth-­century society engendered the formation of disciplines, or branches of knowledge embedded in power relations and whose professional experts—­in our case, medical

58  Chapter Two

practitioners—­claimed authority to speak the truth in matters of health (both in savant and popularizing discourses).55 If surgeons were the principal agents behind these institutional adjustments, an as yet undefined specialization of military medicine functioned as the indispensable catalyst to many of the transformations affecting eighteenth-­ century medicine. Although still in their infancy, military medical services became a permanent feature of  European armed forces in the age of  Enlighten­ ment.56 The model for all was the French Service de santé des armées, created by royal edict in 1708 to ensure the battle worthiness of Louis XIV’s ever-­expanding armies. It initially included some 270 men, mostly surgeons, placed directly under the authority of the war ministry and affected either directly to regiments or one of the fifty military hospitals established in Vauban’s place fortes along the country’s borders (primarily in the northeast). These hospitals had little in common with the various Hôtels-­Dieux and hôpitaux généraux used at the time to round up incurables, paupers, and criminals alike. They were training institutions, tied from the 1770s onward to special military medical schools established in Paris, Lille, Metz, and Strasbourg. There, aspiring officiers de santé—­surgeons, physicians, and pharmacists—­received rigorous clinical training in anatomy and bedside medicine. But despite huge advances in invasive surgery (particularly for battlefield amputations) and ambulance services—­one cannot quite say the same about hospital hygiene, which remained appalling—­the army medical corps did not enjoy an institutional standing commensurate with its members’ important role. First awarded as venal offices, positions became open to talent in 1716, but medical offi­ cers never broke through the glass ceiling separating menus officiers (subaltern officers) from the higher commissioned ranks, where nobles made up to 95 per­ cent of the officer corps as late as 1788.57 Beneath their handsome uniforms and despite prestigious affiliations to medical and surgical societies, medical officers remained for the most part common roturiers (non-­nobles) and were reminded daily of their inferior rank and status by both combatant officers and the much-­hated commissaires des guerres—­civilian administrators appointed by the crown to oversee hospital management among other things. To make matters worse, the medical corps—­which had trebled in size by the 1780s—­was itself undermined by internal strife between physicians and surgeons envious of the former’s higher status and pay.58 For medical officers in general and surgeons in particular, identifying new domains of medical expertise was a way of allaying professional fragility and of fighting institutional subordination. One of the targets they set their eyes upon in the last decades of the eighteenth century was nostalgia (and soldiers’ psychological care more generally).

The Reasons of a Passion  59

Between Caring and Policing Epistemological and nosological conundrums notwithstanding, everyone seemed to agree that nostalgia was particularly prevalent among men serving in the military. Hofer had been coy about the issue, but starting with Zwinger’s revision the condition’s association to military life became a given to all. In fact, Heimweh was already listed specifically as a soldiers’ disease in the founding text of occupational medicine, Bernardo Ramazzini’s De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (Diseases of  Workers), first published in 1700. The Italian physician reported from a Prussian colleague the (surely) apocryphal claim that only one in every hundred men affected could be saved!59 Stories of Swiss soldiers thought to have “died of Heimweh” abroad date back to the French wars of religion in the mid-­1500s and had become commonplace two centuries later in works of medical vulgarization such as Samuel Auguste Tissot’s best seller Avis au people sur sa santé (first published in 1761).60 In sixteenth-­century Flanders Spanish infantrymen presenting similar troublesome symptoms were either diagnosed with “el mal de corazón” (literally “heart trouble”) or described as “being broken” (“estar roto”).61 In France, the army physician Remy Fort provided perhaps the first clinical description of “la maladie du païs” in a treatise of military medicine published in 1685 ( just as Hofer was entering medical school). He likened this “extraordinary disease” to a melancholy humor that darkened the animal spirits with black bile but otherwise described a condition very similar to Hofer’s “nostalgia.” Soldiers sent abroad or exposed to a change of air were like deracinated trees, Fort claimed, and would wither away and die unless released promptly upon the first signs of illness.62 This warning rang especially true for contingents stationed across the Atlantic, who died because of excessive “sadness” (chagrin) in far greater numbers than troops at home did, according to the governor of New France, the Marquis de Denonville.63 By the mid-­eighteenth century “nostalgia” proper was being reported in armed forces across Europe, spurring a first wave of clinical investigations. In Vienna, the Austrian physician Leopold Auenbrugger experimented percussing the chest of hospitalized Spanish soldiers to detect what he called the “occult” (or unclear) effects of “passions of the soul” such as nostalgia upon the lungs. Using rudimentary auscultation techniques and postmortem autopsies, he established a likely causal connection between soldiers’ moods and fatal pulmonary infections such as phthisis (or tuberculosis)—­a finding that would attract much interest in subsequent decades.64 Military physicians elsewhere found similar signs of tissue swelling and blood clotting seemingly

60  Chapter Two

caused by nostalgia in Burgundian and Welsh units, inaugurating a new anatomical perspective on the disease’s localized effects.65 Not all armies seemed to be affected in equal measure, though. Despite numerous attested cases, the comparatively small British army was considered relatively immune, and nostalgia didn’t even feature in John Pringle’s midcentury bible of military medicine, the Observations on the Diseases of the Army.66 Conversely, it was reported more often on board British navy vessels, prompting concerns about “scorbutic nostalgia” and “calenture,” a feverish delirium that brought sailors to jump overboard at the delusive sight of green meadows.67 But it was in large, disciplined standing armies such as the Prussian, Austrian, and French ones that nostalgia caused most concern. So much so that in 1741 Louis XV’s war minister, the Baron de Breteuil, instructed commanders of the provincial militias to grant short leaves of absence to any man suffering from “maladie du pays.” A decade later the provision was being contemplated for the regular army of the line as well—­that is, to the largest permanently standing army in Europe at the time (never fewer than 200,000 men at any point throughout the century).68 A standard treatise of military medicine authored by Louis XV’s personal physician endorsed the measure, describing nostalgia as a most dangerous disease caused by the physical and emotional hardships of military life. It recommended that officers “console” homesick men and send them home if necessary, but wasn’t entirely naïve about the rank and file either: army doctors should also be vigilant against the inevitable malingerers who might attempt to feign the illness.69 Similar cases of nostalgia (and fears about malingering) were reported in the Continental army at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775. Homesick volunteers and militiamen were treated by physicians such as Benjamin Rush—­who would go on to write the first medical study of nostalgia in the United States in 1789—­but also met with the indignation of officers, including George Washington, who railed against excessive furloughs for homesick men in much the same way as some military psychiatrists would one day speak of “compensation neuroses” faked by soldiers to obtain a pension.70 By the late 1700s, then, the question of nostalgia in the army had moved beyond academic debates about the nature of the condition to touch upon more practical concerns about manpower, hygiene, and the soaring social costs involved in maintaining large and increasingly “national” armies. It had also opened up unexpected professionalizing opportunities for military doctors. All of this appeared most clearly in France, where the medical bureaucrat and tireless reformer Jean Colombier put growing alarm about the effects of nostalgia at the heart of his manifesto to reform the army’s aging medical service

The Reasons of a Passion  61

(Code de médecine militaire, first published in 1772). Colombier had little to add to existing descriptions of the condition and happily combined vitalist references to the imagination and passions with atmospheric tenets. He adapted Sauvages’s distinction between “simple” and “complicated” forms of the condition to describe an “essential” nostalgia that struck fresh recruits almost immediately upon joining the army and a “symptomatic” variant that matured among hospital patients assailed by other illnesses and ennui (boredom). A pragmatist, Colombier recognized that it was not always possible to release home­ sick soldiers from duty and that the problem therefore needed to be dealt with as one of “medical hygiene,” that is, with prescribed regimens and prophylactic measures. He urged officers to treat their men humanely and establish a more welcoming environment in their units. Colombier also proposed major changes to the army’s recruitment policies, recommending that line infantrymen be drafted only from within the ranks of the provincial militias so as to ease the men into regimental life. Most importantly, he advocated for a regional system of recruitment so that fresh recruits could be entrusted to the cares of “comrades from [their] pays” and the watchful eye of a seasoned compatriot. According to Colombier, nostalgia was an inevitable byproduct of the large, impersonal armies of  his day; and in a stark warning to his compatriots, he  pre­dicted that, barring urgent reforms, it would continue to grow exponentially to ultimately “wreak havoc” ( faire de ravages) in the ranks.71 * Colombier’s bleak forecast echoed the vast movement of reform that had shaken up the French army following a string of embarrassing defeats during the wars of Spanish and Austrian succession and the Seven Years War (1756–­ 63).72 According to Christy Pichichero, these reforms witnessed the birth of military psychology, signaling a growing attention not only for the physical health of soldiers, but also their emotional well-­being, even their happiness in learning to become a soldier.73 It is in these last years of the Old Regime, then, that the history of nostalgia proper begins—­with the condition’s coming into being not only as an object of discursive interest, but of clinical practice and political import as well. As we will see in the next chapter, nostalgia came to mediate the relationship between patient and practitioner with growing frequency during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, carving out a space for its own legitimacy in a high-­stakes context of war and revolution. Just how much was at stake by the late 1780s became increasingly clear to French medical officers affiliated to the Journal de médecine militaire, a

62  Chapter Two

new periodical designed to showcase the medical corps’ achievements and promote its professionalization, which used its pages to raise awareness about nostalgia in garrison towns and military hospitals across the country. 74 The journal’s editor, Jacques De Horne—­who, like Colombier, was a member of the reformist Société royale de médecine—­repeatedly urged readers to be especially vigilant for signs of the condition, for it was easily confused with other mental and physical disorders and often diagnosed when it was already too late to save its victims. De Horne was adamant that nostalgia posed a serious threat to the French army, and he bemoaned his profession’s incomplete grasp of the condition: “Nothing,” he wrote, “is more dispiriting for the practitioner than to have to deal with this kind of illness, for it eludes all forms of treatment.” His conclusion struck an ominous note that echoed Colombier’s premonition: medicine would only find a suitable treatment for nostalgia, De Horne pre­ dicted, once it finally learned how to simultaneously heal bodies on the one hand and “the mind and imagination” on the other.75 Writing in 1788, he could not have guessed just how soon that day of reckoning would come.

Chapter 3

The Lost Pays of the Patrie Carbon (to Cyrano, whispering): But you make them weep! Cyrano: Ay, for nostalgia! A nobler pain than hunger,—­’tis of the soul, not of the body! I am pleased to see the pain change its viscera. Heart-­ache is better than stomach-­ache! e d m o n d r o s ta n d , Cyrano de Bergerac [1897], Act 4, scene 31

On 30 Brumaire Year II (November 20, 1793), as French revolutionary armies battled for the second year running to halt Prussian and Austrian forces invading from the northeast, Surgeon-­Major Jérôme Lasserre decided he had had enough. By then, Lasserre had been at the front for over a year, having answered the patrie’s call to arms and volunteered to serve in the First Battalion of the Lot-­et-­Garonne stationed across the country, in the lower Rhineland. As he prepared for a second winter in Alsace, he complained to his superiors in Paris that the local climate was “unfavorable” to his health and asked to be transferred to a lower-­ranking post in a military hospital in southern France. His request was endorsed by his immediate superior, the chief physician of the Army of the Rhine,  Joseph-­Adam Lorentz, who praised Lasserre both as a regimental surgeon and as a good patriot eager to show his fervor for the Republic.2 Prudently, the pair enclosed a cértificat de civisme signed by elected representatives of Lasserre’s battalion, attesting to his zeal on the battlefield.3 Perennially gray skies and drab weather clearly weren’t the only thing bothering Lasserre; since October, a tense political climate had also reigned over the Army of the Rhine, as a special envoy of the National Convention, none other than Saint-­Just, combed the ranks for traitors to be sent to the scaffold.4 Luckily, Lasserre’s letter did not land him in trouble, but neither did it generate the desired response, for five months later he renewed his request to be reassigned to the Army of the Midi or of the Pyrenees in southern France, this time bolstering his case with worrying signs of catarrhal fever and scurvy. He explicitly blamed these upon his permanence in Alsace, a region he described as “very different” to his native one of Gascony, in southwestern France. Now

64  Chapter Three

also convinced of the local (atmospheric) climate’s pernicious effects, Lorentz again endorsed his subaltern’s request, urging the army’s medical authorities to accede to Lasserre’s request.5 Unfortunately for Lasserre, his superiors in Paris were no more inclined to do so the second time round. Throughout that winter, their main preoccupation was the amalgame, or the reorganization of  French forces to fully integrate units from the old royal army, the national volunteers, and, eventually, draftees as well. In January 1794 Lasserre’s battalion was joined to troops from the Fifty-­Eighth Regiment of the line and the First Battalion of volunteers from the Moselle to form the 116th demi-brigade (the new, smaller, and more versatile tactical unit introduced by the revolutionaries).6 By then, the regional composition of  his unit had been almost entirely diluted, leaving only a handful of the original seven hundred or so fellow Gascons from Lot-­et-­Garonne with whom he had volunteered in  June 1792. In the first year of the war alone, Lasserre had witnessed twenty fatalities, 132 desertions, and had sent home another 114 men, mostly for ill-­defined “chronic illness.”7 The one person Lasserre seemed un­ able to send back to Gascony, even just for a temporary leave, was himself. In the summer of 1794, he did finally depart from the Rhineland but only to move farther north, as the 116th was integrated to the new Army of Sambre-­et-­Meuse. In Wallonia, Lasserre crossed paths with Saint-­Just (soon to be guillotined himself) once more and participated in the Battle of Fleurus ( June 26, 1794), where the French inflicted a resounding defeat to coalition forces. Later that year, he was even promoted to principal surgeon of the 116th and thus made responsible for the well-­being of just under 3,000 men, a sizable proportion of  which (perhaps one-­third) would eventually be erased from the regimental roll book, as either missing or presumed dead after excessively long hospitalizations. (A smaller number was known or presumed to have deserted following temporary leaves of absence.)8 Throughout this eventful year, Lasserre’s health continued to deteriorate. In January 1795 two colleagues examined him and found clear signs of scurvy on his gums, as well as the loss of two teeth.9 He was most likely hospitalized that spring and in August was finally granted a convalescence leave to return home by the chief medical officers of the Army of Sambre-­et-­Meuse, who described his state as “desperate.”10 Unfortunately, they misspelled his name, and so Lasserre had to wait another month for the paperwork to be corrected, by which point he had returned to the Rhineland once more to serve in the newly created Army of Rhin-­et-­Moselle. There, he at last found a savior in Chief Surgeon Pierre-­François Percy, who wasted no time in granting his ailing subordinate a lifesaving, two-­month leave with pay.11

The Lost Pays of  the Patrie  65

Ultimately, it took Lasserre two years to return home on furlough; and, when he finally did, this was in part due to legislation passed in the summer of 1795, which suspended the requisition of medical officers in France following the defeat of  Prussia and the Peace of Basel (April 5, 1795).12 After two months at home, Lasserre was even able to obtain a permanent discharge from the army, as the Directory began scaling back the war effort following the suppression of rebel insurgents in the Vendée.13 Until that point, though, none of the arguments, both medical and nonmedical, that he and his superiors had used to justify his requests had succeeded in moving military authorities. Given the dearth of capable medical officers in the French army in these first years of the war—­a mere 1,400 in 1792, of which half died within the first eighteenth months of the conflict—­it is not that surprising that Lasserre was not allowed to leave the front sooner.14 Still, as the following pages will suggest, he might well have had more luck in doing so had he or his doctors drawn the lines between his symptoms and identified the root cause of  his ailment. His insis­ tence on just how “different” Alsace, its people, and its climate felt reminds us that the wars of the First Coalition were a journey of individual discovery as much as a collective surge of national defense for hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen, most of  whom hadn’t even willingly singed up (as Lasserre had). For a native Alsatian such as Lorentz, it was perhaps impossible to see that Lasserre’s scurvy could not simply be put down to foul “miasmas” emanating from damp grounds and that his complaints had all to do with the fact of feeling like a stranger in his own country, five hundred miles away from home. On the other hand, for a Breton like Nicolas-Pierre Gilbert, it did not take long to identify the source of  Lasserre’s ill. (Gilbert was equally loath to leave his homeland and was almost denounced to the revolutionary tribunal for repeatedly stalling on his nomination to the Army of Sambre-­et-­Meuse from his previous position in a military hospital in Brittany in the spring of 1795.)15 The actual convalescence certificate that he delivered to Lasserre in August 1795 did not specify the medical diagnosis, and unfortunately we do not have Percy’s certificate from the following month (only a minute survives in Lasserre’s personal dossier at the French army archives); but as Gilbert’s and Percy’s subsequent careers lead one to believe, both had identified the muted anxiety that runs through Lasserre’s complaints, the symptom of a longing he did not admit to but which Rostand’s fictional Cyrano de Bergerac already (anachronistically) ascribed to other Gascons weeping at the Siege of Arras in 1640: nostalgia. It was only when his doctors diagnosed a clear case of mal du pays that Lasserre was finally allowed to return home, in accordance with official directives that

66  Chapter Three

restricted all leaves of absence explicitly to well-­defined instances of  homesick­ ness. Indeed, had Lorentz done so earlier, Lasserre would most likely have been allowed to serve closer to home, as other medical officers managed to do, typically swapping positions with colleagues also seeking to return to more familiar landscapes and climes. In sum, the early years of the French revolutionary wars were a time when “it paid,” so to say, to be diagnosed with nostalgia. And diagnose medical officers did, soon mapping out a veritable epidemic throughout the armed forces and thus drawing attention to the emotional tug-­ of-­war soldiers felt between the call of the patrie and an overbearing affection for their pays. As Percy would eventually decree at the end of a career spent succoring wounded and sick men on battlefields and military hospitals across Europe: “No epoch has witnessed as many cases of nostalgia as the French Rev­ olution and the wars it precipitated.”16 This chapter moves from a transnational, largely abstract medical discourse of nostalgia to the clinical practice of  French military surgeons and physicians who confronted the disease in the theater of war. French doctors were hardly the only ones to treat homesick soldiers, and all European armies involved in the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–­1815) had to contend with the problem to one extent or another. But whether they actually suffered from it more than others or not, the French were undoubtedly the most concerned about nostalgia, as measured by the number of cases reported, measures taken, and amount of ink spilled upon the condition. This particular form of French morbidity (or at least morbid curiosity) makes it possible to study the phenomenon in an empirical way, as a concrete form of practice. By following practitioners like Lasserre, Percy, and Gilbert onto battlefields and into field hospitals, I seek to understand how they deployed and reworked the nostalgia diagnosis in the light of their experiences and fraught interactions with military authorities. As we shall see, though lingering doubts about the disease were never fully dispelled, nostalgia came to play a surprisingly important role in the management of the largest and most destructive military confrontation the French army had ever fought—­indeed, that Europeans had ever witnessed until then. During the period 1792–­1815, it became a new “actant” of  war—­that is, a nonhuman, not even material “thing” that modified relations between actors in the light of new parameters such as the psychological care of soldiers.17 This chapter tells the story of this actant as a disease viewed from the doctor’s perspective, as an object of interest; in the next, I flip the coin to unearth narratives of illness discernible in the soldiers’ own tales of war, where nostalgia becomes subject, a kind of emotive (or performative act) that doesn’t simply describe an emotional state but actually alters it in the process.18 Taken

The Lost Pays of  the Patrie  67

together, these two chapters uncover what emotional breakdown and survival looked like before the age of trauma.

The Saddest Attribute of the Army It did not take long once France declared war on Austria on April 20, 1792, for Colombier’s and De Horne’s bleak predictions about the effects of nostalgia in the army to come all too horribly true. On November 18, 1793, barely a year into the war and two days before Jérôme Lasserre wrote his first letter asking to be reassigned, Deputy War Minister Didier Jourdeuil informed the Army of the Nord’s general in command,  Jean-­Baptiste Jourdan, of measures necessary to preserve the ranks as soldiers were garrisoned along the Belgian border for the winter. It had been an eventful year for France’s largest army (over 100,000 men at the beginning of 1793 and twice as many twelve months later): early forays into the Austrian Netherlands gave way to defeats and to Dumouriez’s treason in April, exposing the Republic to allied invasion and a desperate situation that was only redressed thanks to Lazare Carnot’s reorganization and victory at the Battle of Wattignies in October. (Over the same period, the Revolution itself entered its most radical phase, with the execution of Louis XIV, the removal of the Girondins, and the establishment of a revolutionary government led by the Montagnards.) By then, the levée en masse decreed earlier that summer was finally bringing fresh troops from all over France to the front line; but it was also swelling the ranks of deserters, as reluctant draftees sought every opportunity to flee what felt every bit like a reimposition of the hated royal militia. Most worrisome to Jourdeuil were incoming reports of  volunteers also demanding to be released from service on the basis that they had fulfilled their pledge to defend the patrie. Alarmed at the prospect of weakening the country’s defenses, Jourdeuil instructed the army general to suspend indefinitely all existing furloughs and special permissions. New leaves were to be granted parsimoniously, he added, and “only when the patient is diagnosed with Nostalgia or maladie du pays.”19 Lest we be tempted to dismiss Jourdeuil’s order as the sentimental whim of a protoromantic bureaucrat, let us recall that this same man had previously served as a juror on the revolutionary tribunal and shown no qualms, as a member of the Paris Commune’s Surveillance Committee, in signing arrest warrants during the September 1792 massacres. More importantly, his directive only adopted provisions already in place in auxiliary units of the old royal army—­albeit in a time of desperate need—­and which would soon be confirmed at the highest level of the revolutionary government. With the law of

68  Chapter Three

2 Thermidor Year II (July 20, 1794) and decree of 5 Brumaire Year III (October 26, 1794), the National Convention and Committee of Public Safety extended to all armed forces the provision to release men affected by nostalgia or, as they put it in neo-­Hippocratic terms, needing a “change of air at home.”20 The notion that homesick soldiers must be sent home on sick leave thus became firmly entrenched and was not questioned for the duration of the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. More surprisingly still, it remained in place throughout the nineteenth century, right up to the eve of the First World War. Just how big of a problem, one might well ask, could this nostalgia have been in the armies of the French Revolution? Unfortunately, there are no official medical statistics for the time, and it is therefore very difficult to get a precise idea of the scale of the disease.21 Piecemeal evidence from contemporary medical reports and periodical “returns” (summary tables providing a quantitative overview of troop strength in a unit) paints a varied picture, ranging from obsession with epidemic nostalgia to suspicion, even plain ignorance about the clinical entity itself. At the military hospital in Verdun, nostalgia was blamed for one in every four fatalities during the Year II. Across France as a whole, it seems, the figure was closer to one in twenty.22 Military hospital records during the Empire provide somewhat more detailed counts: in 1812, the medical officer Emiland Estienne counted 298 cases of “simple” nostalgia (that is, not concomitant with other disease) out of a total hospitalized population of roughly 25,000 across northern Spain. He evacuated 186 of these back to France, cured 12, and lost none of the remaining 100 that year.23 Relatively low figures such as these don’t necessarily provide the whole story, though. Of the 4,687 soldiers that he observed in military hospitals across Italy, Spain, and France, Jean-­Baptiste Tyrbas de Chamberet identified no one suffering from a clear case of nostalgia. (He did record one case of “melancholia.”) But in an article on “military medicine” that he subsequently contributed to the multivolume medical section of the Encyclopédie méthodique, Chamberet hastened to correct the impression these figures might give: “If the name of this formidable neurosis (redoubtable névrose) is not to be found in the preceding list of soldiers’ conditions,” he clarified, “it is because young recruits are always hospitalized for another, concomitant disease, which is diagnosed first. Nostalgia, on the other hand, is rarely detected until after several close examinations, especially since the patient tries to dissimulate it.” Chamberet concluded that homesickness ought to be considered as “endemic” in the army, “more frequent than scurvy and no less lethal than typhus.” Although its deadly effects rarely appeared on numerical returns and only revealed themselves fully in conjunction with other

The Lost Pays of  the Patrie  69

disorders, nostalgia thus fully deserved to be known as the “saddest attribute of the armed profession.”24 Our picture of the epidemiology of nostalgia within the French revolutionary and Napoleonic armies is therefore necessarily impressionistic; it is no less striking nonetheless. To individual cases diagnosed sporadically across Wallonia, the Rhineland, and in the Pyrenees at the beginning of the conflict, there soon followed veritable epidemics that allegedly decimated entire companies of draftees in the Army of Rhin-­et-­Moselle in the Year II and during Napoleon’s victorious campaign in Italy as first consul in the Year VIII (1799–­ 1800).25 Nostalgia continued to plague French forces throughout the Empire: it followed the formidable Grande Armée from its first training camps around the port of Boulogne in 1803 to its conquest of central Europe a decade later, and proved as formidable an obstacle to the pacification of Spain and Italy as insurgent guerrilla fighters.26 The condition was deemed most dangerous, though, during faraway expeditions, where medical conditions typically were at their most challenging. During the ill-­fated Egyptian campaign of 1798–­1801, nostalgia sometimes struck soldiers already suffering from ophthalmia and the plague.27 In Saint-­Domingue, it aggravated a lethal outbreak of yellow fever that wiped away most of the 30,000 soldiers sent by Napoleon in 1801 to reestablish French authority over the colony after the slaves’ successful revolt and bid for emancipation in the 1790s.28 Right up to the Empire’s bloody twilight, nostalgia continued to torment soldiers, finishing off enfeebled conscripts retreating from Moscow through the unforgiving Russian winter in 1812, and some 30,000 typhus-­ridden men besieged for months on end in Mainz the following year.29 As enemy forces entered Paris in April 1814, future luminaries of  French psychiatry and pathological anatomy such as Jean-­Pierre Falret and René Laënnec (soon to become famous as inventor of the stethoscope) could be found attending to thousands of  wounded, ill and, as they underscored, hopelessly homesick soldiers in the capital’s overcrowded hospitals.30 Nor were French forces the only ones affected; no army could afford to disregard the disease entirely, even though epidemics such as those recorded among the French were unheard of elsewhere. In 1812 nostalgia killed at least thirty men in military hospitals throughout the small Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. Many more Italians, as well as Poles, Germans, Swiss, Dutch, Spaniards, and others, succumbed to the condition during the disastrous Russian campaign. Likewise, up to a third of the 25,000 military personnel that clogged Parisian hospitals in April 1814, most with suspect cases of Heimweh, were from Prussian, Austrian, and Russian occupying forces. Even British army officers, who generally considered themselves immune because theirs was not

70  Chapter Three

an army of conscripts, were asked to be extremely vigilant against outbreaks of homesickness in the ranks.31 No one, it seemed, was safe from nostalgia in this first age of  “total war.”

A N at i o n i n A r m s It is tempting, given this unprecedented surge in cases of nostalgia from 1792 to 1815, to explain the condition simply in terms of the protracted conflict that tore the European continent apart for over two decades. Undeniably, it acquired a whole new salience during what is often presented as a watershed in the history of  warfare. Yet nostalgia was not entirely new in 1792, and Europeans were hardly novices to protracted continental conflagrations. Nor were the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars all that innovative, as historians steeped in the “new military history” pioneered by early modern and twentieth-­century specialists have shown.32 Recently much has been written about whether they should be viewed as a first instance of  “total war”—­an analytical frame that has proven fecund for some and limiting to others.33 That the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars did not mark a major rupture in terms of battlefield tactics and military technology has long been an established fact.34 Foot soldiers continued to anchor armies to the sound of eighteenth-­century drill commands and maneuvers. For sure, rigid line formations were loosened, and the French infantry règlement of 1791 (which remained in force throughout the period) allowed for “feu à volonté ” as it sought to combine the firepower of the line with the attacking mobility of column formations. The result was the famous “ordre mixte” first envisaged by the Comte de Guibert in the 1770s as a way of synthesizing Prussian-­style automatisms and the characteristically French ardor known as the “furia francese.” Lack of training and experience meant that in the early battles of the revolutionary era formations tended to break down into skirmishing contests; by 1794, though, the mixed order allowed better-­drilled infantrymen to perform complicated maneuvers designed to throw enemy forces off balance. The infantry’s effectiveness was limited by continued reliance on inaccurate smoothbore flintlock muskets, but the standardization of the socket bayonet allowed columns to disrupt enemy lines and expose them to crushing cavalry charges. Improvements in the accuracy and mobility of interchangeable-­parts artillery—­Jean-­Baptiste de Gribeauval’s standardized cannons and howitzers, which could fire round shots as well as explosive canister shots—­gave the French an edge that the artillery officer Napoleon Bonaparte would come to exploit masterfully.35

The Lost Pays of  the Patrie  71

Where the revolutionary and Napoleonic conflicts did signal a more discernible turning point, though, was in the scale of mobilization and its ideological significance—­two factors that bear upon the extraordinary outbreaks of nostalgia in the French army in particular. As Carl von Clausewitz famously remarked in his masterpiece On War, this was the first time that “the people became a participant in war.”36 By enrolling the masses and drawing entire nations into the conflict, the Napoleonic era achieved what Clausewitz saw as “absolute war,” or a kind of ideal-­type conflict no longer hampered by any constraints (be they political, demographic, or cultural). The crucial linchpin to this evolution was the formation of a national army, which the French had already pointed toward with the creation of the royal militia in 1688 but now lurched to with the levée en masse of 1793 and the introduction of conscription five years later (a trend soon followed, in one way or another, by other European armies, with the notable exception of Britain).37 No longer dependent on foreign mercenaries, the French army would now field only “citizen-­soldiers,” that talisman of the military Enlightenment brought to life by revolutionary legislation that recognized, for the first time, the soldier’s dignity, civic rights, and access to advancement.38 By the summer of 1794, successive levies of volunteers and draftees had swelled the ranks to roughly 750,000 men (and a nominal strength of over a million). Despite losses and desertions, yearly levies allowed Napoleon to maintain a similar army size, bringing the total number of men enlisted in the French army over the period to 3.5 million (4.5 including enrolled foreigners).39 The “nation in arms” and total mobilization of society’s resources extended the scale and destructiveness of  war—­if not quite its geographical scope—­in previously unimaginable ways. As David Bell has argued, the new horizon of military engagement became one of “absolute enmity” (a concept he borrows from Carl Schmitt), in which nothing short of the adversary’s total destruction would do.40 Revolutionary passions certainly helped forge this “apocalyptic” worldview and even tested it during the bloody “pacification” of  Vendée (1793–­96); but it was Napoleon who implemented it systematically, by steering tactical and political logics of national defense into a strategy of conquest and empire. First as a general of the Republic in Italy and Egypt, then as first consul and eventually as emperor, Napoleon mustered ever larger armies organized into independent divisions and corps (that is, completely autonomous fighting units), and marched his men to the four corners of Europe and beyond in his quest for “decisive” battles. Typically, this entailed forcing them into a pitched battle and then concentrating his forces upon one point in a

72  Chapter Three

concerted, overpowering attack—­a tactic he executed brilliantly in a string of emphatic victories against Austrian, Prussian, and Russian forces at Ulm, Austerlitz,  Jena/Auerstadt, and Friedland between 1805 and 1807. By all accounts these battles were bloodbaths in which the destructive potential of mass warfare (if not quite yet industrial warfare) became all too discernible. If early battles of the revolutionary era scarcely differed from midcentury “lace wars” ( guerres en dentelles) in terms of forces engaged and casualties, by the late Empire the sheer size of armies brought battles to a whole new level of violence and, ironically enough, of inconclusiveness (thus foreshadowing the aimless butcheries of the First World War). At the aptly named “Battle of Nations” outside Leipzig in 1813, up to half a million men collided over three days at the cost of some 150,000 casualties—­a scale of engagement and loss of  life not seen again in Europe for a century. Battlefield losses rarely passed 10 percent during the 1790s but frequently reached 20 percent, even 30 percent, during the late Empire: 70,000 men lost on both sides at Wagram in 1809 (out of 300,000 combatants); 75,000 (out of 250,000) at Borodino three years later, in an inferno of artillery fire where the French alone fired 60,000 cannon shots (at a rate of 100 per minute over a ten-­hour period).41 Yet for all the importance of superior firepower and resources poured into it—­including the setting up of huge government-­run manufactures capable of producing over 140,000 muskets a year42—­this was still a time in which firearms and artillery killed far fewer men than poor hygiene and sickness. Of the 600,000 men that Napoleon led into Russia in 1812, fewer than 20,000 made it back safely to France, most of the others having succumbed to illness, starvation, and hypothermia. (The entire campaign mobilized close to a million men, only 100,000 of  which remained the following year.)43 Nor were soldiers the only victims of these ever-­larger campaigns. Newly defined boundaries between military and civilian spheres tended to blur as state bureaucracies continued to expand their reach and governments resorted to mass propaganda for the first time. They collapsed all together once counterinsurgency tactics pioneered against royalist rebels in the Vendée and perfected against irregular combatants in Spain and Italy brought horrific cycles of violence and retribution to civilian populations as well (as captured in Francisco Goya’s harrowing series of etchings The Disasters of  War). The overall human cost of these twenty-­three years of semicontinuous fighting is difficult to evaluate precisely. Relatively accurate figures for armed forces place the number of French military deaths from 1792 to 1815 at around 1.4 million; less reliable estimates for all victims (military and civilian from all countries involved) over the period range from 3.5 to 7 million.44

The Lost Pays of  the Patrie  73

Ultimately, this muddled picture makes it difficult to attribute to one single cause the spike in cases of nostalgia witnessed during these wars. In a polemical article, the French historian Jean-­Yves Bercé presented these not as outbreaks of a disease, but as a willful act of  “resistance against state oppression,” a “silent form of counterrevolution” directed against Paris (a suicidal one, we might add).45 Proceeding more cautiously, military historians such as Marcel Reinhard and Hervé Drévillon have sought to explain nostalgia in terms of changing “military societies” and the tension between “individual” and “mass” that dogged the question of military organization from the Renaissance to the First World War.46 For the doyen of  French military history, André Corvisier, the condition belies a “crisis of adaptation to the conditions of modern society—­conditions that soldiers experienced before other sectors of society” and that first manifested themselves in what Jean Waquet and Odile Roynette have described as the “transit phenomenon,” or painful “metamorphosis” demanded of nineteenth-­century conscripts upon being drafted into the army.47 What is clear from these explanations, and is largely corroborated by contemporary sources, is that nostalgia was not thought of in terms of traumatic battlefield experiences—­as shell shock would be a century later during the First World War—­but rather of military life as a comprehensive transformative experience: not just the horror of  battle, then, but also the boredom of the barrack and camaraderie of the regiment, the fatigue and mindless drill, the discipline and care alternatively meted out by paternal officers. The impact of the military’s institutionalization on individuals and society at large was already a favored topic of  Enlightenment salons. Most philosophes condemned standing armies as inherently despotic and instead championed militias of armed citizens ready to take up arms to defend the fatherland: Rousseau advised Polish elites to adopt a “genuine militia exactly as it is established in Switzerland” to preserve their independence; for his part, Kant viewed such a force as a precondition for establishing peaceful relations between states.48 In his classic satire Candide (1759), Voltaire made a mockery of  Prussian (i.e., “Bulgar”) discipline and its army of mindless automatons, despite the prestige then enjoyed across European military circles by the “Sparta of the North.”49 For Rousseau, military service was a unique civic practice, simultaneously responsible for the production of self-­standing individuals through their adherence to a civic community (and general will)—­a paradoxical theory of political subjectivity and sovereignty that he famously expounded in The Social Contract (1762) and bequeathed to French revolutionaries.50 Even those like Adam Smith, who reluctantly endorsed permanent forces for their superior efficiency obtained through division of labor, were forced to recognize the one-­sided human

74  Chapter Three

beings that mind-­numbing drill and single-­task activities inevitably seemed to produce.51 With the advent of industrialization in the nineteenth century, social theorists from Karl Marx to Max Weber and Michel Foucault would come to view these armies as incubators for a wider range of modern disciplinary powers, and soldiers’ experience of heteronomy as prototypical for that of  factory workers and commodified labor in general.52 Over the following two chapters, I argue that the nostalgia epidemics of the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars must be viewed in this light, as symptom­ a­tic of deeper social transformations foreshadowed in the army. At a general level, clinical nostalgia was the name given to an emotional reaction to the experience of enlistment and adaptation to military life—­one characterized by painful feelings of dislocation and disembedding. Of course, not every soldier felt, or at least reacted, this way. (In fact, the vast majority did not, or else armies would have become totally ungovernable.) But in the latter eighteenth century, this had become a distinct possibility as most major European armies adopted, to one extent or another, the kind of rigid tactics, mechanical movements, and punitive discipline perfected by the Prussian infantry. Yet exhausting dressage and mindless drill alone cannot account for why nostalgia became so prevalent among Swiss hired militiamen first, then French citizen-­soldiers, and eventually volunteers and conscripts in the Union army during the American Civil War, but not (or at least not as much) among Prussian and Russian serfs. Nor can circumstantial explanations such as the precariousness of Mulhouse’s independence in the late seventeenth century or the precocious professionalization of a military medical corps in the French army fully account for these specificities. Instead, I suggest that clinical nostalgia was most prevalent in those military formations that somehow sought to combine the formal features of the Prussian model with a very different, almost diametrically opposed political culture premised on emergent ideas about patriotism, civic equality, and individual autonomy and care. As André Guinier has shown, French military reformers of the late Old Regime did not only worry about the soldier’s discipline, but also his agility and grace, his moral education and individual initiative, ultimately envisaging a form of self-­discipline based on consent and example instead of blind subordination. The ideal, if not quite the reality, of the citizen-­soldier was a product of the 1770s, a time when new ideas about soldiers’ civic rights and obligations to the “nation” met a newfound concern for their motivations, feelings, even enjoyment at maneuvering on the training ground.53 Perhaps more so than any other modern institution, the French revolutionary army that came into being in the 1790s exemplified the problem of enlisting free and sentient individuals to willingly (and, ideally, joyously)

The Lost Pays of  the Patrie  75

subject themselves to a form of  heteronomy, thus creating simultaneously free and unfree citizens, passionate and miserable soldiers.54 The ambiguities of nostalgia, its fundamentally dialectical nature, can be traced back to the paradoxes of this early form of modern subjectivity/subjecthood in an institution—­ the preindustrial standing army—­that prefigures what Frédéric Lordon has analyzed as the broader challenge of willful “enlistment” (“enrôlement”) and “joyful mobilization” in liberal capitalist societies.55

Clinical Portrait As far as French medical officers were concerned, the outbreak of war in 1792 did not change much in terms of the actual nature of the disease that they had to contend with—­at least at first. Most drew from existing late eighteenth-­ century descriptions to diagnose an “afféction morale”—­that is, a psychogenic disorder that would, via the nervous system, affect the body as a whole. As defined by Denis Guerbois—­who served as a surgeon in the French army from 1792 to 1800 before going on to write the first of many medical theses on nostalgia in 1803—­this was a “condition that affects an être sensible as he moves away from all that is dear to him in the world. [ . . . ] Those who suffer from it [ . . . ] experience an imperious need to return to their pays, to see once again the places they inhabited in their youth, in short, the pressing need to return to their first home.” Its symptomatology was wide ranging and spanned both psyche and soma: “sorry and melancholic look; bemused and sometimes dazed expression; inanimate countenance showing general disgust for everything; weak and slow pulse, occasionally with high temperature; constant torpor; speaks, calls out, and cries while asleep; cannot leave bed; refuses to speak, drink, or eat; emaciation; marasmus; death.”56 The intellectual matrix for Guerbois’s and other colleagues’ outlook continued to be that of eighteenth-­century sensibility and medicine of the nerves, tailored either to the vitalist tradition of Montpellier or to the more materialist brand of sensationalism promoted in Paris by the ideologue physician Pierre-­ Jean-­Georges Cabanis, whose ambitious “anthropological medicine” posited a reciprocal influence of body and mind (or what he called “le physique” and “le moral,” the latter including both cognitive and affective states).57 Humoralism and Hippocratic environmentalism continued to cast a shadow across the army’s medical service, particularly when it came to identifying predisposing factors. But military surgeons and physicians by and large showed little interest for scholastic debates about nostalgia, preferring instead a pragmatic approach driven by the exigencies of  war. They admitted a variety of causes of the

76  Chapter Three

condition: from long-­term predispositions including gloomy weather and melancholic temperaments, to immoderate or improper sexual conduct, and easily impressionable senses and nervous systems in youthful or rural populations. Why soldiers were most affected was a matter of some controversy: for those who blamed the permissive and overly affective environment of bourgeois families for raising delicate young men who turned out to be quite unprepared for the rigors of military life, there were those who identified in a bustling urban environment a source of adaptation to the chaos of  war and rather deplored the fact that French peasants were inveterate casaniers (stay-­at-­home).58 “Their village is the only world they know,” noted one physician from a common stereotype; “none other can be as beautiful, let alone replace it. They are drawn to their parents as their parents are to them. Being for the most part illiterate, they suddenly find themselves cut off from their object of affection and at a total loss.”59 The debate continued as the French army grew from a small force of mostly urban volunteers to a mammoth army of peasant conscripts (a trend initiated with the turn to permanent requisition and accentuated by the provision for paid replacement in the 1798 law on conscription, which allowed many affluent bourgeois to avoid military service). An important study published in 1798 on behalf of the Société médicale d’émulation (the most important medical society in Paris at the time) appeared to settle the question by demonstrating that nostalgia did not favor urban or rural victims per se, but rather affected both in equal measure, only in different circumstances. Its author, the military physician René Pierre Moricheau-­Beauchamp, drew from personal experiences succoring homesick soldiers in two very different theaters of  war—­in hospitals to the rear of counterinsurgency operations in the Vendée and side by side with orderly formations fighting along the northern border—­to show that whereas illiterate peasants suffered more than literate urbanites from ennui when hospitalized, they found a “preservative against nostalgia” in the constant activity and maneuvering imposed upon them in the Army of the Nord (unlike frail Parisians, who were so fatigued by intense physical labor they became homesick). Moricheau-­Beauchamp’s conclusion was that the underlying causes of nostalgia were to be sought in lack of education, loss of habit, and alien practices (mainly laboring activities)—­in other words, it could affect anyone.60 All medical officers agreed that the triggering mechanism behind any outbreak of  homesickness was the displacement and estrangement caused by enlistment. “What kills the unfortunate nostalgic,” explained one surgeon, “is the persuasion that his life and habits have changed forever.” 61 The unprecedented mobilization of the wars disrupted Old Regime rural communities

The Lost Pays of  the Patrie  77

by tearing young men from their families, often for good. As Alan Forrest has shown (and as I shall elaborate further in the next chapter), a very tangible sense of separation and loss transpires from the letters they sent back home from the early victory at Valmy to final days in Moscow.62 This was true of seasoned linemen and enthusiastic volunteers who signed up in 1791, but it was especially the case for reluctant draftees enlisted by ballot.63 The extraordinary levies of 1793—­300,000 in the spring, followed by generalized mobilization in summer—­brought half a million men into the ranks, with immediate effects on troop morale. As soon as the first requis started arriving in the Pyrenees that spring, physicians noted a sharp increase in complaints of  homesickness and a general deterioration of the army’s sanitary conditions.64 In the summer, nostalgia spread like wildfire in the Rhineland, particularly among newly arrived draftees from Brittany, such as those of the 141st demi-brigade. Of 292 recruits raised in the Finistère during the Levée des 300,000, within a few months more than half had deserted, 64 had died (almost all of disease), and 14 had received permanent discharges, leaving a mere 57 combat-­worthy troops by the end of the year. A similar fate awaited a second batch of some 400 more Bretons who arrived in the Rhineland later that summer. By the winter, the levée en masse produced a further 810 men also from the Finistère, all but 37 of  whom either deserted, died, or were evacuated to a field hospital over the following months.65 Similar epidemics were recorded in Italy in the Year VIII, among the first levies of conscripts raised after the introduction of obligatory military service for all French males aged twenty to twenty-­five in 1798 (as decreed by the Loi Jourdan-­Delbrel of 19 Fructidor Year VI). As late as 1811, medical officers of the Grande Armée in Poland complained about nostalgia among newly arrived green recruits.66 Speaking for all army doctors, the father of French psychiatry, Philippe Pinel, would later sullenly remark: “The laws on military requisition and conscription, as well as those on recruitment, have provided and continue to provide us with painfully vivid evidence of the appalling effects of nostalgia.”67

S pa t i a l E p i d e m i o l o g y In the 1790s and early 1800s, “nostalgia” continued to be construed spatially, as a pathological form of  homesickness. After all, enlistment in the army typically entailed traveling long distances for troops that tended to be garrisoned and deployed far from home in order to lessen the temptation to desert (an expedient that medical officers were compelled to criticize). An official report from 1794 by the army’s chief doctors warned government authorities that

78  Chapter Three

F i g u r e 3 . 1 . Death certificate for Jean-­Pierre Cange, aged nineteen, a pontonnier (bridge engineer) from the Lot who died “of nostalgia” at the military hospital in Bayonne on February 8, 1813. Photo © Musée du Service de Santé des Armées, Val-­de-­Grâce, Paris, carton 1.

nostalgia was “quite understandable [among] men who have left home for the first time, [and that] experience shows that [their] sense of isolation [éloignement moral] is directly correlated to physical distancing.”68 “Every day that [draftees] travel away from the paternal roof (toit paternel ) is a day given to regrets,” echoed Guerbois, based on experience in northeastern France during the Year II, where troops from southern and western parts of the country were found to be more vulnerable than locally raised ones.69 In the absence of any other recognizable symptoms, being two hundred miles away from home might be enough for a medical certificate to state “died from nostalgia.”70 For those who sailed across the Atlantic, the diagnosis was easier still to make. As a hospital return laconically noted about one private recently arrived in the Ca­ ribbean: “Scanovi: since his arrival in the colony: nostalgia. Died on 15 Thermidor, five days after contracting a putrid malignant fever” (yellow fever).71 Such emphasis on the spatiality of nostalgia was hardly fortuitous and rather served to validate a generous leave policy. Throughout the wars, French military doctors spoke with one voice when it came to extolling the virtues of the congé temporaire (temporary leave) to cure soldiers affected by mal du pays. “Sending home whoever is tormented by the desire to return there is, without a doubt, the only remedy to this ill,” noted a surgeon-­major of the Imperial Guard. “L’air du

F i g u r e 3 . 2 . Medical certificate granting private Jean-­Baptiste Adam a five-­month medical leave due to nostalgia having complicated his convalescence from a battle wound, 21 Messidor Year III (July 9, 1795). Courtesy of the Archives nationales, Pierrefitte-­sur-­Seine, AF III 3131.

80  Chapter Three

pays is the most efficient cure there is,” echoed a colleague, glossing over the two traditional—­atmospheric and socioemotional—­explanations of the disease.72 Once physicians identified the true cause of  Jérôme Lasserre’s sorrows in 1795, they did not waste any more time in delivering him a lifesaving medical certificate. Nor was Lasserre alone in being allowed to return home that year: a thorough review of temporary leaves initiated in 1796 by the Directory fills no fewer than seventy-­eight cartons at the Archive nationales in Paris, or a rough estimate of some 17,000 dossiers for soldiers who were released on temporary leaves the previous year and who were now trying to prolong their stay at home beyond the standard three months. (This figure thus does not include soldiers who were granted a permanent discharge [réforme] or who had already returned to their units at the end of their temporary permissions.)73 A large number of these men were originally released from service on medical grounds, typically needing to “respirer l’air natal” and convalesce at home. (The other main reasons were to assist ailing parents or help with agricultural work.) The medical certificate that freed one Jean-­Baptiste Adam on 21 Messidor Year III (July 9, 1795) specified that he had sustained a leg wound in combat and needed to be returned to his family for five months because “nostalgia [was] hampering his recovery.”74 Scattered archival evidence shows similar cases of medical officers being released in subsequent years because they had “been suffering from nostalgia for some time” or had a fever “accompanied by symptoms of nostalgia” or simply “par cause de nostalgie.” In each of these cases, the prescription was the same: urgent repatriation to “inhale” some native air, as the formula prescribed, even when it applied to a native Parisian, at a time when the capital’s foul atmospheric envelope was known to all!75 Such was the almost talismanic nature of the medical leave, that a mere promise was sometimes enough, if not quite to cure, then to keep patients alive, even when hospitalized as far away as Saint-­Domingue.76 Conversely, leaves could be prescribed to patients much closer to home, such as in the case of Pierre Audriet, a young grenadier who was hospitalized in Calais in the winter of 1795 with a high fever, only to be diagnosed months later with a case of  “maladie du pays, characterized by a moral affection,” and consequently sent “to convalesce in Bouquehault, his home [sa patrie], which is 3 leagues away.” In other words, Audriet was homesick for a small village a mere ten miles due south of Calais—­not exactly a distance commensurate with exile!77 In fact, almost anyone, it seems, might be in need of a congé temporaire at the height of the Revolution: not only the rank and file, but also General Hoche—­at one point Napoleon’s rival in love and politics—­ fresh from suppressing the Vendée uprising, and even radical Montagnards

The Lost Pays of  the Patrie  81

who conveniently became “seriously ill” in the wake of  Robespierre’s downfall in 1794 and requested to be excused from the Convention.78

P o l i t i c s o f N o s ta l g i a Leaves prescribed to politicians or to soldiers needing to return to Paris or nearby villages raise doubts about the merits of nostalgia’s spatial framing and suggest an instrumental rationale to the medical explanation. This is not to deny the reality of nostalgia as an illness; as the next chapter will make clear, soldiers did suffer from homesickness and did succumb to a host of connected complications. But for the reformed and expanded military medical service that developed in France after 1792, nostalgia was more than just a “fashionable” disease: it was a potential “ally” of sorts in their ongoing quest for professional recognition. For medical officers too, the Revolution seemed to herald a new dawn: decrees passed in 1792 promised them officers’ rank and a free hand in running medical matters in military hospitals, ushering in what one historian has called a “brief golden age of  French military medicine.”79 Brief it certainly was, as doctors were never accepted as equals by the officer corps and repeatedly failed in their bid to obtain permanent commissions and the épaulette (the ornamental shoulder piece worn by officers). The army’s medical service remained just that, a “service de santé,” not a proper medical corps (which it would only become in 1852)—­one undermined, moreover, by simmering tensions between physicians and surgeons, whose respective stock sunk with the appalling mortality rates of army hospitals and rose with celebrated feats of  battlefield surgery. The service was headed by a central supervisory council at first, eventually by a group of inspectors, and had to contend with repeated shortages of manpower, particularly during the Consulate, when successive cuts reduced the number of physicians to 62 and surgeons to 842 (for an army of some 400,000 poised to conquer much of Europe). Its tense relationship with the War Ministry revealed how limited its powers actually were, and from 1792 to 1815 medical officers frequently clashed with government and hospital administrators, especially when it came to the thorny topic of medical leaves. Obtaining a leave of absence, even on medical grounds, was no easy feat at the time of the patrie en danger. Medical officers had to contend not only with representatives on mission—­many of whom tended to view all sick soldiers as likely malingerers—­but also with the commissaires des guerres, administrators placed in charge of  hospital procurement and police but who overreached their responsibilities just as frequently as the royal intendants had formerly done. When the local commissaire prevented two physicians in charge of the military

82  Chapter Three

hospital in Perpignan from releasing homesick men, the medical council reacted with exasperation, sermoning its colleagues on their prerogatives and insisting that in clear cases of nostalgia “leaves should never be refused; the danger incurred by the fatherland cannot justify letting citizens perish in hospitals when they can only be useful to the cause if given a chance to heal.”80 The conflict over who had the authority to release men from active duty came to a head in the summer of 1794, as French armies waged war from Flanders to the Pyrenees and in Paris the Terror drew to its dramatic denouement. In  June, mystified medical officers in the Army of the Nord were handed restrictive instructions on leaves by overzealous representatives on mission, drawing renewed remonstrances from the council.81 Surprisingly, the Committee of  Public Safety sided with the army doctors against the representatives and, in an attempt to lessen hospital overcrowding, on 6 Messidor (June 24) allowed soldiers hospitalized less than twenty leagues (approximately fifty miles) away from their homes to be returned to their families at their doctor’s discretion.82 One month later, and only one week before Robespierre’s downfall, Representative Cochon de Lapparent (a member of the Military Committee close to Carnot) brought to the floor of the National Convention a law on army pay (Law of 2 Thermidor) which confirmed medical officers’ authority over the decision to send convalescent men home when needing a “change of air.” In language suffused with the sentimental style prized by Jacobins, Cochon harangued his colleagues on the very same day that they voted for the eradication of local patois and regional languages (with the infamous decree also voted on 2 Thermidor): “Humanity demands that convalescent soldiers be allowed a change of air (aller changer d’air) in their homes when such a measure is deemed necessary to their wellbeing.”83 By October the army’s health council reported having granted over 16,000 medical leaves to soldiers but that it had no idea how many more soldiers were leaving hospitals by virtue of the decree of 6 Messidor.84 The new Thermidorean Committee of Public Safety rushed to close the loophole and clarify the language used in the Law of 2 Thermidor, specifying that only “soldiers struck by nostalgia or maladie du pays, verified and attested for by at least two medical officers in chief ” would receive temporary leaves to return home.85 At the committee’s request, the health council drafted a resolution on all medical conditions warranting temporary and permanent discharges that included special provisions for soldiers affected by nostalgia. In exchange for full authority over the release of these men, army doctors agreed to “scrupulously distinguish simulated sadness and passing urges to return home from the deep melancholy and ardent desire to see one’s parents’ birthplace ( pays natal), which characterize a true case of nostalgia.”86 Over the following year, they successfully countered repeated

The Lost Pays of  the Patrie  83

attempts by the Thermidoreans and the Directory to eliminate leaves for medical officers affected by nostalgia or replace them with confinement to special “convalescence facilities.”87 In short, against all odds and in spite of continued disdain from the officer corps, the medical community had scored a decisive victory in the “battle” over leaves—­one it would hold onto jealously for decades to come. Critical to the doctors’ success was persuading political authorities that they could discriminate between true and feigned cases of nostalgia. This was easier said than done, for the specter of the malingerer loomed large over the condition, and it was not uncommon then for doctors to be branded traitors for encouraging soldiers to “return to their homes ( foyers), as if forgetting that they have a patrie,” in the Manichean view of one representative on mission.88 Accusations and “machinations” abounded, forcing doctors to defend themselves as best they could: in Verdun, the military hospital’s physician pretexted having denied three hundred leaves in one month in order to justify his decision to grant many more; over in Haguenau, physicians showed more circumspection, releasing only those patients whose health clearly deteriorated after a leave was initially refused but who regained hope at the promise of an imminent reexamination. In these and other cases, doctors invoked specialized medical knowledge to justify their ability to distinguish between genuine and simulated symptoms, cautioning all those who might “question the reality of nostalgia [but] know nothing of the soldier’s plight.”89 Based on these early examples, the medical service codified relatively simple symptomatic and behavioral protocols for weeding out malingerers: whereas the true nostalgic did not admit to his illness, fled the doctors’ questions, sought solitude, and showed early signs of consumption, vocal histrionics and open pleas in the absence of any other somatic symptoms generally denoted simulation.90 These guidelines remained in place after the introduction of conscription and throughout the Empire, when they were incorporated into the nascent specialization of legal medicine through the efforts of  hygienists such as François Fodéré, who insisted that doctors held the key to unmasking the malicious malingerer and saving the life of the true nostalgic by sending him home.91 Ultimately, for all the military constraints and political passions of the period, it seems as if army doctors and government authorities were able to find common ground over how to manage cases of nostalgia within the army. There were instrumental reasons for this: if for doctors prescribing the coveted medical leave became one of precious few ways to assert their corporate identity in an otherwise unpropitious environment, for revolutionary legislators a generous leave policy must have seemed relatively cost-­effective when viewed against

84  Chapter Three

unpalatable alternatives such as mass draft dodging and desertion, or appalling casualty rates in insalubrious and overcrowded military hospitals (which the men commonly referred to as “mouroirs,” or places where people were left to die).92 In this respect, revolutionaries, including the most radical Monta­ gnards, showed more pragmatism and flexibility than they’re often given credit for. Ideological purity sometimes had to be put aside, even (or especially) when the fate of the patrie was at stake. When it came to keeping medical officers healthy, the Committee of Public Safety did not hesitate to allow a homesick doctor to swap units with a colleague simply so that each could serve closer to home.93 Clearly it made both military and financial sense to heed to the threat posed by nostalgia; it also made a lot of  “moral sense” to people steeped in the cult of sensibility and the kind of sentimental language used by Cochon when discussing homesick soldiers. Both doctors and revolutionary legislators of all stripes shared what William Reddy has called an “emotional common sense” that prized expressions of “natural sentiments” such as “l’amour du pays” (or patriotism, albeit in a form that entertained a certain ambiguity as to the scale of territorial identification at stake) and that viewed the revolution as a project of emotional, as much as political, liberation. Legislation passed in favor of nostalgia’s victims must therefore be viewed as part of what Reddy calls the revolutionaries’ “laws about feelings”—­the moral pendant to welfare reforms that introduced pensions for war widows (August 1790) and allowed soldiers to marry without prior authorization from their superior (March 1793).94 Unfortunately, regimental troop rosters (registres matricules) don’t keep track of temporary leaves, so it is impossible to know how many soldiers actually returned to the front having been cured, or at least temporarily relieved, of their homesickness after a short stay at home. We only know that far fewer were listed as absent for having “not returned following a leave to go home” than were crossed out and presumed dead after an “excessively long hospitalization” (in many units the single most important source of  losses).95 No doubt many did not rejoin the army. In April 1796 Private Claude Gambart was tried in absentia by a military council and sentenced to the hulks for having failed to report back to his unit following a three-­month leave.96 Not everyone needed to desert and could instead count on a sympathetic doctor or a mayor willing to help them obtain a permanent discharge, as the medical officer Ducros was able to do by pretexting that a brief  whiff of “l’air natal” had not been enough to eradicate the “deep melancholy [that he felt] in his heart and soul.” 97 Yet, while the sweeping review of prolonged congés temporaires initiated by Carnot in 1796 certainly shows that several thousand soldiers did find ways of extending medical leaves and returning to civilian life, it does not tell us

The Lost Pays of  the Patrie  85

much about the proportion of those men who did return to the ranks after their regular three-­month leave. Surely there were just as many who, like surgeon Manenc, successfully “reestablish[ed their] health amid (au sein de) [their] family members” and were back on the front line years later.98 Lieutenant Gabriel Noël—­whose travails I shall return to in the next chapter—­successfully obtained short leaves to assuage his homesickness roughly once a year, each time loyally rejoining his comrades thereafter. In fact, the sheer scope of Carnot’s review of  leaves in 1796 shows the extent to which an embryonic “security state” was emerging in those years, one not yet able to quell “brigandage” and restore order across the country (as only Napoleon would), but one confident enough already to take the calculated risk of sending homesick men home.99 Ultimately, one need only point to successive directives that maintained temporary leaves for cases of nostalgia well into the nineteenth century to presume that the measure was deemed effective and worthwhile by the French military hierarchy and successive political regimes.

B a n d s o f P ay s In a sense, both doctors and administrators thus “needed” nostalgia and were prepared to meet each other halfway on the matter. Still, there were only so many leaves doctors could grant without undermining combat effectiveness and incurring reprimands from above. Moreover, once troops found themselves in another country, let alone another continent, repatriation was no viable option in any case. Curing nostalgia at home could thus not be all; the condition also needed to be “managed,” by limiting its outbreaks and contagiousness. In other words, medical officers had to be hygienists as well and find prophylactic measures to lessen the pain of enlistment and displacement. When Philippe Pinel, speaking for fellow doctors, blamed mass mobilization for the surge in cases of nostalgia over the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, he distinguished between requisition and conscription on the one hand and recruitment on the other—­meaning how new recruits were organized and incorporated into their units. From the start of the Revolution, doctors and officers of the royal army had warned legislators against privileging a “national” form of recruitment over “regional” or “provincial” ones simply out of aversion to the Old Regime. Jean Colombier, who died on August 4, 1789, the day the National Assembly abolished the feudal system, had long advocated for a regional system of recruitment as part of his sweeping reforms of the army’s medical service. Colonel de la Barollière, who would go on to become a baron of the Empire, deemed the idea of mixing troops and sending them from one

86  Chapter Three

end of the country to another “ridicule” as it would only cause the soldiers much “sadness” (chagrin).100 But the revolutionaries had a political agenda to stick to, one in which the army quickly became an impromptu school of the nation, an ideal image of the new republican order to come. In the eyes of its chief promoter, Edmond Dubois-­Crancé, the dual process of embrigadement and amalgame would not only regenerate French armed forces by simulta­ neously helping to train new recruits and spread republicanism across the ranks; it would also insure its national integration, by fusing citizens from all over the country into one great melting pot. The systematic reorganization of battalions into demi-brigades was followed by attempts to assimilate the men at the company level (typically seventy to one hundred men at the time). Radical Jacobins such as Carnot and Saint-­Just pushed to incorporate the requis of 1793 directly into existing companies, both to discipline these new recruits and break up any traces of  localism that still lingered in the ranks, especially among companies of volunteers, which had cultivated a strong regional identity from their inception. But the amalgame didn’t only have supporters in the Convention. Speaking in January 1794, at a time when federalist revolts and chouanneries raged across the country, Cochon criticized the reorganization for its complexity and the fact that, far from achieving the “nationalization” of troops, it only “stirred their passions” by stoking dangerous “ideas of locality and isolation.” (Six months later, the same Cochon would be urging his colleagues to release homesick soldiers and send them home.)101 Likewise, medical officers were not ones to mince their words when it came to debating soldiers’ passions. As one surgeon raged in a public statement (a medical thesis he submitted to the Paris faculty of medicine within weeks of Napoleon’s coronation in 1804): “Compelled to obey laws that forced them out of their country (qui les expatriaient), while knowing no fatherland (patrie) other than the place (lieu) where they were born, [the soldiers] were unable to show the kind of courage and heroism that they might well have been capable of  had they been allowed to defend their hometowns (pays), their lives, and all that they held most dear.”102 From the start, doctors were quick to point out that the innate “esprit de clocher” (parochialism) of rural and mountainous people in particular could easily cause them to become severely homesick in the very foreign world of the army. Breton draftees and conscripts who succumbed to nostalgia in northeastern France during the Year II and in Italy in the Year VIII became textbook cases in this respect. “I stumbled into them at every step,” wrote Denis Guerbois, recalling his service in the Rhineland in 1793. “These poor Bretons were hit by nostalgia in a most dreadful way. Almost all of them had to be hospitalized, but they were unable to exchange a word with either their fellow Frenchmen

The Lost Pays of  the Patrie  87

or their doctors. Very few escaped a near certain death.”103 At the heart of the Bretons’ supposed predisposition to homesickness, then, was their inability to speak French and thus understand their officers, doctors, and fellow soldiers, except when these were compatriots. At a time when up to a third of Frenchmen and women did not speak the national language and the country still was a Babel of patois dialects and regional languages (such as Breton, Basque, or German), this clearly was not only a Breton problem.104 The only way to spare these men from the dreaded mal du pays, doctors maintained, was to lessen that sense of separation from the pays by preserving as much of this polysemic concept—­at once a specific locale, a community of descent (family and neighbors), and the name given to fellow countrymen—­in the ranks.105 And the best way to do so, they insisted, was by reinstating a regional system of recruitment. For all the talk of the patrie and blood spilled in its name from 1792 to 1815, the French army remained a patchwork of pays. Even when universal conscription was introduced, it relied most heavily on northeastern regions—­historically better purveyors of troops already to the Bourbons—­than remote and mountainous regions in the South and West, where draft dodging and desertion were never quite eradicated.106 If anything, under Napoleon, it became a multinational force once more by extending the draft to occupied territories and satellite states (which provided more than half the troops for the fateful Russian campaign of 1812). Undoubtedly, both the revolutionary and imperial armies that emerged from the crucible of war were “national” in the sense that they nurtured patriotic enthusiasm among soldiers and crystallized nationalist sentiments both in France and, at least embryonically, elsewhere across Europe (most famously in German lands, where the campaigns of 1813–­14 would later come to be known as “wars of [national] liberation”).107 Yet no coherent and durable plan to mold men of disparate origins into one national force ever emerged. Instead, the authorities moved back and forth between large-­scale reorganization plans—­such as the two amalgames (1793 and 1796) and Napoleon’s decision to revert back to regiments in 1803—­which tended to diversify unit composition, and a willingness to turn a blind eye to the persistence of regional cohorts in the ranks. These typically formed as draftees were first incorporated into their units, giving a distinct regional identity to some regiments and battalions but most often to individual companies (the soldier’s primary group of daily interaction, which typically numbered just under 100 men during the revolutionary period and up to 140 during the Empire). Much like the pals’ battalions in Kitchener’s army, these “bands of pays,” as we might call them, could be found especially at the level of sections (forty to fifty men) and squads (ten to twelve men), the smallest tactical subdivision that

88  Chapter Three

typically mapped onto the men’s mess group, the ordinaire. As John Lynn has shown, these primary groups provided essential cohesiveness and combat motivation for inexperienced French recruits in 1792 and remained central to the formidable Grande Armée that Napoleon assembled and trained relentlessly at Boulogne in 1803–­4.108 Many were preserved even as the amalgame proceeded to dilute the overall regional identity of  larger units (as happened in the aforementioned 141st demi-brigade, which, having lost most of its 1,500 Bretons to disease and desertion in 1793, received an assortment of men from all over the country and its colonies thereafter).109 No systematic pattern of recruitment seems to have guided Napoleon’s reorganization of 1803 and subsequent levies. Regional cohorts continued to be incorporated en bloc in some units: 148 Vauclusiens in the Fifty-­Second Infantry Regiment in 1807 and some 8,300 Varois integrated to the First from 1803 to 1814—­that is, up to nine in ten of its recruits over the period. On the other hand, the Twenty-­Fourth drew its troops from no fewer than 80 departments (out of 130) over the same period, with the largest regional contingent providing no more than 12 percent of the men.110 A similar hit-­and-­miss tale emerges at the company level. For all its overall heterogeneity, several companies in the Twenty-­Fourth were up to one-­third composed by men from the same department. Likewise, when twenty-­nine conscripts from the Deux-­Sèvres were incorporated into the Seventy-­Ninth on February 9, 1804, they were split into three squads of nine or ten men and assigned to three companies. Conversely, when ninety-­seven conscripts from Charentes were incorporated into the same regiment the previous year, they were parsed out across no fewer than twenty-­eight companies (otherwise recruited from all over French and Dutch departments). A similar fate awaited sixteen soldiers from the Caribbean identified as “personne[s] de couleur,” who were assigned to five different companies upon being incorporated in 1799 (in what was then still a demi-brigade).111 Such mixing of troops seems to have been most frequent in the elite units of the Imperial Guard, where esprit de corps, devotion to the emperor, honor, and glory supplanted regional identities (and, eventually, former civilian ones too).112 The First Foot Grenadiers Regiment, one of the oldest and most decorated units of Napoleon’s Old Guard, was a true melting pot for seasoned soldiers from all over France who had either enrolled before 1793 or already served in regular line units for a number of years.113 Even when admission rules to the guard were relaxed, allowing less experienced conscripts from all over the empire to join the Fusilliers-­Grenadiers regiment, for example, there was no question of them banding among pays and developing any affiliation other than to

The Lost Pays of  the Patrie  89

their unit’s flag.114 But in the desperate last days of the Empire, as Napoleon toyed with the idea of a new levée en masse to save his throne, he reverted once more to regional recruitment in order to provide the so-­called Marie Louise (120,000 young conscripts of the classes of 1814 and 1815 named after the empress, who signed their call-­up in October 1813) with much needed cohesiveness. The Seventy-­Ninth, which had been decimated at Leipzig that summer, received 650 new recruits from Haute-­Loire (548 men) and Lozère (103), all organized into one new battalion and seven homogenous companies.115 When the restored Bourbons officially reverted to a regional system of recruitment after Waterloo and with the Gouvion Saint-­Cyr Law of 1818, they found that the patrie had never quite done away with the pays within the army.

Real and Imaginary Ills Regional recruitment was not without its own critics, including among doctors. Sporadic epidemics of nostalgia in homogenous units, such as that which annihilated an entire detachment of four hundred Normands conscripts stationed in Spain, led some to question the wisdom of banding compatriots together on the assumption that group solidarity would necessarily prove beneficial.116 In fact, regimental troop rosters and anecdotal evidence from courts-­ martial suggest that desertions often occurred in groups of men from the same areas.117 But on the whole, the army’s medical service saw bands of pays as the cornerstone to an effective prophylaxis against nostalgia. Writing in 1818, the now-­retired army surgeon Percy insisted that, despite the odd epidemic outbreak, regimental recruitment was the most effective way to shepherd draftees from their homes to the barrack. Expanding upon Colombier’s prewar recommendations, Percy outlined a set of quasi-­ritualistic measures to help young Frenchmen across what had effectively become a rite of passage on the path to adulthood with the normalization of conscription during the Empire (and which the Restoration surreptitiously maintained after Waterloo, albeit for far fewer young men, by supplementing its army of  volunteers with draftees raised by ballot). The recruit must be made to view his unit “like a family,” Percy submitted, and eased into military life by officers keen to show “gentleness” (douceur) and “tender affection” (tendre intérèt) for their men. He must be spared from hazing rituals and, instead, entrusted to a compatriot (pays) for bed companion (compagnon de lit), someone who may exert a “benevolent oversight” (surveillance tutélaire), much like an elder brother.118 Percy went on to list other prophylactic measures designed to preserve men from nostalgia while

90  Chapter Three

on campaign and when hospitalized—­essentially forms of distraction such as music, games, and other activities aimed at keeping boredom and melancholy moods at bay.119 But it was this need to re-­create a semblance of a family, or at least what Barbara Rosenwein has called an “emotional community” that he and other physicians insisted most upon.120 “The soldier who finds himself amid childhood companions and people who speak his patois and share his habits,” reiterated a fellow medical officer, “[would] develop for his regiment the same kind of bonds that formerly attached him to his family and his pays natal.”121 In short, he had to be given “a new family as compensation for that which he left behind.”122 Even imperial prefects agreed, urging the ministry to keep recruits together and entrust them to gendarmes from the same pays so that these could “console” and “reassure” them en route to their postings.123 Repeated references to extended families and to the sentimental language of “douceur” should hardly surprise us at a time when these “hackneyed motifs” suffused, in so many ways, revolutionary and imperial political cultures. (Even radicals like Saint-­Just urged representatives on mission to act as “fathers and friends” to soldiers.)124 That they may seem incongruous to us in the context of the military is indicative of the extent to which soldiers at the time lived in a very different conceptual world to twenty-­first-­century ones—­a point I will return to in the next chapter. Clearly, Enlightenment moral philosophy and humanitarianism had made major inroads in the army by the outbreak of the Revolution—­though not quite enough for some it would seem.125 It is useful, in this respect, to view these references in the light of two contemporary institutions that offered comparative models of social organization: chattel slavery and artisans’ corporations. The first of these often served as a foil in discussions of nostalgia, as an extreme state of  violent expatriation and dehumanizing treatment that caused outbreaks of mental illness and suicide on board slave ships and in New World plantations. Physicians that served in the colonies and slave-­owning colonists noted the frequency with which African slaves became hopelessly homesick once bound for Saint-­Domingue or elsewhere in the Antilles.126 Gruesome stories of men and women jumping overboard in the Atlantic or of plantation owners mutilating their slaves to shame them out of wanting to return home and burying deceased ones up to their torsos so as to dispel popular belief in the repatriation of body and soul after death were popularized by French and British abolitionist literature from the early nineteenth century.127 They also influenced a quite different vogue of racist medical conjectures about forms of mental illness specific to black Africans. Homesick slaves were supposedly liable to develop “cachexia Africana,” or “negro consumption,” a wasting

The Lost Pays of  the Patrie  91

disease caused by dirt eating.128 In the years leading up to the American Civil War, the proslavery Southern physician Samuel Cartwright sought to promote “drapetomania”—­or a morbid desire to flee servitude—­as a kind of madness congenital to black slaves.129 The homesick slave brought to an extreme the logic of coercion and alien­ ation already identified by Johannes Hofer as a possible explanation for why free-­spirited and insulated Swiss soldiers suddenly developed the disease in the disciplinarian world of Louis XIV’s army. It is the same logic that favored the spread of nostalgia in eighteenth-­century armies right up to the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and that can help account for why milder symptoms were also reported at the time among exiles and other social groups submitted to similar forms of displacement and regulation (albeit much less arbitrary and violent ones than in slavery). Although they never received the same kind of medical attention as soldiers—­they were much more disposable victims—­in the early 1800s various other “docile bodies” and forms of monetized wage labor, including boarding school pupils, prison and asylum inmates, domestic housemaids, and the first factory workers, regularly cropped up as potential victims of something that looked very much like nostalgia. Perhaps the young Karl Marx had something similar in mind when, feeling his way into the study of political economy in the 1840s, he conceptualized the estranged laborer as someone who “only feels himself when he is not working, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.”130 Significantly, one institution and laboring world in which nostalgia was seemingly unheard of at the time was that of compagnonnage, or corporations of journeymen employed in craft trades (outlawed in 1791, but which continued to operate clandestinely thereafter). Affiliated artisans and itinerant apprentices toured the country for three to seven years in order to learn their trade in different workshops. They might, therefore, have provided fertile soil for more epidemics of homesickness. But the fact that they did not shouldn’t surprise us in the light of the elaborate rites of initiation and strong bonds of sociability that characterized these corporations, distinguishing them from other trades and especially from wage laborers. Nicknaming, baptizing, and secret oaths gave a halo of mystery and shared identity to an extended brotherhood in which members referred to one another as a “mon pays” (in this case, “my brother,” irrespective of place of origin). Despite the long distances and duration of their travels, compagnons could look forward to lodging in affiliated inns called “mères,” where they would find surrogate parental figures in the innkeepers, referred to as “ma mère” and “mon père.”131 In short,

92  Chapter Three

compagnonnage was everything that the army was not, but perhaps should aspire to be, at least in part, lest it become more akin to a slave ship adrift in the mid-­Atlantic. Clearly grafting such rituals and matriarchal appellatives onto regimental life was out of the question, and there are few, if any, explicit references to compagnonnage in discussions of military reforms. Yet Percy’s guidelines on how to prevent nostalgia by easing recruits into a more caring military environment speak to a growing concern about what we might call the estrangement of the Napoleonic soldier, his emotional response to impersonal social relations and an acute sense of disembedding. What Percy and his colleagues had shown over the previous twenty-­five years was that nostalgia was not so uncertain a disease after all when looked at from the bivouac and through the fog of war rather than under candlelight at the nosologist’s desk. And while some continued to harbor doubts about its effects, it is worth emphasizing once more that its victims were not automatically branded malades imaginaires, as many shell-­shocked soldiers would be a century later on the western front. * Napoleon I was hardly one to lavish praise on doctors, and his stinginess toward his army’s medical service, woefully understaffed and underfunded, is well known.132 Yet he too recognized the “reality,” as it were, of nostalgia when viewed from the battlefield. Writing from Moscow in October 1812, the emperor approved measures adopted to save newly enrolled Dutch conscripts from becoming homesick by returning them closer to home after a short deployment along the North Sea coast. The mobilization of these men to protect a coastal marshland from a hypothetical British invasion had been totally unnecessary, Napoleon wrote, adding that it had thus “created a real illness in order to fight an imaginary ill” (“C’est, pour combattre un mal chimérique, s’attirer un mal reel”).133 In a year during which French soldiers found themselves chasing many chimeras—­from retreating Russian forces to vanishing Spanish guerrillas and phantasmal British amphibious landings—­“home” remained as distant but as clear as ever on their horizon, like a painful idée fixe around which we must now try to reconstruct their own tale.

Chapter 4

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War Tears, big tears, gush’d from the rough soldier’s lid l o r d b y r o n , Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812)

Jérôme Lasserre never fully recovered from the attacks of nostalgia he experienced as an army surgeon on the banks of the Rhine during Year II of the French Republic. Having obtained the medical leave he so craved, he turned his back on the front line and headed southwest on a five-­hundred-­mile journey back to Agen. A few weeks at home were not enough though to restore his health; he was through with war, with life in the army, and with being far from his loved ones. Lasserre benefitted from a permanent discharge, opened a respected practice as a lithotomist, and settled, for good, in his hometown. He left little to posterity other than a short medical study titled Manuel du père de famille (Manual for family fathers), which he published in 1822.1 The result of two decades of research, the publication showcased a sophisticated artificial mammal designed for infant bottle-­feeding. By the early nineteenth century this had become a booming market, as Enlightenment critiques of wet-­nursing spurred medical entrepreneurs to devise all manner of feeding devices to replace the simple vessels and animal horns used since ancient times. To distinguish himself in this crowded field, Lasserre proposed an artificial nipple made of natural sponge and fine muslin cloth rather than animal udder skin, and a bottle equipped with a special air inlet and tubes designed to create pressure during suction. Thus, he claimed, his “artificial mammal” would reproduce the “natural sensation” of breastfeeding by mechanical means. This was vital, he in­ sisted in a startling passage worth quoting at length, because nature procures pleasure to the wet nurse during breastfeeding. It is aroused [s’excite] as the child approaches her breast or when she feels the effects

94  Chapter Four

[l’impression] of suction, and it provokes both the erection [l’érection] of the nipple as well as secretion in the mammary glands. This causes the milk to ejaculate [éjaculé] abundantly into the child’s mouth. In turn, the child will then experience an orgasm [orgasme] of the salivary glands through the movement of suction and sensation of the nipple. Saliva will then flow in quantities commensurate with its important role in the digestive system.2

Passages such as these make us post-­Freudians squirm. Yet we must resist the anachronistic urge to read into words and thoughts from an age and sensibility very different from our own. We would do better to think of  Lasserre’s insistence on the importance of reproducing the full, carnal sensations of breastfeeding in terms of  his experience of  homesickness in the army. In a revealing preface, he conceded that his was no treatise of pediatrics and that he had little to add to medical “recipes” for treating children’s maladies. Rather, what interested him were “those suckling children who, for whatever reason, are deprived of their mother’s or wet nurse’s rescue.” Therein lay both the root cause of their illness and the possibility for sparing them further suffering, by “replacing the wet nurse’s breast.”3 Lasserre advocated testing his bottle in orphanages, but one wonders to what extent he was also still thinking (at least subconsciously) of another “motherless” institution, one he had himself known and run away from twenty-­five years earlier but could still not quite get out of his head. He would hardly have been the only one to do so at the time: distant mother figures haunted letters and memoirs of  homesick soldiers and veterans, as did wet nurses and maternal breasts in the writings of those physicians who sought to cure nostalgia in situ, without having to send the men far away from the front line. As the following pages will suggest, Freud’s “joking saying,” as he put it in The Uncanny, that “love is homesickness” has an unknown prehistory—­though hardly an amusing one.4 Lasserre’s personal tale of wartime nostalgia and lifelong quest to come to terms with the sorrow it caused him point us toward the subjective experience of the condition. They allow us to pierce into the soldiers’ “illness narratives” during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars—­stories that both resonate and depart from those of physicians related in the previous chapter. In the following pages I tighten the lens and delve into the sensorial and affective world of late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century soldiers in order to sketch a historical ethnography of military life at the time, both on and off the battlefield. Most of all, I am interested in grasping the subjectivities and emotional economies of these young men as may be gleaned through their relationships with family and

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  95

fellow soldiers (and while knowing full well that I will never quite get to what they actually felt).5 My quest is hampered by the limitation of sources but aided by those physicians who also became interested in the psychological well-­being of their men and heeded their complaints. Indeed, it is my contention that the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars witnessed the first sustained attempt by military doctors to comprehend and confront the psychoneuroses of war by way of a rudimentary listening and talking cure. A full-­blown theory of psychological trauma these men did not have; but they did lavish attention upon soldiers’ emotions, arguably more so than the first military psychiatrists would a century later. The nostalgia that emerges from their case studies and their patients’ personal narratives is a much more complex emotion—­part pathological, part prophylactic—­that mediated a rejection of military estrangement and counteridealization of family life, and maternal care most of all. Paradoxically, it also paved the way for the disillusionment of those veterans who were never able to fully return “home” after the war’s end and who developed a surprising, almost benign, longing for their wartime existence—­an incongruous “nostalgia for the regiment.” Theirs was the first example of a bittersweet but relatively harmless feeling we have called “nostalgia” ever since.

The Soldiers’ Tale The revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were not only the first to mobilize conscripts and entire nations; they also produced a whole generation of war witnesses able to and intent upon recording their experiences in letters,  journals, and subsequent memoirs. Peter Fritzsche has spoken of an “autobiographical impulse” to describe an era in which rising literacy levels and a widely shared impression of being a witness to extraordinary times generated the irresistible urge to write down personal narratives.6 Soldiers were, quite literally, on the front line of this subjective turn, and the sheer volume of writings they have left open up the possibility for a textured history of Napoleonic wartime experiences. Of course, the dispersal of sources and low literacy rates make it difficult to reproduce the kind of thick descriptions of subject-­formation, alienation, and emotional life that First World War specialists glean from rich diaries and epistolary exchanges.7 Nevertheless, as Alan Forrest and Natalie Petiteau have shown, it is possible to read between the lines to glance into the “fundamental psychology” of “Napoleon’s men” thanks to surviving letters and memoirs.8 The former are of particular value due to their spontaneous and essentially private nature, at a time when military censorship was still relatively light-­handed.9

96  Chapter Four

Without the eloquence of Great War poets, nor the confidence of a poilu or a Tommy schooled in the art of letter writing, the Napoleonic grognard resorted systematically to pen, paper, phonetic spelling, and approximate grammar in order to maintain a vital connection with home and his emotional community.10 He wrote to family and friends about life in the army and eagerly awaited news from them in return. When he couldn’t write—­according to the best estimates, less than half the troops could sign their name—­he would dictate to a literate comrade (generally an NCO), often for the letter to be decoded by designated interpreters in his home village.11 The letters tended to be short, formulaic, and frustratingly factual but not entirely devoid of information on these men’s feelings. Needless to say, the grognards had plenty to grumble about, from lack of money, food, and wine, to endless hardships and chronic exhaustion. Letters from the front provide insight into levels of politicization, patriotism, religious belief, and camaraderie in the ranks. The also run the whole gamut of emotional responses to war: from boredom and loneliness while garrisoned or hospitalized, to excitement and bravado while on campaign, all the way to the paroxystic experience of the battlefield: the rush of adrenaline and feeling of excitement, the moments of fear, panic, and desperation upon being confronted, often for the first time, with gruesome visions of human slaughter. Most of all, though, private correspondence reveal the aching pain caused by enlistment and the gnawing desire to return home that most soldiers experienced at some point and that drove many to desert or break down with homesickness.12 Samuel Hynes’s observation that the defining characteristic of the “soldiers’ tale” during the First World War was the “strangeness of war’s happenings,” its “unimaginable otherness” compared to romanticized Victorian and Edwar­ dian myths of war in 1914, rings equally true for the generation that mobilized in 1792.13 For sure, the expectations of those who marched into battle were different, and there wasn’t the same shared belief in war’s potential to regenerate a decadent bourgeois society (although the notion of total war as a necessary redemptive stage toward universal peace was not uncommon to eighteenth-­ century thinkers and those warmongering revolutionaries who threw caution to the wind in 179214). If anything, the perception was the opposite one—­namely, that war would tear communities apart, as opposed to forging a new sense of shared belonging. The sources of disillusionment may thus have been different, but the end result was the same in 1792 and in 1914: enlistment produced excitement and dislocation in equal measure, ultimately resulting in a sense of deep emotional disembedding. It is to this experience of “exile from one’s own real life” and the “lure of family and farm” it brought about that we must now turn.15

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  97

Disembedded Revolutionary and Napoleonic soldiers rarely dwelled on their health in their letters. They might mention, in passing, that they had been ill and hospitalized, but they typically did so only to reassure their loved ones that they were now feeling better and to ask them about their own health. “Dear Mother,” wrote rather cryptically one infantryman in 1795, “to tell you that I have been sick is to reassure you that I am now cured.”16 The rank and file were especially loath to admit to psychological disorders, which they often didn’t have the vocabulary to describe anyway. Few openly confessed to being homesick and, at most, acknowledged a passing sorrow (chagrin, peine). When private Bihan wrote to his parents soon after being drafted, he did so to tell them that he had finally “started to overcome his ennui du pays.” Likewise, when the volunteer Joseph Ladrix wrote, “I have been homesick for some time now” (“J’ai depuis quelques temps la maladie du pays”), he blamed his illness on the northern Italian marshlands that he trudged through, adding that virtually the whole company was sick as well.17 Silences (or voluntary omissions) and tentatively reassuring words often belied deeper anxieties however: by repeating no fewer than seven times that he was no longer chagriné (or no longer felt de la peine), a chasseur (light cavalry) implicitly revealed his true state of mind. Sometimes, the body would speak for the mind, as in the case of an infantryman who belatedly remembered to add “bien” (or “well”) in writing “je me porte [ bien],” as if the extreme fatigue and headaches for which he had been briefly hospitalized following days of exhausting marches had spoken for him, turning the idiomatic expression “I am well” into a more literal “I carry myself.”18 Nor did limited medical knowledge prevent soldiers from having an intuitive grasp of nostalgia’s effects, either. When Normands draftees from the levée en masse joined his unit in March 1794, Gunner Bricard noted in his diary that “[they all] fell ill; many became so sad [prenaient un tel chagrin] that they passed from life to death in four or five days.”19 Sergeant Fricasse wondered whether the six weeks he had just spent in a hospital in Metz were not somehow correlated to the sixty leagues he had just traveled in order to get there from home.20 Few possessed the education of a Stendhal, who noted his own medical woes in his diary when, aged eighteen, he served as a second lieutenant in the cavalry in northern Italy: “It appears that ennui is my customary illness,” wrote the young Henri Beyle from Brescia in 1801, adding that his doctor had detected “some symptoms of nostalgia and melancholia” and thus prescribed a prompt return home on medical leave.21

98  Chapter Four

Such admissions of one’s homesickness and use of medical vocabulary are extremely rare in letters to someone else. One needed to be a medical officer (and be truly desperate) to write home from the distant shores of Guadeloupe, only to say: “My soul is drowning in melancholy.”22 Although they rarely spoke of their nostalgia, soldiers’ correspondence clearly exudes a latent homesickness. Travel and adventure certainly brought anticipation and wonder for some; but for many the thrill of the new quickly gave way to a feeling of loss and discomfort. Soldiers made a point of noting scrupulously their distance from the pays in their letters, echoing the kind of emotional geography captured so poignantly in Louis Boilly’s painting La Lecture du Bulletin de la Grande Armée (1807), in which an artisan family is pictured trying to locate the whereabouts of a conscripted relative on a map of Europe. Writing from Russia in 1812, Napoleon’s men lamented being 650, even 800, leagues from Paris and showed relief at the idea of folding back from Smolensk to Vilnius, which was “still 500 leagues from Paris,” but at least was “within the ancient limits of Europe.”23 For others, “Europe” was far enough already: Venice was twice as distant from Liège as he had been told, noted one disconsolate recruit clearly unimpressed with La Serenissima; for another, it was not the distance to Italy itself but what lay in between him and his loved ones that bothered him: “The Alps that separate us frighten me, and I am horrified by the length and difficulty of the journey.”24 Indeed, soldiers could feel just as estranged far closer to home, even within the same country, as happened frequently in the first years of mass mobilization. At the Army of the Nord during the Year II, draftees from all over France wrote about their difficulty at “getting used to” (“s’y faire”) being in Flanders, where “local people don’t speak French.”25 In Alsace, volunteers from Auvergne had to resort to sign language to communicate, while soldiers from Strasbourg stationed in Vendée lamented (in German) not being able to understand “the French.”26 Linguistic diversity had long posed a challenge to Old Regime military authorities, and, notwithstanding plans to “annihilate” regional dialects and root out foreign conspirators, the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies remained highly polyglot forces throughout (all the more so once they reverted to enrolling foreign regiments during the Empire).27 Privates eagerly sought out their pays (countrymen) in the army and reassured their loved ones about whom they spent most of their time with. “We are all together, all from the pays,” Joseph Rousseau wrote his parents, before proceeding to list the names of village friends, now section comrades, that sent their regards from the Army of the Rhine in 1793.28 Families recognized the importance of local camaraderie at the front and worried that their loved ones might find themselves isolated in

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  99

a “foreign” unit. Upon learning that a second amalgame was being planned in 1796, Louis Dumez wrote to his brother François in the Low Countries, urging him to stick with fellow citizens from their native town of  Verlinghem, near Lille. Louis reminded François that, “when far from the pays natal, it is a source of sweet consolation to be surrounded by people who have inhaled the same air since childhood [. . . One] feels transported back to the [au sein de la] patrie.” (Conversely, losing touch with compatriots was a cause of much “torment.”) François wrote back to reassure his brother that no changes had occurred in his battalion, and five years later he was still standing side by side with surviving “Verlinghemois” during Napoleon’s first victorious sweep through southern Germany.29 Whenever possible, medical officers sought to assign doctors from the pays who could speak the same language or dialect to these regional cohorts of men. Over the course of an illustrious career that led him from Brest to Saint-­ Domingue and Russia, Nicolas-Pierre Gilbert was shuttled from one army to another to listen and talk to fellow Breton soldiers (and, where necessary, prescribe leaves, such as the one he granted Lasserre in 1795). As chief physician of the Grande Armée from 1803 to 1808, Gilbert oversaw the training of Napoleon’s elite units and, according to his colleague Percy, performed miracles among Breton conscripts in the army’s training camps around Boulogne: “[Gilbert] visited these young men daily and spoke a reassuring language to them; this restored their resolve and accelerated their convalescence. Most ended up returning to their regiments, forgetting about the leave they had been promised.” Gilbert’s waning health allowed him to spend the last two years of the Empire in Paris, where he continued to attend homesick soldiers at the Val-­de-­Grâce military hospital through to his death (from typhus) in 1814.30 His legacy was not lost, however, as that same year his fellow Breton colleague René Laënnec was placed in charge of a special ward at the Salpêtrière hospital, assigned specifically to Breton soldiers suffering from mal du pays. Breton may well have been the language of “federalism and counterrevolution,” as Bertrand Barère famously put it at the height of the Terror in 1794;31 it also kept alive those Bretons soldiers who fought for the nation (be it republican or imperial) until the bitter end. But for all those recruits who weren’t fortunate enough to march off with childhood friends and neighbors or encounter a doctor from the pays, enlistment proved to be a heart-­wrenching moment of separation. One disconsolate soldier compared himself to a “tree that has been uprooted” after traveling across France to reach his unit.32 Even for those who got used to military life and relished the adventure it undeniably brought, familiar sights of vineyards,

100  Chapter Four

smells at harvest time, or sounds of church bells and accents might, at any moment, trigger painful reminiscences of home. When this happened, soldiers scampered to write their loved ones, asking for news about them, about the state of crops and the price of wine, about who had been conscripted that year and who had (or hadn’t) remained faithful while the other was away. Having described, in graphic detail, the horror of mutilated bodies and his fears at being abducted by Spanish “brigands,” Private Dubois ended a letter to his parents with a plea: “Send me news from home [du pays]; I am five hundred leagues away and soon will be seven hundred.” “I hope you will write to me as soon as possible,” echoed another soldier, “for I dream of you every night. I never could have imagined what it would be like to leave you, Father and Mother.”33 As Fernand Braudel reminds us, prior to the advent of railways and telegraph cables, distance was measured in letters and the weeks, if not months, it took them to get from one place to another.34 Soldiers’ correspondence from the front map out an emotional geography of the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, one premised on corrosive feelings of distance, isolation, and longing. And yet, as Michael Roper has persuasively argued with reference to twentieth-­ century wartime correspondence, these letters also functioned as a vital psychological link to home and to a former, civilian life—­testimonies to stubborn emotional survival amid the disaffection of war.35 Every day, soldiers awaited the arrival of mail with trepidation, often to be disappointed at its erratic flow, especially once units pushed farther and farther from France. Recognizing the importance of correspondence to soldiers’ psychological well-­being, successive regimes subsidized the cost of moving mail and established regimental postal officers (vaguemestres) and courier services (estafettes) to try to overcome prohibitive logistical difficulties.36 No stranger to the delights of epistolary relations, Choderlos de Laclos constantly implored his wife to write to him while stationed in Italy as an artillery officer during the Consulate: “Understand that it is only our correspondence that keeps me alive. Yesterday’s letter and tomorrow’s letters, that is my life; the rest is nothing but vegetation.” Sadly, there was only so much letters could do once Laclos contracted malaria while in Puglia in the summer of 1803. In one of  his last messages to his wife, dictated days before he expired, he informed her that his doctors had placed all fading hopes in one miraculous remedy: traveling back home, to “breath some French air.”37 Laclos never recovered enough strength to set off on the perilous journey that might have saved his life; but for other avid epistolarians, such as the young volunteer soldier Gabriel Noël, letters and the occasional short leave were the only way he could get through the ordeal that was becoming a citizen-­soldier.

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  101

B e c o m i n g a C i t i z e n - S­ o l d i e r Joseph-­Louis-­Gabriel Noël was twenty-­one years old when he volunteered to join the Second Infantry Battalion of the Meurthe in 1791. He would serve in the army for the next six years, climbing the ranks to become aide-­de-­camp and a cavalry lieutenant in the dragoons, before resigning and retiring to his hometown of Sommerviller, near Nancy, in 1797. Noël was, in many respects, an utterly unique soldier of the French Revolution: born to poor peasants, he was adopted by his godmother, a local grande bourgeoise tinged with nobility and steeped in Enlightenment writings who raised him like her own together with an older stepsister (also adopted) in the spirit of the philosophes.38 Far more educated than the average Frenchman at the time, he wrote long, introspective, and sentimental letters to his godmother and sister almost daily, seamlessly passing from descriptions of  battles and bivouacs to his enduring love for them or appreciation of  Rousseau and Condillac. Yet Noël’s experience of war was far from exceptional and, rather, echoed many of the concerns common to the rank and file: the difficult adaptation to regimental life, the hardships and constant need (especially due to the depreciation of the assignats) while on campaign, and the importance of finding good camarades from the pays to share a bed with, cook a meal, and watch over each other’s back in combat. His letters bring into sharper focus the constant mood swings felt by countless others and in particular that relentless feeling of isolation and longing to return home (or at least receive news from home). In fact, even where Noël does depart significantly from his fellow soldiers—­for example, in his strong politicization and attention to the fate of the Revolution in Paris—­he embodies the revolutionaries’ ideal-­type warrior: the good citizen who rushes to arms at the behest of the patrie. Noël’s enthusiasm for the revolutionary cause, though genuine and never disavowed, was always that of a moderate and gradually morphed into a sense of duty of national defense as the Revolution took a radical turn. But even before he became disenchanted with the course of political events, Noël found it supremely hard to live up to that ideal of the civically minded Spartan warrior sketched by Enlightenment military reformers and now summoned into exis­ tence by revolutionary legislators. As he realized upon leaving his “family nest” (an expression he used systematically) in December 1791, one did not become a citizen-­soldier overnight; for Noël as for so many other recruits, the hyphen between the two terms hid a chasm separating two radically incommensurate worlds—­the civilian and the military—­and in between which he soon found himself stranded.39

102  Chapter Four

Like his comrades, Noël meticulously recorded his distance from home and informed his godmother and sister of his every movement. In reality, he never traveled too far from his native Lorraine, being first garrisoned in Sierck (some sixty miles north of Sommerviller) and then serving for six years along the northeastern front line from Wallonia to southern Alsace, only to ever push once as far as Cologne and Bavaria. Toward the end of his career, Noël hoped to join the Army of  Italy, seeking advancement, adventure, and perhaps needing to put more distance between himself and home. For so long as he remained within a few days’ walking distance from Sommerviller, its lure could become unbearable, and the young soldier frequently had to resist the urge to drop in for a few days while marching from one position to another. Though he did not have to fight much during his first stint at the front—­ he witnessed Valmy at a distance and only received his baptism of fire at the Siege of Namur in November 1792—­Noël’s acculturation to military life was testing enough. Despite being surrounded by fellow Lorrains and entrusted with the mess group’s meal responsibilities, our young bourgeois complained of  having “no real friends in the army.”40 Letters from home were his lifeline: he felt “forgotten” when no mail came through and “reborn,” even “hauled back from across the river of oblivion,” when it finally did. He kept his mother’s and sister’s letters on him at all times and viewed his own ones as an extension of his persona, repeatedly expressing a wish to travel with them. Most of all, he despised the discipline and phony war of garrison life, describing his encounter with military drill in words that could have come straight from Foucault’s pen: I try to not perform the exercise as a machine and make sense of each movement; they are all intended to make us occupy the least possible space in the ranks without disturbing the other men. These exercises are without doubt a good way of disciplining the body [dresser le corps] and of becoming more agile, but I don’t believe they help to develop the intellectual faculties of those who practice them all their life. Witness our second lieutenant: he is a good lad, has always been a soldier, and certainly knows how to perform the drill. But that is all he knows; in everything else he does, it is as if he were still wearing his uniform.41

Noël was hardly alone in resenting the regimentation of military dressage, and many other recruits had a hard time squaring the fact that they were now citizens (and “active” ones at that, as the National Assembly had legislated in 1790) but still had to, per regulation, learn sixteen drill commands and twice as many

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  103

sequenced movements simply to charge and fire their muskets.42 The Revolution had ostensibly redeemed soldiers from their unflattering status under the Old Regime—­the “scum of the earth,” in the Duke of Wellington’s memorable phrase—­a point that Napoleonic propaganda hammered away at with flattering comparisons between boyish French warriors and “German automatons, who wage war like machines.”43 But few French soldiers, whether volunteers or conscripts, actually saw things that way, especially once the revolutionary fervor and genuine egalitarianism that initially pervaded the army gave way to draconian discipline in the Year II and more conventional forms of hierarchy during the Directory. Their letters frequently describe a world of blind obedience to orders barked by “men who are wholly foreign to our existence.”44 “I am increasingly disgusted with military life,” one peasant soldier admitted to his parents from Dusseldorf in 1796: “I have to confess that I would prefer to scrape the earth with my own fingers rather than seek to make a career in the military, as it is preferable to work and be one’s own master than be led as we are here.”45 Already in the fall of 1792, Noël reported fellow volunteers’ “seditious” complaints about “having been freed only to be re-­enslaved.”46 The introduction of conscription in 1798 brought back bad memories of the royal militia and complaints about a new kind of military “servitude,” or “yoke.” As one soldier-­poet wrote meekly home (apparently indifferent to potential censors): “the soldier wonders / Yesterday while enslaved / at least I had my freedom / Freed today by my courage / I find myself in captivity” (le soldat se dit / Jadis au sein de l’esclavage / J’avais du moins la liberté / Libre aujourd’hui par mon courage / Je suis dans la captivité).47 Military dressage and marches were not necessarily any “harder” than the agricultural labors that most recruits would have been used to; what made them unbearable, however, was the toll they took on soldiers’ psyches, rather than their muscles. “We must always be ready to march at any moment. Not a day goes by without us being attacked from one side or another. . . . I must end this letter here for I lack space and have no time to myself: we are always marching, because of an alert or something else. For life, your son,” hastily scribbled an emotionally drained chasseur to his parents, in 1793. “We are forced to mount guard four hours in a row day and night [ . . . ] and perform exercises twice a day,” echoed an infantryman, further adding: “You tell me what time I have left to myself ?”48 These experiences of regimented time and space, of frenetic days of dawn-­to-­dusk activities followed by long hours of idleness and boredom in camp, were often wholly new to recruits, and arguably also distinguish their experience from that of industrial-­era soldiers, many of whom would have already tasted clock time and work discipline in factories before trenches.49 Army

104  Chapter Four

doctors already recognized the problem of soldiers’ exhaustion and prescribed periods of rest for fatigued men. But for Noël, it was not just a question of taking a breather from frontline action; the dense, estranging temporality of the docile soldier was radically opposed to the intimate, airy one that he associated with home and his own personal “emotional refuge.”50 The very day after having dissected military drill, he wrote his family: “I ambled to the top of a nearby hill [ . . . ] I wish the three of us could have been there together. [ . . . ] It almost felt as if the trees were already in bloom. [ . . . ] By then I will have no doubt obtained a short leave.”51 This was the first time Noël mentioned the possibility of returning home on furlough to his loved ones—­barely one month into his service!—­a thought that offered momentary solace by collapsing duration and distance but that would become a nagging obsession in subsequent months. These two letters set the chronotopic parameters, as it were, of Noël’s interstitial existence between two incommensurable worlds, separated both in space (“here” and “there”) and in time (past union, hypothetical future re­ union, and different temporalities in between). They frame a bipolar structure of feeling reminiscent, in some respects, of Achilles’s famous choice between nostos (homecoming) and kleos (glory, but also certain death) outside the walls of  Troy.52 Noël’s emotional seesaw between patriotic devotion and longing for home did not go unnoticed, and he was eventually diagnosed with nostalgia, placed on medical leave, and sent home after twelve months at the front. Overjoyed, he wrote his mother (in the third person) that “the soldier does not suffer so much from homesickness [maladie du pays] as from family sickness [mala­ die de la famille].”53 In doing so, Noël did not as much question the object of his longing, as its meaning and function. For sure, his nostalgia was a symptom of distress, a form of suffering we might today call “separation anxiety.”54 But that’s not all it was. Reminiscences of  home (his “nest”) and fantasies of reunion with his beloved stepmother and stepsister provided the young man with an escape route from what he perceived to be a newly acquired, warlike alter ego (at least until the next trumpet call): “[I have] learned the terrible business of killing,” he once confessed to his increasingly worried mother, “[but] will always return home gentle and human. [ . . . ] You know well that you did not raise me to be a soldier forever.”55 The prospect of wartime “brutalization” prompted psychological regression to a lost age of innocence and emotional investment in transitional objects such as letters—­both his family’s, which Noël kept tucked against his chest at all times, and his own, which he constantly sought to “beat” back home in his dreams—­all of which brought him some measure of relief.56 What his physician diagnosed as a disease, he experienced as a coping mechanism—­a set of emotional practices that kept him going in between moments of reprieve

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  105

with his family.57 Noël continued like this for six years, allowing his nostalgia to both torment and reassure him in equal measure but never to kill him. He hung up his uniform definitively in 1797, became a successful farmer, and found a more agreeable way of serving the public good as mayor of  his hometown (an office he held for almost half a century). At home and at peace with himself, Noël even managed to erase the time and space lost while at war by marrying his beloved stepsister.

Mothers and Sons As unique a volunteer as he undoubtedly was, Gabriel Noël’s “family sickness” was anything but exceptional. Irrespective of their social and geographic origins, revolutionary and Napoleonic soldiers wrote impassioned letters to their parents, and in particular to cherished mothers. While they constantly sought to shield them from war’s more gruesome aspects, they often let their feelings speak for themselves and remind people at home that they remained sons in need of affection. Writing to his mother from Lyon on June 14, 1815, just days before the Battle of Waterloo, a young Savoyard conscript clearly had other things on his mind than the fate of the Empire: “I write to let you know about my health: I have been hospitalized. I wrote to you on the first of the month but have not received a response; this saddens me a lot. I can’t understand why you haven’t written back to me; maybe the letters aren’t getting through[?] I am still very ill. If my letter gets to you, you will let me know what is happening at home. If the letter gets to you, you will write back to me. Please send my regards to my brother.”58 Even when soldiers did not describe themselves as ill, their longing and sadness would shine through: “I am no longer sad [  je ne prends plus de chagrin],” wrote another conscript from northern Italy, “but I think of you day and night [ . . . ] Every night I imagine that I am with you. I imagine myself to be in my bed, and when called upon, I think it is you, my dear father and mother. It is hard to then realize where I really am, still three hundred leagues away from my pays.”59 Like Noël, these men sought escapism in letters, recollections, even dreams, revealing similar traces of psychological regression, as in the case of one Basque conscript stationed in Corsica, who wrote his mother: “Every single minute I think of my pays; days seem to never go by and months become years; in short, I am miserable [  je suis très chagriner (sic)] in this island of Corsica, and I think more and more about the love and tender affection that you nurture in your bosom [l’amour et la tendresse que vous soutenez dans votre sein].”60 Escapism was not always sufficient to overcome the feeling of being “trapped” in a foreign

106  Chapter Four

and endless present, and could easily lead to a more permanent detachment from reality: “Every night I think of you [mother],” wrote one private soon to march off into the Russian wilderness in 1812: “I dream that I am by your side. I cry and call out your name, but it is no use. I no longer live right here, right now. This world has no joy left for me. Hours seem to last for days and days for weeks.”61 At such a state of helplessness, and especially if they felt forgotten, soldiers might start showing anger and resentment to their loved ones: “I would like to know if mother is still as she was when I left home,” asked awkwardly one soldier (in effect inquiring whether she still cried for him as she had done when he had left her). “Dear mother, I write to remind you that I still exist,” echoed tersely another.62 Not one to normally delve in sentimentalism, Gunner Bricard summed up the mood in the ranks when, after five years at war, he conceded in his journal that like everyone else around him, “[he] too ached to see [his] family again, and especially [his] mother.”63 A similar emotional investment in the family and maternal relations transpires from revolutionary era iconography of departing soldiers, suggesting a broader cultural resonance to these feelings. Scenes of soldiers leaving their families to join the army became a popular form of genre painting in the 1790s. They drew at once from the moralizing, sentimental painting of Jean-­Baptiste Greuze—­whose famous Ungrateful  Son (1777) clearly served as a model—­and the tradition of history painting, newly revived by Jacques-­Louis David with his neoclassical masterpiece Oath of the Horatii (1784).64 These works are often viewed as products of a revolutionary ideology peddled by complicit artists to instill a spirit of patriotic self-­sacrifice both in the heroic men who enrolled and the good “Republican mothers” who let them go.65 But in paintings such as Le Départ du volontaire (1793?), generally attributed to François Watteau de Lille, or cheap prints like Pierre-­Charles Coqueret’s On doit à sa patrie le sacrifice de ses plus chères affections (1795), the didactic message is arguably counterbalanced by the pathos of separation and the juxtaposition of (interior) domestic and (outside) public worlds. Watteau’s volunteer seems remarkably downbeat for a model citizen-­soldier and seeks comfort in the embrace of his wife and wet nurse. Cocqueret’s dashing hussar appears decidedly more eager to join his squadron, but as the dog and letter on the floor suggest, he too might well miss his family’s warm embrace. (He will, in fact, return home a dying man, in a pendant that subverts the moralizing message of Greuze’s seminal diptych, in which the “ungrateful” son returns to find that his father has died.) In both compositions, there is a stark contrast between the emotional intensity of the sentimental family and the regimented anonymity of the army units in the background, and to which these young men will be escorted by the eerie recruiting

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  107

F i g u r e 4 . 1 . François-­Louis-­Joseph Watteau de Lille (attrib.), Le Départ du volontaire, 1793. Oil on canvas, 73 × 59 cm. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-­Viollet / The Image Works.

officer lurking in the doorway (a direct reference to the scheming racoleur in Greuze’s Ungrateful Son). Like Gabriel Noël, they too will come to understand the gap separating citizen from soldier. Outright political compositions such as Guillaume Lethière’s La patrie en danger (1799)—­a grand canvas designed to endow conscription with the

F i g u r e 4 . 2 . Pierre-­Charles Coqueret, after Dutailly, On doit à sa patrie le sacrifice de ses plus chères affections, 1795. Etching. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes.

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  109

patriotic fervor of 1792 and the levée en masse—­certainly attempted to erase the home-­army divide by placing the scene of family embrace in broad daylight, amid jubilant scenes of national mobilization. But these contrasted with the far more intimate setting of works such as Jean-­Baptiste Isabey’s Départ des volontaires (1794?), or with the extreme desolation of Jean-­Baptiste Mallet’s Le sacrifice à la patrie, ou le départ du volontaire (1794)—­a work that synthesized Greuze’s seminal diptych by depicting a dejected soldier departing a dilapidated rural home, leaving behind disconsolate mother and child, a dying father, and a fainting wife who has just dropped her baby child to the ground. Scenes of departing (and returning) soldiers such as these continued to circulate under the Empire, especially as cheap prints. These first images d’Épinal testify to a practice that had, by then, become a permanent feature of people’s lives, but which continued to be perceived in terms of a fundamental separation between home and family on the one side and the army on the other.66 Such effusive displays of affection within the family were hardly uncommon in this high age of sentimentalism.67 What was new, though, was military physicians’ readiness to connect soldiers’ expressions of filial love with their psychological breakdowns. For many this was simply a consequence of their own sorrows at  joining the army. For a junior surgeon such as Denis Guerbois, who was barely eighteen when the war broke out, trying to understand and cure nostalgia among the men was a way of coming to terms with his own anguish at having left behind a beloved mother. He prefaced his inaugural dissertation on the topic (defended in 1803) with a telling homage to soldier patients—­“They left behind a beloved mother” (Ils laissaient, en partant, une mère chérie)—­ and underscored their longing for a “maternal embrace,” not just for home (or what he called the “paternal roof ”). In a poignant autobiographical preface, Guerbois confessed to his examiners (which included the likes of Percy and Pinel) that the day he had left home to join the army was “the first time I left my mother; her eyes soaked with tears, her hand’s grasp of mine, her looks that endlessly called me back—­these impressed on my heart a memory that I preserved everywhere I went.” For Guerbois as for Noël and no doubt countless others raised in the cult of sensibility, reminiscences such as these brought both pain and solace, comfort with a bittersweet aftertaste: “Sweet memories, you were my only consolation, and yet you tormented me all the time.”68 We don’t know how often Guerbois was able to return home to his mother’s side; what is certain, however, is that he dedicated himself assiduously to relieving his and others’ troubled minds right behind the front line, without relying solely on the miraculous cure of a “retour au pays.”

F i g u r e 4 . 3 . Title page from Denis Guerbois’s “Essai sur la nostalgie, appelée vulgairement maladie du pays” (Paris: medical thesis, Year XI [1803]). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque inter­ universitaire de santé, Paris.

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  111

F o r wa r d P s y c h i a t r y Notwithstanding its generous leave policy, the French army couldn’t simply send all soldiers home at the first signs of nostalgia. Nor did it have to; if the condition was diagnosed early enough—­before it affected other vital organs, that is—­then it could be dealt with immediately, right behind the front line, medical officers claimed. As soon as the war started, they began improvising treatments for homesick soldiers evacuated to temporary military hospitals set up in the rear. Throughout the second half of 1794, the junior surgeon Riquier watched hopelessly as his men developed a “melancholy induced by the insurmountable desire to see their parents again” along the western bank of the Rhine. Whether weary of antagonizing political administrators or simply hesitant at the idea of sending enfeebled men on the road, Riquier decided against releasing them and instead set about treating them on the spot. He scrupulously noted his patients’ symptoms—­including a variety of headaches, insomnias, temporary deafness, and convulsions he characterized as “nervous”—­and tested ineffective pharmaceutical concoctions (mainly purgatives and laxatives), before turning to what he described as the men’s “psychological condition” (état moral). He visited his patients daily and attempted to converse with them, undeterred by their evasiveness or indifference. Riquier sought to inspire confidence by showing genuine concern and asking the men about their sufferings. It was painstaking and time-­consuming work, but after several weeks he could claim to perceive “great glimmers of  hope in their souls.” The most desperate cases were sedated with doses of opium and promised a release; but for most of the men, Riquier estimated that he had successfully restored their spirits and made them ready for combat once again.69 Riquier’s rudimentary psychotherapy bears considerable resemblance to the innovative treatment for insanity being developed almost simultaneously by Philippe Pinel and his assistant  Jean-­Baptiste Pussin at the Parisian asylums of Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière. This “moral treatment,” as Pinel called it, posited that mental illness could be cured with a combination of gentleness and mea­ sures targeted at dispelling the delusional idées fixes and pathological passions that troubled the patients’ imaginations.70 A prominent member of the Idéologues circle and of the reformist Société médicale d’émulation, Pinel was an unavoidable figure in the medical world of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era. From his professorship at the Ecole de santé (later Faculté de médecine) in Paris, he exerted considerable influence on a generation of physicians and surgeons who served in the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies; most likely, he also learned a thing or two from their battlefield experiences.

112  Chapter Four

A good case in point is Moreau de la Sarthe, a young surgeon close to Pinel’s circle who was drafted into the army in 1793 and sent to the military hospital in Nantes, where he successfully treated a nostalgic conscript. Moreau published a detailed report drawn from his observations in 1798 in the Mémoires de la société médicale d’émulation (incidentally, in the same issue as one of Pinel’s first systematic outlines of the moral treatment) and then again in the Idéologue journal Décade philosophique, before summarizing them one last time in the Encyclopédie méthodique.71 The patient, identified as citizen Lecomte, was a twenty-­eight-­year-­old peasant evacuated from Vendée to receive surgery. He bore recognizable hallmarks of a man of feeling: a “great sensibility” (“sensi­ bilité profonde”) and “strong moral sentiments” (“existence morale bien devel­ opée”). Although the operation was successful, he soon became melancholic and developed worrying signs of consumption. Lecomte and Moreau were both natives of the Sarthe in the Loire Valley, so it was relatively easy for the two to establish a relationship. Moreau examined his patient repeatedly, concluding that his “exalted desire to see his native and beloved homeland” belied a classic case of “well-­defined nostalgia.” He became convinced that Lecomte first developed the condition upon hearing another soldier speak with a familiar accent—­an instance of pathogenic memory that Moreau explained with a lengthy aside on the legendary effects of the ranz des vaches on Swiss soldiers. “Delighted with this discovery,” Moreau exulted, “I became convinced that the cause of the ailment could [ . . . ] become its best remedy.” Instead of trying to distract Lecomte, Moreau encouraged him to indulge emotional reminiscences of his homeland, family, and childhood, occasionally sharing his own anxieties and homesickness as a young medical student in Paris. He combed the ranks to identify the soldier “responsible” for Lecomte’s collapse and, having found him, introduced him to Lecomte as a “family friend.” The two “pays” (“compatriots”) spent several days talking to one another, with immediate results: “These conversations, some moving scenes, and abundant tears that had, until then, been held back by the spasm of a repressed (concentrée) sadness—­all these means had a prompt and happy effect [on Lecomte’s health].” This highly emotional denouement—­underscored by the iconic outpouring of tears72—­ rendered unnecessary any further treatment, whether of the pharmaceutical kind or repatriation. Lecomte had been cured, and, feeling embarrassed at his momentary weakness, he quickly regained his unit. As Jan Goldstein has written about this case, Moreau attributed healing powers to a “full, cathartic expression of painful feelings.”73 His cure for nostalgia bears resemblances with the abreactive technique that military psychiatrists such as W. H. R. Rivers developed during the First World War, drawing

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  113

from Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud’s early research on hysteria and traumatic neuroses. The similarities don’t end there, for there is much in common, from a symptomatological point of view, between an “alienated” Napoleonic grognard and a “shell-­shocked” poilu evacuated from the western front. Signs of frayed nerves such as those noted by Riquier were commonplace throughout the French army—­headaches, insomnia, nightmares, panic attacks, deliriums, and despair—­but also conversion disorders with unexplained (functional) neurological symptoms such as temporary deafness, blindness, and aphonia, or respiratory difficulties, partial paralyses, and epileptic fits.74 Medical officers had no systematic way of discriminating between these symptoms, some diagnosing “hysterical” outbursts, others “hypochondria” or “war fatigue.” All agreed that these were clear signs of “nervousness,” of unequivocal “physical and moral effects” of combat and military life on the men’s nerves.75 And whenever they detected signs of melancholy, or some predisposing factor could be inferred, they systematically resorted to labeling these cases “nostalgia,” which thus became an umbrella term for a wide spectrum of syndromes.

Before Trauma But is it possible to speak of these men and of nostalgia in terms of trauma? Here the analogies must end, and the short answer would have to be no. Simply put, there was no concept of psychogenic trauma available at the time (the word traumatisme was only used in a physical sense, for a bodily wound). Nor could there be, historians agree, until the last third of the nineteenth century, when discussions of “railway spine” (or nervous “shock” caused by railway accidents) paved the way for Jean-­Martin Charcot’s psychoneurological account of hysteria and, in turn, the psychodynamic ones of Pierre Janet and Freud.76 Yet one need not believe in the timelessness of evidently “constructed” psychological diagnoses such as PTSD in order to rescue the destructiveness and emotional suffering caused by preindustrial warfare from the proverbial condescension of posterity. That Noël and his fellow citizen-­soldiers were deeply affected by what they experienced at war is quite obvious; it is equally clear, however, that no physician viewed them as “traumatized” in the same way that one might today. Take for instance the legions of  hopeless Breton conscripts whom Denis Guerbois struggled to rescue from fatal nostalgia in the Armies of the Rhine and of Italy during the 1790s. As we saw above, Guerbois was quite willing to think of nostalgia in terms of troubling reminiscences rather than simply spatial displacement. He even compared the Bretons’ sense of loss when joining the army to the sudden weaning of an infant from its wet nurse’s

114  Chapter Four

breast.77 Yet in no instance did Guerbois conceive of this likeness in terms of childhood sexuality and of the repetition of  latent trauma, as we post-­Freudians almost inevitably would. Like Lasserre describing the “orgasmic” experience of suckling, he appears to have reasoned within epistemological parameters prior to the advent of “sexuality” in the Foucauldian meaning of the term (that is, of sexuality as an object of scientific knowledge and an occult causal agent of human behavior, a development that Foucault pinpointed to the 1830s) or, for that matter, of the opaque workings of  “traumatic memory.”78 Instead, Guerbois chalked it up to similar experiences of “déchirement,” a word that translates both as “tearing apart” and “heartbreak” (or “emotional distress”)—­in other words, to simultaneously physical and emotional sensations that undermined, from without and within, the human being as a whole. Rather than turn to Freud and trauma, then, we would do better to start by placing Guerbois and his colleagues firmly within the conceptual world they lived in—­that is, one in which cognition and emotion were not opposed but fundamentally entangled around the paradigmatic concept of sensibility. Guerbois, Moreau, Riquier, and the vast majority of French military doctors were steeped in the holistic medical philosophy taught both in Montpellier and in Paris, where Cabanis’s science of man and Pinel’s pioneering research on mental illness injected new life into the venerable “medicine of the imagination.” Arguably, they also made medical officers more alert to the complexities of soldiers’ emotional lives than the “discovery” of psychogenic trauma would for the first military psychiatrists a century later. Their medical reports don’t only speak of the sadness caused by homesickness, but also of soldiers’ fears, anger,  joy, and various other “passions” or “moral affections.” These caused sol­ diers to experience “shock” and other “nervous accidents,” such as a “weakening of [their] nervous fluids,” particularly when exposed to intense artillery fire or following surgical operations.79 For someone like Moreau, serving in Vendée was a daily reminder of medicine’s need for a “pathomètre,” an instrument that would somehow measure a patient’s suffering—­the stuff of dreams for a doctor in the age of sensibility.80 In the absence of such a gadget, Moreau made do with the tools of “moral medicine,” emphasizing the same douceur (gentleness) and confiance (trust) between doctor and patient that Pinel recommended for insane patients.81 The rank and file had to have “blind faith in [their surgeon], even enjoy his intimacy,” wrote Guerbois, echoing soldiers’ letters that praised compassionate officers who could empathize with the men’s longing.82 In his postwar précis of medical knowledge on nostalgia for the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, Percy resorted to the same language of trust and gentleness to describe the

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  115

prescribed treatment for nostalgia. If his prophylactic recommendations had affinities with rites of initiation, his therapeutic ones required oratorical skills worthy of an actor: a military doctor needed to show “eloquence, compassion, and persuasion” in order to “grab hold of the patient’s imagination and redirect it away from the object [or idea] to which it is enslaved.” Only thus might he replace the pathological idée fixe with a countervailing passion (such as military glory). Ultimately, for Percy the surgeon-­major had to be a “consoling,” even a priestly “father”-­like figure (un consolateur et un père) for the regiment, much in the same way as Pinel saw his own role in the asylum.83 As we will see in the next chapter, the founder of French aliénisme showed limited interest for nostalgia, although at Moreau de la Sarthe’s request he did contribute a short article on the topic to the Encyclopédie méthodique, in which he reiterated that the condition could be cured by “moral means alone.”84 Pinel’s many students and admirers in the army’s medical corps embraced the moral treatment as a blueprint for dealing with soldiers whose nerves gave way. “Moral medicine,” wrote one surgeon of the Grande Armée, “is most especially necessary in the army.”85 Arguably, the same army provided as much of a testing ground for Pinel’s ideas as the asylum did (at least until the institutionalization of aliénisme with the 1838 law on asylums). At any rate, it may be said that the Napoleonic battlefield gave rise to the first systematic therapy for war neuroses, a century before the appearance of military psychiatric units proper.

Male Tears By placing this turn-­of-­the-­century medical discourse of nostalgia firmly within its intellectual milieu, we also begin to discern the apparent gendering of its plot’s protagonists and setting: the homesick male recruit, loving mother at home, and benevolent paternal doctor in the army. The filial affection that transpires so palpably from Noël’s and countless other soldiers’ sobbing letters speaks to those “torrents of emotion” and empathy characteristic of late eighteenth-­century family relations.86 Likewise, by likening conscription to weaning, Guerbois surely meant to invoke that highly sensitive point for his contemporaries: the farming out of infants to rural wet nurses, a practice as widely condemned as it was practiced at the time.87 Rousseau famously called wet nurses “mercenary women,” and it is no coincidence that Greuze should depict the Painful Separation between mother and helpless newborn consigned to a stranger in a strikingly similar way to the Ungrateful Son’s departure to join the army.88 Both these sentimental and militaristic undertones survived into the Revolution and Empire: “Republican mothers” were

116  Chapter Four

summoned to fulfill their “natural” roles by breastfeeding children who would one day be patriotic volunteers; as it turned out, they would in fact become reluctant conscripts, but this hardly prevented imperial commentators from blaming wet-­nursing for high child mortality rates and “degeneration.”89 Without quite going so far, Guerbois argued simply that maternal breastfeeding would strengthen the men’s resolve, by shielding them for the first separation and arming them with enough maternal love to survive when their turn to take up arms came.90 Viewed from the twenty-­first century, Guerbois’s breastfed conscripts and other sniveling recruits, such as Lecomte and Noël, all cut a rather odd figure as soldiers. Delicate “men of feeling,” prone to shedding tears and needing gentle affection from their officers, if not maternal pampering at home—­they go against our commonly held assumptions of what makes a macho warrior the epitome of virile masculinity today. It is as if these men belonged to another age—­an age of nervous distempers and effusive sentiments that allowed, per Mark Micale, for a precocious “medicalization of male emotional suffering” and that was subsequently foreclosed by a “great Victorian eclipse” (to be only partially revived by psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century).91 Changing gender norms framed the emotional lives of revolutionary and Napoleonic soldiers. Proud “soldats sensibles” when they went to battle in 1792, homesick recruits were increasingly viewed as embarrassing leftovers from a waning age of sensibility only two decades later.92 Moreau’s case history, published in 1798, already hints at two distinct normative types of masculinity that crossed paths on the battlefield: the eighteenth-­century man of feeling and nineteenth-­century virile male.93 Lecomte’s emotions, as related by Moreau, responded to both, with the trademark outburst of tears and embarrassed blushing, respectively. By 1805, the aforementioned Napoleonic pamphlet “La vie du soldat français” purposefully contrasted “weakling” boys who stayed close to their mother to the “vigorous conscript” armed with “manly resolution” by regimental life.94 Even someone wholly sympathetic to nostalgia’s victims as Percy seems to have not been immune to the change of tone. In 1807 he was summoned to the side of his senior colleague Jean-­François Coste, a veteran of the American War of Independence and chief physician of  Napoleon’s Grande Armée, who had been forced to take to bed in Poland. No stranger to nostalgia, Coste had successfully fought countless administrators intent on limiting soldiers’ medical leaves and relentlessly briefed junior medical officers on how to treat homesick men, scolding those who opted for pharmaceutical quick fixes instead of lengthier psychological means.95 But what he was not prepared for was his own emotional burnout. As Percy noted in his journal, the long wait to be repatriated

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  117

brought “our poor nostalgic to almost die of impatience, for he longed for his home, his family, and especially his garden.” Although he was hardly the first Napoleonic doctor to be evacuated home, Percy’s malicious comment shows just how upsetting Coste’s homesickness had become to the aging physician.96 This was a slow and patchy mutation, however, and at no point did French revolutionary and Napoleonic armies and their physicians resort to the kind of shaming of  homesick “weaklings” that became common during the American Civil War and the norm by the time of the First World War, when shell-­ shocked men could expect to be bullied, court-­martialed, or have electrodes applied to their tongue. The only instance of a physician endorsing cruel methods—­including the application of a red-­hot iron onto the stomach or the burying alive of wailing soldiers, as allegedly practiced in the Russian army—­to jolt soldiers out of their “weakness” came from someone outside the medical corps and best known for his cookbooks (and bouillabaisse recipes).97 Cases of  faked nostalgia were extremely rare, medical officers insisted, and “no one was worthier of pity than the young man affected by [nostalgia].”98 In fact, well into the nineteenth century French soldiers could expect to fall on understanding ears when feeling homesick (as we will see in subsequent chapters). As Odile Roynette has argued, the surprising durability of the nostalgia diagnosis points toward viewing the condition as a symptom of muted male suffering in the face of the increasingly stringent codes of martial manliness promoted by military service and barrack life.99 Ultimately, the whole trajectory of nostalgia in the French army maps onto the latter’s changing gender profile, starting with the marginalization of  women from the ranks in the Old Regime (when wives, prostitutes, and female combatants were banned from family-­like “campaign communities”). The trend accelerated during the revolutionary and Napoleonic era with ever-­more-­stringent regulations imposed upon vivandières (sutlers) and blanchisseuses (laundresses).100 How much the masculinization of the army led to an emotional overinvestment in the figure of a distant mother for so many young men is a matter of speculation. At any rate, as the military became an increasingly distinct and self-­consciously masculine environment, so did nostalgia become gender differentiated. Hofer, Harder, and their eighteenth-­ century heirs had either explicitly or implicitly described a gender-­neutral disease, with both male and female cases to prove it. By the late Empire, on the other hand, medical texts spoke of a predominantly male disorder, from which women were spared thanks to fragile nerves and physical constitutions—­or so the explanation went—­which prevented them from fixing all their attention onto one object alone and conversely allowed them to settle wherever they went.101 Notwithstanding the numerous cases of “male hysteria” diagnosed in

118  Chapter Four

the ranks, it is therefore precisely at the same time as hysteria was becoming once again a distinctly feminine disorder (following a long period during which neurological discoveries had challenged ancient theories of wondering wombs) that nostalgia increasingly came to be viewed as a male illness, or rather, as a sign of delicate and thus perhaps a touch unmanly warriors.102

A T i m e f o r N o s ta l g i a Wounded, haggard, the grenadier gazes into the distance, a look of stern desolation upon his face. He sits atop a sepulchral mound, from which emerge the limbs of a dead body and scattered debris. In the distance, more corpses litter a broken landscape, against the vivid backdrop of a setting sun and menacing clouds above. With one hand, the soldier grasps the spade he has just used to bury his fallen comrade. He rests his head on the other, in what has been a recognizable melancholy pose since antiquity (and most famously perhaps since Albrecht Durer’s Melencolia I [1514]). As the dim twilight and imperial eagle standard lying on the ground amid the wreckage also remind us, his despair is a form of collective singular: not just personal bereavement, but also a shared epic come to a crashing end on the battlefield. Horace Vernet’s 1818 painting The Soldier at Waterloo captures the melancholy tone of the end of the Napoleonic saga for those men left orphaned of their brothers in arms and dreams of military glory. Unsurprisingly, the painting proved too controversial to be shown in public and Vernet, who had fallen out of favor with the return of the Bourbon monarchy, was only able to exhibit it in his studio in 1822. It was part of a diptych, casting an equally down­ hearted (if perhaps more politically correct) Soldier Laboureur (1820), who had traded sword and uniform for plough, like a modern-­day Cincinnatus soon to be embodied in the legendary fictional character of the soldat Chauvin.103 Both images tapped into an underground swell of Bonapartist support and circulated clandestinely as cheap prints (while prudently removing any visible imperial insignia). Two decades later, under the more benevolent eye of the July Monarchy, Vernet’s Soldier at Waterloo resurfaced to adorn an expanded edition of  Emmanuel de las Cases’s bible of  Napoleonic legend, the Mémorial de Sainte-­Hélène. The melancholic grognard, who had perhaps suffered from nostalgia while following his emperor, had thus become an icon of Napoleonic “nostalgia”—­of a new kind of  benign longing for an idealized past. In theory, demobilization at the end of the Napoleonic Wars should have brought relief to an army stricken with homesickness. Starting with Napoleon’s first abdication in April 1814 and then again after Waterloo the following year, up

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  119

F i g u r e 4 . 4 . Jean-­Pierre-­Marie Jazet, after Horace Vernet, Le Soldat de Waterloo, 1821. Aqua­ tint. Courtesy of McGill University Library, Rare Books and Special Collections, Napoleon Collection.

to a million men—­veterans of many campaigns, new recruits, invalids, deserters, and prisoners of war—­were hastily discharged and summoned to return to their foyers (homes).104 But as we know from the novels of  Balzac and the scholarship of Isser Woloch and Natalie Petiteau, among others, there was no easy “way out” of war for Napoleon’s men. Ostracized by a restored Crown that viewed them with suspicion, as fomenters of disorder, theirs was a very underwhelming homecoming, exacerbated by a stingy pension policy that benefited only 130,000 officially recognized “veterans” (that is, soldiers having served for thirty years or severely invalidated) and some 16,000 officers placed on inactive half pay (the famous demi-­solde).105 Although plenty managed to reintegrate civilian life, the enduring image of the Napoleonic veteran was that of Balzac’s characters Goguelat, Gondrin, and Chabert, impoverished drifters whose heroic deeds had been forgotten—­an “unknown hero,” Gondrin is sole survivor of the fearless pontonniers of the Berezina crossing—­or whom everyone believes dead, as in Chabert’s case.106 Denied any official recognition or public commemoration until the 1830s, these “vieux débrits” of  Napoleon’s armies survived in the

120  Chapter Four

shadow, immortalized by the artwork of military painters such as Vernet and the clandestine repertoire of  popular chansonniers like Jean Béranger.107 Veterans’ recollections draw a miserable portrait of this “lost generation.” Their life after demobilization was marked by disenchantment and the impression of  “vegetating” in the present: “For thirty years [the veteran] looks toward that day when he will retire, collect his pension, and, free of all obligations, will do as he pleases, plant cabbages or watch others doing so. When that moment arrives, though, when he has settled in his little town, he generally gets bored. His life until then had followed the rhythm of daily events and new encounters; it now flows in frightful monotony. . . . Those who have no particular preference as to where to settle choose an army town so that they may see others do what they had once done.”108 Ennui was not all these men suffered from, though. Throughout the Restoration, hundreds if not thousands of  Napoleonic veterans were admitted to the Salpêtrière, Bicêtre, Charenton, and other mental asylums, often under police escort following arrest for disorderly behavior or attempted suicide. They were diagnosed with “mania,” “deliriums,” and general “aliénation mentale” (psychosis), but typically presented symptoms of melancholy and motor disturbances as well, such as in the case of one Charles Remy, a demi-­solde admitted to Charenton in September 1820 and described as “sad,” “taciturn,” a “loner” who suffered from memory loss, incoherence, and partial paralysis.109 For these men, the war had never quite ended and played on in their heads, with ravaging results. Veterans’ memoirs speak of recurrent nightmares and flashbacks, of visions of “streams of blood,” “severed limbs,” and “expressions of  horror”—­of “traumatic memories,” as we would call them today, to describe symptoms of post-­traumatic stress disorder.110 Napoleonic veterans did not use such terms but did lament “dark thoughts” that continued to “haunt” them decades after the war.111 Even as aging men, they still seemed to be working through a wounded soul, as in the case of  Vivien Stanislas, who ended his memoirs by describing how he had been dropped to the ground as a newborn and miraculously saved by a surgeon and wet nurse—­a curious way to end one’s memoirs, “in the beginning.”112 Like Lasserre trying to patent his artificial breast three decades after being discharged, Guerbois and the fifty other medical students (about two-­thirds demobilized medical officers) who opted to write medical theses on nostalgia in the first half of the nineteenth century all seem to have engaged in one great round of collective catharsis. Viewed from the twenty-­first century, this does look very much like a forgotten prequel in the discovery of the unconscious, almost like a dress rehearsal for a discontinuous genealogy of trauma.113

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  121

But not all veterans of the Napoleonic Wars found the past to be quite so daunting or intrusive. When not worrying about “dark thoughts,” Desboeufs was happy to reminisce about the “days of  glory and disaster” and “those beau­ tiful regiments” he had once been a part of. “When I left my retired comrades,” he explained, “I felt my heart wither, and tears swelled my eyes; that was the last time I saw friends with whom I had braved so many dangers and who had become so very dear to me.”114 War had forged enduring bonds of camaraderie among these men and almost filial devotion to their leaders, creating ties of  fictive kinship that eventually came to replace prewar, civilian ones.115 This surrogate emotional community, painfully re-­created on the battlefield, was torn asunder all over again by demobilization, leading many to idealize life in the army and distort the war years beyond recognition (especially in memoirs written long after the fact, at the height of romanticism and phases of Bonapartist rehabilitation under the July Monarchy and the Second Empire).116 For their part, army doctors already recognized the strength and importance of these homosocial ties in the immediate aftermath of demobilization. The son of an army surgeon but born too late to actually serve under Napoleon himself, M. Reynal had plenty of opportunities to examine hospitalized veterans during his medi­ cal studies in Paris in the first years of the Restoration. From his observations and the teachings of  his professors Pinel and Percy, he drew one of  many French medical theses on nostalgia written at the time. (He defended in 1819.) Much of it rehashed wartime writings on the condition, which typically arose from the soldiers’ “burning desire” to see their homes again. But, much to his astonishment, Reynal also claimed to have observed veterans developing nostalgia from an “opposite desire”—­namely, from a “craving to return to their regiments.” He provided a touching example with the case of an old sailor who had never quite managed to move on from being forced off his ship after thirty years at sea, as if the vessel and its crew had “become a surrogate homeland.” Crucially, this surprising variety of nostalgia did not appear to be quite so malevolent; if anything, it seemed to sustain its “victims,” providing them with a new family in replacement for one they never quite found upon returning home (as Kant had warned two decades earlier, it may be recalled). “You see the old defender of the motherland, betrayed by his weapons on the battlefield?” asked another medical student (also born too late to actually fight) the following year, almost as if  looking at Vernet’s Soldier at Waterloo. “It is not his home that he longs for so badly; his Penate [household] gods are with the national flag, and it is his comrades in arms whom he wishes to embrace. His regiment has become his tutelary God.”117 Like Noël clinging to his former civilian self,

122  Chapter Four

these dewy-­eyed veterans held onto meaningful wartime experiences to provide them with comfort in an inhospitable postwar world. Far from mitigating their homesickness, demobilization had shattered their sense of self all over again, asking them to forget and move on a second time. Everyone coped as best they could, some descending into mental illness, others idealizing those “good old days”—­a new phenomenon that, per George Mosse, marked the birth of a modern “myth of the war experience.”118 For the history of nostalgia itself, this was a decisive turning point. For the first time, doctors used to conceiving of a disease in spatial terms now spoke openly of a temporal form of longing, a relatively benign “maladie du souvenir” or “maladie de mémoire.”119 Increasingly, medical dissertations on nostalgia began shifting the onus of the condition from imaginations gone awry to overzealous memories, highlighting their patients’ “reminiscences,” “memories,” and “all that reminds of [tout ce qui rappelle] home,” rather than the actual place itself.120 “Only the past preoccupies us,” wrote one army surgeon of the temporal underpinnings of nostalgia: “All we notice in the present is the discrepancy between our current situation and our former existence.”121 By 1819 Reynal could venture onto terrain still unthinkable to Guerbois only a decade and a half earlier and posit a more properly causal relation between the soldier’s homesickness and childhood memories: “To find the causes of nostalgia,” he wrote, “the doctor must work his way back to the [remonter jusqu’aux] first im­ pressions made by objects on man”—­in other words, the “tender affections” of a mother or wet nurse.122 Nostalgia, it seemed, had found its “caput Nili” on the battlefields of the Napoleonic era. * “The veteran,” writes Eric Leed in his landmark study of combat experience and neuroses during the Great War, “[is] a man fixed in passage who [has] acquired a peculiar ‘homelessness.’ ”123 This rings especially true for the lost generation of  Napoleonic veterans, for not only had their homes (Heim in German) become rather uncanny (unheimlich)—­that is, “unfamiliar” and “revealed” all at once—­so had nostalgia (Heimweh) become strangely familiar to them in the wake of Waterloo.124 The nostalgia that emerged from these wars was in fact two nostalgias: one pathological and still grounded in a medicalized view of homesickness; the other, a coping mechanism that sought refuge in melancholy recollections. In a sense, therefore, we may say that soldiers, more so than exiles or romantic writers, were the first “modern” nostalgics—­that is, the first people to experience nostalgia as a temporal phenomenon and not necessarily die of it

Mothers and Sons in the Time of  Napoleonic War  123

(quite the contrary, in fact). Of course the revolutionary era had displaced many more men and women, prompting a widespread sense of loss and romantic pining for an idealized past. But it wasn’t for another half century that this kind of attitude to the seemingly irreversible passing of time came to be described as “nostalgic” in everyday French—­and, significantly enough, via expressions such as “nostalgia for the barracks” or “for the front line.”125 In the following chapters I trace the protracted, often fitful process whereby this became a general phenomenon and, perhaps most importantly, a seemingly natural one—­a human given, pure and simple. But before moving on, we should pause one last time on the Napoleonic soldiers’ nostalgia, for it suggests revising standard chronologies in the history of  war neuroses that posit a blank slate before the appearance of psychological trauma and military psychiatric units in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The point is neither to say that trauma actually existed before its discovery nor that there is an immutable soldiers’ emotion that has existed from Achilles to Rambo but that we have simply called differently at given moments in time. Instead, I suggest that we take clinical nostalgia seriously, as a historically specific syndrome in its own right, one that sought to grasp the emotional labors of citizen-­soldiers such as Gabriel Noël. It entailed not just painful spatial displacement, but also estrangement from one’s self, from the time and place of one’s former life and through no actions other than one’s own (unlike the exile, who witnessed transformations passively). This performative dimension is crucial for it is also what allowed for nostalgia to become a coping mechanism and, in turn, acquire the semblance of a hardwired, basic human trait. It is perhaps no coincidence that Freud himself—­who never wrote about nostalgia but was surely aware of  Heimweh’s etymological connections—­gestured toward a similarly paradoxical historicity of war neuroses when, in the midst of revising his early psychoanalytic theories during the First World War, he sought to explain these not in terms of shell shock or trauma, but as a consequence of mobilizing mass armies of conscripts (as opposed to professional soldiers). This, he speculated, was what caused the soldiers’ peaceful civilian ego to encounter and seek flight from a newly acquired and highly parasitic warlike one—­a hypothesis that would have made quite a lot of sense to Napoleonic-­era physicians.126

Chapter 5

Golden Age When the pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. j a n e a u s t e n , Persuasion (1816)

On May 23, 1838, Honoré de Balzac wrote his beloved mistress, Eveline Hanska, from Milan: Dear Countess [ . . . ] I have never been so sad: I am homesick! [ J’ai le mal du pays.] France and its gray skies wring my heart beneath the clear skies of Milan. The Duomo, decked with its laces, leaves me quite indifferent; the Alps say nothing to me. This soft, lax air fatigues me; I come and go without spirit, without life, without being able to say what is the matter with me; and if I stay thus for two weeks longer, I shall be dead. It is impossible to explain. . . . What a horrible malady is nostalgia. . . . I am happy only when I write to you. . . . Only then does my mind escape from this black existence under the sun, this atonia that weakens the flow of life. It is the only thing that holds my soul and body together.

Thankfully, Balzac did not die in northern Italy; but neither was he through his torments. He continued to complain about the “nostalgia under which I am” throughout that summer and suffered a relapse a few years later in Prussia. Despite the different climate, Berlin proved to be just as “wearisome” as Milan, a “city of ennui”: “I should die of it within a week,” he wrote in October 1843. Balzac fled the Prussian capital the very next day but found no solace in Dresden: “I left Berlin with ennui, dear, but I have found nostalgia here.” Even once back in Paris, he could not shake the gloom out of his head: “Dear Countess,” he wrote to Hanska in December 1845, “I feel overcome by the same nostalgia that I felt before I went to Chalon. . . . I am gloomy, like a Breton

Golden Age  125

conscript regretting his dear galette and his Bretagne.” Four days later, he felt “seized again by spleen, complicated by nostalgia, or, if  you like, by an ennui I have never felt before. Yes, this is the true ennui: [ . . . ] it is a death of the soul, a death of the will, the collapse of the whole being.”1 Balzac’s repeated bouts of nostalgia and obvious familiarity with its medical tropes was not limited to his intimate correspondence. Nostalgic fictional characters abound in his novels as well, adding to the Comédie humaine’s panoramic medical physiognomy of early nineteenth-­century French society.2 We find classic cases of mal du pays affecting travelers and migrants of both sexes in Séraphîta (first published in 1834), Le Curé du village (1839), and Pierrette (1840), where the main characters are described as suffering from “nostalgia and monomania,” or “Breton nostalgia, [a] psychological condition [maladie mo­ rale] so well known that colonels look out for it among Bretons soldiers in their regiments.”3 In Louis Lambert (1832) Balzac described at length the “chronic melancholy,” eventually identified as “nostalgia,” that affects the eponymous schoolboy when confronted with regimental-­style discipline at the collège des Oratoriens in Vendôme. A “nervous poet” likened to Goethe’s Werther, the precocious Louis will eventually become insane.4 As is well known, Louis Lambert is a thinly veiled autobiography, and many other contemporaries of Balzac’s seem to have felt similarly about their boarding school days. In his Vie de Henri Brulard (written in 1835–­36), Stendhal recalled how, having moved to Paris at the age of sixteen to attend the Ecole Polytéchnique, he had experienced “disgust bordering on nostalgia” after only a month without seeing his native Alps.5 The same happened to the young Ernest Renan when he left Brittany for boarding school in Paris in 1838 and experienced the “worst crisis of [his] life, . . .  a dreadful fit of nostalgia” that almost killed him.6 Such was the worry about young collégiens succumbing to nostalgia as if they had joined the army that there were even medical textbooks on the question at the time.7 These many examples of personal and fictional “nostalgias” outside of the military reveal the success of the disease entity and of the French army medical corps’ efforts at establishing it in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Not that this was an exclusively French story: in the early 1800s nostalgia became just as popular a theme in Victorian novels, German folk songs, and romantic music, leading literary scholars to speak of its transformation from “malady to aesthetic” in these years.8 But whereas in most European countries medical interest for nostalgia subsided after the end of the Napoleonic Wars (without for as much disappearing altogether), in France it blossomed and continued to command attention. A century and a half after Hofer first coined the term, “nostalgia” entered the sixth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’académie

126  Chapter Five

française, the official authority of the French language, published in 1835. This was, for sure, an indication of it having outgrown narrow medical usage to become a broader cultural category. Yet its succinct definition as an “illness caused by a violent desire to return to one’s homeland” left little ambiguity as to the word’s meaning in the age of  high romanticism: it was first and foremost as a disease that nostalgia captured the lay imagination in France, not as a wistful, romantic longing. Admittedly, some had started using the term in a demedicalized way, to talk about a bittersweet feeling akin to that observed among Napoleonic veterans. If in 1802 he had described “nostalgia” squarely as a doctor’s term, three de­ cades later René de Chateaubriand invoked a rather more poetic “regret for the homeland” to describe how he had felt the opposite of nostalgia—­a disgust for France and longing for solitude—­upon being overtaken by a “fever for ruins” in Rome.9 When he wasn’t “dying” of it, Balzac actually experienced a much less harmful kind of “nostalgie” for his Parisian writer’s study and inkstand. Apparently he wasn’t the only one to long for the French capital while in dreary Berlin: despite being a Berliner, the consummate scientific traveler Alexander von Humboldt also “drag[ged] about him a nostalgia for Paris.”10 Balzac’s fictional characters yearned for a variety of things besides their homes: a scientific laboratory, the Parisian editorial scene, or the sordid world of prostitution. 11 The novelist even described nostalgia as a “sickness of physical memory” (or bodily memory, as opposed to the mind’s) and provided a memorable example of it in one of  his last novels, Le Cousin Pons (1846), with the growling “gastric nostalgia” coming from a glutton’s empty stomach. Nor was Balzac the only one to use the term in increasingly creative ways. By 1851, Barbey d’Aurévilly’s dandy hero Ryno de Marigny could clearly distinguish “nostalgia for time” from the “nostalgia for space” that was “mal du pays.” Soon thereafter, Baudelaire would vicariously muse about “nostalgia for unknown lands.”12 But it wouldn’t be until the turn of the century, if not the immediate aftermath of the First World War, that “nostalgia” became a common word, used on a large scale outside of medical discourse and in the benign, temporal understanding we have given the term ever since. “Nostalgia” as we insouciantly experience it was as much an achievement of the Belle Époque—­an apt description if there ever was one—­than of the age of romanticism. What this brief excursus in semantic history suggests is that there was no sudden shift from clinical nostalgia to its harmless alter ego, no light-­switch flick from pathological passion to benign emotion. Rather, this was a protracted, fitful process that spanned the nineteenth century and that cannot, therefore, be explained solely in terms of neat epistemic shifts or revolutionary ruptures. In

Golden Age  127

F i g u r e 5 . 1 . Google Books NGram Viewer chart for “nostalgia” (Italian corpus), “nostalgie” (French), “nostalgia” (English), “hystérie” (French), “nostalgie” (German), and “neurasthénie” (French). In order to highlight the remarkably similar trends in usage of the word “nostalgia” across the four languages, the lines in English and German have been multiplied by a factor of two and twenty, respectively. (The relatively low usage of the word in German can be attributed in part to the existence of “Sehnsucht.”) The trajectories of hysteria and neurasthenia—­ canonical transient mental illnesses—­offer striking contrasts to that of nostalgia.

F i g u r e 5 . 2 . Usage of the word “nostalgie” in the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, the Revue des deux mondes, and the New York Times from 1814 to 1920. In the case of the New York Times, the last two entries are approximate and most likely underestimate the actual number of times the word was used.

this chapter I take a different tack and unravel how a relatively precise medical term became a broader but underdetermined concept—­in other words, how it came to subsume, through concurrent processes of abstraction and condensation, what Koselleck calls “an entirety of meaning and experience within a sociopolitical context.” The nostalgia vogue of the early 1800s was, first and foremost, a medical craze that turned into a passing fad. It was also the moment when the word was invested with (and affixed to) a romantic structure of feeling that preceded the invention of nostalgia itself—­reaching as far back as medieval

128  Chapter Five

romances of chivalrous love and reactions to the “courtization” (curialization) of  warriors in early modern European courts—­but that only crystallized into a worldview and aesthetic style at the turn of the nineteenth century.13 During the French Restoration (1814–­30), nostalgia was reframed as a “romantic disease”—­ that is, a malady doubled up with an aesthetics of suffering that ultimately undermined the condition itself in the eyes of an increasingly positivist medical establishment. Under the  July Monarchy (1830–­48), doctors and laymen sought to extricate a benign, instinctual form of homesickness from the disease and wield it to steady a society still jittery from postrevolutionary aftershocks. As psychiatrists left nostalgia to rival schools of psychology and their attendant politicians (conservative and liberals), only military doctors maintained an interest for what they and the soldiers they followed continued to view as a deadly disease. Moving back and forth across this volatile and heteroglot historical context, nostalgia became something of a “floating signifier” much like “trauma” has in the twenty-­first century.14 The result of its many circumvolutions was an incipient, as yet incomplete, process of demedicalization and naturalization of a dangerous passion into a bittersweet, even positive emotion.15

Golden Age The 1820s and ’30s were a short-­lived “golden age” for clinical nostalgia and its self-­professed experts, French military doctors. Fresh from the battlefield, they dispensed wisdom on the condition, consolidating the medical corps’ ongoing professionalization and cementing its central role in the incipient “medicalization” of nineteenth-­century French society.16 But the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had given nostalgia newfound visibility beyond the military, and few French doctors doubted its legitimacy, even as they turned their backs to the eighteenth-­century medicine of the passions. Major medical encyclopedias from the time, including mammoth multivolume enterprises such as the medical series of the Encyclopédie méthodique, the Dictionnaire des sciences mé­ dicales, and the Dictionnaire de médecine et de chirurgie pratiques (published 1787–­1830, 1812–­22, and 1829–­36, respectively), all lavished attention on the condition. Senior army surgeons, such as Percy, and illustrious physicians, such as Pinel, were called upon to synthesize available literature, while editors worked tirelessly to provide cross-­references, alternative nomenclature, and updated theories where necessary.17 Perhaps even more impressive, though, was nostalgia’s entry into the unofficial list of acceptable topics for medical theses to obtain a doctorate in one of the three French medical faculties (Paris, Montpellier, and Strasbourg). As

Golden Age  129

F i g u r e 5 . 3 . Total number of medical dissertations on nostalgia, monomania, and neurasthenia submitted to French medical faculties per decade from 1801 to 1920.

already mentioned, the condition became a favored topic of investigation for demobilized medical officers who followed Denis Guerbois’s lead and re-­ enrolled in medical school to complete their degrees and open a civilian practice. After 1815, growing numbers of medical students without any military background followed suit, and by the late Restoration both Paris and Montpellier were churning out works on nostalgia on a yearly basis. Altogether, the two faculties produced at least sixty-­one doctoral dissertations explicitly on nostal­gia during the century, half of  which were defended in the 1820s and ’30s alone. (Over the same period, they also produced as many works covering nostalgia in considerable detail under a different heading.) Paris was the most productive faculty in absolute numbers (thirty-­six theses), though Montpellier held more than it’s worth (nineteen theses) proportionate to its much smaller size.18 The scale of the French nostalgia craze can be measured against better-­ established nineteenth-­century psychiatric disorders and equivalent literature in other countries. As “noble” a diagnosis as it was, melancholia elicited less interest than nostalgia among French medical students (no more than fifty-­five theses over the century, including a handful on the more technical diagnosis “lypemania”); the same went for hypochondria (fifty-­six theses). More striking, perhaps, is the fact that contemporary coinages strongly endorsed by the nascent psychiatric profession, such as monomania, only seduced fourteen students, all in the 1830s. In fact, nostalgia was second only to hysteria for total number of doctoral dissertations filed during the century. Its clustering over a relatively short period in the 1820s and ’30s mirrors that of neurasthenia in the 1890s and 1900s, when no fewer than sixty-­four students chose to write on George Beard’s popular fin de siècle ailment (albeit at a time when the number

130  Chapter Five

of degrees awarded across the country had quadrupled compared to the Restoration).19 French medical students were certainly not the only ones to dissertate on nostalgia at the time: medical faculties across Europe from Edinburgh to Halle and Vienna to Pavia also continued to produce inaugural theses on the condition, albeit with nothing like the same regularity as their Parisian peers. (These were, for the most part, Latin texts of  limited originality that borrowed heavily from French ones.)20 As we will see, nostalgia did generate lively debates on its climatic and racial causes in Italy and the United States, as well as weighty works of synthesis in German; but with the possible exception of theories of “arsonic instinct” across the Rhine, it was French physicians that continued to set the research agenda.21 If the nostalgia rage of the early 1800s started off, at least in part, as a way for demobilized medical officers to assert their particular expertise acquired on the battlefield, and perhaps work through some scars of war left over in the process, there is no denying that the phenomenon, like that of neurasthenia, answered in part to the logic of a fashionable disease.

T h e E l u s i v e A n a t o m i c a l S e a t o f N o s ta l g i a The early nineteenth century is often presented as the “triumphal age” of French medicine, not necessarily because of any nostalgia craze but because of the heroic feats of the “Paris clinical school” (“Paris medicine” for short). As the story goes, anatomists swept away the medical Middle Ages by systematically tracking down organic lesions thanks to routine physical examinations, autopsies, and medical statistics. The training hospital, or clinic, was their home; the scalpel, their favored instrument with which to “open up a few corpses,” in Xavier Bichat’s memorable and, per Michel Foucault, paradigmatic exhortation. And in these bodies, it was signs of tissue abnormalities that they expected to find, not elusive passions of the soul.22 It is often forgotten, though, that virtually all the doctors who made the renown of the Paris school had spent at least some time (often much of their careers) in the army, where they would have almost inevitably encountered nostalgic soldiers. Take, for instance, Dominique Larrey and François Broussais, arguably the greatest medical celebrities of their time in Paris, both veterans of the Napoleonic Wars and staunch adepts of pathological anatomy. Larrey’s steady hand in battlefield surgery had become the stuff of legend among his contemporaries. (He allegedly performed two hundred amputations in the space of twenty-­four hours at the Battle of Borodino in 1812.) He also found the time to conduct autopsies on dead soldiers while on campaign, including among victims of nostalgia during the French army’s fateful retreat from

Golden Age  131

Moscow. In his postwar account of these cases—­revealingly titled “Memoir on the seat and effects of nostalgia”—­he noted profuse inflammations, hemorrhaging, and signs of stroke in their brains, which he blamed on the intense cold and cannon explosions. Larrey concluded that nostalgia should be treated as a severe encephalitis caused by a “lesion of the encephalon.” He questioned the utility of the moral treatment against this kind of malady and instead advocated for aggressive bleedings and amputations in order to release blood pressure from the brain.23 Larrey’s pinpointing of nostalgia to abnormal brain tissues was questioned by Broussais, whose hugely popular “physiological medicine” tended to locate the causes of all illness in the abdomen instead. A student of Pinel’s, Broussais had originally viewed nostalgia rather conventionally as a sad passion affecting the body via the imagination.24 However, following a public break with his mentor, he redefined it as a “nervous excitation” caused by enteric inflammation, or gastroenteritis, and responsive only to profligate use of leeches and bloodletting.25 Frequently at odds with the authorities due to his strong republican sympathies, Broussais enjoyed tremendous clout among his peers and oversaw the training of innumerable medical officers from his position at the helm of the Val-­de-­Grâce military hospital in Paris. For many of them, it became axiomatic to connect cases of  homesickness among soldiers to upset stomachs and ulcerations of mucous membranes.26 Not everyone was swayed by Larrey’s and Broussais’s charismatic personas, though. In the 1820s an acrimonious debate played out on the pages of the army medical corps’ new semiofficial publication, the Recueil de mémoires de médecine, de chirurgie, et de pharmacie militaire, pitting against one another proponents and opponents of their ideas. As reports of inflamed cerebellums and irritated esophagi in victims of nostalgia poured in from hospitals across the country, the journal’s first editor, François Fournier de Pescay—­a mixed-­race Haitian who became the first black surgeon to practice in Europe upon joining the French army in 1792—­advised his colleagues to be particularly vigilant against the disease, to consider its prognosis as essentially organic, and to deploy aggressive pharmacopoeia against it.27 By contrast, his successor, Emiland Estienne, cautioned against Broussais’s “fashionable theorems” upon taking charge of the journal in 1823, and instead urged his colleagues to reconsider the ghastly effects of nostalgia during the recent wars before unceremoniously abandoning the condition to materialist nit-­picking.28 Even among medical students, some cautiously emitted reservations, pointing to inconclusive autopsies performed on nostalgia’s victims. In one particular case, the surgeon Hippolyte Buisson poked fun at the médecins physiologistes, as Broussais’s followers were

F i g u r e 5 . 4 . Illustration of a groin ulcer caused by gastroenteritis and nostalgia in a patient at the Val-­de-­Grâce military hospital in 1824, from Marie-­Nicolas Devergie, Clinique de la maladie syphilitique (Paris: Maurice, 1826), vol. 3 (Atlas), plate 141. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque inter­ universitaire de santé, Paris.

Golden Age  133

known, noting that while he hadn’t been able to identify alterations in his patient’s brain, lungs, or abdomen, he had found a highly suspicious clue in the soldier’s pocket: a “most ardent of  love letters.”29

Romantic Doctors Skepticism about pathological anatomy’s ability to grasp emotional disorders such as nostalgia came from within the Paris clinical school as well. Two of its most brilliant practitioners, Gaspard Bayle and Théophile Laënnec, challenged the organic reductionism of Larrey and Broussais in their pioneering research on pulmonary phthisis (tuberculosis), the “white plague” of their time (and to which both men would succumb prematurely in 1816 and 1826, aged forty-­two and forty-­five respectively). Their ideas shaped understandings of the disease in France until the advent of bacteriology at the end of the century, and Laënnec’s perfecting of the stethoscope in 1816 came to symbolize the accomplishments of  his era. Auscultation allowed Laënnec and Bayle to redefine tuberculosis in terms of audible anatomical alterations in their patients’ lungs as opposed to endless symptomatologies. It still left them in the dark, however, as to the disease’s causes, of  which they admitted a variety, including passions and melancholy moods blamed for consumption ever since the Renaissance. These caused what Bayle called, in a language indebted to Montpellier vitalism, “vital lesions”—­that is, functional disorders invisible to the eye and inaudible to the ear, but which could occasion organic alterations, such as tubercles in the case of phthisis.30 As the medical historian Jacalyn Duffin has shown, Bayle and Laënnec had both personal and scientific reasons to insist on the role of emotions, such as nostalgia, in the etiology of tuberculosis.31 They became close friends during student days in revolutionary Paris, where royalist sympathies, devout Catholicism, and a sense of foreignness common to all newly arrived provincials drew them together. Most of all, they understood each other’s burning longing for home—­in Provence and Brittany respectively—­and became convinced that herein lay the cause of their chronic respiratory problems. It is quite possible that Bayle and Laënnec encountered nostalgic soldiers during brief stints in the army already in the 1790s. At the time, their mentor was Jean-­Nicolas Corvisart, soon to become personal physician to the emperor, as well as translator and popularizer of Leopold Auenbrugger’s pioneering research on chest percussion (discussed in chapter 2). Having witnessed nostalgia’s effects in the French army, Corvisart urged his contemporaries to explore further Auenbrugger’s insight into its role in the etiology of lung disease, a task Bayle and Laënnec took

134  Chapter Five

on in earnest.32 By 1814, they would be tending to hundreds of homesick and typhus-­stricken evacuees from Napoleon’s desperate campaign to save the Empire in the capital’s hospitals. Bayle’s own mal du pays and frequent illness became a mini cause célèbre among Parisian doctors at the time. He was repeatedly forced to interrupt his practice and return home for short spells of time. So long as these trips restored his health, Bayle believed that his vital lesion (homesickness) hadn’t yet developed organic complications (tubercles) and could thus be alleviated, at least temporarily. In his 1810 book on pulmonary phthisis, Bayle recorded observations of one of his first attacks in the summer of 1802,  just after completing his degree. (He identified the patient as “G. L. B.,” and while he did not explicitly mention nostalgia, he did attribute his prompt healing to a “change of air.”)33 Two years later, he suffered a relapse and, following another restorative trip home, recounted his experience to a doctoral student, C. Castelnau, who published a detailed account in a thesis on nostalgia defended in 1806 (once again, without revealing Bayle’s identity).34 This time, his illness was squarely identified as nostalgia, and Castelnau tailored his account to the medical genre’s conventions, including scenes of weeping and of miraculous recovery upon returning home. He also added a more distinctly romantic motif, though, presenting Bayle as a successful young doctor tormented by bittersweet thoughts both harmful to his body and alleviating to his mind. Bayle was forced to make several more restorative trips to Provence in the late Empire, but Napoleon’s unexpected return from Elba in March 1815 proved to be too much for this unrepentant royalist. He suffered yet another relapse, was diagnosed with tuberculous lungs, and died the following May. His long battle with nostalgia and phthisis was only disclosed to the public several years later by Laënnec during his lectures at the Collège de France, in which he used the “story of Bayle” (as it is identified in his lecture notes) to illustrate the “imag­ inary alteration of organs” caused by vesanies (mental illnesses) such as nostalgia.35 That same year Moreau de la Sarthe also gave a vivid description of Bayle’s illness in the Encyclopédie méthodique, adding a certain drama to the moment when, “suddenly, in the middle of his readings, [Bayle] realized that his longing would have the better of  him if  he continued to resist it.”36 This mor­ bid revelation was in turn expanded into a lengthy elegy written before Bayle’s death but only published in his posthumous treatise on cancer (1833). Over 278 mawkish verses reminiscent of Delille’s descriptive pastoral poetry (and, at least in intent, of Shelley’s embellishing of Keats’s death in his elegy Ado­ nais), the young man’s consumptive homesickness was turned into a desirable ill, a “sweet sadness” or “charming melancholy” bearing all the hallmarks of a

Golden Age  135

romantic cult of disease. A tragic hero and fatally flawed character promised to an “implacable death,” Bayle (who himself  had unsuccessfully tried at poetry in his youth) became yet another “fashionable” victim of  TB, a “withered flower” prey to the same kind of atony deplored by Balzac and popularized by John Brown’s then highly influential medical theories on chronic asthenia (weakness). His fatal nostalgia had become a “romantic disease,” a testament to just how porous, even intertwined, romantic and “scientific” sensibilities were in France during the early 1800s.37

V a u d e v i l l e N o s ta l g i a Nostalgia did more than become a romantic disease in the 1820s; it also morphed into what Susan Sontag has called an “illness as metaphor”—­that is, a condition encumbered with a series of phantasies and expectations that overdetermine its representations.38 In the case of nostalgia, these tended to be of a demedicalizing kind, so that the category itself was eventually abstracted of its pathological substance and kept only as an aesthetic shell. We can catch a glimpse of this process in the successive re-­emplotments of nostalgia in Balzac’s novels from the time. For a closer look, we may turn to the lively scene of Parisian popular theater and more precisely to the Théâtre Madame on the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle on the evening of December 28, 1827, when the latest vaudeville by the prolific duo of Eugène Scribe and Mélesville opened to a full house. A short and jaunty verse play with music, Le mal du pays, ou la batelière de Brienz was typical of the light entertainment that Scribe excelled at, with an action-­packed plot, love triangles, and comical misunderstandings fit for the fast-­paced turnover of boulevard theater.39 Critics gave it mixed reviews, and the play enjoyed a modest, two-­month run followed by a shorter reprise.40 By any account, it cannot be said to have left an enduring legacy in the annals of French theater; instead, it made nostalgia kitsch. Part love story—­one critic thought it ought to be called “Le mal d’amour”—­ part tale of exiles and happy homecomings, Le mal du pays enacts a kind of spectral nostalgia manifestly aped from medical sources but twisted in such a way as to fit amusing situations and a happy ending. By setting the play in the Bernese Alps, Scribe was able to tap into both a durable perception of nostalgia as a Schweizerkrankheit and a generous repertoire of folksy songs, provincial naïveté, and irresistible German accents. He could also draw inspiration from a successful tradition of plays, operettas, and folk poems on the sorry figure of the deserter dating back to prerevolutionary French sentimental dramas by Michel-­ Jean Sedaine and Louis-­Sébastien Mercier, and given a decidedly more Swiss

136  Chapter Five

(and homesick) flavor by Clemens Brentano’s song “Der Schweizer” (1805).41 Scribe’s vaudeville was successful enough to export the genre and inspire an Italian imitation revealingly titled Il Disertore Svizzero, ovvero la nostalgia (1831).42 The play itself tells the familiar plot of nostalgic Swiss soldiers, here represented by two infantrymen and an officer from the Swiss regiments serving at Charles X’s court (regiments that the Bourbons had reassembled after their disbanding during the Revolution and that were, as it turns out, still plagued by “real” cases of clinical nostalgia43). The three characters provide glimpses of the homesick soldier’s plight, from the misery and alienation of enlistment, to the respite offered by a medical leave, and the liberation experienced by those who return home for good. One of the foot soldiers has deserted, and his unexpected arrival in the village brings the story’s intrigue to life. He explains his actions as resulting from his superior’s refusal to grant him a leave and the “delirious fever” he experienced upon hearing a familiar herdsmen’s melody while abroad (a direct reference to the legendary effects of the ranz des vaches on Swiss troops). The miraculous improvement in his physiognomy and countenance as he approaches his native village approximates medical descriptions of the patient’s homecoming, particularly romanticized ones such as Bayle’s. Significantly, the fugitive is eventually pardoned for deserting, and all three soldiers walk offstage happy and cured of their mal du pays. Scribe’s audience would have undoubtedly been able to relate to these soldiers, whether because of memories of  Napoleonic-­era conscription or because of the Restoration’s stealthy reimposition of a milice-­like limited draft in 1818 (whereby voluntary enrollments were complemented with lottery call-­ups for a lengthy service of four, and eventually six, years). But the character whom Parisian theatergoers were probably most attracted to was that of the political exile, a dashing and free-­spirited litterateur forced to flee the police des mœurs following one too many affairs and licentious publications. His homesickness—­ fueled by letters from his female lovers and a yearning to mingle with the Pari­ sian crowd on the boulevards—­may have seemed at odds with reigning medical wisdom; but from a political standpoint, it would have resonated with contemporaries accustomed to police surveillance and to the threat of exile. Restoration politics were haunted and to an extent dominated by the Émigrés—­150,000 to 180,000 nobles, priests, wealthy bourgeois, and displaced families in war-­ torn eastern France—­who had fled abroad during the Revolution and only returned to their country during the Consulate, if not after 1814. Exiles by choice for some, banishment for others, they experienced another kind of  homesickness throughout the upheavals of the revolutionary era, one best expressed, no doubt, in René de Chateaubriand melancholy prose.44 Émigrés were only

Golden Age  137

occasionally mentioned in wartime medical writings on nostalgia, and military doctors such as Percy explicitly distinguished their sorrow from that of soldiers, who did not have the luxury to long for home from some castle across the Rhine or townhouse in London, as he rather callously put it.45 By the 1820s and ’30s, medical literature on nostalgia increasingly spoke of an “illness of exile,” common to outcasts of all ages, from Odysseus and Ovid to Victor Hugo.46 The shift reflects the perception of a society increasingly placed under surveillance, where not only conscripts, but a whole host of  “undesirables” including ex-­ convicts, petty criminals, migrant workers, vagabonds, and republican militants fell under the watchful gaze, extensive banning writs, and deportation orders of the French state.47 Police files show that Scribe had originally intended to accentuate the theme of exile in the play but was advised against even using the word by the censor’s bureau.48 A cautious man content with relatively “safe” theater, Scribe settled for portraying another kind of romantic nostalgic, who naturalized Swiss so as to become a proud descendent of  William Tell, and who accepted his sorrow as the price of heroic abnegation (at one point refusing to lend his pen to the officer for fear that it thus become the pen of a bailiff rather than that of a free man). Ultimately, he is able to return to Paris incognito, having traded identities with the deserter, thanks to the complicity of the officer (whom our litterateur promises to sing the praises of in the Parisian press). The play ends with joyful hymns to pastoral landscapes and an exhortation to all exiles to return to their homelands. In Scribe’s vaudeville world, all’s well that ends well, including cases of once deadly mal du pays. The nostalgia enacted in his play is a sanitized, pale copy of its medical progenitor, a sham nostalgia fit for popular consumption. And consume it the French public did. As medical interest for nostalgia ebbed in the 1840s, so did the condition become a matter of curiosity for a much broader audience of educated laymen who sought topics for polite conversation in the many advice manuals of the time.49 The trajectory of the ranz des vaches is emblematic in that regard. A rustic shepherd’s hymn dreaded by Swiss mercenaries and celebrated by romantics such as Senancour, it had already become a repetitive refrain to increasingly clichéd examples of littérature alpèstre spawned by savvy publishers. In the able hands of Scribe and his prolific composer, Adolphe Adam, it was further turned into a jaunty refrain fit for Parisian salons and commercialized as the craze of the season in operatic librettos, partitions for pianoforte beginners, and the ubiquitous conversation guides.50 One hardly needed to travel to the Alps anymore to hear the ranz; nor should one want to, suggested Louis Simond, the consummate traveler and the first person to define the pleasure-­seeking “tourist.” For Simond, the bliss he experienced

138  Chapter Five

at hearing the ranz echo across the valley as he made his way up the Pragel pass quickly turned sour once he came upon the shepherd responsible for the music and asked him to play the tune again on his alpenhorn. “How much will you give me?” was all he got for an answer, an “utterly un-­Arcadian” one at that.51 Rousseau must have been turning in his grave. Johannes Hofer too would probably have been quite mystified at the thought of nostalgia being hollowed out of its pathogenic substance and the ranz des vaches entertaining the Parisian bourgeoisie. French doctors didn’t necessarily follow the trend and stop viewing the condition in medical terms, especially those serving in the army. But something undoubtedly happened in between the 1820s and 1840s to turn the category inside out, as it were, and shed not only its pathogenic effects, but also its original association with nature and authenticity. The nostalgia staged by Balzac’s novels and in Scribe’s play share with that of Napoleonic veterans a sense of inauthenticity common to our twenty-­ first-­century acceptation of the term as well. They signal the moment when the term “nostalgia” began to connote that unmistakable ersatz flavor it has kept ever since, the moment when it became “a longing that of necessity is inauthentic [ . . . ] because the past it seeks has never existed except in narrative,” to borrow Susan Stewart’s elegant formula.52 Whether clinical nostalgia as it had existed until then actually was any more “authentic” is beside the point. (Our postmodern sixth sense assures us it wasn’t.) Surely it is more significant that this awareness of inauthenticity crystallized at a certain point in time and that, in the French case at least, this occurred as nostalgia entered a field of cultural production spawned by the economic expansion and rampant commercialism that characterized the reign of Louis-­Philippe, the so-­called bourgeois king. It is in the Paris of booming publishers and commercial arcades, of “temples of commodity capitalism” far removed from its rustic origins, that nostalgia was commodified: a queer thing that, if not quite abounding in metaphysical subtleties, wasn’t what it seemed—­or at least was no longer what it used to be.53

From

m a l d u pay s

to

l ’ a m ou r d u pay s

The irony, we may speculate, was not lost on the French physician Jean-­Louis Alibert, who insisted on keeping nostalgia under the doctor’s purview in peacetime, albeit with a very different outlook to that of Larrey, Broussais, or even Bayle and Laënnec. Alibert was a survivor: a disciple of Cabanis and cofounder of the Idéologue Société médicale d’émulation in 1796, he had outlived the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration’s backlash against “liberal” professors, recusing his youthful radicalism to maintain a professorship at the Paris faculty

Golden Age  139

of medicine and become personal physician to Louis XVIII and Charles X. In 1825 he published to great acclaim a two-­volume treatise somewhat misleadingly titled Physiologie des passions, in which he articulated a “moral psychology” tailored to a postrevolutionary order still jittery from twenty-­five years of upheaval. Alibert shelved his early sensationalist sympathies—­widely blamed for the excesses of the revolutionary era—­but also challenged the reigning materialism of Paris medicine. “To understand men,” he opened, echoing the language of introspection and metaphysics of selfhood of his contemporaries Maine de Biran and Victor Cousin, “we must look into his soul, not at the material organs of his corporeal envelope.”54 Among the soul’s most important tasks was administering the passions, the principal subject of the book. Alibert identified thirty-­nine passions all tied to four basic drives innate to all human beings: the instincts of conservation, imitation, reproduction, and social relations. The latter included patriotism, or what Alibert called, in language popularized by eighteenth-­century classical odes, “love of the native soil” (l’amour de la terre natale).55 A wholly benign and natural emotion—­like others at the time, Alibert used “passions,” “emotions,” and “moral sentiment” interchangeably—­ patriotism ensured that all living beings did not compete for the most fertile and temperate parts of the world, preferring instead their homeland to that of others. Of course, like all passions, patriotism too could be brought to a dangerous extreme, in which case it might develop into “nostalgia,” “a dreadful disease” known to exiles and young soldiers far from their homes (which Alibert had in fact had to treat in Parisian hospitals). But, so long as kept in check by a strong will, there was nothing inherently bad about this natural instinct; on the contrary, it was of divine inspiration and strongest among indigenous people as yet untouched by the corrupting influence of civilization. Alibert extoled Scandinavian Sami (Laplanders), Mahois, Caribs, and Native American tribes for their supposed love of the native soil and illustrated his point with an exotic pastoral influenced by the primitivism made fashionable by Bernardin de Saint-­Pierre’s hugely popular novel Paul et Virginie (1788). It tells the story of a young Guianese girl named Couramé who is found abandoned in the forest and is adopted by a generous French noblewoman based in Cayenne, the colony’s capital. Rechristened Démétrie—­after Demeter, goddess of the harvest and of fertility—­Couramé is educated à la française and grows into a delightful young lady troubled solely by a vague sense of melancholy and Rousseauian indifference to all forms of luxury. When members of her tribe are invited to Cayenne by the French governor (in a shamelessly embellished rendition of interracial relations in the colony), she fraternizes and, torn between instinct and nurture,

140  Chapter Five

decides to flee with her own people under cover of darkness. A French doctor finds her again in the jungle several years later, now grown into a beautiful adult woman, the happy wife of  her tribe’s chief and a content mother of many Christian children. Moved by his eye-­opening conversation with Couramé and shaken by a sudden pang of homesickness, the doctor heeds his own love of the native soil and promptly sets sail for France.56 A classical story of noble savages reacquainting civilized man with Arcadian simplicity (while simultaneously becoming good Christians), Alibert’s moral tale illustrates a different kind of  benign re-­emplotment of nostalgia in the early nineteenth century, one that swapped the dangerous excesses of mal du pays for more benevolent feelings of l’amour du pays. It was a highly successful one, judging both by the book’s acclaim and the trend that it helped cement among French doctors in the 1820s (many of them Alibert’s students at the Paris medical faculty). The opening lines of medical theses on nostalgia are revealing in regard. If medical officers fresh from the Napoleonic battlefield had squarely identified la maladie du pays as a “disease entailing extremely dangerous consequences,” after 1815 it became customary for medical students to preface their dissertations—­still, ostensibly, on nostalgia—­with stirring homages to l’amour du pays, a most “noble sentiment [sentiment],” even the “greatest, strongest, and most durable” passion “to move the hearts of all men.”57 The turn to l’amour du pays in post-­Napoleonic France must be understood as symptomatic of a society unmoored and in search of stability following two and half decades of revolutionary turmoil. By its “fixist” discourse of passions as innate drives, Alibert’s project mirrored the conservative turn of  French intel­ lectual life already initiated under the Empire. His own evolution as a medical researcher speaks for the broader profession’s retreat from the reformist goals of Cabanis’s science of man, to the micromanagerial role French doctors increasingly assumed during the Restoration.58 At the same time, Alibert’s attention to the soul and to psychological interiority distinguishes his project from the materialist flavor of Paris medicine, pointing instead to romantic sensibilities and religious spirituality cultivated by his contemporaries. Looking ahead, it also speaks to a reconfiguration of psychological self-­talk in the age of constitutional monarchy, characterized by the waning influence of sensationalism, the institutionalization of psychiatry, and most of all, the triumph of Cousinian psychology during the July Monarchy. In the immediate term, however, Alibert’s project spoke most pressingly to the Restoration’s need for a new form of patriotism, to be wrestled and reappropriated from the Napoleonic epic. This was particularly the case within the army, whose limited loyalty to the crown had been revealed all too clearly during the Hundred Days, and which

Golden Age  141

continued to be beset by internal wrangling between royalist and ex-­imperial officers after Waterloo. Downscaled and subordinated to an occupying allied force that remained in France until 1818, the new royal army was nonetheless to be a “truly national army,” at least in the wishes of  Louis XVIII.59 This helps explain how, despite a general neglect and suspicion of Napoleonic veterans under the Restoration, it was possible for medical officers to cast a more benevolent eye on these men’s sorrows and longing for their regiments. Surely, it was wrong to stigmatize battlefield heroes in such a way? Wasn’t the French soldier’s propensity to nostalgia, compared to other European troops, the sign of a greater “attachment to our patrie, our customs, and our habits”? wondered a surgeon-­major only two months after Napoleon’s first abdication, willfully glossing over the difference between pays and patrie.60 As another medical officer and student of Alibert’s echoed in 1825, “painting [l’amour du pays] as a weakness would be tantamount to criticizing patriotism [l’amour de la patrie]” itself, and that would be a “crime against the sensibility that nourishes our best social virtues.”61 In fact, viewed under the more benign auspices of an innate drive binding people to their homeland, l’amour du pays actually suited the Restoration’s ideological goal of social mooring, even the conservative strands of “romantic anti-­modernism” it harbored among its intellectual elites.62 These appear most clearly in the complete naturalization of nostalgia pursued by doctors at the time. From the biogeographical hypotheses of Linnaeus and Georges-­Louis Buffon, they drew the conclusion that animals and plants too experienced a kind of homesickness if removed from their natural habitats and had done so since the dawn of Creation. Otherwise, how to explain that “French” bees should be found swarming furiously around ship masts when transported to distant colonies? Even “the most humble lichen” clinging on its rock seemed to grasp “the great law of attachment to native soil” (la grande loi de l’attachement au sol ).63 At any rate, it understood it better than humans, among whom only indigenous people seemed to still heed the call of l’amour du pays. Medical texts from the 1820s and ’30s endlessly extolled the spontaneous outburst of feeling of Ahu-­toru (“Aoutourou,” or “Poutaveri,” following his adoptive name), Bougainville’s Tahitian celebrity traveler who recognized a native tree at the Jardin des plantes while staying in Paris in 1769. (Some rehashed the same story line but featuring Captain Cook’s Polynesian darling of London society, Mai [“Omai”], or nonidentified “Chinese” and “Indian” subjects instead.) On the contrary, they condemned the innumerable factitious distractions of urban life, which drew people away from nature and into the thrall of an “illusory homeland.” Patriotism (l’amour national) was all but unknown to worldly urbanites,

142  Chapter Five

who could scarcely be counted upon should the patrie ever be en danger again, they warned.64 This modern predicament was not lost on the military surgeon Delmais Pilet, whose 1844 medical thesis on nostalgia already took stock of the condition’s golden age. As a doctor, Pilet noted with satisfaction a certain decline in cases of nostalgia, even predicting that the condition would disappear altogether with the inexorable advance of industrial society (a conjecture probably prompted by the first sustained burst of railway construction in France, and which Pilet shared with colleagues both in France and abroad).65 But as something of a romantic, Pilet also bemoaned the tremendous cost at which this medical milestone would be reached: The establishment of rapid communications and the relentless invasion of civilization efface, one by one, the diverse qualities [couleurs morales] that formerly made both possible. The consequences of this generalized cosmopolitanism is that we grow attached to everything and therefore to nothing at all. Cosmopolitanism is becoming degenerate under the influence of material well-­being; for everywhere materialist egoism is replacing the heart’s noble instincts; everywhere positivism kills our imagination and its divine creations.66

Pedagogies of Mind and Place There is a performativity to Pilet’s charge—­a study on nostalgia becomes an exercise in nostalgia—­that captures the transformation of a disease into a romantic feeling that we invariably associate with the first half of the nineteenth century. How surprising, then, that few colleagues of Pilet’s actually followed his lead at the time. As it turns out, the French medical profession’s neo-­Rousseauianism ran only so deep, and for a majority of medical students writing on nostalgia under the Restoration and July Monarchy, the switch from mal to amour du pays did not follow from a romantic awakening. Instead, it partook of the conservative liberalism championed by the so-­called Doctrinaires and their parliamentary leaders, Pierre-­Paul Royer Collard and François Guizot. Constitutional monarchists staunchly opposed to widening the electoral franchise to anything other than wealthy landowners, the Doctrinaires were arguably no less distrustful of mass politics than their Ultra-­royalist and Legitimist foes. Where they differed was in their acceptance of the revolutionary heritage (at least, that of the “liberal” revolution of 1791) and steadfast embrace of capitalist modernization—­an outlook earnestly summarized in Guizot’s oft-­cited exhortation to his compatriots to enrich themselves through hard work and thrift. The Doctrinaires’ blueprint for regenerating the country after twenty-­five years

Golden Age  143

of havoc was not simply to ignore what had happened, but to find new ways of shoring up French society to promote a bourgeois order above and maintain social order below. Central to their project was what Stéphane Gerson has called the “cult of local memories,” or government-­sanctioned local initiatives to rediscover local heritage and resurrect a sense of  belonging in postrevolutionary France. Rather than promote particularisms, these festivals, museums, and other cultural initiatives sought to recompose the jigsaw of territorial and political identities within a shared civic consciousness. Eschewing Old Regime nostalgia (sic), they did so with a Whiggish confidence in historical progress and in the local’s ability to promote national regeneration—­a vision eventually approximated in the Third Republic’s successful synthesis of petites and grande patries. But the moralizing “pedagogy of place” promoted by moderate liberal governments during the July Monarchy didn’t only serve lofty future goals. In the immediate term it helped allay the many social anxieties that besieged the newly empowered bourgeoisie of the July Monarchy: from the first portents of a rural exodus to mass urbanization and its assorted ills of vagrancy, pauperism, disease, and class conflict.67 The ongoing naturalization and depathologization of nostalgia into l’amour du pays therefore dovetails with the “discovery” of local folklore in the 1830s and ’40s, against a bleak backdrop of urban cholera epidemics (Paris in 1832) and workers’ revolts (Lyon silk workers in 1831 and 1834). Doctors weary of celebrating what they saw as the “primitive” émotions (unrest) of the “classes dangereuses” (a notion popularized in the 1840s) sought to distinguish between l’amour du pays and l’amour de la patrie as two distinct forms of territorial attachment and moments in a process of both individual and historical development. The former evoked a sense of rootedness in a concrete place: it “belongs to nature” and to “the first impressions man receives from the surrounding world.” The latter, on the other hand, spoke to a more abstract sense of national space and was tethered to “civilization,” to the actions of individuals and government institutions. Where one was an instinctual, “raw” feeling typical of childlike behavior, the other was a more sophisticated and rational “noble sentiment” nourished by family love and the pursuit of fortune and glory.68 Nature and nurture were, of course, related, and doctors viewed l’amour du pays as the “source” from which l’amour de la patrie would spurt out.69 But if all living beings were thus born with an innate affection for their hometown, only some rose to the higher, more reasoned emotional order through education and socialization.70 This developmental logic enabled doctors to have it both ways, and on two fronts: pay lip service to the cult of nature without renouncing material progress and “civilization,” while simultaneously devising ways

144  Chapter Five

to reconcile local and national forms of belonging—­or, to use the sociological language of Ferdinand Tönnies, a kinship-­based Gemeinschaft (community) and large-­scale Gesellschaft (society)—­at loggerheads since the Revolution.71 At their most optimistic, they even turned nostalgia upside down, as it were, into a kind of invisible hand spinning concentric circles of emotional and imagined communities that bound individuals to family, pays, patrie, and “that most sublime idea according to which man is at home in the whole world.”72 Repackaged in this way, the patriotism that nostalgia belied thus became a sort of ideological pendant to the highway patrols that crisscrossed the French countryside, a moral force interpellating individuals as grounded subjects. Somehow nostalgia was thus fitted into Guizot’s “government of minds,” as a part-­natural, part-­acquired attribute of the politics of selfhood he enacted together with his close collaborator in the ministry of education, Victor Cousin. Cousin’s eclectic philosophy sought for the psyche the same juste-­milieu the Doctrinaires trumpeted in their political speeches. It posited a reasoning individual (male) rooted in space (in a specific locale and on private property) and animated by an a priori, volitional self (the “moi”).73 In the lingo of his disciples, nostalgia was thus a “perversion” of a “natural sentiment,” a dangerous “neurosis” resulting from the “exaggeration” and excessive “exaltation” of an otherwise wholly natural and benign amour du pays. As with all such “inclinations,” it was therefore up to one’s will to keep it in check so that it may remain “freely chosen” and not the subject of “fatal desires.”74 Even outside of Cousin’s circle, few discussed nostalgia anymore without extolling its instinctual roots. Proponents of phrenology, the materialist psychological school developed by Franz Joseph Gall that resorted to craniology to explain human character, suggested folding the condition under the mental faculties of “adhesiveness,” or “inhabitiveness,” and sometimes “habitiveness,” all of  which they located in organs at the back of the brain.75 Broussais, who turned to phrenology late in his life, assured that he had frequently noticed pronounced lumps at the back of nostalgic soldiers hospitalized at the Val-­de-­Grâce, prompting a lot of inconclusive cranial palpation among fretful students.76 Though it attracted a large following in the 1830s, partly because of its proximity to the popular pseudoscience of physiognomy, phrenology soon fell into scientific disrepute and never managed to gain the same kind on institutional foothold as Cousinianism due to its members’ more radical politics. Much more successful at the institutionalization game was the first generation of French psychiatrists, the cohort of aliénistes that coalesced around Pinel’s ambitious disciple Jean-­Etienne-­Dominique Esquirol. Savvier in their political moves than the phrenologists, the aliénistes built their case for scientific

Golden Age  145

and professional recognition around new diagnoses such as lypemania (a revarnishing of melancholia) and monomania (or partial insanity caused by obsessive ideas and feelings), and a law establishing public mental asylums across France (passed in 1838). Despite all the evidence of psychological breakdown among soldiers and the rudimentary moral treatment adopted by medical officers during the Napoleonic Wars, they showed relatively little interest for nostalgia. Even Moreau de la Sarthe, who had deployed such efforts against the ailment in the 1790s, now refused to describe it as a “maladie mentale” (or mental illness), because the mind’s faculties weren’t altered, he insisted, only absorbed by a perfectly reasonable desire.77 Neither Esquirol nor his favorite pupil, Etienne-­ Jean Georget, considered nostalgia a disease proper; instead they saw it as a potential cause of melancholia, monomania, and suicide.78 As the aliénistes tinkered with their nosologies in the 1830s, there was talk of using “nostalgic monomania” and “pyromania” in forensic medicine. The latter had sparked a major controversy across the Rhine following a series of extraordinary court cases in which prepubescent girls employed as domestic servants were tried for setting fire to the homes of their employers. Forensic psychiatrists were able to plead for madness as extenuating circumstance by arguing that the propensity to incendiarism was a pathological one induced by homesickness. Although the cases received considerable attention abroad, “incendiary nostalgia” did not catch on elsewhere, including in France.79 The time, it seemed, was for l’amour du pays, no longer its pathological alter ego.

M i l i ta r y N o s ta l g i a s Or was it? In 1833, the respected statistician and hygienist Louis-­François Benoiston de Chateauneuf published a statistical investigation on mortality in the French army. This was the first study of its kind (the Ministry of War wouldn’t start compiling systematic medical statistics until the 1860s), inspired by the public health investigations launched at the time by Alexandre Parent-­ Duchatel, Louis-­René Villermé, and other hygienists associated with the An­ nales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale. For the period 1820–­6 (excluding 1823, when the army was engaged in Spain), Chateauneuf counted ninety-­seven deadly cases of nostalgia out of 17,000 fatalities (from a total of some 725,000 recruits enrolled). Like others before him, Chateauneuf considered this a conservative estimate because medical officers didn’t always fill out death certificates with due diligence.80 For those who did, the conclusion was clear enough: not only had clinical nostalgia not disappeared after Waterloo, it continued to undermine French armed forces under the Restoration and July Monarchy.

146  Chapter Five

Military hospitals continued to report isolated cases—­two fatal ones, out of 491, at the military hospital of Gros Caillou in Paris during the year 1838.81 In some instances the disease still spread epidemically among garrisoned units, as happened on the remote island of Ouessant off the coast of Brittany, in Lille, and in military training camps near Nancy.82 Most of all, though, military doctors continued to observe nostalgia in expeditionary corps sent abroad: across the Pyrenees to shore up Ferdinand VII on the Spanish throne in 1823 and to the Peloponnese five years later in support of the Greeks’ fight for independence from Ottoman rule. In both campaigns it caused much suffering, hospitalizations, and repatriations, including attempted fraudulent ones, as suggested by the identification of “malingerers” on hospital returns from Greece.83 Even the French navy, rebuilt after its crushing defeat at Trafalgar in 1805, now came to grips with the problem. “Sadness is a poison for the crew,” observed Pierre-­ François Kéraudren, inspector general of the navy’s medical service from 1813 to 1845.84 Like their British counterparts, most French naval surgeons admitted a causal relation between homesickness and scurvy on board vessels.85 Jean-­ Baptiste Fonssagrives, author of a popular midcentury manual of naval hygiene, described nostalgia as a “kind of cerebral nausea” and remarked that he knew of no colleague who hadn’t dealt with a “nostomaniac” sailor at least once in their career. (Another contemporary of  his estimated that the condition affected no fewer than two-­thirds of French sailors!)86 Clearly, both on land and at sea, whether in France or abroad, mal du pays still proved malignant enough for some. Medical officers of the 1820s and 1830s described a condition similar to that of the Napoleonic Wars and continued to place blind faith in the therapeutic virtues of a medical leave.87 Two differences stand out, however. The first is a noticeable turn to pathological anatomy and to Broussais’s theories, visible for instance in numerous cases of homesick men treated for “gastroencephalitis caused by visions of a distant homeland” in Spain.88 The second concerns the growing association of nostalgia to suicide and a medicalized form of ennui (boredom), which physicians derived largely from a secularized discourse of medieval acedia (the sinful torpor common among monks), and which culminated in Brierre de Boismont’s midcentury treatise De l’ennui.89 This was, to a certain extent, a reflection of ennui’s ubiquity among an “ardent, pale and nervous generation” born at a time when “all that was is no longer [and] all that will be is not yet.” But the term didn’t only befit the existential “mal du siècle” of an Alfred de Musset, a Julien Sorel, and the many other orphans of Napoleon;90 it also spoke to doctors’ growing concern for people’s hygiene, and particularly their mental hygiene in the face of  what they perceived to be

Golden Age  147

civilization’s ever greater demands on the nerves. Peacetime army barracks and ships sailing on distant oceans were considered prime sites for the kind of tedium and isolation that bread ennui and “sowed the seeds of nostalgia.”91 The crushing monotony of garrison life spared no one, not even educated officers such as Alfred de Vigny, who joined a diminished army in the summer of 1814 and trudged on through ten uneventful years as a lieutenant, stranded, as he put it, between “echoes and dreams of  battle.”92 Years later, Vigny recalled how “mal du pays had started to overcome [him]” during one particularly unbearable spell in Orleans in 1823. Jaundiced and barely able to hold onto to his rifle, Vigny even suffered the derision of  his men, who had seemingly internalized the new codes of martial manliness paraded by official and popular literature alike. As an 1841 Physiologie du troupier by the successful feuilletonist Émile Marco de Saint-­Hilaire had it, military life was all about growing up: upon joining the army, the new recruit (or “Jean-­Jean”) was as clueless as a child or indigenous inhabitant of Oceania; but after many years in service, he could aspire to become a true trooper, sport a thick mustache, and display donjuanesque seduction skills.93 The remarkable transformation of the recruit’s physiognomy, from a hesitant boy leaving home to a self-­assured and uniformed adult returning to embrace his aging parents, was pictured in widely circulated images d’Épinal (cheap prints). Another Physiologie du conscrit even promised young draftees that regimental camaraderie and character tempering would soon overcome their boyish ennui and moments of passing sadness upon joining the army.94 * Like so much of the “panoramic literature” (as Walter Benjamin called it) from the 1830s—­individual physiologies and bound anthologies like Les français pei­ nts par eux-­mêmes (1840–­42)—­social sketches of soldiers’ lives don’t make for actual soldiers’ experiences. If only Vigny had been able to stretch his legs on a battlefield, he too might have been able to prove his worth. He narrowly missed out on a piece of the action in Spain and resigned from the army in 1827 to concentrate on his literary career,  just as the French were preparing to send soldiers to Greece (where Vigny might, ironically enough, have followed in the footsteps of  his romantic idol, Lord Byron). Had he gone, he might have been surprised, though, to find out that ennui would not let go of the men, even when on campaign. As the quartermaster of the expeditionary corps wrote to the ministry in Paris having only just arrived in the Peloponnese a few weeks earlier: “There is no point hiding it: our nostalgia is worsening every day. The army is like a colony here, deprived of all contact and relations with the local population. It

148  Chapter Five

cannot sustain itself thus, for this state of isolation is drawing a veil of sadness and ennui over our eyes, causing them to turn inexorably toward the motherland.”95 This was a very different kind of  warfare to that of  the Napoleonic era, a low-­intensity conflict that foreshadowed, in many respects, counterinsurgency operations soon to be conducted by the French in North Africa. And as those young men who set sail in 1830 would quickly find out, there was little chance of them being taught the hidden virtues of  l’amour du pays by some imaginary noble savage across the Mediterranean. In Algeria, it was mal du pays that remained very much the order of the day.

Chapter 6

Nostalgia in the Tropics Colonies (our): show sadness when speaking of them. g u s tav e f l a u b e r t , Dictionary of Received Ideas (1850–­80)

The French invasion of the Regency of Algiers in 1830 is often presented as an ill-­conceived dress rehearsal for the high age of imperialism—­a “stumble,” as it were, before the “scramble for Africa.” Ostensibly triggered by a diplomatic incident, this was to be a swift operation to assert French commercial interests along the so-­called Barbary Coast and boost the monarchy’s sagging popularity ahead of difficult parliamentary elections. Prolonged military occupation, let alone another “New France” to replace North American colonies lost after the Seven Years War, was not, initially, in the cards. An armada of 37,000 men was hastily assembled and took the capital, Algiers, on July 5—­too late to spare the government a humiliating electoral defeat. As French forces pressed on to take the ports of Bône and Oran, the Trois Glorieuses toppled the Bourbon monarchy in Paris, sending Charles X and Prime Minister Jules de Polignac on the run. Orphaned of both its political mastermind and commanding officer (who preferred to desert to Spain rather than swear allegiance to the new king, Louis-­Philippe), the French expedition to North Africa may well have ended there and then, in utter disarray. Instead, after some initial wavering, the Orleanist regime opted to pursue an increasingly aggressive policy of military conquest and colonial settlement, making sure that for the next 132 years Algeria would be French—­although just “how French” it should, and indeed could, be was by no means immediately apparent. Until the late 1850s, if not the 1870s, French rule was precarious to say the least, as political regimes and governors-­general succeeded one another in Paris and the colony. Having taken control of coastal areas relatively easily, French troops encountered fiercer resistance as they attempted to penetrate

150  Chapter Six

mountainous regions farther inland. General Clauzel’s strategy of total occupation only succeeded in antagonizing tribal leaders, many of  whom rallied behind the charismatic Emir Abd-­el-­Kader to oust the foreign invader. As the conflict escalated, the French army proved ill prepared for guerrilla warfare against an elusive enemy in an inhospitable terrain. The tide only turned in 1841 when General Thomas-­Robert Bugeaud (a veteran of the Peninsular War) resorted to sending mobile columns on razzias (raids) to snuff out the enemy by burning crops, slaughtering cattle, and razing villages. Bugeaud’s scorched-­earth tactics and atrocities committed against civilians—­most infamously the 1845 “smoke-­ out” in the Dahra caves—­caused a popular outcry in Paris but achieved their goal with the surrender of Abd-­el-­Kader in 1847. Military operations were completed a decade later with the conquest of the mountainous region of Kabylia, but most of Algeria remained under military rule until the advent of the Third Republic, when French troops mercilessly repressed a Kabyle uprising (the last serious threat to French authority until the “events” of the 1950s).1 It had taken the best part of  half a century for the French army to deliver on its leaders’ foggy visions of conquest in the Maghreb. The loss of life among native Arab and Berber people—­one to two million people in a country of three to four million lost to violence and famine—­can only be described as mass extermination, if not genocide.2 But even as native populations were decimated, few Frenchmen and women were lured across the Mediterranean to settle in what officially became part of the kingdom of France in 1834. Those that did often came to regret it upon discovering the bitter reality of life on the colonial frontier. Outside of coastal towns, pioneer settlers found much arid and insalubrious land and were easy prey for Arab marauders. As one officer sullenly remarked in 1841 after eleven years in North Africa, “Cemeteries [ . . . ] are the only flourishing colony one finds in Algeria.”3 Ambitious plans for colonial settlement had to be revised and “la question algérienne” came to dominate Parisian headlines, pitting against one another “colonistes” and “anti-­colonistes,” advocates of total colonization, of restrained (coastal) occupation, and of a humiliating pullout from Africa altogether.4 The colonial party only won the argument in the late 1850s, by which time the European civilian population in Algeria had grown to just under 200,000.5 Algeria may not have been the exotic El Dorado would-­be emigrants were sold as they pawned their belongings and headed south, but in 1856 births did finally outstrip deaths among European settlers, suggesting that the colony might well see brighter days after all.6 For increasingly emboldened colons, this new dawn arrived when Napoleon III’s imperial fantasy of a semiautonomous “Arab Kingdom” (rather than a colony or integral part of the metropole) came

Nostalgia in the Tropics  151

crashing along with the Second Empire at Sedan in 1870. The newly installed Third Republic sealed the settlers’ triumph by freeing them of military rule—­ the much resented “regime du sabre”—­and fully assimilating the three Algerian departments of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine to eighty-­six metropolitan ones. Having obtained civilian rule and consolidated massive land seizures from native tribes, French colons could henceforth devote themselves to the creation of a brave new colonial world—­to paraphrase one historian, to truly “making Algeria French.”7 For the newly created French Armée d’Afrique—­up to 100,000 men, or one-­ third of  French armed forces at the height of Bugeaud’s total war in the 1840s—­ the Siege of Algiers in the summer of 1830 was therefore only the beginning of a protracted engagement in the new colony. Like the better-­known Algerian War of Decolonization a century later, this first “guerre d’Algérie” bore little resemblance to official representations. Celebrated battles hid a daily reality of “pacifying” operations in hostile terrain, boredom, and treacherous sanitary conditions in camps. Disease still proved far deadlier than enemy fire in Algeria, and soldiers’ rotations were often cut short by hospitalization. For the military physician Jean-­Christian-­Marc Boudin, one of the most vocal skeptics about France’s chances at colonizing Algeria, the figures were all too eloquent: in 1846, out of a total force of about 99,700 men, there had been 121,000 recorded hospital admissions (meaning that men had been admitted several times) and 6,822 hospital fatalities, compared to only 116 on the battlefield. As Boudin remarked, in Algeria “the hospital is the soldier’s true battlefield.”8 Mortality rates averaged a staggering 78.2 per thousand throughout the 1830s, before stabilizing around 50 per thousand at midcentury and dropping to 15 per thousand only in the late 1860s. (By comparison, mortality among metropolitan units was estimated at 22.5 per thousand in the 1830s and 10 per thousand in the 1860s.)9 Based on partial data, it is possible to estimate the number of French military fatalities in between 1830 and 1875 at up to 150,000, the majority of which occurred during the first two decades of the conquest.10 So desperate was the Armée d’Afrique’s plight in the 1830s that military authorities recruited permanent “Algerian” units initially composed of native men and eventually opened to battle-­hardened French troops (the famous zouaves and tirailleurs algériens in­ fantry units, or the spahis and chasseurs algériens light cavalry regiments). The onus of trying to keep the men alive fell upon the expeditionary force’s medical corps: all of 271 physicians, surgeons, and pharmacists when the French set sail in 1830.11 Their task was Sisyphean, as the army’s helpless chief physician admitted to his superiors in Paris in 1841: “Since the beginning of the conquest, the history of our African possessions is almost exclusively a medical

152  Chapter Six

one.”12 Not that his service had underestimated the expedition’s perils: senior French doctors could draw from experience accumulated during the Napoleonic campaigns, and many younger personnel had been tested in Spain and the Peloponnese during the 1820s. Still, nothing quite prepared either for the levels of sickness and the “paratropical” diseases they would now encounter. And amid daily outbreaks of dysentery, cholera, typhoid, and malarial fevers, French army doctors also continued to grapple with that emotional ailment that typically followed soldiers every step of the way from familiar to foreign landscapes: nostalgia.13 Long a taboo subject and source of collective amnesia, France’s rule in Algeria and its colonial past more broadly have become fertile ground for both historical research and controversial memorializing.14 Imperial and colonial forms of nostalgia feature prominently in these, both as subject and object, and have even spawned fecund new compounds such as “nostalgérie”—­a pied noir (North African settler) identity credo become academic shibboleth for much recent scholarship in memory studies.15 Yet, unbeknown to most, nostalgia was already very much a feature of  French rule in North Africa, long before the days of postcolonial anxieties and neocolonial longings—­except it didn’t quite mean the same thing back then. This chapter tells a little-­known story of fatal longings in a page of  history the French have long sought to forget. It shows how before becoming a land of exiles’ regrets, Algeria was already a source of far deadlier algias affecting not only French soldiers, but also civilian settlers. This colonial detour via the Maghreb captures clinical nostalgia both at its zenith, when it seemed poised to anchor the budding specialization of imperial tropical medicine, and in its undoing, as the diagnosis was definitively subsumed under hardened theories of environmental determinism. From this crooked trajectory, it would emerge invalidated as a medical category but revived both as a source of personal comfort and identity, and as a way of making Algeria look, perhaps even “feel,” French. t r o p i q u e s n o sta lg i q u e s

A medical instruction drafted for the expedition on the eve of the invasion already singled out nostalgia among likely diseases to be encountered in Algeria. Its author was none other than the aging surgeon Dominique-­Jean Larrey, who warned junior colleagues that “traveling far from one’s pays is a source of melancholia that paralyzes even the bravest of soldiers.” Although he spent the 1820s trying to pinpoint the causes of nostalgia to cerebral congestion, when it came to managing the condition on campaign, Larrey resorted to familiar

Nostalgia in the Tropics  153

psychological measures and speedy repatriations at the first signs of  homesick­ ness. As the first medical reports from Algeria reached Paris in the summer of 1830, they must have held a distinct air of déjà vu to Napoleon’s former chief surgeon.16 Within a few months of the fall of Algiers, military doctors reported an alarming sanitary situation, made worse by sagging troop morale and dozens of  “nostalgic affections.”17 Barely a year into the expedition, more than half of French forces had either died, been hospitalized, or evacuated to France due to severe homesickness, forcing the new commander in chief, General Bertrand Clauzel, to beg for fresh recruits.18 But as more troops poured into Algeria the medical emergency only worsened. By mid-­1831 the main military hospital in Algiers was already admitting nostalgic soldiers on a daily basis.19 As French forces pushed westward toward Morocco, the physician in Tlemcen complained of losing forty patients a month—­“almost all nostalgic”—­during the summer of 1836. Similar epidemics were reported elsewhere across the country, from the highlands of the Tell Atlas and central Mitidja plain near Algiers to the eastern province of Constantine. Nostalgia affected foot soldiers as well as officers, driving both to insanity, self-­mutilation, and suicide. It worsened ubiquitous “fevers” (caused by infectious diseases such as typhoid and malaria), complicating prognoses and prolonging periods of convalescences. “Our young men,” despaired one officer, “clutter ambulances and hospitals, where they die without glory, killed by fever, dysentery, and nostalgia.”20 No sooner had it landed in Algeria than the French army started evacuating sick and convalescent men to hospitals and lazarettos in Menorca, Marseille, and Toulon.21 Temporary repatriations were recommended to escape the sum­ mer heats and the principle of sick leave (congé de convalescence) with half pay for up to six months was reaffirmed by successive ordinances, specifically when soldiers were diagnosed with nostalgia.22 The scale of these repatriations was considerable, up to 1 in every 10 men during the summer “epidemic season” according to one report.23 In 1833, Field Marshal Monk d’Uzer released 222 convalescent men hospitalized in Bône all at once for fear that they would “infect” the rest of the regiment with mal du pays.24 Throughout the first two decades of the occupation, the military hospital in Oran evacuated up to 1,400 soldiers (mostly infantrymen) from a permanent garrison of 4 to 5,000 men every year. Of the 802 patients it sent home in 1842, 105 were diagnosed with nostalgia alone, and another 150 were listed for suspected nostalgic complications.25 While it is hard to extrapolate from these figures, it seems clear that a sizable proportion of combat troops (no doubt several thousand) were nursing illnesses and sorrows back in France at any one moment in time.

154  Chapter Six

Such levels of sickness and evacuations placed great strain on the army, and military authorities did try to limit sick leaves by making them contingent upon a second medical examination and the approval of hospital administrators. Like their predecessors during the revolutionary wars, the medical corps rose in arms to defend its members’ prerogatives over questions of soldiers’ health. In an official report, the army’s chief physician Jean-­André Antonini reminded the ministry that “the charms of the pays natal” and the “affectionate care of the family” were no “chimeras” that modern medicine could palliate with some pharmaceutical concoction. In advanced cases of nostalgia, Antonini insisted, repatriation was the only effective remedy.26 The issue was even raised during parliamentary debates, where Amédée Desjobert, a left-­leaning deputy and vocal opponent of colonization, denounced the government’s imperial ambitions and, in language reminiscent of  Jacobin legislators, censured War Minister Simon Bernard in particular for his unwillingness to speedily repatriate homesick soldiers.27 The medical corps was ultimately able to maintain evacuations but in an 1841 circular reminded its members to use them scrupulously and only for “men affected by clear signs of nostalgia” or convalescents requiring “a change of climate” for complete recovery.28 l a n o sta lg i e a f r i c a i n e

Unlike for the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, when a coherent discourse of nostalgia as an emotional disorder coalesced in the twilight of the age of sensibility, the Algerian campaigned spanned a period of fluctuating medical epistemologies that vied for dominance in the decades before the generalization of bacteriology. Of these, climatic and racial theories would have the greatest impact upon the nostalgia diagnosis, but only once the influence of the Paris clinical school and of  Broussais had made itself felt among physicians and surgeons of the Armée d’Afrique. Medical reports from Algeria show a proliferation of “gastric inflammations,” “tissue irritations,” and cases of “nostalgie-­gastralgie,” such as those diagnosed by Broussais’s own son, Casimir, in a military hospital in Algiers.29 Emetics, bloodletting, and the application of leeches to homesick soldiers now became fair game for surgeons like Jean Félix Hutin, who admittedly had more success identifying “cerebral congestions” than he did at saving his patients’ lives.30 Even phrenology left its mark, leading doctors to scrupulously screen skulls for any evidence of a particularly pronounced lump of  “habitativity.”31 But if the language had certainly changed, the remedies most often remained the same. “The treatment must be exclusively moral,” wrote one physician

Nostalgia in the Tropics  155

fresh from North Africa. “[Physical] treatment would only worsen the ill.” The nostalgia he had encountered while in service was a kind of “monomania” caused by an impervious “idée fixe,” and that could only be cured by an equally powerful countervailing thought: that of returning home.32 To see this, doctors continued to listen and talk to their patients, act as their confidante and a surrogate parent figure. “I mentioned to [Private] Trude the possibility of returning to France to cure his diarrhea,” wrote of another case Auguste Haspel, also a veteran of the Algerian campaign and who would go on to author a definitive medical study of nostalgia in the 1870s. “His face suddenly lit up with joy, and I realized that I was looking at a nostalgic man.”33 Some distinguished between “primitive” and “secondary” forms of nostalgia, the one striking down fresh recruits within days of their landing, the other maturing slowly to one day surprise battle-­hardened veterans.34 The former could have spectacular consequences when it combined with infectious diseases, as happened in Bône in 1832, where “fevers” (cholera and malaria) and nostalgia took turns to decimate a regiment of newly disembarked soldiers (incidentally prompting Dr. François Maillot to start administering quinine sulfate as a prophylactic against the noxious [malarial] “miasmas” released by surrounding marshes the following year).35 In a similar case, thirty-­four men were hospitalized in Algiers with acute symptoms of homesickness and dysentery within a mere four days of their arrival in the colony. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted following a trip to Algeria in 1840, this happened especially to young recruits whose “spirit has not yet been sufficiently tempered. Coming straight from their villages, their tender imaginations offer little resistance to the unfamiliar and terrible nature of this war; they therefore fall prey to nostalgia and other diseases typical of the local climate.”36 Still, it was “secondary” nostalgia that military doctors worried most about, as it lay dormant even in the bravest and most experienced of soldiers and could be triggered at any moment without warning. In some cases, it emerged out of sheer disgust at their task at hand. After three years of service and having received one too many orders to pillage and burn a Kabyle village, Private Flavien Parisot wrote a close friend: “My dear friend, although I am far from the pays, I think about it every night. I return there in my dreams; I see it. I see you all, parents and friends. I speak to you and we play together. But alas! Upon waking up I realize it was all an illusion and that I must return to my duties here as if nothing had happened.”37 Sometimes it was hard labors, such as terracing and land reclaiming, that drove the men to lose their minds and be sent home. In most cases, though, this insidious homesickness arose out of  long periods of idleness and monotonous camp lives that soldiers experienced in Algeria. Razzias notwithstanding, this was a low-­intensity conflict waged against irregular enemies

156  Chapter Six

and with few pitched battles in which to shine or at least display hard-­learned drill maneuvers. For ambitious officers such as Lieutenant Colonel Lucien-­ François de Montagnac, who illustrated himself for his mercilessness against civilians, occasional raids were hardly enough to offset the shear boredom of camp life: “Our life here is the most monotonous you could imagine,” he wrote his nephew. “Nothing moves, dead calm.”38 Such ennui undermined entire companies of men, sapping discipline, weakening esprit de corps, and bringing on inevitable outbreaks of nostalgia. In Miliana, a remote town conquered by the French in 1840 but cut off from reinforcements by Arab incursions, General Boniface de Castellane witnessed some 750 men waste away to the disease or commit suicide while waiting to be relieved for months on end. Military doctors viewed this as a problem of moral hygiene and pleaded for investments in prophylactic measures to distract the men and “fill up [their] empty time,” as one put it. They demanded regimental libraries and coffeehouses to keep officers entertained, as well as theatrical performances, live music, and a host of physical exercises (gymnastics, dance, games) to steer foot soldiers away from “dark thoughts,” intemperance, or sexual licentiousness. Most of all, they encouraged letter writing and sought improvements in the colony’s erratic postal service, demanding a reduced rate for soldiers writing back home to France.39 Even General Bugeaud, hardly one known for being a softy, chimed in, urging his lieutenants to treat their men “with paternal care, so as to prevent the spread of illness and especially of nostalgia.”40 For many, though, the feeling of isolation and loss was simply too strong, and it is no coincidence that the expression “avoir le cafard” (to have the blues) made popular by First World War poilus was originally adopted by soldiers in Algeria in the late 1800s (particularly among penal units).41 Writing from Boghar, a strategic but remote outpost in the Tell Atlas, a distraught doctor wrote his superior Lucien Baudens: “Life in Boghar is a life of deprivation and such uniformity that one cannot avoid succumbing to nostalgia. [ . . . ] There is no form of life other than animal life here, not even a place where our few officers may meet. [ . . . ] Boghar is stultifying due to the total absence of intellectual exchanges and social interactions.” He compared his fate to that of prisoners and warned that there would be no end to his men’s homesickness without an infusion of “intellectual nutrition and of social or family relations” in the colony.42 A similar impression of isolation and despair transpires from an 1833 engraving of a homesick troupier africain by the military artist Hippolyte Bellangé (a contemporary of Horace Vernet who never traveled to Algeria, but who devoted his career to painting the soldier’s condition and psychology). By adopting standard motifs of the iconography of illness and eighteenth-­century

Nostalgia in the Tropics  157

F i g u r e 6 . 1 . Hippolyte Bellangé, Le Mal du pays, 1832. Lithograph. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes.

moral paintings—­the interior, quasi-­domestic scene centered around a deathbed, the gloomy atmosphere lightened only by the liturgical figure of the nurse—­Bellangé clearly sought to convey that mal du pays was a serious and even deadly affair. The patient’s sorrowful physiognomy and the presence of the dog at his side serve to underscore nostalgia’s well-­established understanding as an emotional disorder akin to melancholia. His emaciated facial traits and prominent, skeletal chest suggest an advanced state of marasme (malnutrition), perhaps even the weakened complexion of a poitrinaire wasting away to a suspect case of tuberculosis (though not one that we may consider glamorized in any obvious way). Beyond this immediate clinical portrait, Bellangé also sought to situate the scene epidemiologically and in space. This was, obviously, a soldier’s disease, caused at least in part by displacement—­as suggested by the traveling trunks

158  Chapter Six

above the patient’s head and his cap, an early model of the lightweight casquette d’Afrique introduced in Algeria to replace the iconic but impractical shako of Napoleonic uniforms. That this was, precisely, a homesickness is likewise evident in the central chronotopic marker of the composition: the letter that the soldier grasps, having apparently just read it, and that seems to point toward a “home” symbolized by the metonymic figure of the faithful spaniel pining for his master. Bellangé chose to immortalize the homesick trooper in that keenly awaited but bittersweet moment when mail arrived from France, momentarily bridging the distance separating these men from their loved ones. The sense of estrangement in the army is reinforced by the dark, blurred silhouettes ambling about in the background and the anonymity conveyed by the number “134” hanging above the patient’s bed. The only person who can touch him (quite literally) is the nurse, an incongruous female offering spiritual and maternal consolation in this masculine universe. As the Saint-­Simonian leader Barthélémy Prosper Enfantin quipped upon returning from an official trip to Algeria in 1843, only the “soldat-­colon” surrounded by his family would be able to exclaim: “I am at home” (“Je suis chez nous!”). To the existing draftee of the Armée d’Afrique—­the one in Bellangé’s Le Mal du pays—­Algeria remained a foreign land: “Your home is a lovely village in France, and nostalgia consumes you!” This was the sad reality of “la nostalgie africaine.”43

C l i m at e s o f E m p i r e There is another, less obvious dimension to Bellangé’s engraving worth highlighting: the dog lying on the patient’s bed is not just any spaniel; it is a Brittany, a hound breed originating in Brittany in the seventeenth century. Most likely, Bellangé chose this dog precisely because of the Bretons’ legendary proneness to homesickness, a characterological trait that had by then acquired the status of dogma both among doctors and the lay public. Medical encyclopedias of the 1830s assured that “homesickness, or nostalgia, is most frequent among the Swiss, the Bretons, and other peasants from western France,” drawn from remote mountain communities and close-­knit families.44 The image of hopelessly homebound Bretons was broadcast to a wider public by Balzac’s novels and by hugely successful “moral encyclopedias,” such as the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques (published between 1820 and 1878) or Les français peints par eux-­mêmes (1840–­42).45 Even departmental prefects in Brittany and other rural regions endorsed the stereotype in explaining their difficulties at fulfilling enlistment quotas or to recommend special measures to ease their recruits into military life (such as initial cantonment close to home and with a compatriot as

Nostalgia in the Tropics  159

officer).46 In Algeria, physicians invoked such constitutional predisposition to explain mysterious outbreaks of fevers. Having explored in vain possible miasmatic and organic causes, a physician at the military hospital in Oran solved the riddle behind thirty-­nine mysterious deaths by noticing that all patients were either Bretons or from remote mountainous regions—­an indisputable indication, he concluded, that nostalgia was the psychological cause (“cause morale triste”) of the ailment. These examples highlight an encroaching discourse of race and milieu that increasingly overdetermined discussions of nostalgia in colonial Algeria with popular tropes from medical geography. This was hardly a new phenomenon: eighteenth-­century atmospheric explanations for the condition had never quite died out; nor had discussions of its predisposing factors moved much beyond neohumoral questions of temperaments and constitutions. In the early nineteenth century, however, these were reframed in terms of climatic and racial determinants in a context of overseas colonial expansion. Neo-­Hippocratic climate theories had a long history in France and were famously expounded upon by Montesquieu in the mid-­1700s. As Eric Jennings and Michael Osborne have shown, climatisme (and the closely connected specialization of hydrotherapy) would remain at the heart of French tropical medicine well into the twentieth century, long after it had been discredited elsewhere by bacteriology and parasitology.47 Though technically removed from the dreaded tropics of central Africa and America, Algeria was identified as a “pathogenic place” as it fell squarely within the dangerous liminal zones known at the time as the “pays chauds” (warm climes).48 Medical topographies of the colony lamented the insalubrity of its “miasmatic” plains and eyed its torrid summers with suspicion. Most of all, they pondered Europeans’ ability to “acclimate” in Algeria—­that is, adapt their bodies to a new climate. Originally restricted to zoological and botanical applications, the nebulous concept of “acclimatization” was extended to humans as well in the context of slave labor in the Caribbean and of parliamentary debates over emancipation during the revolutionary era.49 The idea of human seasoning owed to the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitanism and was fashioned into a quasi science of colonization in France and Britain in the early 1800s. Advocates marshaled neo-­Lamarckian ideas of monogenetic evolution and environmental adaptation to argue for limitless horizons to European expansion, at first welcoming the necessary process of creolization that seasoning seemed to imply.50 “It may be said that the whole of colonization is a vast deed of acclimatization,” summed up the director of the botanical gardens in Algiers.51 But acclimatization also had its critics, both among proponents of polygenism who denied the

160  Chapter Six

mutability of species and doctors who simply did not welcome it. One of the most vocal of these in France was the aforementioned Boudin, a founder of modern medical geography and veteran of the Spanish and Greek expeditions before being dispatched to Algeria in 1837. In a series of devastating articles published a decade later, Boudin compiled calamitous medical statistics to argue that Europeans were clearly not acclimating to the Algerian environment. Mortality rates in the colony, he argued, were more than three times those in France and could only be compared to those found in penal colonies or the most insalubrious of industrial towns. Boudin’s conclusions questioned the very wisdom of French colonialism in North Africa and were, logically enough, challenged on both scientific and political grounds.52 A bitter polemic ensued in medical journals and publications, with supporters of acclimatization (and colonization) rushing to claim victory in 1856, the first year of natural population increase among European settlers. It was a pyrrhic triumph, however, for the day belonged to the antiacclimatization camp, newly emboldened by “scientific” theories of race and hereditary degeneration that cast a dark shadow not so much on the possibility of seasoning, but on its very desirability. At first, concerns about the Algerian climate and seasoning meshed with ones about nostalgia, reviving shades of Scheuchzer’s atmospheric theories. Medical officers of the Armée d’Afrique blamed torrid temperatures and high levels of humidity for increased outbreaks of mal du pays during summer months. They advised against hard labors in the sun and in favor of  better screening of recruits for both “physical” and “mental” predispositions to illness.53 Abrupt exposure to tropical heats could cause “instantaneous death” or a gradual but no less fatal “slow nostalgia” in unprepared organisms, explained the naval surgeon Jean-­Paul Thévenot.54 Young military surgeons in Algeria drew a clinical distinction between classic, psychoemotional cases of “cerebral” or “mental” nostalgia (“nostalgie cérébrale” or “morale”) and those where morphological and physiological transformations caused by acclimatization produced a kind of “organic” or “physical” nostalgia (“nostalgie organique” or “physique”) in the body itself.55 In theory, army regulations prescribed fixed rotations whereby units would undergo preliminary seasoning in southern France, ideally in specialized training camps such as those set up by General de Castellane in the Twenty-­First Division in Perpignan. The measures weren’t always followed, though, and doctors frequently lamented being sent unseasoned recruits straight from barracks in northern France, who became homesick almost as soon as they disembarked.56 For some, the solution lay in abolishing tours of duty altogether and replacing them with a permanent Algerian army instead.57 Others thought it

Nostalgia in the Tropics  161

possible to lessen homesickness by facilitating the acclimatization of soldiers in Algeria itself, thanks to hill stations for convalescents. The French army had used convalescent depots (dépôts de convalescence) attached to regimental hospitals since the 1780s. Napoleon expanded their use during his campaigns, and in the late 1830s a network of stations was established in southern port towns to accommodate evacuees from Algeria needing a whiff of “French air” to restore their health. A ministerial decree of 1841 stipulated that these men must receive plentiful amusement and distraction, and that those still presenting symptoms of nostalgia after a month should be sent home to their families for a prolonged period.58 Convalescent depots in France did not solve the army’s shortage of manpower, though, and in 1839 the junior surgeon Jean-­Pierre Bonnafont suggested redirecting mild cases of  homesickness to a hill station to be built right on the outskirts of Algiers, on the slopes of  Mount Bouzaréah (an area long known to natives for its salubrious climate).59 Bonnafont recommended maintaining evacuations in severe cases of nostalgia, but his colleague J.-­A. Gaudineau proposed replacing those too with restorative sojourns atop coastal mounts in Algeria, where they would be both sheltered from the Saharan sirocco winds and “exposed to pure, fresh air similar to the one [the soldiers] breathed au pays natal.” To prevent relapses, Gaudineau suggested integrating these hill stations to villages of French settlers drawn from existing village communities so that soldiers would “no longer feel exiled on African soil.”60 As the acclimatization dispute heated up in the 1840s, its scientific overtones came to overshadow the rather more quaint medical logic behind the nostalgia diagnosis. For some it simply was a matter of swapping the therapeutic effects of a return to the “pays natal” with those of the “climat natal.”61 Others were more openly dismissive: “Many have spoken of nostalgia, of depressive passions, of changing habits, etc. . . . All this may well play some role [. . .  ,] but we believe that there is something far more important about the physiological situation in which an individual finds himself in relation to his surrounding environment.”62 That nostalgia may suddenly find itself excluded from the purview of experimental science had already occurred to medical students who were censured for peppering studies on the condition with verses and hymns as opposed to case studies and statistics. In one blistering attack on a Portuguese student at the Paris medical faculty, the chief editor of the Gazette médicale de Paris mocked the “touching naïveté” of his novelistic thesis, contrasting it with the “prudish science” that was de rigueur for French doctors.63 In Algeria, it seemed as if acclimatization would now simply brush away two centuries of painfully achieved medical respectability: “People have often spoken of nostalgia as something that hinders acclimatization, but its inconveniences and frequency have been much

162  Chapter Six

exaggerated. [ . . . ] There is, in this notion, a lot of exaggeration, and truth is somewhat sacrificed to poetic spirit.”64 Over the course of the 1850s, the entry “nostalgia” was even removed from medical taxonomies used on reports and hospital returns, prompting complaints from some medical officers who now found it impossible to keep track of “mental illnesses” (alienations) such as those caused by “burning regrets at having left one’s pays natal.”65

R e l u c ta n t C o l o n i z e r s As the question of acclimatization subsumed that of soldiers’ nostalgia in Algeria, so did it come to dominate the question of settler emigration to the colony as well. With the ordinance of  July 22, 1834, France officially annexed what was then still referred to as “les possessions Françaises d’Afrique du Nord.” (The term Algérie only became official in 1839.) After some hesitation, the July Monarchy thus committed to long-­term colonization, though how, exactly, it would be achieved no one really knew. Previous examples of French settler emigration were not exactly encouraging, notwithstanding the global expansion of the First French Colonial Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not that there wasn’t evidence of mobility in the country and grounds for some to diagnose a “national malady” of expatriation. (Ironically enough, this was particularly true of maritime people like the Bretons.)66 Compared to the British, Spanish, or Portuguese, however, the French definitively cut a more sedentary figure. It is estimated that the most populous country in Europe contributed less than five percent of total European intercontinental migration in between 1500 and 1800, with probably less than 50,000 men and women crossing the Atlantic to reach the main North American colonies of New France, Acadia, and Louisiana (and no more than 80,000 leaving the hexagon altogether). By comparison, the much smaller thirteen colonies of British North America welcomed up to 700,000 emigrants from the British Isles.67 In fact, the highest concentration of eighteenth-­century Frenchmen abroad was not to be found in settlement colonies at all, but in slave ones around the Caribbean. On the eve of the French Revolution, Saint-­Domingue was home to roughly 30,000 white Frenchmen and women, but even they were dwarfed by about half a million free men of color and black slaves. (By comparison, the proportion of whites to blacks in Virginia at the same time was 450,000 to 300,000.) To be fair, Bourbon kings had never really sought to encourage emigration in the same way as the Spanish or Portuguese monarchies did. (Portugal is estimated to have sent 1.1 million emigrants overseas between 1580 and 1760.) Nor had a comparatively slow population growth ever acted as a strong “push” factor. When entrepreneurial

Nostalgia in the Tropics  163

French administrators, such as the Duc de Choiseul, did actively pursue ambitious resettlement projects, these tended to end in disaster anyway, as happened in French Guiana in 1763–­64.68 The architects of Napoleon’s civil code took for granted their compatriots’ indomitable “esprit de retour” in basing French citizenship on the principle of jus soli.69 None of this made for good colonizers, thought Tocqueville: the French “national character,” he wrote in 1833, “displays a singular mix of domestic tendencies and passion for adventure.” Unlike the restless but phlegmatic British, the French became “possessed by an insatiable need for action [and] violent emotions” as soon as they were “uproot[ed] from [ . . . ] quiet habits” and lured away from domestic hearths and familiar parishes.70 Despite such omens, Orléanist authorities eager for some imperial glory of their own could look to Algeria with cautious optimism. Surely the Mediterranean would seem less daunting than the Atlantic, and, once overseas, citizens would thrive where subjects had faltered. The first decade of colonization brought much disillusionment, however, as the so-­called colonization sauvage of independent pioneers produced a mere 27,000 European settlers, of  which less than half were French and only one in ten lived off the land. Clearly, one could not expect the 315 families of colons (etymologically, “rural settlers”), who braved the fertile but dangerously malarial plains of the Mitidja in the late 1830s, to single-­handedly revive the myth of ancient Rome’s Mediterranean granary. They were having a hard time barely staying alive and had taken to carrying doses of quinine in their pockets while working in the fields. In 1839, as Governor-­General Vallée sanctioned the birth of  “French Algeria,” mortality rates in the agricultural center of  Boufarik stood at a staggering 20 percent, casting a shadow of doubt over the colonial enterprise as a whole.71 As French columns pushed further inland, seizing more land for settlements, the unregulated colonization of the 1830s made way for large projects sanctioned by the Ministry of War (in charge of Algerian policy) and overseen by the governor-­general’s office in Algiers. Throughout the 1840s, dozens of commissioned and unsolicited plans received varying amounts of encouragement and material backing (generally restricted to infrastructure and security) from the ministry.72 General Bugeaud’s vision of a colony secured by a cordon sanitaire of fortified military villages where demobilized soldats-­laboureurs would swap rifles for ploughs made many admirers in military circles but was repeatedly voted down in parliament. (Bugeaud was eventually allowed to found three military villages and recruit orphan girls from Toulon to marry to his men.)73 Liberal MPs like Tocqueville, who returned from Algeria deeply troubled by the army’s exceptional powers (if not its wanton violence against natives) in

164  Chapter Six

the colony, campaigned instead for civilian settlement and a transition to the rule of law, at least for Europeans. Reformists of various stripes saw the colony as a laboratory for the improvement of people through faith, labor, individual property, or collectivism. Christian socialists like the Abbé J.-­M. Landmann campaigned tirelessly in favor of philanthropic projects to resettle indigents and orphans in the colony.74 Utopian socialists of all kinds—­Saint-­Simonians, Fouriéristes, Cabétiens—­flocked to Algeria in droves, most often via the army, its medical corps, and the Bureaux Arabes placed in charge of indigenous affairs.75 In 1846 a group of  Fouriéristes from Lyon was granted a land concession to establish a short-­lived phalansterian community of workers (the Union Agricole d’Afrique).76 Less scrupulous investors opted for joint-­stock companies and fixed-­term sharecroppers, if not cheaper native laborers. This kind of “free” or “capitalist” colonization developed rapidly in the 1840s, spawning numerous cases of  bankruptcy and obliging the state to foot the bill of an increasingly costly “official” colonization.77 The task of changing “prolétaires” into “proprietaries” was ultimately left to disciplinarians like General Bertrand Clauzel, who dreamed of turning the Algerian countryside into one vast poorhouse for France’s “dangerous classes” ( just as the army had decided to quarantine its “hotheads” to penal institutions and disciplinary battalions in the colony). For the less visionary in the procolonization camp, it seemed as if Algeria may best be left to vagabonds, criminals, foundlings, and the unemployed.78 But whatever the plan or the means adopted to get there, the result was all too often the same: emigration to the colony continued to stutter, and new arrivals barely offset deaths and departures, causing some to despair of it ever becoming properly French.79 Insecurity and harsh conditions certainly dampened the enthusiasm of would-­be colons, but the main problem remained the precarious sanitary conditions of those who made it to Algeria. Colonization guidebooks urged civilian settlers to adopt the same kind of hygienic precautions observed in the army and facilitate acclimation to the Algerian environment by sojourning in Provence for some time before crossing the Mediterranean.80 In his numerous settlement projects, the Abbé Landmann identified acclimatization as the single most important obstacle to colonization, and proposed the creation of small “acclimation farms” (“fermes d’acclimatation”) similar to those recommended by the military doctor Gaudineau on the gentler northern slopes of the Tell Atlas.81 In these early, optimistic days about seasoning in warm climates, it was even possible to find military doctors praising the “crossing of races” and “mixing of bloods” that would produce a fully acclimated “métisse population” in the colony.82

Nostalgia in the Tropics  165

It was presumably such lofty hopes that induced republican authorities in 1848 to screen prospective colons for their “seasoning chances” (“chances d’acclimatement”) ahead of the most ambitious population resettlement plan ever undertaken by the French state.83 In the wake of a bloody workers’ uprising in June 1848, Prime Minister Louis-­Eugène Cavaignac and his minister of war, Christophe de Lamoricière (both decorated generals of the Armée d’Afrique), hatched a plan to transport some 100,000 unemployed workers to the colony over three years. Fifty million francs were allocated to finance the recruitment of volunteers, their transport across the Mediterranean, and their resettlement in purpose-­built “agricultural colonies” spread out across Algeria’s three departments. The scheme attracted huge interest in a country wracked by economic crisis and social unrest, and by October a first batch of 13,972 settlers, almost all Parisian artisans and their families, had been selected for immediate departure (with twice as many more awaiting further notice). They had been promised a fresh start in a colonial idyll; what they found in Algeria was little better than a penal colony. l e m a l l e p lu s f r a n ç a i s

Poorly conceived and ill managed, the project was an unmitigated fiasco for French authorities and an oft-­fatal ordeal for settlers.84 Upon arriving in Algeria, most “Parisiens” found that military engineers hadn’t even started building their villages and that no provisions had been taken to select suitable agricultural lands, let alone prepare them for sowing. In most cases the designated sites lay on communal or even privately owned land, all but guaranteeing the hostility of Arab and Berber populations. The settlers were instructed to camp in improvised shelters and start clearing the virgin soils of fan palms and boulders. Those who could afford to left hurriedly; the others stayed on, waiting for the first meager harvest and for their modest dwellings to be finished. These were single-­family, two-­room cottages stacked back to back and built directly on dirt floors to cut costs (official documents described them rather bluntly as “sheds” [“baraques”]). The forty-­two villages erected in 1849 were all surrounded by fortified walls and followed a rectangular grid layout typical of the militarized “villes régulières” established throughout colonial outposts since the seventeenth century.85 They were run as military boot camps by plenipotentiary directors (all middle-­ranking army officers) intent on teaching settlers “military habits” before learning how to use a plough.86 Unsurprisingly, the commission placed in charge of the colonies agricoles—­which was headed by Ulysse

166  Chapter Six

Trélat, the former minister of public works during the 1848 Revolution—­was submerged with complaints from disillusioned settlers who lamented being forced to march like “combat units” and treated “worse than prisoners in a pe­ nal colony.”87 Sanitary conditions were appalling, and soon enough dysentery, typhus, and a virulent epidemic of cholera that broke out in July 1849 added to the settlers’ woes. Villages lost dozens of  lives every month and were almost wiped out within a year. (Of its original 449 inhabitants, Millesimo II had a mere 108 survivors by the end of 1849.)88 Army physicians were called in to provide minimal medical assistance but were only allowed to evacuate back to France those settlers deemed unable to “acclimate” properly.89 Amid spiraling costs, mounting complaints, and catastrophic mortality figures, the convoys ground to a halt in the autumn of 1849, stranding some 45,000 would-­be settlers who had already been tipped for departure. (Twelve more villages were in fact built that year, but instead of volunteer settlers they would eventually house political prisoners deported from France following Napoleon III’s coup d’état of December 1851.) An official inquiry led by the economist Louis Reybaud found various faults with the scheme, but ultimately lay the blame with the settlers themselves, described as urban workers inapt for agricultural labors, male bachelors of dubious morality and known intemperance, and republican agitators fresh off the barricades.90 It was rebutted by an internal investigation commissioned by Trélat, which took the settlers’ defense and accused the authorities of having abandoned them to their own destiny, thus “sharpening the scythe of nostalgia against them.”91 That these Parisian settlers might feel a little homesick upon sailing across the Mediterranean became apparent as soon as popular songwriters began mourning their “exile” before the first conveys had even left the capital.92 Sporadic cases of deadly mal du pays among pioneer colons had already been reported elsewhere in Algeria, and French colonial administrators were hardly new to emigrants’ sorrows. When Cavaignac and Lamoricière hastily assembled their plan in the summer of 1848, the Saint-­Simonian director general of civil affairs in Algeria, Frédéric Lacroix, sought in vain to draw their attention to this point: As much as is possible, I would like it if each colony could be populated with people originating from the same department. Indeed, it is with great satisfaction that the African settler finds himself surrounded by compatriots with whom he shares local dialect, customs, and a solidarity of ideas that nurtures a precious harmony within such a small community. The village of Cheraga,

Nostalgia in the Tropics  167

which was populated in this way by sheer coincidence, has succeeded better than any other agricultural center of the Sahel simply because each settler, in seeing himself surrounded by compatriots, felt as if he had found anew his clocher and l’air natal.93

Lacroix’s warning fell on deaf ears at the time but came back to haunt the colons of 1848 once in Algeria. By their own admission, doctors were slow to understand that nostalgia could affect civilians just as it did soldiers, and not only bashful rural folk but also worldly Parisian artisans.94 Such was the “universal discouragement” in the colonies agricoles that monthly reports soon started recording widespread homesickness among settlers of all origins, from Parisian jewelers and Swiss laborers to composers and seamstresses suffering from “first-­degree pulmonary phthisis complicated by nostalgia.” Virtually all surviving settlers looked “forward to the day when they [would] own their plots of land, only so as to sell them and return to France.”95 Army physicians typically linked these cases of nostalgia to other organic diseases (such as TB, dysentery, or cholera) and blamed the usual list of environmental causes: excessive heats, telluric miasmas, or “the incessant vision of an arid and burned landscape deprived of mountains or greenery.”96 They proposed evacuating sick settlers to convalescent stations in Algeria and, just like soldiers, repatriating those in desperate need of some “French air.”97 But climatic determinism didn’t satisfy all, and some found confirmation of the condition’s social epidemiology in these civilian cases. Surely the settlers’ misery had to do with their awful living conditions and their new homes’ lack of “homeliness” (“chez soi ”), ventured some.98 Working conditions were no better, and it was folly to think that Parisian artisans could be made to feel at home in Algeria by being drilled into “agricultural work.” Most felt “disgust [ . . . ] at tasks that [were] clearly beyond their strength” and, far from settling down, had their “eyes [and] hearts [ . . . ] turned toward Paris,” where they should be sent at once to “resume occupations they should never have been abandoned in the first place.”99 Although a skilled cabinetmaker such as Roger Gabriel found plentiful work during the construction of  his village dwellings, he found these “terribly sad in their monotonous uniformity.” Like so many others in Assi-­Ben-­ Okba, he longed for his former life and reflected sadly on the unfortunate turn of events that led him to Algeria: “We had fought to obtain the ‘right to work’ in February and  June 1848. Well! We found a penal labor colony [bagne de travail] here!”100 This and other embittered assessments of the colons’ fate speak to the longstanding association of nostalgia to the kind of coercion experienced by exiles,

168  Chapter Six

prisoners, and penal convicts more so than anyone else. Although they were not actually deported manu military (as a persistent hagiographic myth has it), the colons certainly shared a lot with the tens of thousands of military and civilian convicts exiled to Algeria, Guiana, and New Caledonia throughout the nineteenth century.101 Needless to say, nostalgia was endemic among these people, but it went systematically underreported due to lack of medical personnel (or by explicit political choice, as in the case of those deported to New Caledonia after the Paris Commune).102 Even the British couldn’t quite deny a certain proneness to homesickness among those transported to penal colonies in Botany Bay and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in Australia. Though a colonizer—­and an often violent oppressor as such—­the colonial settler in Algeria shared with the penal convict and the regimented infantryman an experience of coercive heteronomy that the political scientist Timothy Mitchell has fruitfully explored using the Heideggerian notion of  “enframing”—­ and which allegedly caused some 18,000 Sudanese conscripts to die of nostalgia in Mehmed Ali’s European-­style Egyptian army in those years.103 With all due proportions, it is possible to suggest that many more “alienated” laborers might also been diagnosed with nostalgia at the time had they only come under the purview of doctors. Socialist writers spoke openly of propertyless proletarians as victims of nostalgia, and Jacques Rancière has lovingly exhumed the diffuse feelings of  loss and longing that agitated nighttime reveries of deskilled French worker-­poets during the July Monarchy.104 The great hygienist Louis-­René Villermé had already remarked something similar (minus the poetry) while inspecting Mulhouse’s textile mills during the 1830s, where frail and exhausted workers “reminded [him] of the many conscripts [he] had once seen succumb to nostalgia far from their native villages” (twenty years earlier, when serving as a surgeon-­major in Napoleon’s armies).105 Medical taxonomies used by the Paris Préfecture de Police to compile coroner’s reports listed “nostalgia” as a possible cause of death—­no doubt with an eye to garrisoned soldiers, but most likely also to cope with the influx of migrant workers in the capital.106 Many of these ended up on the admission registers of the Salpêtrière and Bicêtre mental asylums, where patients were only occasionally diagnosed with nostalgia—­or, more likely, “mélancolie nostalgique”—­but where hundreds of carpenters, bricklayers, seamstresses, and housemaids were admitted as “lipémane” or “monomanique” only to be sent back “au pays,” to their families or to breath “l’air natal,” following a short hospitalization.107 For the military physician Auguste Haspel, the startling realization that la nostalgie africaine affected Parisian workers just as Breton conscripts

F i g u r e 6 . 2 . Pillbox (pseud. Edward Hopley), “Nostalgia,” from his The Chirurgo Comico ABC of Fifty Professionals (London: Renshaw, 1838). In this satirical cartoon two sailors on a chain gang carry a plank of wood and a barrel, as if shipwrecked. The sign in the background indicates that they have landed in Van Diemen’s Land, or Tasmania, site of one of Australia’s many penal colonies in the nineteenth century. Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine, Washington, DC.

170  Chapter Six

confirmed that its epidemiology was first and foremost social in nature: “It is impossible,” he argued, “to understand nostalgia [ . . . ] without fully grasping its conditions of manifestations—­that is, the social environment [milieu social ] that determines its existence.” Haspel described nostalgia as a “moral consumption” that sapped away at vital energy like TB. While in Algeria, he had precociously started describing the nostalgic as someone suffering from “surmenage,” a pathologized form of overwork and fatigue that we might today call “burnout” but that contemporaries of  his would soon associate to neurasthenia.108 But if neurasthenia became the nervous illness of individual writers and intellectuals par excellence (as memorably typified by Jean des Esseintes in Joris-­Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel À rebours), nostalgia always remained a social disease insofar as it hinged on a sudden change in surrounding social relations. At least that’s how the liberal economist Achille Fillias presented the ill, in a damning review of the 1848 agricultural colonies published in the early 1850s. Fillias, who had lived in Algeria throughout the 1840s, accused the government of having caved in to political expediency in opting to “organize the [settlers’] departure with purely mathematical rigidity.” By refusing to allow these men and women to regroup among relatives and neighbors, and instead distributing them in an arbitrary manner based solely on the availability of  housing, the authorities had only succeeded in breaking up those networks of sociability that might have sustained the colons in this Babel of “indigènes,” soldiers, speculators, and settlers from all around the Mediterranean rim that was Algeria. Worse still, by selecting the villages’ locations purely with an eye to occupying the terrain, rather than favoring communications between them and the closest towns, French authorities had unintentionally managed to “lock strangers to one another in pockets of isolation.” This, Fillias continued, was to forget that “both urban workers and rural peasants live by their habits; parochialism [l’esprit de clocher] exerts a direct impression on them, even the strongest ones, weighing heavily on both their psyche and on their body.” His conclusion was unambiguous: “This is why nostalgia causes more deaths than poverty.”109 Fillias’s damning assessment echoed themes dear to Tocqueville, who spent much of his parliamentary career in the 1840s debating the Algerian question. Centralization in Paris and exceptional military rule in Algiers had stifled the colony’s growth, he argued, preventing it from developing the kind of intermediary bodies and municipal government he had so admired in New En­ gland. He railed against the “taste for uniformity” of colonization projects that sought to “cover Algeria with veritable phalansteries, theocratic, military, or economic.” What the colony needed was not abstract planning from a ministerial office, but nimble local rule attentive to the specificities of “local ecology”

Nostalgia in the Tropics  171

and to the settlers’ fragile “lifeworld.”110 As Tocqueville summed up, “The truth is that there does not yet exist in Africa what Europeans call a society. The men are there, but not the social body.”111 * At the dawn of the Second Empire, the balance sheet for three years of extraordinary investments into resettling Europeans in Algeria fell far short of expectations. Less than half the land allocated to farming had actually been sown, and yields were in any case subpar. Of the 20,000 or so Frenchmen and women that had crossed the Mediterranean since the first convoys left Paris in October 1848—­the original colons plus political prisoners and demobilized soldiers sent in reinforcement—­there remained less than half spread across the fifty-­four newly created agricultural centers. Among these, the Parisian colons de ’48 were scarcely more than a handful. Despite all his misgivings about the colony, Tocqueville advocated staying the course in Algeria purely for reasons of national prestige and competition with Great Britain. France’s troubles at creating a settlement colony worthy of this name in its own backyard had become a source of embarrassment at a time when its old rival was relentlessly extending its empire farther east. Luxuriant dreams of tropical El Dorados and agricultural cornucopia across the Mediterranean had turned into deadly nightmares for all those who couldn’t stop thinking of their homes as soon as they set sail. Little did it matter that the British army was also reporting abnormal levels of nostalgia, mental illness, and suicide among troops stationed in India at the time.112 Prophets of French decline lined up to lambast their compatriots’ ineptitude at making good colonizers, brandishing this shameful “French malady” as a clear indication of the country’s decadence on the world stage. Surely, nostalgia had become “the most French of ills” (“le mal le plus français”).113

Chapter 7

Ubi bene, ibi patria: Nostalgia Fin de Siècle The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it. s i g m u n d f r e u d , Three Essays on Sexuality (1905)

Or had it? One Auguste Bourel-­Roncière, a respected agronomist and town councilor from Saint-­Brieuc in Brittany, thought not. In October 1851 he addressed a singular colonization project to his president, soon to become Emperor Napoleon III, in which he outlined an ambitious plan for a joint-­stock company that would fund the construction of agricultural villages for Breton peasants in Algeria. In Paris people at the War Ministry must have at first choked on their coffee as they read about this Société Bretonne de colonisation. Only three years earlier the conseil général of Finistère (in Brittany) had counseled against mobilizing Bretons for emigration, citing their well-­ established indisposition to cosmopolitanism and proneness to nostalgia when drafted into the army.1 Bourel-­Roncière didn’t as much contest these traits as view them differently: not as weakness, but as qualities that should make for successful colonial settlers. His compatriots were hardworking rural folk, pious to the core and, unlike the Parisian “rabble,” politically docile (not to mention good sailors who had long navigated the Atlantic Ocean). Most of all they understood better than any other people except for the Swiss the importance of bringing their “clocher natal” (an untranslatable expression encompassing both one’s “hometown,” its church tower, and parish community) with them wherever they went. In other words, more so than any other Frenchman the Breton would know how to re-­create in Algeria “the elements of order, work, and perseverance typical of their motherland.”2 Against all odds, Bourel-­Roncière’s argument struck a chord in Paris, as did his promise to recruit solvent sharecroppers only and fund the project by raising two million Francs in private capital. When the first 20,000 shares were

Ubi bene, ibi patria: Nostalgia Fin de Siècle  173

floated on the Paris stock exchange in 1854, he sought to reassure potential investors against what he described as the two “greatest risks” of such a venture: acclimatization, which he dismissed as a medical storm in a teacup, and nostalgia, which the Bretons would stave off precisely by migrating as “families from the same pays.” Bourel-­Roncière drew the same lessons as Fillias had from the fiasco of the 1848 colonies, arguing that emigration would have to be “departmental” and “localized” in nature—­that is, geared toward transplanting kinship units, neighborhoods, and even whole villages to Algeria, instead of random individuals. It was, in other words, via the local that one would achieve the “assimilation of Algeria to France.” Even better, Breton peasants would act as “missionaries” across the Mediterranean, guaranteeing that this New France would have the “religious fervor, customs, and patriotism [of ] the old French society.” The most parochial of people, it seemed, had suddenly become the linchpin to all kinds of “Frances”—­pays, patrie, and colonie, both old and new.3 As fanciful as it may have seemed, Bourel-­Roncière’s plan was not a one-­ off. In the early 1850s administrators in Paris received many similar projects to populate the colony with Normands, Corréziens, Limousins, Savoyards—­in other words, precisely those rural and mountainous people deemed most likely to become homesick abroad until then. Most astonishingly, they even welcomed projects to relocate Swiss farmers in Algeria, extending lavish financial favors to private enterprises of dubious, if not downright fraudulent intents (the Compagnie genevoise des Colonies de Sétif most famously).4 Clearly, Heimweh no longer seemed to pose quite so much of a threat to colonization as it once had. If anything, a little homesickness might help stave off a new and far more wor­ rying hazard to contemporaries: that of an overly successful acclimatization or, as some now saw it, a perilous descent into racial degeneration.

R a c e a n d t h e (R e) f r a m i n g o f N o s ta l g i a To fully understand this shift in perceptions of nostalgia and its “victims,” we must return to ongoing debates about Europeans’ capacity to acclimate to warm climates. By the early 1850s proponents of acclimatization were touting their success on the basis of improved demographics among European settlers in the colony. They may have won that particular argument, but they lost the war, for new, purportedly “scientific” theories of racial degeneration had simulta­ neously begun turning the intellectual playing field upside down. In 1853, just as Bourel-­Roncière was refining his colonization plan, Arthur de Gobineau published a first, partial edition of  his landmark Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Fears about miscegenation reached fever pitch only four years

174  Chapter Seven

later, with the publication of  Bénédict-­Auguste Morel’s equally influential Treatise on Degeneration. Morel did not question the validity of acclimatization theories; in fact, he began his study by acknowledging the many effects of seasoning on living beings. What he worried about, however, was the desirability of these changes, some of which he considered pathological and hereditary, in other words “degenerative.”5 Critics of acclimatization were quick to buy into this new “racial common sense” and by the late 1850s were denouncing the inevitable racial mixing, or métissage, it seemed to entail.6 For them, Frenchmen might well be learning how to survive in Algeria but at the cost of  “becoming Arab and Creole,” meaning useless to the cause of colonial settlement.7 When Boudin succeeded Paul Broca at the head of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris in 1863, he reiterated his doubts about Europeans’ ability to acclimate to hot climates with impunity and show the same kind of cosmopolitanism found only, he claimed, among the “Jewish race.”8 Racial discourse was of course not new at the time; medical officers in Algeria were in fact among the first to attempt to parse competing polygenetic and monogenetic theories about the origins of humanity and test them on the ground. As Patricia Lorcin has shown, they were instrumental in creating racial hierarchies among Algeria’s multiethnic population, most notably distinguishing between Arabs and Kabyle Berbers.9 The encroaching of racial theories among military doctors during the 1840s is palpable in successive revisions to an official medical report drawn by the scientific commission sent to Algeria in 1840 to assess, among other things, the feasibility of French settlement in the colony.10 In the manuscript draft to the report (written in 1842), the senior military physician Joanny-­Napoléon Périer described acclimatization as a two-­way process of beneficial adaptation: it both entailed a necessary “creolization” of Europeans and impelled the reproduction of certain French ways of life in the colony, so to establish “harmony” between the “inner and outer spheres.” When the report was published a few years later, however, Périer provided a much darker picture of acclimatization, as a weakening of the body and mind, a “generalized atonia.” In a passage worth citing at length, he described the ac­ climating European as a Man [who] acquires a darker skin color similar to that of indigenous people; he adopts local customs and even certain ways of thinking. He has lost a part of himself and assimilated something foreign instead; and we may say that, overall, he has not gained in the exchange. This last character trait, which may be described as a kind of creolization, is perhaps the clearest sign of a complete acclimatization. What happens in France is of lesser and lesser interest; the

Ubi bene, ibi patria: Nostalgia Fin de Siècle  175

person no longer regrets his shores; the patrie is all but forgotten: Ubi bene, ibi patria [where one is well, there is one’s country].11

Périer compared the fully acclimated and creolized European to those who fell under the spell of Homer’s lotus-­eaters and forgot all about their native Ithaca. While he also warned against the dangers of clinical nostalgia among soldiers in Algeria (and endorsed prophylactic recommendations to screen the men and offer them plentiful distraction when sick), Périer therefore seemed more concerned about Frenchmen not pining enough for France from overseas.12 Paradoxically, hardening racial theories and hysteria about degeneration actually stimulated interest for a benign strand of  homesickness as a way of instilling and preserving a French identity overseas. Not everyone accepted the cold fatalism of seasoning theories. “Changing climate is like being born to a new life,” wrote the military physician and hygienist Michel Lévy, meaning that it didn’t only affect the body, but “ideas and customs” as well.13 For all their empiricism and scientific nous, discussions of acclimatization left out the more ineffable, but no less real, question of people’s “state of mind” (état moral ). Most of all, they failed to appreciate the allure of home and that natural instinct dear to Alibert and his students: “l’amour du pays natal.”14 As one colonization project addressed to Napoleon III in 1862 put it, not only was it futile to fight against the Frenchman’s “esprit de retour,” it also wasn’t necessary, for it was precisely this attachment to the pays that would incline them to emigrate to nearby Algeria rather than farther afield. From across the Mediterranean, they wouldn’t “lose sight of their clocher natal and would continue to hear the echo of the pays natal.”15

A P ay s f o r t h e

colonie

Ironically, it was therefore the subsumption of clinical nostalgia under scientific theories of acclimatization and racial degeneration that finalized its rediscovery as a benign form of  homesickness, a salutary way of clinging on to one’s identity and origins. This passing of the baton, as it were, is tangible in the evolution of settlement projects toward the goal of displacing emigrants as little as possible, by quite literally uprooting, moving, and reimplanting the whole pays abroad. When in 1843 the military physician Gaudineau presented his superiors with a plan to dot the Algerian Tell with hill stations for convalescent soldiers, he insisted that they be integrated to villages of civilian families all recruited from the same areas. These ought to be real “French village(s) flying the banner of modern civilization” in the colony.16 At the same time and one thousand miles

176  Chapter Seven

away, the mayor of a small town in Alsace, a certain Achard from Hochsfeld, was contemplating the possibility of moving his village in toto across the Mediterranean. Concerned at the growing number of his constituents tempted to emigrate to America (a new phenomenon at the time), Achard wrote the War Ministry that those with an itchy foot would gladly set sail for Algiers rather than New York if only they were allowed to travel and resettle as a group—­kin and neighbors but no strangers—­in a village they would be allowed to name to their liking. Only then, the mayor concluded, would the inhabitants of Hochsfeld “feel as if they are still at home [chez eux], [and] I prevent them from feeling nostalgic.”17 In essence, what Achard proposed was to reproduce the system of regional recruitment adopted in the army during the revolutionary wars and never quite abandoned in subsequent years. His plan was received favorably but never obtained sufficient financial backing to be implemented. It was taken up again two years later by Leopold Turck, a doctor from the Vosges, who sent the ministry an audacious plan to establish eighty-­six agricultural villages of 3,000 hectares each, one for every French department. Settlers would be recruited locally and allowed to re-­create a sense of “voisinage” by founding an Algerian Épinal, Vesoul, Colmar, Nancy, and so forth—­familiar sounding places that would help “prevent nostalgia, one of the worst scourges of the emigrant.”18 Turck saw nostalgia everywhere and even accused alienists of indirectly killing thousands of homesick men and women locked up in asylums.19 His republican sympathies and controversial views compromised his colonization plan with July Monarchy authorities but earned it much praise in the tumultuous days of the early Second Republic. Sympathizers rhapsodized at the idea of “traveling through Algeria and seeing nothing but towns and cities bearing familiar French names.” This would be a “new and peaceful crusade” destined to fashion the colony into “a mirror image of  France.”20 A revised version of  Turck’s plan was brought to the floor of the National Assembly in June 1848 and submitted to local authorities. (Unsurprisingly, few expressed a willingness to recruit settlers and fund their resettlement overseas.)21 Ultimately, this first flurry of localized colonial settlement projects came to naught as Generals Cavaignac and Lamoricière opted to remove unemployed workers from the streets of Paris and relocate them pell-­mell in Algeria in the summer of 1848. But the costly fiasco of the 1848 agricultural colonies caused renewed interest for what came to be known as “departmental” (or “regional”) colonization in the early years of the Second Empire. Newspapers and publishers close to the new regime painted rosy visions of “communes of Alsatians, Flemish, Normans, Bretons, Provençaux, and Languedociens” planting their flags on

Ubi bene, ibi patria: Nostalgia Fin de Siècle  177

African soil. “Settlers will bring their customs and lifestyles with them under the African sun” went the now familiar refrain. “They will name their villages after those of their pays so as to remember their native land” and thus defeat nostalgia, the “greatest hazard” of emigration.22 For the prefect of the Haute-­Saône and forty families of Franc-­Comtois peasants, this mirage became real in 1853, when they were collectively resettled in the village of Aïn-­Bénian, hastily rechristened “Vésoul-­Bénian” for the occasion.23 By then, ambitious regional entrepreneurs like Bourel-­Roncière were actively seeking financial backers to send Bretons and other peasants from all over France to the colony as well. Departmental colonization appealed to the Bonapartist regime because it offered a more cost-­effective way of colonizing Algeria in line with its increasingly free market economic policies (at least until Napoleon III turned to the arabophile policies of the Royaume Arabe in the 1860s, effectively stalling any further settler emigration until the fall of the Second Empire in 1870).24 Many of the hundred or so new villages that were created during the 1850s were funded primarily through private capital, with state intervention limited to the provision of  land concessions, infrastructure, and security. Over the same period, the old mercantilist constraints of Colbert’s Exclusif were dismantled and trade between France and Algeria liberalized with the abolition of tariffs (a prelude to the Anglo-­French free trade agreement of 1860).25 Despite their dislike for the Second Empire (at least until its liberal evolution in the 1860s), even French liberals found this kind of  laissez faire colonialism more conge­ nial to their tastes. Given time, the nimbler, decentralized settlement policy it promoted might still yield that elusive civil society Tocqueville (who died in 1859) had sought in vain in the colony, and which his successors now discerned on the horizon of an imperial-­cum-­liberal “New France” to come.26 Algeria might not quite be a New England of townships and free men, but by reproducing the same kind of “persistent localism” and native customs already found in seventeenth-­century North American colonies, it might succeed in reconciling France’s “two identities”—­local and national—­linking up the July Monarchy’s cult of  local memories with the Third Republic’s “nesting” of pe­ tites and grande patries.27 Significantly, the push for departmental colonization coincided with archaeological efforts to unearth Algeria’s ancient Roman (and Christian) vestiges and promote a declentionist narrative that bracketed centuries of Arab and Berber presence in favor of a redemptive myth justifying the French presence in Algeria. Its appeal to authenticity spoke equally to promoters of a “Latin race” rooted in the Mediterranean and to artists tired with “Orientalizing” Algeria into an exotic land and instead intent on depicting a hospitable environment to be landscaped with familiar vineyards, grain fields,

178  Chapter Seven

and forests.28 But its biggest promoters remained doctors, for whom settlers’ immersion in a neo-­French ecosystem, surrounded by familiar faces, accents, street names, and urban landmarks (the village church, town hall, and, in big­ ger towns, Haussmannian boulevard, bench, and bandstand) had restorative ef­ fects on the mind comparable to those afforded to the body by taking a plunge in one of the many Vichy replica spas that similarly began springing up across the French Empire.29 In both cases, a mild, almost “homeopathic” dose of nostalgia revived just enough amour du pays to provide ressourcement (a term connoting at once spiritual and organic regeneration and return to an original source or water spring) and buttress French identities overseas. (Coincidentally, early adepts of  homeopathy could also try to self-­cure bouts of nostalgia with the appropriate doses of nux vomica, pulsatilla, and mercury.)30 Not that the French were the only ones doing so: apparently the British also felt a little homesick in India, as in the wake of the 1857 Uprising they too scrambled for the hills and started building altitude stations embellished with quaint sights of cottages, English gardens, and tea parties.31 For them too, nostalgia had begun laying the groundwork for “collective memories” and “invented traditions.”32

L a s t o f t h e N o s ta l g i c s Not everyone was willing to give up on clinical nostalgia, though, not least those who had been so instrumental in piecing together and promoting the disease entity. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, French army and navy doctors (as well as colleagues in other countries) continued to use the diagnosis in spite of changing medical paradigms. In 1852 they had finally been reorganized into a full medical corps and granted equivalent military rank to combat officers. Nostalgia may then have lost its instrumental raison d’être, but soldiers continued to display troubling mental and functional symptoms that needed to be dealt with somehow. Medical reports from the Crimean War (1853–­56) still describe endemic nostalgia within the French expeditionary force (as they do for Ottoman troops, but seemingly not for British ones33). Though victorious, the campaign against the Russian Empire proved extremely costly to the French, who lost a third of the 310,000 men they sent to the Black Sea, in most cases to infectious outbreaks of cholera and typhus.34 Doctors complained about the men’s homesickness and their inability to evacuate them to France. In the circumstances, empathy and moral sustenance were all they could offer exhausted and downcast soldiers.35 Similar reports speak of nostalgia among French troops stationed in Italy to defend the papal state. Conversely, there is little evidence of the condition during

Ubi bene, ibi patria: Nostalgia Fin de Siècle  179

ill-­fated expeditions to Mexico and more successful operations to establish protectorates in Indochina during the 1860s.36 This is perhaps surprising, at a time when medical corps elsewhere were pouring over French medical texts to come to terms with cases of their own. In Italy the climatic and racial reframing of nostalgia had sparked both lively medical debates and parliamentary ones on how to forge a national army without stoking localist sentiments. Cases of nostalgia, including deadly ones, were reported yearly in the country’s post­ unification armed forces, prompting both army and navy official regulations to recommend systematically placing homesick men on medical leave.37 But it was across the Atlantic, during the American Civil War, that the disease caused the most concern. According to official statistics, the Union army suffered 5,213 attested cases of nostalgia and 58 fatal ones among white soldiers (out of some 614,000 mobilized, for a mortality rate of 11.6 per thousand), and 334 cases for 8 fatalities among black soldiers (from roughly 61,000 men, or a mortality rate of 49.9 per thousand).38 Regardless of their accuracy—­like French statistics, they surely underestimated the condition—­these figures speak to a racially overdetermined discourse of manliness that viewed African Americans as less dependable soldiers because more vulnerable to “childish” melancholy moods than the “Anglo-­Saxon race.” On the ground, military surgeons took all cases of nostalgia seriously, as evidence of inadequate recruitment screening and poor communication lines into the Deep South. Well versed in French writings, they too relied on furloughs and moral means to treat the condition but didn’t shy away from recommending more vigorous cures as well: sometimes, all soldiers needed was to have their mettle tested in battle or their sense of manhood prickled by public shaming.39 Despite the considerable interest for nostalgia thus generated in the American medical profession, the perception that homesickness was unknown to rugged Americans lived on. In 1898, during the Spanish-­ American War, the New York Times published a story for which the headline said it all: “A Death from Nostalgia. The Case of  Private Atkins, Who Died of Homesickness, Regarded as Remarkable. One of the Rarest Diseases. Dr. E. C. Spitzka, Specialist in Nervous Disorders, Says it is Next to Impossi­ ble for an American to Have It.”40 Fear that American soldiers might not be quite so immune to the illness after all resurfaced periodically as the army established a permanent presence in the Caribbean and the Philippines.41 The impact of nostalgia during the American Civil War echoed back across the Atlantic, and the condition was diagnosed on both sides during the Franco-­ Prussian War, particularly among reservists of the Landwehr and the garde mobile. The latter were called upon to save Paris following the regular army’s collapse at Sedan; among them were many Bretons, who predictably enough

180  Chapter Seven

came down with all the usual symptoms once the Prussian army set siege to the capital.42 Over the following months many more fell victim to the disease while trapped in Paris. On a bitterly cold night in December 1870, three months into a siege he would not see the end of, twenty-­one-­year-­old Gabriel Gaston Espir from Bordeaux put on his uniform and jumped off a bridge into the freezing waters of the Seine. His body was found the following morning a few miles downstream and identified two days later at the morgue, where a clerk laconically recorded that the presumed cause of his suicide was “nostalgie.”43 As the année terrible approached its bloody climax with the Paris Commune, the city of Paris was a city said to be already reeling with victims of homesickness. Isolated cases of nostalgia continued to trouble garrisoned recruits during peacetime as well, despite a gradual reduction in the duration of military service—­fixed at five years in 1868 and eventually brought down to two years three decades after the reintroduction of conscription in the 1870s—­and improved sanitary conditions in barracks. When the French army published its first comprehensive medical statistics for the year 1863, it counted twenty-­ seven soldiers hospitalized because of uncomplicated nostalgia (equivalent to 0.3 per thousand sick men)—­twenty-­two in France, three in Algeria, and two in Italy. The same study boasted drastically reduced levels of mortality—­down to under 10 per thousand in France and just above in Algeria, where the improvement was most noticeable—­and only two fatal cases of mal du pays. By comparison, there were 176 attested cases of suicide, and typhoid fever, which accounted for almost one-­fifth of  hospitalizations, had caused the death of 677 men.44 No doubt these figures underestimate the real numbers just as previous ones had; still the trend was undeniable, and only a handful of deadly cases of nostalgia were reported yearly into the mid-­1880s, but not beyond. The army still worried about homesickness leading men to commit suicide and continued to release soldiers from active duty into the twentieth century, particularly those stationed overseas in Tunisia, Madagascar, and Indochina.45 Medical officers thus kept their hard-­earned prerogative to grant homesick soldiers short-­term leaves back home. For the first time, they could also discharge chronic cases of nostalgia definitively (with a congé de réforme) and even exempt a young man from conscription due to unspecified predisposing factors. Young medical cadets at the Val-­de-­Grâce training hospital continued to learn how to diagnose and treat the ill, if anything so as to weed out malingerers seeking to simulate a melancholic complexion during their conseil de révision.46 For a while, it also seemed as if clinical research on nostalgia might continue as well. After falling sharply in the 1840s, interest for the condition among French medical students leveled out in the 1850s, with five theses on the topic

Ubi bene, ibi patria: Nostalgia Fin de Siècle  181

and several more on acclimatization. (It was actually Italian medical students who wrote the most on nostalgia at midcentury.) Most of these were written by medical officers returning from Algeria and whose main interest was either to make nostalgia cohabitate with seasoning theories or distinguish it entirely in the name of the old medicine of the passions still invoked by some in Montpellier.47 In Paris, students of Andral rehashed the eclectic (Cousinian) view of nostalgia as a natural sentiment that could develop into a dangerous neurosis, even a lypemania (melancholia), if left unchecked.48 Only two students presented theses on nostalgia in the 1860s, in both cases advocating for a change of nomenclature—­to “nostomania”—­and an openly psychiatric reading of what they described as a “monomanie du pays” or a “monomanie affective.”49 Nostalgia had in fact made some inroads among French aliénistes during the Second Empire, as a potential case of “partial madness” ( folie partielle), or the milder neuroses of hysterics and other “demi-­fous” that interested Jean-­Martin Charcot and his students.50 It continued to feature in the most important medical encyclopedias of the time, and in one of these the naval physician Henri Rey described the condition squarely as a “mental insanity” (insanité d’esprit): “If the expression insane [aliéné] has ever been used in a rightful and rigorous manner, then surely it is with regard to those affected by [nostalgia]. Who can claim to be more of a stranger [étranger] (alienus) to outside things?”51 As a matter of fact, many did, and the important Parisian psychiatrist Charles Lasègue found only a “confused assemblage of intellectual states” in medical officers’ attempts to define nostalgia. In language reminiscent of earlier attacks on medical students, he accused them of amateurism, of writing “psychological drama(s)” fit for “elegiac poetry [but not] medical descriptions.”52 The target of Lasègue’s contempt was the retired army surgeon and Algerian veteran Auguste Haspel, who in 1874 had published one of two definitive studies on nostalgia (the other being that of  his naval colleague Antoine Benoist de la Grandière). Both were entered into an endowed prize held triennially by the Académie de médecine to promote clinical research on melancholia. Renewed anxiety about mal du pays following the Franco-­Prussian war and the reintroduction of military service in 1872 had prompted the academy to solicit works on this “particular form” of sadness. It received three submissions and split the 2,000-­Franc prize money between Haspel and Grandière, though it didn’t actually award the prize itself to either of them. (The third entry was discarded altogether.)53 Haspel’s and Grandière’s studies were in many ways the crowning achievements of a century of military medical research on nostalgia. Both book length and replete with personal observations, they provided detailed investigations of the condition’s etiology, prognosis, and therapy, as

182  Chapter Seven

well as critical assessments of existing literature. Their differences were largely questions of nuance, and both issued heartfelt pleas to rehabilitate the battered psychosomatic tradition that had first consecrated the diagnosis. They noted too much “confusion” surrounding the condition and challenged those who billed the nostalgic a “malade imaginaire.” Nostalgia was a disease entity in its own right, they insisted—­the “pathological thorn” itself in Haspel’s poetic formulation that so irked Lasègue. In their opinion this was neither a cause of monomania nor a form of insanity itself; instead it was a “hypochondria of the heart,” a disease resulting from an “alteration in one’s affective life.” Its treatment was resolutely moral and its prophylaxis held in two words: “books and steam”—­almost like a manifesto for the Third Republic’s vision of turning “peasants into Frenchmen” by way of railways, public schools, and, of course, military service.54 But even Haspel and Grandière couldn’t deny that nostalgia was becoming rarer and didn’t seem to cause as much harm as it once had. As late as 1879 the Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales still maintained that the French were the most “prone to mal du pays [among] the civilized nations” and that they were therefore “constitutionally ill equipped” to colonize. Still, the article’s author—­a senior army physician who also happened to be an Alsatian Jew displaced by the Franco-­Prussian War—­seemed to doubt his own words and felt it necessary to add that, based on his experience in Algeria, nostalgia appeared to have become quite “rare and benign” there.55 In the blunter assessment of a medical student at the same time, the condition had simply been confined to “oblivion.”56 By 1884 the army would record its last official case of fatal nostalgia. If we are to believe the official records, no French soldier has ever died of it since.

W e H av e N e v e r B e e n M o d e r n Epitaphs for clinical nostalgia were few and far between in the 1880s. By then, conversations about imperialism in Algiers and Paris exuded newfound confidence in a French “génie colonisateur” emancipated of its youthful homebodiness.57 As a powerful colonial lobby gained traction in the National Assembly, apologists of the République coloniale brushed aside the dubious notion of an “insurmountable constitutional vice” preventing their compatriots from traveling overseas. If anything, it was now that other typically Gallic character trait—­the “uncontrollable thirst for adventure”—­that needed to be reined in, lest it lead them too far from home and to “adopt the customs of primitive people,” as warned the economist Paul Leroy-­Beaulieu.58 Suddenly, different

Ubi bene, ibi patria: Nostalgia Fin de Siècle  183

peddlers of  French decay were on stage, not to lament their compatriots’ hopeless attachment to the pays, but rather to praise it amid growing fears about rural depopulation and the country’s stalling demographics. In the nascent age of empire, the pays and its pastoral accoutrements—­the rural village, church tower, and community—­took on a quasi-­messianic task: to preserve an authentic, “true” France from the related evils of cosmopolitanism, miscegenation, and decadence.59 But where did all the ailing nostalgics go? Broadly speaking, late nineteenth-­ century French physicians fell into two camps on this question. On the one hand were those who felt that nostalgia hadn’t simply disappeared but had instead been renamed due to changes in psychiatric nosologies and the nature of war neuroses themselves.60 In 1900 the Paris-­based neurologist S. Lubetzki wrote that nostalgia’s “relegation to oblivion” should not be mistaken for an actual eradication of the illness; rather, it signaled a taxonomic switch in favor of neurasthenia. There was, Lubetzki argued, little to distinguish between these two “functional disorders” in terms of their etiology, symptoms, and pathological course. To all intents and purposes, they were the same disorder, and it was no coincidence that medical research on one had dried up precisely as the other became popular in the 1880s.61 This transfer from one mental disorder to another was most visible in the army. At the turn of the twentieth century, French military psychiatrists suddenly started talking of peasant conscripts’ “neurasthénie du pays.” During the Russo-­Japanese War of 1904–­5, their Russian counterparts—­generally credited with having laid the foundations of forward psychiatry—­continued to diagnose toska (nostalgia) as a psychological stressor conducive to neurasthenia and nervous breakdown.62 There was little talk of nostalgia in the ranks by the time European nations mobilized for war in 1914, and other neologisms soon came to capture the violence and sheer scale of war neuroses in the age of industrial warfare—­“shell shock” most famously.63 But as the First World War dragged on, the odd “nostalgic obsession” or fretting about “cafard” led some French psychiatrists to contemplate resurrecting the old diagnosis. 64 Even the British got cold feet as it became clear that the boys would not be home by Christmas, prompting the Lancet to publish a brief medical history of nostalgia from the ranz des vaches to the American Civil War that ended on a wishful tone.65 It would prove hopelessly misplaced, but the very nature of the conflict—­characterized by immobility and passive endurance of unsustainable shelling, at least in the trenches along the western front—­suggested interpreting neurotic symptoms as commotional, hysterical, or neurasthenic; if anything, a little homesickness could only help the men maintain a tenuous

184  Chapter Seven

connection to their homes and former lives.66 By contrast, the highly mobile fronts, massive civilian displacements, and huge numbers of POWs that characterized the Second World War would again provoke renewed interest for clinical studies of nostalgia among military psychiatrists in the 1940s.67 Writing from Michigan, the émigré Austrian child psychoanalyst Edith Sterba speculated about the “oral nature of the loss of fatherland,” describing her patients’ experiences of forced expatriation as a “repetition of the trauma of weaning” in an article tellingly titled “Homesickness and the Mother’s Breast.”68 Of course, traumatic memory (though not necessarily any oceanic feeling of maternal wombs) would become the linchpin of yet another new diagnosis for mentally wounded soldiers: post-­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), used initially among Vietnam veterans in the 1980s and an ever-­expanding list of people since. Yet even in our age of trauma, nostalgia has not entirely shaken off its pathological origins: in the wake of the Vietnam War and other so-­called low-­intensity conflicts since, some American military psychiatrists have called for a full rediscovery of the medical concept itself.69 Unsurprisingly, the one group of soldiers among whom there was never any need to revamp a nostalgia diagnosis was nonwhite and colonial troops. Right up until decolonization, the French army deployed its many “troupes coloniales” overseas—­up to half a million men during the First World War. Since their in­ ception in the mid-­nineteenth century, these indigenous units had been considered prone to outbreaks of nostalgia and few French military doctors were surprised to see so many North and West African recruits sufer from histrionic “crises nostalgiques” when deployed along the western front.70 For psychiatrists schooled in racial and hereditary theories, such instances of homesickness were manifestations of congenital “idiocy” and other forms of  “mental retardation” taken for granted in African people. Praised for their sacrifice to the patrie, colonial troops nonetheless remained “débiles” (“retards”), assimilated to psychopaths and degenerates in the galaxy of turn-­of-­the-­century French bogeymen. For the last medical student to write a thesis on nostalgia in France in 1890, whatever was left of the disease was now fully elucidated by the science of hereditary predisposition.71 This racial reframing of nostalgia also influenced those physicians who felt that the condition had actually been eradicated altogether, not simply smuggled into new medical taxonomies. For them, Frenchmen had at last “outgrown” the illness and “acclimated,” as it were, to the modern world. Everyone knew nostalgia was virtually unheard of among Germans and Anglo-­Saxons, those most “civilized and cosmopolitan of people,” wrote disingenuously Grandière. The condition existed directly in inverse proportion to the extension of

Ubi bene, ibi patria: Nostalgia Fin de Siècle  185

railway lines, echoed others, and was “bound to disappear with the advance of hygiene and civilization,” or “scientific progress.”72 The irony of a disease first caused by the inroads of modernity but eventually cured by the same forces was not lost on Haspel, who viewed the seemingly inexorable movement of  his age with a bittersweet mixture of optimism and regret reminiscent of earlier romantic-­era sources: If cases of nostalgia have tended to diminish in the army over the past few years, it is not only due to more readily available and faster means of communication. A whole host of other reasons explain the attenuation of nostalgia’s effects; these are intimately linked to the universal movement of diffusion of enlightenment and civilization into the darkest corners of our society. This movement has partially effaced the local customs and particular languages that once caused nostalgia so frequently.73

All of these sources describe the disappearance of nostalgia as a consequence of the modernization of the French countryside and nationalization of the French people. They reproduce at the level of the national collective the process of individual bildung already observed in attempts to rethink nostalgia as amour du pays during the July Monarchy. Grandière’s exhortation to “wage war on ignorance” with public schools and “inculcate [ . . . ] the idea of the fatherland” in young children so as to “transform l’amour du sol natal [into] l’amour de la patrie” sounds every bit like proselytizing for Jules Ferry’s educational reforms and Ernest Lavisse’s civic history lessons of the 1880s. But why didn’t the disease take the word with it, then? Why didn’t “nostalgia” just disappear, like an artifact from a bygone age? The hint of melancholy in Haspel’s noting of the passing of an age reminds us that the demedicalization of nostalgia initiated in the 1820s and only completed by the end of the century did not sink the concept itself, but rather opened it to a range of longings not necessarily pathogenic. What we discern in Haspel’s words is that atmosphere of fin des terroirs already noted in earlier sources and soon to become a profession of faith for agrarian, regionalist nationalists in the mold of a Maurice Barrès. In the 1870s, it came tinged with a sour taste of defeat and thirst for revenge that seemingly inspired the third, anonymous entry to the Lefebvre prize on nostalgia (already mentioned above). The author, a provincial doctor from Clermont-­ Ferrand, lamented the “general state of melancholy” his country languished in, its military honor battered and glorious history tarnished. He dedicated his modest study to the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine: “Alsatians and Lorrains, you linger sullenly on the banks of the Moselle and the Rhine, eyes riveted

186  Chapter Seven

upon the motherland. I dedicate these few pages on nostalgia to you.” He had little to say about the disease itself, except that it had been chronically underestimated among peasant girls who moved to the city and soon fell into prostitution, corrupted by industrial work and urban vice.74 Similarly, an 1876 opuscule by the Alsatian military pharmacist Eugène Fritsch, who went by “Lang” and had served in Algeria before trying himself out at patriotic poetry, described “la nostalgie du soldat” as a “mal du retour” felt by all those (like him) whose only hope of “returning” home lay in a revival of  Napoleonic glory.75 If clinical nostalgia had arguably been defeated by Charles Péguy’s famous “hussars of the Republic” and their Kantian rationality, it had seemingly given way to the agrarian nostalgia and revanchisme of the déracinés. The surprising story of the pays and its affections in colonial Algeria helps account for how nostalgia wasn’t simply expunged from this Promethean world but instead became an integral part, even a product, of modernity itself. The Whiggish tale of progress offered by Haspel and his contemporaries is deceptive insofar as it flattens and sequences what is in fact a much more uneven trajectory, marked by overlaps, twists, and unexpected (re)turns. The lesson of both regional recruitment in the army and of departmental colonization in Algeria was that nostalgia wouldn’t be overcome by people becoming carefree globetrotters and forgetting their pays. Quite the contrary, it was by bringing their pays with them, or at least re-­creating its facsimile abroad, that they learned how to be at home in the modern world. It was, moreover, “modernity” itself that made this possible: the “science” of race and acclimatization that reminded Frenchmen of the importance of  feeling French (in a Renanian sense); technologies such as steamboats and telegrams that allowed them to feel closer to home and bring it closer to them across France and the Mediterranean;76 and most surprisingly of all,  joint-­stock companies floated on the Paris Bourse that somehow found themselves in the business of  building “authentic” villages of French peasants overseas. The homely looks and sepia-­toned patina of an Algérie made to look genuinely française were conjured in a kind of laboratory dealing in financial transactions—­a remarkable example of abstraction producing the concrete, in this case modernity spawning nostalgia as its constitutive antithesis. That modern times and distant places might provide fertile soil for old roots was also how the Third Republic sold Algeria to those Alsatians and Lorrainers who chose patrie over pays and left their belongings to Prussian occupiers in 1871. Forced to capitulate to the enemy and confronted with major insurrections in Kabylia and Paris (both repressed in bloodshed), the provisional government led by Leon Gambetta decided to revive settler emigration

Ubi bene, ibi patria: Nostalgia Fin de Siècle  187

to Algeria, now fully assimilated to the Republic and placed under civilian rule. One hundred thousand hectares of land (for the most part in Kabylia) were seized from native inhabitants to welcome an exodus that never quite came, at least not in the size anticipated. Of the 166,000 Alsatians and Lorrainers who opted to remain French, only 1,183 families, some 5,000 people in all, moved to Algeria. (By comparison three times as many emigrated to the United States.)77 This did not prevent patriotic journalists from hailing those who had “changed soils without leaving their homeland.” Uprooted by war, these men and women were no “déracinés” for Algeria would not be a “land of exile” to them.78 Nor did it dampen the Third Republic’s enthusiasm for bolstering the French population in the colony, which it achieved both by encouraging more French settlers to emigrate (leading to the creation of some two hundred villages by the end of the decade) and by naturalizing  Jews and the children of non-­French settlers. By 1900, the European population in the colony had increased threefold, to 621,000 (including 384,000 French).79 Clinical nostalgia still agitated some people’s sleep, and the governor’s advisory committee in Algiers deemed it essential to follow the successful example of departmental colonization, with homogenous groupings of people (kin or neighbors) housed in replica French villages.80 This was, at any rate, the impression that the Société de protection des Alsaciens-­Lorrains demeurés Français, a charitable organization set up by the Comte d’Haussonville to help the displaced, sought to convey of its three villages in Kabylia. The first of these, Boukhalfa, had been founded right after the war by the industrialist Jean Dollfus, a former mayor of Mulhouse and distant relative of none other than Johannes Hofer himself. In December 1873 the society’s second village, named Haussonviller in honor of its namesake, welcomed thirty-­three families of settlers (136 people in total). Four years later it was featured on the front page of the society’s annual report, as a flourishing village of some fifty households nested around a modest clocher on lush, gentle slopes clearly Mediterranean and yet uncannily reminiscent of the eastern slopes of the Vosges, overlooking the Rhine valley.81 Haussonviller exuded a rural serenity and embedded authenticity that distinguished it from the anomic, artificial grid layout of most colonies built until then, which the colons of ’48 had found so alienating. Its palpable sense of place was designed to reassure prospective settlers (as well as donors) and exorcise any fears of  homesickness. If anything, it might allow them to indulge bittersweet reveries of their beloved Alsace: the colonie, this image seemed to call out, had finally found its pays. And as more emigrants set off to “make” Algeria French (or at least make it feel a little more French), they not only

188  Chapter Seven

F i g u r e 7 . 1 . View of Haussonviller in Algeria, from the front cover of a 1787 prospectus for the Société de protection des Alsaciens-­Lorrains demeurés français. Courtesy of the Archives nationales d’outre-­mer, Aix-­en-­Provence, GGA L10.

restored some battered national pride with the myth of a “patriotic migration”; they also established a metonymic principle later expounded in the geography of Vidal de la Blache and on maps of an imperial “Greater France,” that the nation was whole in its diversity and that its global resurgence was premised on its oldest of roots.82 * It seems fitting that the history of clinical nostalgia should end in this colonial “New Alsace,” among the descendants of Johannes Hofer himself. Two centuries after the term was fist coined, nostalgia had seemingly come full circle: no longer a disease affecting displaced people, but a source of sustenance for emigrants in search of a new home. The transformation was perfectly encapsulated in Les enfants de Marcel (1887), Augustine Fouillé’s sequel to her hugely successful textbook Le tour de la France, where French pupils could read the adventures of a displaced Alsatian family that resettles in Algeria having inherited a farm named “Little Alsace” (which also serves, tellingly enough, as a post office for the surrounding community of settlers).83 Surveying these agricultural colonies on the eve of the First World War, the Alsatian Jew George Delahache

Ubi bene, ibi patria: Nostalgia Fin de Siècle  189

(Lucien Aaron) noted with satisfaction the survival of Germanic accents and native customs among his compatriots and their progeny. Despite inevitable setbacks, hardworking colons and their charming villages were a sure sign of “progress” in Algeria—­although it sometimes had a tendency to leave them behind. As Delahache also observed, by 1913 Haussonviller had perhaps already peaked and gone into relative decline since the opening of a nearby railway line that effectively cut off this once strategic outpost into Kabylia, causing a sharp drop in transit and forcing its roadhouse to close.84 Progress, it turned out, was relentless, blind, and uncontrollable, melting into air all that appeared solid, rendering antiquated all new-­formed, fast-­frozen relations before they had even had time to ossify (to paraphrase the famous passage from the Communist Man­ ifesto). Somehow nostalgia had come to mediate between the circumvolutions of this restless dynamism, simultaneously a bitter memory of what was being lost and sweet upshot of what was being created. This trajectory of nostalgia in nineteenth-­century colonial Algeria is marked by a kind of contradictory movement similar to that already observed, at the level of the individual psyche, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars: a dialectic of “old” and “new” that played out in a more concrete way in the Maghreb, as a “production of locality” in a deterritorialized and diasporic colonial modernity.85 Crucially, both sides of this opposition were moved by the same historical processes and actors engaged in changing practices—­the same ones that caused a pathogenic form of nostalgia to become homeopathic, as it were. While the logics and contingencies of French medicine, national identity, and imperial ambitions certainly shaped nostalgia’s tortuous path, it would be a mistake to view it as an exclusively French phenomenon; rather it ought to be seen as symptomatic of transnational trends common to many other parts of an increasingly global world. Indeed, 1884 may serve as a chronological end point for this book for one more reason. As the French army recorded its last deadly cases of nostalgia and as French schoolchildren and colonial settlers learned about the different shapes and sizes of their many communities of belonging, delegates from forty-­one nations around the world traveled to Washington, DC, to attend an international conference tasked with establishing a standard time valid for all. The adoption of Greenwich mean time and twenty-­four uniform hour-­wide time zones that October was hailed by the scientific community then and has since come to mark, at least symbolically, the world’s entry into an era of interconnectedness and standardization (at least in the Western hemisphere). That something dizzying was happening was quite apparent on either side of the Atlantic. As they wrapped up proceedings in Washington, European powers (plus the United States and Ottoman Empire) turned their attention to Otto

190  Chapter Seven

von Bismarck’s residence in Berlin, where they pored over maps of the African continent intent on asserting their national interests in an impending imperial race. Far removed from this diplomatic wrangling, Parisian art lovers meanwhile flocked to the first Salon des artistes indépendants to catch a glimpse of a daring new avant-­garde of neo-­and postimpressionist painters. And four thousand miles away, in downtown Chicago, busy passersby stretched their necks to admire the final phases of construction of the 138-­foot-­high Home Insurance Building, the world’s first steel-­frame skyscraper. As has been noted elsewhere, these and other events marked the beginning of a whole new “culture of time and space,” an accelerated round of “time-­space compression” in which the world seemed to get smaller and spin faster.86 Surely, as years go, 1884 has as strong a claim as any other to being the one when the world—­or at least large chunks of the North Atlantic world—­first became “modern.” But as is often the case when debating how modern modernity is, things aren’t quite as simple as that, and not only because the French predictably balked at the idea that the zero meridian should run through Greenwich rather than Paris, holding out against the implementation of GMT until 1911. They were hardly the only ones to drag their feet or actively reject the standardization of time, something that became a reality for most Westerners only on the eve of the First World War, and not until after the end of the Second elsewhere around the world. As Vanessa Ogle has recently shown, the unification of time and adoption of daylight saving time at the turn of the century were no foregone conclusions, but rather fitful (and sometimes unexpected) outcomes of competing agendas in a cacophonous brouhaha of global “time talk.”87 Often times, it wasn’t international efforts at all but domestic logics (both national and local in scope) that determined the push to standardization—­as in the case of railroads, which in America had already switched to a standard railway time indexed to the Greenwich meridian of their own accord in 1883, and in Germany famously did so in 1891 at the behest of  Helmuth von Moltke, who worried about coordinating troop movements much more than setting planetary norms. If time was unevenly standardized starting in the year 1884, so was it “nationalized,” even “regionalized,” by a variety of state and local actors operating both in relation to and independently of one another. This age of increasing global integration, of circulation and interconnectedness, was, after all, also an age of imperialisms, of nationalisms, and of regionalisms all at once—­and each had their own ideas about what time (it) was and where it should apply. Perhaps 1884 is best seen as the year when we never became modern as well.88 Instead, we have been modern nostalgics ever since.

Afterword

Nostalgia in History Time and space come into being together and are therefore probably one, like subject and object. Space is enduring time; time is fluid, variable space. n o va l i s , General Draft for an Encyclopedia (1798–­99)

Homesickness has been likened to some of  the most distinctive traits of  human beings (or at least ones that have been identified as such at different moments in time). For Sigmund Freud, the common saying “love is homesickness,” revealed something fundamental about our psyche (but that he seems to have only become aware of in the crucible of the First World War): a universal longing for our original home, the mother’s womb.1 A century earlier, the German romantic Novalis famously wrote that philosophy as well was “actually homesickness—­the urge to be everywhere at home.” Novalis, who wrote in the midst of the French revolutionary wars at a time when Heimweh and Nostalgie were essentially synonyms, was referring to idealist philosophers’ quest for a unique principle upon which to ground a comprehensive system of explanation—­a pathological tendency to abstraction and inauthenticity he sought to overcome with fragmentary aphorisms and imaginative poetry.2 Of course, it was precisely our capacity to build imaginative scenarios in our heads that Johannes Hofer blamed for nostalgia in the first place. He tied this new disease to the fate of  Swiss hired soldiers and to what his seventeenth-­century contemporaries perceived to be an epidemic of imaginative rumination—­that is, to two highly contingent factors that, on second look, don’t seem quite so contingent at all: nostos was, after all, known to ancient Greek warriors, and according to twenty-­first-­century psychologists imagination might just be what distinguishes human beings from other animals.3 Ultimately, it may be impossible to disentangle what is transhistorical and what is historically specific about our propensity to long for and desire things lost or never quite possessed—­ starting with “home” itself, as T. S. Eliot proposed to do in 1940 (needless to

192  Afterword

say, yet another year of war). Until we actually invent a time machine (surely the mother of all our wishes) and load it with a functional MRI scan with which to brain image the dead—­and especially the war dead—­nostalgia will likely continue to perplex. * Eschewing what must be an intractable mystery, this book has recast the question in a different way; namely, why is it that a particular kind of longing was laid bare at a given moment in time, deemed pathological for the next two centuries, only to then be progressively folded into the “normal” emotional economy of  human beings? Contemporary psychologists have two simple answers to this question: either Hofer and his followers failed to adequately distinguish between (negative and harmful) homesickness and (positive or benign) nostalgia as we do today, confusing the latter for the former; or they mistook the symptom for the cause and erroneously saw nostalgia as the source of distress, as opposed to a defensive response to it.4 But while it may be possible to make such distinctions in the controlled environment of a psychological experiment, they make a lot less sense when viewed historically. Our present-­day tendency to separate harmful homesickness from benign nostalgia might well be congenial to us (although it probably seems rather academic to the tens of millions of refugees fleeing war and misery around the world as I write these lines), but it certainly did not to people living two centuries ago. As I have shown, it was itself a historical product, something that emerged slowly and was, eventually, generalized to the point where it became obvious to all. To grasp what nostalgia was and why it became something else, we cannot, therefore, rely on a presentist standpoint (that is, with an analysis oblivious to the fact that its universal categories are in fact historically contingent). Instead we need to proceed more reflexively, with a theory of society fully aware that both its object and its own categories of analysis are historically specific and mutually influence one another. In this book, I have striven to present clinical nostalgia through contemporary eyes and a conceptual world often quite foreign to our own. To make sense of the phenomenon on its own terms, I have outlined a number of contexts and practices (or axes and vectors) that render nostalgia in its rich, contradictory, at times perplexing historicity. Doing so has brought to light a tortuous trajectory marked by fits and starts, disruptions and continuities, centrifugal and centripetal thrusts whereby soldiers came to long for the very forms of practice that had initially prompted their sense of displacement, or joint-­stock ventures sought to re-­create “authentic” lifeworlds

Nostalgia in History  193

rendered obsolete by the very economic forces that created those corporations in the first place. It is no coincidence that nostalgia is central to the endless cycles of the fashion industry and localized (embedded) marketing strategies of multinationals and global banks today. These are simultaneously directional and contradictory trends that cannot be reconciled with a linear conception of temporality as expansive progress alone and that it simply will not do to explain solely in terms of cultural ruptures. Instead, we need to understand how time and space were torn asunder and reconfigured in strange, overlapping ways that made it possible for the “old” to resurface from underneath the “new,” for the “local” to grow from within the “global,” and for nostalgia to be equated with homesickness and then become its opposite. We need, in other words, to think of nostalgia with a historically grounded theory of practice, as an emotional state and a form of subjectivity specific to the modern capitalist epoch. * By capitalist epoch I do not mean an economic system alone, but rather a “complex social whole, with specific political forms, psychologies, social relations, and cultural features.”5 Distinctive (if not quite unique) to this social formation is a tendency for human practices to congeal into structures that then appear removed from their contingent origins and come to dominate human life as alien (or natural). It is this kind of dialectical dynamic that can help account for the forms of transformation and reconstitution, of abstraction and concretization (reification), that punctuate the tortuous trajectory of nostalgia. In his sweeping reinterpretation of  Marx’s mature thought, Moishe Postone advances an interpretation of capitalism’s complex temporalities that offers a possible point of departure for such a self-­reflexive theory of nostalgia. It hinges on the interaction between two qualitatively different forms of time generated by the generalization and inherent instability of the commodity form: a linear form of “abstract” time tied to the measuring of human activity and a lumpier form of “historical” time that, while distinct from the task-­oriented time of precapitalist societies, is similarly “concrete” in that it imparts a fitful dynamic to the flow of time itself (a tendency akin to a “treadmill effect”). Postone ties this peculiar concrete movement of time itself to the contradictory interaction between the commodity’s two dimensions (use value and value) and its constant, escalator-­like reconfiguration of the magnitude of  value with increases in productivity. He thus seeks to explain the restless dynamism of the capitalist epoch—­its simultaneously directional and cyclical tendencies—­not

194  Afterword

in terms of class struggle or some other putative laws of  history, but rather with reference to a historically determinate generalization of commodity production and circulation starting in late medieval Europe but that truly gathered pace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.6 Needless to say, this explanation will not sway everyone; yet it does offer one possible way of grounding both the “tyranny of time” and those instances of “creative destruction” (as Joseph Schumpeter famously called them) that seem to invest all forms of modern life within the fundamental categories of capitalism itself. As such, it also provides a suggestive blueprint for the trajectory of nostalgia: in its early, pathogenic form, clinical nostalgia expressed the alienating qualities of “abstract time” as it congealed to regulate the activities and livelihoods of people in the army and other institutions subjected to a similar kind of rationalized time management. By the same token, the naturalization of nostalgia would seem to correspond with the crystallization of a more concrete “historical time” and the spasmodic, “back-­and-­forth” movement it imparted to late nineteenth-­century North Atlantic societies (by then thoroughly saturated with the production and circulation of commodities). As schematic as it no doubt is, this outline enables us to view nostalgia not just as a product of the modern world, but as a fundamentally constitutive part thereof: a subjective experience of time and space so adequate to the peculiar regimes of historicity of capitalism that it appears natural, as if it were a fundamental human trait. But a history of the practices of nostalgia must not be confused with a deterministic explanation, let alone a teleological one. Time and again, contingencies of all kinds shaped the eventful temporalities of nostalgia. (Indeed, one could say they are necessary to its very experience.) This analysis does not try to explain human agency as a reflection of external structural determinants or, as is more likely in the case of nostalgia, as a manifestation of underdetermined free will reacting against some form of heteronomy. Instead, it seeks to overcome the very terms of this opposition by viewing each side as mutually constitutive of the other within an interdependent social totality. And this is where it behooves the historical profession to pay more attention to emotional life: for by oscillating back and forth across the porous thresholds of cognition and habit, mind and body, self and society, our desires and feelings have a tendency to blur neat Cartesian divides and the potential to question the subject-­object antinomy that constrains our very understanding of history itself—­at least in its accepted empiricist paradigm. Understanding what nostalgia was doesn’t simply mean explaining the phenomenon as it “really happened”; it entails showing that nostalgia always is what it was (or will have been): a Janus-­faced

Nostalgia in History  195

product of our constant constitutive interaction with the social world. As ever we do well to remind ourselves of the Marxian axiom that “men make their own history, [but] do not make it just as they please”7—­to which the historian attentive to an histoire sensible might add that neither does it necessarily always please them.

Abbreviations

a d p : Archives de Paris a h p m l : Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale a h r : American Historical Review a n : Archives nationales, Paris a n o m : Archives nationales d’outre-­mer, Aix-­en-­Provence a p h p : Archives de l’Assistance Publique-­Hôpitaux de Paris j m m : Journal de médecine militaire r m m c p m : Recueil de mémoires de médecine, de chirurgie, et de pharmacie militaire s h d : Service historique de la Défense, Vincennes v d g : Archives du Musée du Service de Santé des Armées, Val-­de-­Grâce, Paris

Notes

Introduction 1. J. A. Edmond Puel, “Essai sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1822), 12–­14. 2. On Greek nostos and its Indo-­European antecedents, see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); and Marcello Durante, Sulla preistoria della tradizione poetica greca, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1971–­76). 3. On basic emotions, see Paul Ekman, “Basic Emotions,” in Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, ed. Tim Dalgleish and Mick J. Power (Chichester: Wiley, 1999), 45–­60. Most psychologists today view nostalgia as a “complex emotion,” that is, as a culturally inflected mixture of basic emotions. 4. For an ethnographic approach to medicalization, see Junko Kitanaka, Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 5. The saying is variously attributed to Peter de Vries, The Tents of  Wickedness (Boston: Little Brown, 1959) and Simone Signoret, La nostalgie n’est plus ce qu’elle était (Paris: Seuil, 1978). 6. Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011). 7. For another perspective on how passions became emotions in the early nineteenth century, see Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The “James-­Lange theory of emotion” (so called because developed in parallel by William James and the Danish psychologist Carl Georg Lange) remains central to the work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux. 8. Théodule Ribot, Problèmes de psychologie affective (Paris: Alcan, 1910), 63–­67. On nostalgia in Ribot and Proust, see Michael S. Roth, “Dying of the Past: Medical Studies of  Nostalgia in Nineteenth-­Century France,” History and Memory 3, no. 1 (1991): 5–­29; and Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 185–­239.

200  Notes to Pages 4–5 9. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–­1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (London: Verso, 1991); and Pierre Nora, “Lavisse, The Nation’s Teacher,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 2, Traditions, ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 151–­86. Ernest Lavisse’s ubiquitous illustrated history of France (the famous “Petit Lavisse”) was first published in 1884, only a few years after Augustine Fouillée’s instant best seller Le tour de la France par deux enfants (first edition in 1877). 10. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of  Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), 146–­63. For similar trends across the Rhine, see Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–­1918 (Chapel Hill: University of  North Carolina, 1997). 11. Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 12. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xvi. 13. For long-­and short-­term perspectives on hysteria, see Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); and Sabine Arnaud, On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 14. On “glocalization” and ersatz nostalgia in our contemporary consumer culture, see Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-­Space and Homogeneity-­Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (London: Sage, 1995), 25–­44. In this respect the trajectory of nostalgia both parallels and tends to subsume that of semantically related words in other languages and cultures, such as Russian toska, Czech litost, Portuguese saudade, German Sehnsucht, Turkish Hüzün, Ifaluk  fago and pak, and doubtless many more. On these, see Catherine A. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Kyria Giorgi, Emotions, Language and Identity on the Margins of Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Sara Dickinson and Laura Salmon, eds., Melancholic Identities, Toska and Reflective Nostalgia (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2015). 15. William Cullen, Nosology, or a Systematic Arrangement of Disease by Classes, Orders, Genera, and Species (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1800 [1769]), 162n. 16. Constantine Sedikides, Tim Wildschut, and Denise Baden, “Nostalgia: Conceptual Issues and Existential Functions,” in Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology, ed. Jeff Greenberg, Sander L. Koole, and Tom Pyszczynski (New York: Guilford Press, 2004), 200–­214 (quote at 206); and Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Jamie Arndt, and Clay Routledge, “Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Functions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91, no. 5 (2006): 975–­93. 17. See, for example,  Jay A. Gottfried, Adam P. R. Smith, Michael D. Rugg, and Raymond J. Dolan, “Remembrance of Odors Past: Human Olfactory Cortex in Cross-­Modal Recognition

Notes to Pages 5–7  201 Memory,” Neuron 42, no. 4 (2004): 687–­95; and Kentaro Oba, Madoka Noriuchi, Tomoaki Atomi, Yoshiya Moriguchi, Yoshiaki Kikuchi, “Memory and Reward Systems Coproduce ‘Nostalgic’ Experiences in the Brain,” Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience 11, no. 7 (2016): 1069–­77. 18. Lorraine Daston, “Introduction: The Coming into Being of Scientific Objects,” in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), quote at 14. 19. Fred Davis, Yearning  for Yesterday: A Sociology of  Nostalgia (New York: Free Press, 1975), 118; and David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4. 20. For representative psychological work coming from the Nostalgia study group at the University of  Southampton (http://www.southampton.ac.uk/nostalgia/ ), see note 16 above and Clay Routledge, Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource (New York: Routledge, 2016). Psychoanalytic perspectives may be found in Nandor Fodor, “Varieties of Nostalgia,” Psychoanalytic Review 37 (1950): 25–­38; Sisto Vecchio, ed., Nostalgia: Scritti Psicoanalitici (Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina Editore, 1989); and André Bolzinger, Histoire de la nostalgie (Paris: Campagne Première, 2007). For philosophical reflections, see Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’irréversible et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1983); James Philips, “Distance, Absence, and Nostalgia,” in Descriptions, ed. Dan Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), 64–­75; and Edward Casey, “The World of Nostalgia,” Man and World 20, no. 4 (1987): 361–­84. For an influential semiotic analysis, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). The classic work on the sociology of nostalgia is Davis, Yearning   for Yesterday. On anthropology’s often fraught relation to nostalgia, see in particular Kathleen Stewart, “Nostalgia—­a Polemic,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 3 (1988): 227–­41; and Olivia Angé and David Berliner, eds., Anthropology and Nostalgia (New York: Berghahn, 2014). 21. On nostalgia in cultural studies and postmodernism, see Georg Stauth and Brian S. Turner, “Nostalgia, Postmodernism, and the Critique of Mass Culture,” Theory, Culture and Society 5, no. 2 (1988): 509–­26; Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); and Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” in Methods for the Study of Literature and Cultural Memory, ed. Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). A particularly revealing example of nostalgia’s newfound scholarly relevance is the sprawling literature on Ostalgie (or nostalgia for the communist bloc). See, among others, Daphne Berdahl, “ ‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things,” Ethnos 64, no. 2 (1999): 192–­211. On nostalgia and consumerism more in general, see Marolin Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Gary Cross, Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 22. On the exclusion of nostalgia at the expense of trauma in a first wave of memory studies, see Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (2000): 139. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Svetlana Boym advanced a distinction between “restorative” and “reflective” forms of nostalgia to try to distinguish her critical reading of urban landscapes from ideological mythologies of state memorializing. Others have

202  Notes to Pages 7–8 since identified a similar “critical potential” for nostalgia within an alternative modernity. See Boym, Future; Andreas Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins,” Grey Room 23 (May 1, 2006): 6–­21; Nadia Atia and Jeremy Davies, “Nostalgia and the Shapes of History,” Memory Studies 3, no. 3 (2010): 181–­86; and Helmut Illbruck, Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012). 23. Charles S. Maier, “The End of Longing? Notes toward a History of Postwar German National Longing,” in The Postwar Transformation of Germany: Democracy, Prosperity, and Nationhood, ed. John S. Brady, Beverly Crawford, and Sarah Elise Wiliarty (Ann Arbor: University of  Michigan Press, 1999), 273. For the classic statement distinguishing history from memory (notwithstanding its own dabbling in nostalgia), see Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–­24. For British trajectories, see Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985); Lowenthal, Past; and Samuels, Theatres of Memory, vol. 1, Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), 17 passim. 24. To paraphrase and adapt the clever title of David Lowenthal’s piece “Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn’t,” in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, ed. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 18–­32. 25. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, “The Dimensions of Nostalgia,” in Imagined Past, 1–­17 (quote at 2). 26. Boym, Future, xvi. 27. Peter Fritzsche, “Chateaubriand’s Ruins: Loss and Memory after the French Revolution,” History and Memory 10, no. 2 (1998): 102–­17; “Spectres of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, Modernity,” AHR 106, no. 5 (2001): 1587–­1618; and Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 28. Terdiman, Present Past; Ann C. Colley, Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1998); Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting and British Fiction, 1810–­1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Tamara S. Wagner, Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740–­1890 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004); Linda M. Austin, Nostalgia in Transition, 1780–­1917 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Simon Bunke, Heimweh: Studien zur Kultur-­and Literaturgeschichte einer tödlichen Krankheit (Freiburg: Rombach, 2009); and Kevis Goodman, “Romantic Poetry and the Science of Nostalgia,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. James Chandler and Maureen McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 195–­216; and “Uncertain Disease: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading,” Studies in Romanticism 49, no. 2 (2010): 197–­227. I borrow the notion of a loosely coalescing “structure of feeling” from Raymond Williams, whose classic study The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) is, in its own way, a study of nostalgia as a paradigmatic trope in British literary history. 29. Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 14 (summer 1966): 81–­103; and his earlier article “La Nostalgie: théories médicales et expression littéraire,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 27, no. 5 (1963): 1505–­18; George Rosen, “Nostalgia: A ‘Forgotten’ Psychological Disorder,” Clio Medica 10, no. 1 (1975): 340–­54; Roth, “Dying of the Past”; Sylvain Venayre, “Le Corps malade du désir du pays natal: nostalgie et médecine au XIXe siècle,” in

Notes to Pages 8–11  203 Imaginaire et sensibilités au XIXe siècle, ed. Anne-­Emmanuelle Demartini and Dominique Kalifa (Paris: Créaphis, 2005), 209–­22; and Bunke, Heimweh. See also Charles A. A. Zwingmann, “ ‘Heimweh’ or ‘Nostalgic Reaction’: A Conceptual Analysis and Interpretation of a Medico-­ Psychological Phenomenon” (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1959); Klaus Brunnert, Nostalgie in der Geschichte der Medizin (Düsseldorf: Triltsch, 1984); Lisa O’Sullivan, “Dying for Home: The Medicine and Politics of Nostalgia in Nineteenth-­Century France” (PhD dissertation, Queen Mary, University of London, 2006); and Bolzinger, Histoire de la nostalgie. 30. Susan J. Matt, Homesickness: An American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Matt shows how Americans became a nation of rugged individualists by repressing the homesickness experienced by settlers and migrants throughout the colonial and antebellum periods. For a fascinating ethnographic perspective on the experience of exile among Franco-­ Algerians repatriated to France following Algerian independence, see Michèle Baussant, Pieds-­ Noirs. Mémoires d’exils (Paris: Stock, 2002). On the epistemological and methodological pitfalls of distinguishing between a pristine “experience” and its discursive construction, see Joan W. Scott’s classic charge “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–­97. For stimulating discussions of how emotions and fantasies can point to a relative autonomy, even contradiction, between subjectivities and prevailing cultural logics, see Michael Roper, “Slipping out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History,” History Workshop  Journal 59, no. 1 (2005): 57–­72; and Joan W. Scott, “The Incommensurability of Psychoanalysis and History,” History and Theory 51, no. 1 (2012): 63–­83. 31. Marcel Reinhard, “Nostalgie et service militaire pendant la Révolution,” Annales historiques de la révolution française 30, no. 1 (1958): 1–­15; and Alice Bullard, “Self-­Representation in the Arms of Defeat: Fatal Nostalgia and Surviving Comrades in French New Caledonia, 1871–­ 1880,” Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 2 (1997): 179–­212. 32. On conjectures, objectivity, and the history of emotions, see Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96–­125; Peter Novick, The Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Sophie Wahnich, Les émotions, la Révolution française et le present (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2009), esp. 28–­36. 33. Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 193–­220. 34. William H. Sewell, “AHR Conversation: Explaining Historical Change, or the Lost History of Causes,” AHR 120, no. 4 (2015): quote at 1392. For Sewell’s broader efforts to rethink capitalism and social causality in historical explanation, see his Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); “The Temporalities of Capitalism,” Socio-­Economic Review 6, no. 3 (2008): 517–­37; “Connecting Capitalism to the French Revolution: The Parisian Promenade and the Origins of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-­ Century France,” Critical Historical Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 5–­46. 35. On the porous, shifting border between medical notions of “normal” and “pathological,” see Georges Canguilhem’s classic study, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn Fawcett and Robert Cohen (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1989).

204  Notes to Pages 11–15 36. Erving Goffman, “On the Characteristics of  Total Institutions,” in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 1–­124; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1988); and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995); and, on “social disembedding,” Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 21–­29 passim. 37. Ian Hacking talks of “vectors” that establish a temporary “ecological niche” for time-­ bound mental illnesses in his Mad Travelers. “Axes of historicity” is the expression that Jan Goldstein uses to reconstruct the contexts within which certain mental operations and illnesses became prevalent. See her Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), esp. 398–­414; The Post-­Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–­1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and, for a wonderful mise en pratique, Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy: The Case of Nanette Leroux (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 38. For critical appropriations of Foucault’s insights regarding military institutions, see Alain Ehrenberg, Le corps militaire. Politique et pédagogie en démocratie (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1983); Sabina Loriga, Soldats. Un laboratoire disciplinaire: l’armée piémontaise au xviiie siècle (Paris: Mentha, 1991); and Arnaud Guinier, L’honneur du soldat: éthique martiale et discipline guerrière dans la France des Lumières (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2014). 39. François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 40. The key text on emotions as performative acts is William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 41. On the complex temporalities of daily practices, see Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). For a comparable analysis of capitalist modernity as an ongoing dialectic of abstraction and reembedding, see James Vernon, Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 2014). 42. For important programmatic statements and reviews of the field, see Lucien Febvre, “La sensibilité et l’histoire: Comment reconstruire la vie affective d’autrefois?” Annales d’histoire sociale 3, nos. 1–­2 (1941); Reddy, Navigation; Barbara Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” AHR 107, no. 3 (2002): 1–­27; and Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 43. For lucid critiques of the turns to affect and “deep” histories, see William M. Reddy, “Neuroscience and the Fallacies of  Functionalism,” History and Theory 49, no. 3 (2010): 412–­25; and Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 434–­72. 44.  Plamper, History of Emotions, 12, 38 passim. 45.  Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles. La micro-­analyse à l’expérience (Paris: EHESS, 1996). 46. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [1944]); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–­1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

Notes to Pages 16–25  205

Chapter One 1. Starobinski, “Idea of  Nostalgia,” 84. 2. For biographical information on Hofer, see Jean-­Gustave Dardel, Histoire et généalogie de la famille Hofer de Mulhouse, 1418–­1935, vol. 1 (Mulhouse: E. Meininger, 1936); and Jean François Rietsch, “Johannes Hofer (1669–­1752), médecin et Bourgmestre à Mulhouse” (medical thesis, Université de Strasbourg, 1986). 3. On Cartesianism in Basel, see Samuel S. B. Taylor, “The Enlightenment in Switzerland,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 72–­89. 4. Wolfgang Rother, “Paratus sum sententiam mutare: The Influence of Cartesian Philosophy at Basle,” in History of Universities, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 22/1:84; and Fritz Husner, Verzeichnis der Basler medizinischen Universitätsschriften von 1575–­1829 (Basel: Universitätsbibliothek Basel, 1942). 5. Rietsch, “Johannes Hofer,” 37. 6. On the problem of assigning authorship to early modern university theses, see Werner Kundert, Katalog der Helmstedter juristischen Disputationen, Programme und Reden 1574–­1810 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1984), 53–­75; Dirk van Miert, Humanism in an Age of Science: The Amsterdam Athenaeum in the Golden Age, 1632–­1704 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 149–­60; and Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 94–­101. 7. On these developments see Oskar Diethelm, Medical Dissertations of Psychiatric Interest Printed before 1750 (Basel: S. Karger Verlag, 1971), 10–­11; Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), 31; and Roger French, Medicine before Science: The Business of Medicine from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 102–­5 passim. 8. The medical faculty of Basel was one of the first, in 1575, to systematically publish its students’ inaugural theses (generally in quarto and distributed in two hundred to three hundred loosely bound copies). The fact that Hofer was able to publish his preliminary thesis as well suggests both that it was well received and that he was well connected. See Diethelm, Medical Dissertations of Psychiatric Interest, 161–­63. 9. Johannes Hofer, Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe (Basel: Jacob Bertsch, 1688). References to this source are inserted directly in the main text. I use my own translation. For an older, problematic one in English, see Carolyn Kiser Anspach, “Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia by Johannes Hofer, 1688,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2 (1934): 376–­91. Abridged and more literary translations into German and Italian are also available in Fritz Ernst, ed., Vom Heimweh (Zurich: Fretz & Wasmuth Verlag, 1949), 61–­72; and Antonio Prete, ed.,  Nostalgia: Storia di un sentimento (Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 1992), 45–­61. 10. French, Medicine before Science. 11. Heinrich Buess, “The Anatomical and Physiological Approach in Swiss Medicine during the Seventeenth Century,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 27, no. 6 (1953): 517. 12. Starobinski, “Idea of  Nostalgia,” 87. 13. George S. Rousseau, “Nerves, Spirits, Fibers: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility,” in Studies in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 3, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 137–­57. See also Illbruck, Nostalgia, 43–­60.

206  Notes to Pages 25–29 14. This has been shown to be the case especially for psychological disorders. See Roy Porter, Mind-­Forg’d Manacles: A History of  Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Penguin, 1990), 13ff.; and Angus Gowland, “The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy,” Past and Present 191, no. 1 (2006): 86–­88. On the slow decline and afterlives of  Galenism, see Oswei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), 134–­92. 15. On these connections, see Jean Starobinski, “Histoire du traitement de la mélancolie,” L’encre de la mélancolie (Paris: Seuil, 2012 [1960]), 13–­157; and Stanley W.  Jackson, Melancholia and Depression from Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); and Care of the Psyche: A History of Psychological Healing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), esp. 201–­35. 16. I am here following Fernando Vidal’s conceptual history of the origins of “psychology” in his The Sciences of the Soul: The Early Modern Origins of Psychology, trans. Saskia Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), esp. 1–­97. 17. Vidal, Sciences of the Soul, 74–­75 passim. 18. François Laplassotte, “Quelques étapes de la physiologie du cerveau du XVIIe au XIXe siècle,” Annales: Economies, Societies, Civilisations 25, no. 3 (1970): 607. Hofer’s preference for locating the sensorium in the corpora striata over the centrum ovale suggests familiarity with the neuroanatomical studies of both Thomas Willis and the Montpellier anatomist Raymond Vieussens. 19. See Theodor M. Brown, “Descartes, Dualism, and Psychosomatic Medicine,” in The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, vol. 1, People and Ideas, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (London: Tavistock, 1985), 40–­62. 20. Sergio Moravia, “From Homme Machine to Homme Sensible: Changing Eighteenth-­ Century Models of  Man’s Image,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39, no. 1 (1978): 45–­60. 21. On this well-­established practice, see Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham, and Jon Arrizabalaga, eds., Centres of Medical Excellence? Medical Travel and Education in Europe, 1500–­ 1789 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 22. Burton talked about the effects of banishment on people’s moods, opining that it was “but a childish humour to hone after home.” Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Philadelphia: Moore, 1857 [1621]), 368. On Platter, see Oskar Diethelm and Thomas Heffernan, “Felix Platter and Psychiatry,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 1, no. 1 (1965): 10–­23; and  Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, 91–­95. 23. Lelland J. Rather, “Thomas Fienus’ (1567–­1631) Dialectical Investigation of the Imagination as Cause and Cure of Bodily Disease,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 44, no. 4 (1967): 349–­67. On the ancient doctrine of the non-­naturals and early modern medicine of the passions, see Lelland J. Rather, “The ‘Six Things Non-­natural’: A Note on the Origins and Fate of a Doctrine and a Phrase,” Clio Medica 3 (1968): 333–­47; and Fay Bound Alberti, “Emotions in the Early Modern Medical Tradition,” in Medicine, Emotions and Disease, 1700–­1950, ed. Fay Bound Alberti (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 1–­21. 24. Theodor M. Brown, “Mental Disease,” in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 1:451. 25. See Starobinski, Histoire du traitement, 62; Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-­Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); and Yasmin Haskell,

Notes to Pages 29–33  207 Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011), 4. 26. Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2ff. 27. See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), esp. 230, 256–­57; and Marie-­Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 28. On Descartes’s use of the word “emotion” as a psychological category (“émotion de l’âme”) at a time when the term signified the commotion caused by a rowdy crowd (an “émotion populaire”), see Joan Dejean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 79–­83. On the passions in Hobbes’s Leviathan, see Peter Harrison, “Reading the Passions: The Fall, the Passions, and Dominion over Nature,” in The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (London: Routledge, 1998), 92–­95. 29. For two recent reevaluations of the debate see Jan de Vries, “The Economic Crisis of the Seventeenth Century after Fifty Years,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40, no. 2 (2009): 151–­94; and Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 30. On these macroeconomic and social transformations, see especially Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–­1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); and The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Pomeranz, Great Divergence; and Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). 31. Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 1680–­1715 (New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2013); and Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–­1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 32. On the history of Mulhouse, see Raymond Oberlé, La République de Mulhouse pendant la guerre de trente ans (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1965); and Georges Livet and Raymond Oberlé, eds., Histoire de Mulhouse des origines à nos jours (Strasbourg: Editions des Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, 1977). 33. Livet and Oberlé, Histoire de Mulhouse, 111. 34. Raymond Oberlé, “La république de Mulhouse et les réfugiés Huguenots,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français 132, no. 2 (1986): 284–­300. Hofer’s mentor, a pastor named Robert, and one of  his brothers repeatedly braved French warnings against offering protection to Huguenot refugees. Once in Basel, Hofer seems to have become acquainted with Charles Ancillon, a prominent  jurist in the Metz Parlement who fled France after the Revocation of the Edict of  Nantes, and who subsequently authored a short poem on nostalgia that features as an appendix to Hofer’s dissertation. 35. The expression is from Hazard, Crisis, 400–­401. “Uneasiness” is the term John Locke used to describe the state of pain and anxiety humans lived in (and sought to break free from) in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Penguin, 1997 [1689]), esp. book 2, chap­ ters 20 and 21. 36. Goodman, “Romantic Poetry”; and “Uncertain Disease.” 37. On the apodemic arts see Daniel Roche, Les circulations dans l’Europe moderne,

208  Notes to Pages 33–36 XVIIe–­XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 2010), 49–­93 passim; and Sylvain Venayre, Panorama du voyage (1780–­1920). Mots, figures, pratiques (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2012), 145–­64. 38. Starobinski, Histoire du traitement, 109–­14; Venayre, Panorama du voyage, 320–­26; and Jonathan Andrews, “Letting Madness Range: Travel and Mental Disorder c. 1700–­1900,” in Pathologies of Travel, ed. Richard Wrigley and George Revill (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 25–­88. 39. For some recent syntheses, see Roche, Circulations, esp. pp. 245–­358, 569–­666, and 923–­1018; and Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 1–­59. Migration within the Swiss Confederation was extensive but, by and large, local and seasonal until the late eighteenth century. See Jean François Berger, Histoire économique de la Suisse (Paris: Armand Colin, 1983), 45–­46. 40. De Vries, Economy of Europe, esp. 147–­209. 41. On domestic servants in early modern Europe, and the gradual trend from viewing them as integral members of the household to wage workers in a monetary transaction, see Jean-­Pierre Gutton, Domestiques et serviteurs dans la France de l’ancien régime (Paris: Aubier-­Montaigne, 1981); Sarah Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-­Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 42. Foucault, Madness. On the policing of mobility, see Roche, Circulations, esp. 359–­478 and 937–­47. 43. Livet and Oberlé, Histoire de Mulhouse, 118–­20. 44. Roche, Circulations, 264–­86. 45. The term had been in use since at least 1569, when the celebrated army captain and leader of Catholic Swiss cantons Ludwig Pfyffer wrote to city authorities in Luzerne that amid casualties at the Battle of  Jarnac, one soldier had “died of homesickness” (“gestorben von heimwe”). Cited in Anton Philip von Segesser, Ludwig Pfyffer und seine Zeit: Ein Stück französischer und schweizerischer Geschichte im sechszehnten Jahrhundert (Bern: K. J. Wyss, 1880–­82), 1:642. In France, the physician Remy Fort was perhaps the first to talk of “maladie du païs” in his Le médecin d’armée ou les entretiens de Polémiatre et de Léoceste sur les maladies des soldats (Paris: R. Pepie, 1685 [1681]), 191–­94. 46. John McCormack, One Million Mercenaries: Swiss Soldiers in the Armies of the World (London: Leo Cooper, 1993). The tradition lives on, of course, in the Vatican. 47. André Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–­1789, trans. Abigail T. Siddall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 131–­36. 48. John Lynn, “Recalculating French Army Growth during the Grand Siècle, 1610–­1715,” French Historical Studies 18, no. 4 (1994): 887 and 899; and Guy Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661–­1701 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 171. 49. Thomas More famously entrusted the defense of his imaginary utopia to mercenary soldiers from the “Zapoletes,” a tribe of warriors modeled on the Swiss: Sir Thomas More, Utopia (New York: Norton, 1992 [1516]), 68. Niccolò Machiavelli had mixed feelings about the Swiss: on the one hand he despised mercenaries in general and Italian condottieri in particular, at times criticizing Swiss pike tactics as well; on the other, he recognized that the Swiss Confederation

Notes to Pages 36–40  209 had provided the first successful example of a successful militia army since ancient times. See Niccolò Machiavelli, Art of  War, ed. and trans. Christopher Lynch (Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 2003 [1521]); and The Prince, ed. and trans. David Wootton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995 [1532]), chapters 12–­13 passim. Writing on the eve of the French Revolution, Condorcet explicitly distinguished the Swiss and American militias from the provincial milice established by Louis XIV in 1688, and which only served as a reserve force to supplement the mammoth French standing army in case of need, thus having none of the virtues of a properly republican force (Marie-­Jean-­Antoine-­Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assemblées provinciales [1788], 1:246–­53). Although it is commonplace to speak of the Swiss as “mercenaries,” this is therefore misleading as they were, first and foremost, patriotic militiamen. As Corvisier further suggests, by serving abroad they were expressing their “national spirit” insofar as defending Swiss independence (Corvisier, Armies, 135–­36). 50. On the history of Swiss hired soldiers in foreign armies, see McCormack, One Million Mercenaries; Paul de Vallière, Honneur et fidélité: Histoire des Suisses au service étranger (Neufchatel: F. Zahn, 1913); and David Parrott, The Business of  War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 46–­67. 51. For some standard and revisionist accounts, see André Corvisier, Louvois (Paris: Fayard, 1984);  John A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army, 1610–­1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); David Parrott, Richelieu’s Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624–­1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Rowlands, Dynastic State; and Hervé Drévillon, L’impôt du sang. Le métier des armes sous Louis XIV (Paris: Tallandier, 2005). David Parrott speaks of a “public-­private partnership” to describe the French army’s reforms and continued reliance on foreign troops and the venality of office during Louis XIV’s reign: Parrott, Business of  War, 1–­17, 266–­79 passim. 52. Corvisier, Histoire militaire de la France, 398. 53. Lynn, Giant, 173. 54. Emmanuel May de Romainmotier, Histoire militaire de la Suisse et celle des suisses dans le différents services d’Europe (Lausanne: J. P. Heubach, 1788), 5:444–­48; Lynn, Giant, 104–­5; McCormack, One Million Mercenaries, 113–­20; and Vallière, Honneur et fidélité, 298–­99. 55. Raymond Oberlé, “Le zugewandter Ort Mulhouse: amitié, assistance, fidélité,” in Eidgenössische “Grenzfälle”: Mülhausen und Genf, ed. Wolfgang Kaiser, Claudius Sieber-­Lehmann, and Christian Windler (Basel: Schwabe & Co., 2001), 74. 56. Goldstein, Post-­Revolutionary Self, 23. My analysis in the following paragraphs is heavily indebted to Goldstein’s argument. 57. On the many permutations of this conceptual couple, see Yates, Art of Memory. 58. For extended discussions of changing views on imagination and its Enlightenment critics, see Huet, Monstrous Imagination; Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), esp. 20–­30; and Goldstein, Post-­Revolutionary Self, esp. 21–­59. 59. Reinhard Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Presner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 154–­69 and 218–­35; and Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 255–­75.

210  Notes to Pages 40–46 60. Hartog, Regimes of Historicity; and, for important applications to the study of the Enlightenment and the famous querelle, Daniel Brewer, The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-­Century French Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). On 1688 as a year of global social and intellectual transformation, see John E. Willis, Jr., 1688: A Global History (New York: Norton, 2001). 61. Koselleck, Futures Past, 266; and Practice, 166. For a cautious revision of Koselleck’s thesis that maintains the idea of a shift in regime of temporalities, see Peter Burke, “The History of the Future, 1350–­2000,” in The Uses of the Future in Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrea Brady and Emily Butterworth (London: Routledge, 2010), ix–­xx.

Chapter Two 1. The four editions that followed Hofer’s original 1688 one are: “Dissertatio Medica tertia de Pothopatridalgia, vom Heim-­Wehe,” in Fasciculus dissertationnum medicarum selectiorium, ed. Theodor Zwinger (Basel: Conradi, 1710), 87–­111; Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe (Basel: Jacob Bertsch, 1678); Dissertatio curioso-­medica de nostalgia, vulgo: Heimwehe oder Heimsehnsucht (Basel: Jacob Pertsch, 1745); and “Dissertatio de Nostalgia (Basel 22 Jun. 1678),” in Disputationes ad morborum historiam et curationem facientes, vol. 1, ed. Albrecht von Haller (Lausanne: M. M. Bousquet, 1757). 2. Harder died in 1711, aged fifty-­five (and followed not long thereafter, in 1724, by Zwinger). By the time Haller’s edition appeared in 1757, Hofer too had passed away. 3. Ian Maclean, “The Medical Republic of  Letters before the Thirty Years War,” Intellectual History Review, 18, no. 1 (2008): 15–­30. See also James E. McClellan, Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 4. On environmental medicine, see Ludmilla Jordanova, “Earth Science and Environmental Medicine: The Synthesis of the Late Enlightenment,” in Images of the Earth: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences, ed. Ludmilla Jordanova and Roy Porter (New York: St. Martin Press, 1987), 119–­46; and Vladimir Jankovic, Confronting the Climate: British Airs and the Making of Environmental Medicine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 5. On the history of professions and the eighteenth-­century origins of the medical one, see Jan Goldstein, “Foucault among the Sociologists: The ‘Disciplines’ and the History of the Professions,” History and Theory 23, no. 2 (1984): 170–­92; and Thomas Broman, “Rethinking Professionalization: Theory, Practice, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-­Century German Medicine,” Journal of Modern History 67, no. 4 (1995): 835–­72. 6. “Dissertatio Medica Tertia de Pothopatridalgia,” §XII, 101–­2. As George S. Rousseau has astutely observed, it is no coincidence that the first medical descriptions of nostalgia appeared at a time of semiconstant warfare and rise in patriotic sentiment in Europe. See G. S. Rousseau, “War and Peace: Some Representations of  Nostalgia and Adventure in the Eighteenth Century,” in Guerres et paix: la Grande-­Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Paul-­Gabriel Boucé (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne, 1998), 1:126–­27. 7. Johann Jacob Scheuchzer, “Von dem Heimwehe,” Natur-­Geschichten des Schweizerlandes (Zurich: David Gesnner, 1746 [1705]), 1:86–­92. Originally published in 1705, Scheuchzer’s text

Notes to Pages 46–49  211 was reprinted several times, including in Latin translation, as “De Nostalgia,” in De bononiensi scientiarum et artium instituto atque academia commentarii (Bologna, 1731), 1:307–­13. Scheuchzer is perhaps best known for his contribution to the “study” of dragons in the Alps. 8. On enthusiasm for barometers and atmospheric medicine at the time, see Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 9. Scheuchzer, “Von dem Heimwehe,” 87. 10. Tackius, Dissertatio inauguralis medica exhibens aegrum nostalgia laborantem (Gießen: Vulpius, 1707), 12–­13; and Jean-­Baptiste Gastaldy, Quaestio medica an pothopadridalgia, seu anxio patriam repetendi desiderio vulgo maladie du pays (Avignon: F. Mallard, 1713), 12–­13. 11. Albrecht von Haller, Relation d’un voyage d’Albert de Haller dans l’Oberland Bernois, trans. Henri Mettier (Langres: Martin-­Berret, 1906 [1732]), 9–­10. 12. See, for example,  Johan Georg Keyßler, Neueste Reisen durch Deutschland, Böhmen, Ungarn, die Schweitz, Italien und Lothringen (Hannover: Förster, 1740), 1:61–­62 (translated into English in 1756). 13. Jean-­Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (Paris: P.-­J. Mariette, 1733 [1709]), 248–­50. 14. “Maladie,” Dictionnaire universel françois et latin (Paris: Trévoux, 1721), 4:92. 15. L. Jaucourt, “Hemvé,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert (Neuftchatel, 1765), 8:129–­30. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2013 Edition), ed. Robert Morrissey, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/. 16. The first occurrence of “nostalgie” in the French language seems to be in Joseph Lieutaud, Précis de la médecine pratique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Vincent, 1761), 201–­3. A decade later, it featured as a separate entry in Hélian’s Dictionnaire du diagnostique, ou l’art de connoître les maladies et de les distinguer exactement les unes des autres (Paris: Vincent, 1771), 284–­85. 17. Sergio Moravia, “Homme Machine”; and Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 419 for quote. 18. On the “Kühe-­Reyen,” see Guy S. Métraux, Le Ranz des vaches. Du chant de bergers à l’hymne patriotique (Lausanne: Editions 24 Heures, 1984). 19. John Gregory, A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World (London: Cadell, 1798 [1765]), 164–­65. 20. In September 1776, John Laurens wrote his father, Henry, from London, complaining that he had “La Maladie du païs to a greater excess than any poor Swiss soldier ever had, upon hearing his dear Rans-­des-­Vaches play’d in a foreign soil.” John Laurens to Henry Laurens, September 29, 1776, in Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 11,  January 6, 1776—­November 1, 1777, ed. David R. Chesnutt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 274. 21. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, “Lettre à M. le maréchal de Luxembourg,” from Môtiers, January 20, 1763, in Lettres (1728–­1778) (Lausanne: La Guilde du Livre, 1959), letter 87, 167–­73. By 1763 Rousseau had been forced to flee France to the Swiss canton of Neufchâtel following the publication of his Emile and The Social Contract the previous year. 22. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1768), 314–­ 15 and plate N; and Encyclopédie, Recueil de planches, 6th installment, vol. 7 (1769), Musique, plate VII.

212  Notes to Pages 49–52 23. Henri Fouquet, “Sensibilité, sentiment (médecine),” Encyclopédie, 15:38. On eighteenth-­ century medical theories of sensibility, see J.-­J. Rousseau, “Nerves”; Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-­Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1–­18 passim. 24. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1959]). 25. See Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloise, letter 23, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969 [1761]), 76–­84. On the ubiquity of pastoral themes in eighteenth-­century France, see Daniel Mornet, Le sentiment de la nature en France de J.-­J. Rousseau à Bernardin de Saint-­ Pierre (Paris: Hachette, 1907), 52–­53 passim; and D. G. Charlton, New Images of the Natural in France: A Study in European Cultural History, 1750–­1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). As Laurence Lerner has argued, nostalgia is the basic emotion of pastoral poetry and themes: Lerner, The Uses of Nostalgia: Studies in Pastoral Poetry (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), 44–­45. 26. Among the first were Gottlieb Jakob Kuhn, Sammlung von Schweizer Kühreihen und alten Volksliedern (Bern: J. J. Burgdorfer, 1812); and George Tarenne, Recherches sur les ranz des vaches ou sur les chansons pastorales des bergers de la Suisse (Paris: Louis, 1813). 27. See Jacques Delille’s hugely popular pastoral (and versified treatise of sensationalist psychology), L’imagination. Poème, 2nd ed. (Paris: Michaud, 1825 [1806]), chant quatrième: Impression des lieux, 1:227–­59. 28. In Britain, the ranz appeared in the poetry of Samuel Rogers and William Wordsworth (“On Hearing the ‘Ranz des Vaches’ on the Top of the Pass of St. Gothard” [1822]), as well as in Archim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s collection of German folk poems Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806). It provided a musical soundtrack to Friedrich Schiller’s theatrical and Gioacchino Rossini’s operatic adaptations of the life of  Wilhelm Tell (1804 and 1829), and went on to become a favored leitmotif for countless nineteenth-­century romantic composers, from Ludwig van Beethoven and Hector Berlioz to Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and Johannes Brahms (among many others). See J. W. Smeed, “The Folk Song ‘Zu Straßburg Auf  Der Schanz’ and Eighteenth-­Century Notions of Switzerland,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 30, no. 2 (1994): 135–­43; Alec Hyatt King, “Mountains, Music and Musicians,” Musical Quarterly 31, no. 4 (1945): 395–­419; Pierre Michot, “Le Ranz des Vaches et son echo dans la musique romantique,” Bulletin de l’Association culturelle pour le voyage en Suisse 11 (2008): 37–­ 54; and Bunke, Heimweh, 253–­401. 29. Etienne Pivert de Senancour, Rêveries sur la nature primitive de l’homme (Paris: Droz, 1939 [1799]), 3rd rêverie, 1:57–­59; and Oberman, letter 38, 3rd fragment (Paris: Garnier-­ Flammarion, 2003 [1804]), 172–­76. 30. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006 [1798]), 60–­72 (my own translation). 31. Johann Juncker, Conspectus medicinae theoretico-­practicae, 2nd ed. (Halle: Impensis Orphanotrophei, 1724), 935–­37. On Stahl’s animism, see Lester S. King, “Stahl and Hoffmann: A Study in Eighteenth Century Animism,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 19, no. 2 (1964): 118–­30.

Notes to Pages 53–55  213 32. Albrecht von Haller, Onomatologia medica completa oder Medicinisches Lexicon (Frankfurt: In der Gaumischen Handlung, 1755), 1072. 33. Albrecht von Haller,  Disputationes ad morborum historiam et curationem facientes, quas collegit, edidit et recensuit Albertus Hallerus (Lausanne: M. M. Bousquet, 1757), 1:181–­90. 34. H. D. G. [Albrecht von Haller], “Nostalgie,” in Supplément à l‘Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Amsterdam: Rey, 1777), 4:60. On Haller and his pioneering research on sensibility, see Vila, Enlightenment, 1–­42 passim. 35. Johann Georg Zimmermann, Von der Erfahrung in der Arzneikunst (Zurich: Drell, 1787), 373 and 555–­57; and Traité de l’expérience en général et en particulier dans l’art de guérir, trans. Le Febvre de Villerbrune, 3 vols. (Paris: Vincent, 1774), 2:354 and 3:264–­69. On Zimmermann and the origins of Swiss patriotism, see Oliver Zimmer, A Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland, 1761–­1891 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. 1–­79. 36. George Cheyne, The English Malady, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1991 [1733]), xxvi–­xxxii. 37. Richard Brookes, An Introduction to Physic and Surgery (London: Newberry, 1754), 54; Thomas Arnold, Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy or Madness (Leicester: Robinson, 1786), 2:59–­60; Hélian, Dictionnaire du diagnostique, 284. 38. Leland J. Rather, Mind and Body in Eighteenth-­Century Medicine: A Study Based on Jerome Gaub’s “De regimine mentis” [1763] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 149–­50 and 174–­77. 39. Paul-­Joseph Barthez, Nouveaux éléments de la science de l’homme, 2nd ed. (Paris: Goujon et Brunot, 1806 [1776]), 2:189; Alexis Miquel, Tentamen medicum de nostalgia, gallice maladie du pays (Montpellier, 1778);  Jean-­Pierre de Bela, Tentamen medicum de nostalgia (Montpellier: Picot, 1779); and Louis-­David Muret, Dissertatio medica de nostalgia in Helvetiis praesertim considerata (Montpellier: Picot, 1780). Montpellier vitalism is explored in Elizabeth Williams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750–­1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 20–­66; and A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Medical students elsewhere also wrote on nostalgia: Georg Curé, Dissertatio inauguralis medica exhibens famosi illius morbi, quem nostalgiam passim pathologici, germani vero Das Heimwehe, oder Heim-­ Sehnsucht vulgo appellant (Würzburg: Kleyer, 1755); and Joseph Verhovitz, Dissertatio inauguralis de nostalgia (Vienna: Gerhold, 1777). 40. William Falconer, A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon the Disorders of the Body, 3rd ed. (London: C. Dilly, 1796 [1787]), 155–­58 (quote at 155). 41. Carl Linnaeus, Genera morborum (Uppsala, 1763); synoptic overview reproduced in Cullen, Nosology, 194–­95. 42. François Boissier de Sauvages, Nosologie méthodique ou distribution des maladies en classes, en genres et en especes suivant l’esprit de Sydenham, & la méthode des botanistes, 10 vols. (Lyon: Gouvion, 1772 [1763]). On Sauvages, see Williams, Medical Vitalism, 80–­111; and Julian Martin, “Sauvages’s Nosology: Medical Enlightenment in Montpellier,” in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Andrew Cunningham and David French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 111–­37.

214  Notes to Pages 55–58 43. Sauvages, Nosologie méthodique, 7:3 and 237–­241. Significantly enough, Sauvages also identified a third form: a pernicious kind of  “feigned” nostalgia. 44. Johann Sagar, Systema morborum symptomaticum (Vienna: Johann Paul Kraus, 1776), 716 and 732–­33. 45. Cullen,  Nosology, 22 and 164. Cullen’s Synopsis nosologiae methodicae was originally published in Latin in 1769. 46. Cullen, Nosology, 162n. On Cullen and the history of neuroses, see, among others, José M. López Pinero, Historical Origins of the Concept of Neurosis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 11–­24. 47. Philippe Pinel, Nosographie philosophique, ou la méthode de l’analyse appliquée à la médecine, 1st ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Maradan, Year VI [1798]). 48. For a classic analysis, see Erwin H. Ackerknecht, Medicine at the Paris Hospital, 1794–­ 1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967). 49. Toby Gelfand, “Gestation of the Clinic,” Medical History 25, no. 2 (1981): 169–­80. 50. For exhaustive analyses, see Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 622–­70 passim; and Matthew Ramsey, Professional and Popular Medicine in France 1770–­1830: The Social World of Medical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 51. On surgery and medical reform in eighteenth-­century France, see Toby Gelfand, Professionalizing Modern Medicine: Paris Surgeons and Medical Science and Institutions in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); and Brockliss and  Jones, Medical World, esp. 480–­621. 52. See Toby Gelfand, “The Origins of the Modern Concept of Medical Specialization: John Morgan’s Discourse of 1765,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 50, no. 4 (1976): 511–­36. 53. Thomas H. Broman, The Transformation of German Academic Medicine, 1750–­1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. 13–­72. 54. On medical police, see George Rosen, “Cameralism and the Concept of  Medical Police,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 27, no. 1 (1953): 21–42; and Ludmilla Jordanova, “Policing Public Health in France, 1780–­1815,” in Public Health: Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on the Comparative History of Medicine—­East and West, ed. Teizo Ogawa (Tokyo: Taniguchi Foundation, 1981), 12–­32. On public hygiene in France, see Ann F. La Berge, Mission and Method: The Early Nineteenth-­Century French Public Health Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 55. Goldstein, “Foucault”; and Console, esp. 8–­40 and 398–­415. On medicalization and popularization see also Jean-­Pierre Goubert, ed., La médicalisation de la société française 1770–­1830 (Waterloo, ON: Historical Reflections Press, 1982); Ramsey, Professional and Popular Medicine; and Roy Porter, ed., The Popularization of Medicine, 1650–­1850 (London: Routledge, 1992). 56. Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 29, 689–­700, 752–­60, and 815–­18. For a brief overview of the origins of  European military medical services, see Mark Harrison, “Medicine and the Management of Modern Warfare,” History of Science 34, no. 4 (1996): 379–­410. 57. Rafe Blaufarb, The French Army, 1750–­1820: Careers, Talent, Merit (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 12. On aristocratic corporatism and professionalization in the army in the last decade of the Old Regime, see also David D. Bien, “La réaction aristocratique avant 1789: l’exemple de l’armée,” Annales ESC 29, no. 1 (1974): 23–­48 and 505–­34; Jay Smith,

Notes to Pages 58–60  215 The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Loyal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600–­1789 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), esp. 227–­62; and Rafe Blaufarb, “Noble Privilege and Absolutist State Building: French Military Administration after the Seven Years War,” French Historical Studies 24, no. 2 (2001): 223–­46. 58. On French military medicine, see Marie Raoul Brice and Maurice Bottet, Le corps de santé militaire en France (Paris: Bergers-­Levrault, 1907), 1–­50; David M. Vess, Medical Revolution in France, 1789–­1796 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1975), 1–­39; and Jean Guillermand, ed., Histoire de la médecine aux armées, vol. 1, De l’antiquité à la révolution (Paris: Lavauzelle, 1982). 59. Bernardino Ramazzini, De Morbis Artificum Diatriba [1700], in Opera Omnia, Medica & Physiologica (Geneva: Cramer & Perachon, 1717), 639. The text was translated into French in 1771 by the chemist Antoine-­François Fourcroy, who kept the German Heimwehe (Essai sur les maladies des artisans [Paris: Moutard, 1771], 482). 60. Samuel Auguste Tissot, Avis au peuple sur sa santé (Lausanne: Zimmerli, 1761), 2. Tissot blamed Heimweh for causing the death of large numbers of Swiss soldiers who served in foreign armies. His Italian translator added a footnote to Tissot’s passing mention, justifying an extensive digression on the subject on the grounds that his Italian readership might not be as familiar as the Swiss on “la nostalgia,” also known as “mal del paese.” See Tissot,  Avvertimento al Popolo sopra la sua salute, trans. Gianpietro Pellegrini (Venezia: Zatta, 1766), 2 and 20–­30. 61. Geoffrey Parker, The Army of the Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567–­1659, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 143. 62. Fort, Médecin d’armée, 30–­39 and 191–­94. Odile Roynette suggests that we view this, rather than Hofer’s thesis, as the very first description of nostalgia in her Les mots des soldats (Paris: Belin, 2004), 184. 63. ANOM COL C11A 10, fol. 10v, Denonville, letter to Champigny, November 2, 1688. 64. Leopold Auenbrugger’s Inventum novum ex percussione thoracis humani ut signo abstruse interni pectoris morbos detegendi (Vienna, 1761) was first translated into French in 1770 and then again in expanded fashion by Napoleon’s personal physician Jean-­Nicolas Corvisart as Nouvelle méthode pour reconnaitre les maladies internes de la poitrine par la percussion de cette cavité (Paris: Imprimerie de Migneret, 1808), 156 and 171–­76 for quotes. Auenbrugger’s contribution to the medical history of nostalgia is highlighted in George Rosen, “Percussion and Nostalgia,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 27, no. 4 (1972): 448–­50. 65. Pierre Barrere, Observations anatomiques tirées des ouvertures d’un grand nombre de cadavres (Perpignan: Reynier, 1753), 7–­27; Robert Hamilton, The Duties of a Regimental Surgeon Considered (London: Johnson, 1787), 1:127–­34; and “History of a Remarkable Case of  Nostalgia Affecting a Native of  Wales and Occurring in Britain,” reprinted in Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry: 1538–­1860. A History Presented in Selected English Texts, ed. Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 499–­500. 66. John Pringle, Observations on the Diseases of the Army (London: Millar, Wilson and Payne, 1752). 67. Thomas Trotter, Observations on the Scurvy, with a Review of the Opinions Lately Advanced on That Disease, 1st ed. (Edinburgh: Charles Elliot, 1786), 29, 37–­38; and 2nd ed. (London: Longman and Watts, 1792), 40–­45; and Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of

216  Notes to Pages 60–63 Organic Life (London: J. Johnson, 1796), 2:346. On scorbutic nostalgia, see also Jonathan Lamb, “ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ a Ballad of the Scurvy,” Clio Medica 56 (2000): 157–­77; and “Scorbutic Nostalgia,” Journal of Maritime Research 15, no. 1 (2013): 27–­36. 68. Ernst Gottfried Baldinger, Von den Krankheiten einer Armee (Langensalza: Martini, 1765 [first latin ed. 1763]), 308; Gerard van Swieten, A Short Account of the Most Common Diseases Incident to Armies, 2nd ed. (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1767 [1758]), v; and André Corvisier, L’armée française de la fin du XVIIe siècle au ministère de Choiseul. Le soldat (Paris: PUF, 1964), 2:876–­77. 69. Guillaume Mahieu de Meyserey, La médecine d’armée, contenant des moyens aisés de préserver des maladies, sur terre et sur mer (Paris: Vve Cavelier et fils, 1754), 1:105–­12. 70. James Thatcher, A Military Journal during the American Revolutionary War, from 1775 to 1783 (Boston: Richardson and Lord, 1823), 242; Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Conrad & Co., 1805 [1789]), 285–­86; Allen Bowman, The Morale of the American Revolutionary Army (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1943), 63; and Matt, Homesickness, 30–­35. On “pension neuroses” in modern Germany, see Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–­1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 71. Jean Colombier, Code de médecine militaire pour le service de terre, 5 vols. (Paris: Costard, 1772), 1:141–­66 and 5:221–­32 (232 for quote). A tireless reformer, Colombier is better known for his calls to overhaul medical treatment for the insane on the eve of the Revolution. 72. The malaise and attempted reforming of the French army are examined in David D. Bien, “The Army in the French Enlightenment: Reform, Reaction, and Revolution,” Past and Present 85 (1979): 68–­98. 73. Christy Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017); and Guinier, Honneur du soldat, 102–­6 and 204–­9. On parallel trends toward a “caring fiscal-­military” state in Britain, see Erica Charters, Disease, War, and the Imperial State: The Welfare of the British Armed Forces during the Seven Years War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 74. M. Rollan, “Exposé d’une maladie putride, inflammatoire et vermineuse qui a régné en 1757 sur la fin de l’été parmi les soldats du bataillon de la milice de Mortagive, en garnison à Maubeuge,” JMM 2 (1783): 149–­59; M. Cotta Lorda, “Observation sur une dissolution gangréneuse guérie par l’air fixe,” JMM 6 (1787): 366–­70; and M. Parant, “Mémoire sur la situation, l’air, et les eaux de la ville de Thionville,” JMM 7 (1788): 292–­314. 75. De Horne added his remarks as footnotes to the articles cited above by Rollan (pp. 159–­ 66); Cotta Lorda (pp. 370–­72); and Parant (pp. 309–­10, footnote g).

Chapter Three 1. Corbon (à Cyrano, bas): Mais tu les fais pleurer! Cyrano: De nostalgie! . . . Un mal plus noble que la faim! . . . pas physique: moral! J’aime que leur souffrance ait changé de viscère, Et que ce soit leur cœur, maintenant, qui se serre! 2. VdG carton 29, dossier 6. Jérôme Lasserre, letter to the members of the military health

Notes to Pages 63–65  217 council in Paris, 30 Brumaire Year II (November 20, 1793). Lorentz’s comments, dated 26 frimaire (December 16), were written directly onto Lasserre’s letter. 3. Service Historique de la Défense (henceforth SHD) 3 Yg 19309 (dossier Jérôme Lasserre). Certificat de civisme signed by the members of the conseil d’administration of First Battalion of Lot-­et-­Garonne, 8 Vendémiaire Year II (September 29, 1793). 4. Saint-­Just was a représentant du peuple en mission—­that is, an elected member of the convention sent to the front to boost troop morale and oversee commanding officers in the wake of Dumouriez’s treason in the spring of 1793. See Ian Germani, “Terror in the Army: Representatives on Mission and Military Disciple in the Armies of the French Revolution,” Journal of Military History 75, no. 3 (2011): 733–­68. 5. VdG 28/1, Lasserre, letter to the members of the military health council in Paris, 5 Germinal Year II (March 25, 1794). Lorentz’s remarks, dated 17 Germinal (April 6), follow Lasserre’s letter. 6. The amalgame was adopted in February 1793 and implemented later that year in order to homogenize France’s disparate forces and combine the military know-­how of seasoned troops to the revolutionary enthusiasm of volunteers. In principle, it entailed assimilating one battalion of the army of the line and two battalions of volunteers raised in 1791 and 1792, in order to form one regiment-­size demi-brigade (on average 2,500 to 3,000 men). As revolutionary leaders turned to a draft system in 1793, leading up to universal service in August with the levée en masse, companies of requisitioned troops were also integrated to the demi-brigades. The amalgame lasted well into 1795 (by which point it had produced 236 demi-brigades) and was immediately followed by a second general reorganization the following year. 7. SHD 16 Yc 237, Contrôle de troupe du 1er bataillon des gardes nationales volontaires du dé­ partement du Lot-­et-­Garonne. 8. SHD 17 Yc 119, Registre matricules de la 116e demi-­brigade de première formation. 9. VdG 28/1, medical examination results (dated 1 Pluviose Year III) added to the verso of Lasserre’s second letter. 10. VdG 28/1, Gilbert et al., convalescence certificate granted to citizen Lasserre, second-­ class surgeon in the 116th demi-brigade, signed by the medical officers in chief of the army of Sambre-­et-­Meuse on 16 Thermidor Year III (August 3, 1795). 11. SHD 3 Yg 19309 (dossier Jérôme Lasserre), minute of missing convalescence certificate delivered by Pierre-­François Percy to Jérôme Lasserre on 19 Fructidor Year III (September 5, 1795). 12. Decree of 24 Messidor Year III (July 12, 1795) by the Committee of Public Safety, suspending the permanent requisition of medical officers in France. In Alphone Aulard, Recueil des actes du comité de salut publique, avec la correspondence officielle des représentants en mission et le registre du conseil exécutif provisoire (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1889–­1923), 25:376–­77. 13. SHD 3 Yg 19309 (dossier Jérôme Lasserre), minute of missing permanent discharge (congé de réforme) granted to Jérôme Lasserre on 21 Vendémiaire Year IV (October 13, 1795). 14. The requisition of physicians, surgeons, and pharmacists was decided on August 1, 1793, bringing in up to 10,000 men by 1795. Most were poorly trained, due to the revolutionaries having closed all medical faculties and completely liberalized the profession (a disastrous policy they would repeal in 1794 with the formation of three new medical schools in Paris, Montpellier,

218  Notes to Pages 65–69 and Strasbourg). See Pierre Huard, Sciences, médecine, pharmacie, de la révolution à l’empire (1789–­1815) (Paris: Roger Dacosta, 1970), 43–­45; and Vess, Medical Revolution, 71–­116ff. 15. SHD 3 Yg 14608 (dossier Nicolas-­Pierre Gilbert), letter from the military health council, signed by Lorentz among others, to Gilbert, dated 2 Prairial Year III (May 21, 1795). 16. [Pierre-­François] Percy and [Charles Nicolas] Laurent, “Nostalgie,” Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (Paris: Panckoucke, 1819), 36:268. Laurent was Percy’s nephew. 17. On microbes and mosquitoes viewed similarly as indispensable historical agents, see Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); and John McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–­1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 18. Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988); and Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (London: Pimlico, 1998). On the concept of “emotives,” which he adapts from J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, see Reddy, Navigation, 96–­110 passim. 19. SHD B13 20, Didier Jourdeuil, letter to the General in command of the army of the Nord, 28 Brumaire Year II (November 18, 1793). 20. Convention nationale, “Rapport et Loi sur la solde des troupes,” 2 Thermidor Year II ( July 20, 1794), Bulletin des lois de la république française 28: 17 and 58 (title III, article IV); and AN AF II 284, Committee of Public Safety, Arrêté of 5 Brumaire Year III (October 26, 1794) on convalescence leaves. 21. Revolutionary era medical officers were asked to keep medical records for their units, but official instructions drafted in 1792 only required them to list these according to four broad categories: fever, wounded, itch, and venereals (the first was by far the largest group). 22. VdG 28/6, Thirion, Mémoire justificatif aux citoyens composants le conseil de santé, Nivôse Year II (December 1793–­January 1794); and Grégoire Lachèse, “Essai sur l’hygiène militaire” (Paris: medical thesis, Year XII [1803]), 36. 23. VdG 30, Emiland Estienne, Résumé des constitutions météorologiques et médicales du gouvernement de Biscaye, pendant l’année Militaire 1812,  January 15, 1813. 24. Chamberet, “Militaire (médecine, hygiène, etc.),” Encyclopédie méthodique, ou par ordre de matières par une société de gens de lettres, de savants et d’artistes. Série médecine (Paris: Panckoucke, 1821), 10:123 and 125. 25. Jacques Terrier, Histoire des maladies de l’armée des Pyrénées occidentales (Pau: Sisos and Tonnet, Year VIII [1799]), 269–­75; Percy and Laurent, “Nostalgie,” 269; Denis François Noël Guerbois, “Essai sur la nostalgie, appelée vulgairement maladie du pays” (Paris: medical the­ sis, Year XI [1803]), 15. 26. On nostalgia in the Grande Armée, see Percy and Laurent, “Nostalgie,” 270; Raymond-­ Aimery-­Philippe-­Joseph de (Duc) Montesquiou-­Fezensac, Journal du camp de Montreuil en 1804 et des campagnes d’Allemagne jusqu’en 1807 (Paris: Imprimerie de Bénard, 1858), 34; and R. Lacronique, “Mesures d’hygiène et de prophylaxie prescrites à l’armée d’Allemagne (1810–­ 1812),” La France médicale, no. 51 (1904): 379. On Italy and Spain, see references above as well as M. Lachaud, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1809); Dominique-Jean Larrey, Mémoires de chirurgie militaire et campagnes (Paris: Smith et Buisson, 1812), 3:179 and 266; and J. J. Armbruster, “Dissertation sur l’hygiène militaire” (Paris: medical thesis, 1817).

Notes to Pages 69–70  219 27. VdG 34 and 35, correspondence from Dominique Larrey and other medical officers serving in the Army of the Orient during the Egyptian campaign (1799–­1801); and René-­Nicolas Desgenettes, Histoire médicale de l’armée d’Orient (Paris: Crouillebois, Year X [1802]), 84. 28. VdG 36, correspondence from Nicolas-­Pierre Gilbert and other medical officers serving in the expeditionary corps in Saint-­Domingue (1801–­3); C.-­A. Gaillardot, “Considérations sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, Year XII [1804]), 23–­24; René le Monnier, “Observations sur quelques épidémies de Saint-­Domingue, compliquées de symptômes de la fièvre dite jaune” (Paris: medical thesis, 1810), 7 and 15; and Alexandre Moreau de  Jonnès, Monographie historique et médicale de la fièvre jaune des Antilles (Paris: Micheret, Béchet, Crevot, 1802), 98. 29. AN F9 57, correspondence between the prefect of Mont Tonnerre in Mainz and the Ministry of the Interior in Paris (1813–­14); Dominique Larrey, “Mémoire sur le siège et les effets de la nostalgie,” in Recueil de mémoires de chirurgie (Paris: Compère Jeune, 1821), 161–­222; Joseph R. L. de Kerckhoffs, Histoire des maladies observées à la grande armée française pendant les campagnes de Russie et 1812 et d’Allemagne en 1813, 3rd ed. (Anvers: Janssens, 1836), 351, and 396–­402; Charles Laurent, “Considérations sur le Typhus qui a régné à Mayence après la campagne de 1813, et pendant le blocus de cette place en 1814” (Paris: medical thesis, 1814); and Jean-­ François Magnin, “Dissertation sur la maladie épidémique et contagieuse observée à Mayence à la fin de la campagne de 1813 et pendant le blocus de cette place” (Paris: medical thesis, 1814). 30. Archives et manuscripts de la Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé—­Médecine Odontologie de Paris, Ms 2418, René Laënnec, letter to Mgr. Dombideau de Crouseilhes, bishop of Quimper ( June 12, 1814); and Jean-­Pierre Falret, “Deux observations de nostalgie, extraites d’un travail inédit sur les maladies mentales, recueillies en 1814 dans les salles de la Salpétrière,” Bibliothèque médicale, recueil périodique d’extraits des meilleurs ouvrages de médecine et de chirurgie (Paris, 1821): 367–­72. 31. AN F8 77, Administration des hôpitaux et hospices civils de Paris, Etat des indigens et des malades, tant civiles que militaires, existans dans les Etablissements ci-­après désignés, le 22 Avril 1814; Annalucia Forti Messina, Il Soldato in ospedale: I servizi di sanità dell’esercito Italico (1796–­1814) (Milan: Angeli, 1991), 211 and 291–­95; and William Blair, The Soldier’s Friend; or The Means of  Preserving the Health of Military Men, Addressed to the Officers of the British Army (London: Longman, 1798), 74. 32. See John Keegan’s essential The Face of Battle (London: Penguin, 1983); and, for developments since, Robert M. Citino, “Military Histories Old and New,” AHR 112, no. 4 (2007): 1070–­90. 33. See Jean-­Yves Guiomar, L’invention de la guerre totale, XVIIIe–­XXe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Félin, 2004); David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007); and, for a critique, Hervé Drévillon, “De la guerre napoléonienne au système napoléonien: les enjeux de la caractérisation des guerres de l’Empire,” in Guerres et armées napoléoniennes. Nouveaux regards, ed. Hervé Drévillon, Bertrand Fonck, and Michel Roucaud (Paris: Nouveau Monde Editions, 2013), 443–­63. For studies of motivation and ideology, see especially Jean-­Paul Bertaud, La Révolution armée: Les soldats-­citoyens et la Révolution française (Paris: Laffont, 1979);  John Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1791–­94 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); and Michael J. Hughes, Forging Napoleon’s Grande Armée: Motivation,

220  Notes to Pages 70–72 Military Culture, and Masculinity in the French Army, 1800–­1808 (New York: NYU Press, 2012). On soldiers’ and civilians’ experiences, see Alan Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990); and Napoleon’s Men: The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire (London: Hambledon, 2002); and Natalie Petiteau, Ecrire la mémoire: les mémorialistes de la Révolution et de l’Empire (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2012). On conscription and desertion, see Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the French Revolution and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformation of the French Civic Order, 1789–­1820s (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1994), 380–­426; and Annie Crépin, Histoire de la conscription (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). On veterans, see Isser Woloch, The French Veteran from the Revolution to the Restoration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); and Natalie Petiteau, Lendemains d’Empire. Les Soldats de Napoléon dans la France du XIXe siècle (Paris: La Boutique de l’Histoire, 2003). On the memory and legacy of the wars, see Jean-­Clément Martin, La vendée de la mémoire, 1800–­ 1980 (Paris: Seuil, 1989); and Alan Forrest, The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars: The Nation-­in-­Arms in the French Republican Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). On these and other facets of this historiographical renewal, see also many excellent studies in the War, Culture and Society, 1750–­1850 series published by Palgrave Macmillan. 34. Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). 35. See Peter Paret, “Napoleon and the Revolution in War,” in Makers of Modern Strategy. From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret, Gordon A. Craig, and Felix Gilbert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 123–­41. 36. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1832]), 238. 37. For transnational perspectives on the idea of a levée en masse, see Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron, eds., The People in Arms: Military Myth and National Mobilization since the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 38. The two classic texts of the military enlightenment in France are Jacques-­Antoine Comte de Guibert, “Essai général de tactique,” in Ecrits militaires, 1772–­1790 (Paris: Copernic, 1977 [1772]); and Joseph Servan, Le soldat-­citoyen, ou vues patriotiques sue la manière la plus avantageuse de pourvoir à la défense du Royaume (Neufchâtel, 1780). For helpful analysis and contextualization, see Thomas Hippler, Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies: Military Service in France and Germany, 1789–­1830 (London: Routledge, 2008), 28–­45; Hervé Drévillon, L’individu et la guerre: du chevalier Bayard au soldat inconnu (Paris: Belin, 2013), 151–­58; and Guinier, Honneur du soldat. 39. Gilbert Bodinier, “L’armée impériale,” in Histoire militaire de la France, vol. 2, De 1715 à 1871, ed. André Corvisier (Paris: PUF, 1992), 305–­8. 40. Bell, Total War, 14–­5 passim. 41. Digby Smith, The Greenhill Napoleonic Wars Data Book (London: Greenhill, 1998), 86–­87; and Alain Pigeard, Dictionnaire de la Grande armée (Paris: Tallandier, 2002), 468–­69, 586–­87, and 923–­25. 42. See Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–­ 1815 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 253–­91. 43. Charles Esdaile, The French Wars, 1792–­1815 (London: Routledge, 2001), 68. 44. Jacques Houdaille, “Pertes de l’armée de terre sous le premier Empire, d’après les

Notes to Pages 73–75  221 registres matricules,” Population 28, no. 1 (1972): 50; and “Les armées de la Révolution d’après les registres matricules,” Population 38, nos. 4–­5 (1983): 843; and David Gates, The Napoleonic Wars, 1803–­1815 (London: Pimlico, 2001), 272. 45. Yves-­Marie Bercé, “Nostalgie et mutilations: psychoses de la conscription,” in Les résistances à la Révolution. Actes du colloque de Rennes (17–­21 septembre 1985), ed. François Le­ brun and Roger Dupuy (Paris: Imago, 1987), 177. 46. Reinhard, “Nostalgie”; Drévillon, L’individu et la guerre, 220–­24. 47. Corvisier, Armée française, 2:879 and 985; Jean Waquet, “Pour une sociopsychologie du transit. L’exemple du recrutement militaire français et belge pendant la Révolution et la pre­ mière moitié du XIXe siècle,” Recrutement, mentalités, sociétés: Actes du colloque international d’histoire militaire, 18–­22 septembre 1974 (Montpellier: Imprimerie de l’Université Paul Valéry, 1974), 127–­28 and 133; and Odile Roynette, “Bons pour le service”: L’expérience de la caserne en France à la fin du XIXe siècle (Paris: Belin, 2000), 34–­40 and 221. 48. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, “Considerations on the Government of Poland and on its Projected Reformation” [1772], in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gurevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 232–­39, quote at 235; and Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” [1795], in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 95. See also Condorcet’s aforementioned Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assemblées provinciales (1788), 1:246–­53. 49. Voltaire, Candide, ed. and trans. Daniel Gordon (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998 [1759]), 43–­45. 50. See Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of  Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); and Hippler, Citizens, 33–­37. 51. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantam, 2003), 879–­89. 52. Marx incessantly compared factories to army barracks, at one point writing to Friedrich Engels that “the history of the army demonstrates the rightness of our views as to the connection between productive forces and social relations.” He left it to Max Weber, though, to explain how centralization and rationalization had “separated [soldiers] from their ‘means of production’ in the same way as the workers are separated from theirs by the capitalist enterprises.” Weber also noted how military discipline had given birth to all other forms of discipline, a point that Michel Foucault would subsequently extend to explore the manifold “micro-­physics of power” exerted to control docile bodies in the modern era. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 443, 448, 450, 549 passim; and letter to Engels, September 25, 1857, in Marx/Engels Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983), 40:186; Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1:215–­24 and 2:963–­83 (quote at 2:983 and 1155–­56); and Foucault, Discipline. 53. Guinier, Honneur du soldat; and cf. Loriga, Soldats, on the eighteenth-­century Piedmontese army (which also suffered from chronic nostalgia). 54. On this point, see also Ehrenberg, Corps militaire. 55. Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire (London: Verso, 2014), 2 and 28 for quotes. 56. Guerbois, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 7, 12, and 17.

222  Notes to Pages 75–80 57. For some examples, see Pierre Mathieu Lourde-­Seillés, “Considérations générales sur la nostalgie” (Montpellier: medical thesis, Year XII [1804]), 7–­10; Antoine-­François-­André Therrin, “Essai sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1810); V. N. F. Boudet, “Dissertation médicale sur la nostalgie” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1814), 11–­12. Cabanis was a professor in the newly reopened medical school of Paris in 1795 (the institution reacquired its old title of  “faculty” in 1808) and became an unavoidable influence with the publication of  his Rapports du physique et du moral in 1802. 58. See, for example, VdG 28/6, Thirion, Mémoire justificatif aux citoyens composants le conseil de santé, Nivose Year II [ January 1794]; and Philippe Pinel, “Nostalgie,” Encyclopédie méthodique. Médecine (1821), 10:662. 59. Jacques Terrier, Histoire des maladies, 274–­75. 60. René Pierre Moricheau-­Beauchamp, “Réflexions sur les modifications que l’éducation et les habitudes ont apportées dans le développement de la nostalgie, pendant la dernière guerre,” Mémoires de la Société médicale d’émulation, vol 1, Year VI (1798), 67–­71. 61. F.-­G. Boisseau, [“Nostalgie”], Encyclopédie méthodique. Médecine (1821), 10:664. 62. Forrest, Napoleon’s Men, 161–­84 passim. 63. For outbreaks of nostalgia in Nancy and Perpignan in 1791 and 1792, see VdG 28/5, Poura, Traité topographique et nosologique de l’hôpital militaire de Nancy, 1791; and VdG 8/5, Anglade and Béringo, Sur l’hôpital militaire de Perpignan, October 1792. 64. Terrier, Histoire des maladies, 269–­75. 65. SHD 17 Yc 146, Registre matricules de la 141e demi-­brigade de première formation. 66. Lacronique, “Mesures d’hygiène et de prophylaxie,” 379. The actual rate of men incorporated for each yearly cohort varied significantly from year to year, between a minimum of 25,000 during the brief peace of Amiens (1802–­4) and maximum of half a million during the Empire’s desperate last days in 1814. Desertion rates also fluctuated widely, typically in inverse proportion to the size of yearly levies. See Gilbert Bodinier, “L’armée de la Révolution et ses transformations,” in Histoire militaire de la France, 236–­44; Alain Pigeard, La conscription au temps de Napoléon, 1798–­1814 (Clamecy: Bernard Giovanangeli Editeur, 2003), 271; Crépin, Histoire de la conscription, 146; and Woloch, New Regime, 411–­26. 67. Pinel, “Nostalgie,” 662. 68. AN F15 257, Rapport de la Commission de santé au Comité des secours publics et au Comité de salut public sur l’affluence des soldats malades et blessés à Paris, 18 Vendémiaire Year III (October 9, 1794). 69. Guerbois, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 12 and 16; and Gaillardot, “Considérations sur la nostalgie,” 24. 70. VdG 1, death certificate for Jean-­Pierre Cange, February 8, 1813. See figure 3.1. 71. VdG 36/14, Delasser (?), Table synoptique des quatre derniers mois de l’an XIII de l’hôpital militaire de Sainte-­Domingue, 20 Vendémiaire Year XIV (October 12, 1805). 72. Therrin, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 20; and Cyr Ducrest de Lorgerie, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1815), 17. 73. AN AF III 3131 to 78. The estimated number of dossier is based upon a sampling of five cartons—­numbers 1, 20, 51, 60, and 61—­which contain between 200 and 250 individual dossiers each (many reviewed by Lazare Carnot in person). Isser Woloch sees this large-­scale review as

Notes to Pages 80–83  223 part of the Directory’s efforts to police and bolster dwindling French forces, paving the way for conscription two years later. See Woloch, The New Regime, 387–­89. 74. AN AF III 3131, leave request for Jean Baptiste Adam, no date ( June–­July 1796). 75. SHD Xr 13, leave certificates for health officers Debette (August 11, 1797), Coquantin (July 12, 1797), and Allaire (May 21, 1799); SHD B13 308, Nicolas Heurteloup, letter to the war ministry requesting a leave for Third-­Class Surgeon Jean-­Baptiste Lacipierre, 14 Thermidor Year XI (August 2, 1803); and acceptance of leave request for medical officer Savary by the Committee of  Public Safety,  January 17, 1795, in Aulard, Recueil des actes, 19:534. On fears of urban miasmas, see Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986). 76. Gaillardot, “Considérations sur la nostalgie,” 23–­25. 77. SHD Xw 83, Pas de Calais, health certificate delivered to citizen Pierre Audriet, grenadier in the Thirty-­First demi-brigade, 6 Ventôse Year III (February 24, 1795). According to the Cassini-­EHESS database, the population of Bouquehault was 555 in 1793. Available at http:// cassini.ehess.fr/cassini/fr/html/fiche.php?select_resultat=6040. 78. SHD B5 36–­10, Lazare Hoche, letter to the members of the Directory, 14 Ventôse Year IV (March 4, 1796); and Archives parlementaires, 1st series, 100 (Paris: CNRS, 2000), 122. Request by Etienne Finot, 6 Brumaire Year III (October 27, 1794). 79. Dora B. Weiner, “French Doctors Face War, 1792–­1815,” in From Ancien Régime to the Popular Front, ed. Charles K. Warner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 60. 80. VdG 8/5 and 10, Anglade and Béringo, letter and report on the military hospital in Perpignan, October 1792; and responses by the members of the Health Council in Paris, Novem­ ber 6 and 29, 1792. 81. VdG 26/1, Enumération des maladies mettant dans l’impossibilité de servir dans l’armée, June 23, 1794; and letter from the medical officers in chief of the Army of the Nord to the members of the supervisory council,  June 28, 1794. 82. AN AF II 284 (dossier 2367), Committee of Public Safety, Arrêté of 6 Messidor Year II ( June 24, 1794), also in Aulard, Recueil des actes, 14:487–­88. 83. [Cochon de Lapparent], “Rapport sur la solde des troupes, fait à la Convention nationale” and Law of 2 Thermidor Year II (July 20, 1794), in Archives parlementaires, 1st series (Paris: CNRS, 1982), 93:342 and 353. 84. AN F15 257, Rapport de la Commission de santé au Comité des secours public et au Comité de salut public, sur l’affluence de soldats malades et blessés à Paris, 18 Vendémiaire Year III (October 9, 1794). 85. AN AF II 284 (dossier 2369), Committee of Public Safety, arrêté of 5 Brumaire Year III (October 26, 1794) on congés de convalescence. 86. AN AF II 284 (dossier 2369), Commission de santé, Instruction sur les maladies et infirmités qui nécessitent la réforme ou s’opposent à l’admission au service militaire, 11 Frimaire Year III (December 1, 1794), approved by the Committee of Public Safety on 18 Frimaire (December 8). 87. VdG 13/2, report by the medical council to the Committee of Public Safety on its decree of 27 Prairial relating to leaves of absence for health officers, 7 Messidor Year III ( June 25, 1795); Committee of Public Safety, decree of 24 Messidor Year III ( July 12, 1795), in Aulard, Recueil

224  Notes to Pages 83–86 des actes, 25:376–­77; and VdG 22/2, letter from the medical council to the war minister, Nivôse Year IV ( January 1796). 88. Fabre, Bonnet, Gaston (people’s representatives at the Army of the Pyrénées Orientales), order taken on October 15, 1793, French Revolution Research Collection 11.1a/484. 89. VdG 28/6 and 29/6, Thirion, Mémoire justificatif aux citoyens composants le conseil de santé, nivôse Year II (January 1794); and second letter of defense against “machinations” waged against him, 7 Pluviôse Year II (January 26, 1794); and VdG 29/7, Baudenet, Observations sur les maladies observées à l’hôpital militaire d’Haguenau en frimaire, nivôse et pluviôse an III, et en prairial, messidor et thermidor an III (1794–­5). 90. See, among others, Guerbois, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 19; Percy and Laurent, “Nostalgie,” 281; and Chamberet, “Militaire (médecine, hygiène, etc),” 125–­26. 91. François E. Fodéré, Les lois éclairées par les sciences physiques, ou traité de médecine légale et d’hygiène publique (Paris: Coullebois and Deterville, Year VII [1798–­9]), 1:148; and Traité de médecine légale et d’hygiène publique, ou de police de santé (Paris: Mame, 1813), 2:457 and 463–­64. 92. Tellingly, the editors of the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales entrusted Percy and Laurent with a lengthy article on simulated diseases (including nostalgia) as well as their separate entry on nostalgia: “Simulation des maladies,” Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1921), 51:319–­66. 93. SHD Xr 25, Committee of Public Safety, report dated 1 Floréal Year III (April 20, 1795), petition by Third-­Class Surgeon Plumereau (“affected by nostalgia”) to change units. See also VdG 29/6 for many similar requests to be reassigned closer to home. 94. Reddy, Navigation, 143 and 173–­99 (182 and 195 for quotes). On competing ideas of national character and patriotism during the Revolution, see David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–­1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 140–­68. On pensions, see Isser Woloch, “War-­Widows Pensions: Social Policy in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France,” Societas 6 (1976): 235–­84. 95. Based on a sampling of thirteen registres matricules for battalions of volunteers, demibrigades, Imperial Guards, and regular Napoleonic infantry regiments. 96. SHD B1 325, Tribunaux militaires armées du Nord, procès verbal of Claude Gambart’s trial, April 5, 1796. 97. VdG 26/3, correspondence between Ducros and the Committee of Public Safety, Years III and IV; and request for a convalescence leave for Ducros by Gilbert, medical officer in chief of the Army of Sambre et Meuse, 8 Messidor Year III ( June 26, 1795). 98. VdG 21/3, correspondence between Manenc and the medical council, Years IV–­VII. 99. Howard G. Brown, “From Organic State to Security State: The War on Brigandage in France, 1797–­1802,” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 4 (1997): 661–­95. On the gradual acculturation of French men and women to conscription during the Empire, see Woloch, New Regime, 411–­26; and Crépin, Histoire de la conscription, 197–­202. 100. SHD 1 M 1907, [J.-­M.-­P.] de La Barollière, “Projet sur la méthode de recruter et de render les troupes plus nationales” (n.d. [1791]); and [A.-­P.] de Loyauté, “Constitution militaire” (n.d. [1791]). 101. AN AD VI/64, Cochon de Lapparent, Rapport sur l’embrigadement de l’infanterie à solde de la République, 19 Nivôse Year II ( January 8, 1794).

Notes to Pages 86–89  225 102. Gaillardot, “Considérations sur la nostalgie,” 13. 103. Guerbois, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 4 and 40; and Percy and Laurent, “Nostalgie,” 277. 104. Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue: La Révolution française et les patois (Paris: Gallimard, 2002); and Bell, Cult, 169–­97. 105. On the history and polysemy of  “pays,” see Michel Puzelat, “La notion de pays: un parcours historiographique,” in Savoirs des lieux: géographies en histoire, ed. Odile Redon (Saint-­ Denis: PUV, 1996): 89–­106. As is frequently pointed out, this thoroughly untranslatable term shares many similarities with the German notion of Heimat—­not least in the common usage of the root in vernacular terms for nostalgia (“maladie du pays” in French and “Heimweh” in German). 106. In his standard 1817 statistical inquiry into the effects of conscription, the French administrator Antoine-­Audet Hargenvilliers concluded that rates on desertion varied between less than 10 percent in Alsatian departments and around 50 percent in parts of Auvergne and Brittany. See his Compte général de la conscription, ed. Gustave Vallée (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1937), 72–­75 passim; as well as Bertaud, Révolution armée, 79–­84 and 134–­39; and Crépin, Histoire de la conscription, 202–­15. 107. Crépin, Conscription, 154–­55; and Forrest,  Napoleon’s Men, esp. 87–­93. 108. Lynn, Bayonets, 170–­71; and “Toward an Army of Honor: The Moral Evolution of the French Army, 1789–­1815,” French Historical Studies 16, no. 1 (1989): 152–­73. The notion of primary group cohesion was developed by twentieth-­century sociologists, including Samuel Stouffer, Edward A. Suchman, Leland C. De Vinney, Shirley A. Star, and Robins M. Williams Jr., eds., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II: The American Soldier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949); and Edward Shils and Janowitz Morris, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” Public Opinion Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1948): 280–­315. 109. SHD 17 Yc 146, 147, and 148. 110. Petiteau, Guerriers du Premier Empire: Expériences et mémoires (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2011), 27; SHD 21 Yc 1bis, 2, 3, and 4; and Michel Roucaud, “L’anatomie d’un régiment consulaire, ou le 24e de ligne en 1803 d’après ses contrôles,” available at http://www.institut -strategie.fr/RIHM_82_ROUCAUD_OK.html. (For this one regiment at least, Roucaud concludes that it is possible to speak of the army as a “national melting pot.”) 111. SHD 21 Yc 616, Registre matricule du 79e régiment d’infanterie de ligne, Vendémiaire-­ Pluviôse Year XII [October 1803–­February 1804]. 112. Hughes, Forging. 113. SHD 20 Yc 5, 5bis, 6, 7, and 8. 114. SHD 20 Yc 15. 115. SHD 21 Yc 621. On the persistence of regional cohorts and constant falling back to a system of regional recruitment during the Revolution and Empire, see V. Labordère, Le recrutement national ou général et le recrutement régional: développement historique dans les armées françaises (Paris: Pichon et Durand-­Auzias, 1906), esp. 164–­68. 116. Armbruster, “Dissertation sur l’hygiène militaire,” 28; and Therrin, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 12–­13. 117. See, for example, various judgments in SHD B3 407, Tribunaux militaires armée d’Italie, Year II.

226  Notes to Pages 89–91 118. These measures sanctioned phases of separation, transition, and incorporation as in Arnold Van Gennep’s classic scheme detailed in his Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 1961). 119. Percy and Laurent, “Nostalgie,” 278–­80. 120. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 121. Vaidy, “Hygiène militaire,” in Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1818), 23:17. 122. Bégin, “Nostalgie,” in Dictionnaire de médecine et de chirurgie pratiques (Paris: Méquignon-­Marvis,  J.-­B. Baillière, Crochard, 1834), 12:81. 123. AN F9 184, dossier 6 (Finistère), letters from the prefect of Finistère to the minister of the Interior and the Directeur général des revues et de la conscription militaire, June 23 and July 8, 1807. The prefect even went so far as to excuse deserters, for his people’s attachment to their native land and penchant for homesickness were known to all. Over in the rugged department of Aveyron, the prefect complained that his recruits were “much like those Swiss [ . . . ] who died of consumption upon hearing the ranz des vaches” (AN F7 3587, rapport du préfet de l’Aveyron,  June 1, 1805). 124. Jean-­Pierre Gross, Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 46–­55, 50 and 51 for quotes. On the importance of  “douceur” in Philippe Pinel’s early psychiatric method, Goldstein, Console, 85–­86. 125. See Colin Jones, “The Welfare of the French Foot-­Soldier,” History 65, no. 214 (1980): 193–­213. 126. Boudet, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 3 (Boudet was a native of Guadeloupe); Guillaume-­Thomas Reynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Genève: Pellet, 1783), 6:112; Moreau de Saint-­Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’île de Saint-­Domingue (Philadelphia, 1797), 1:30–­31; and S.-­J. Ducoeurjoly, Manuel des habitants de Saint-­Domingue (Paris: Lenoir, 1802), 1:32, 37 and 2:228–­30. See also Adrian Lopez Denis, “Melancholia, Slavery, and Racial Pathology in Eighteenth-­Century Cuba,” Science in Context 18, no. 2 (2005): 179–­99. 127. Foreign Slave Trade: Abstract of the Information Recently Laid on the Table of House of Commons on the Subject of the Slave Trade (London: Ellerton and Henderson, 1821), 83–­84; Victor de Broglie, Discours prononcé par M. le duc de Broglie à la Chambre de pairs le 28 mars 1822 sur la traite des nègres (Paris: Herhan, 1822), 41; and Thomas Fowell Buxton, The African Slave Trade, 2nd ed. (London: Murray, 1839), 111. In the 1840s French children could even read about black slaves’ nostalgia in an illustrated edition of Bernardin de Saint-­Pierre’s popular exotic pastoral Paul et Virginie augmented with an explanatory glossary. Jacques-­Henri Bernardin de Saint-­Pierre, Paul et Virginie, suivi d’autres oeuvres (Paris: Renault, 1845), 338. 128. Antonio M. Savarésy, De la fièvre jaune en général et particulièrement de celle qui a ré­ gné à la Martinique en l’an XI et XII (Naples: Imprimerie française, 1809), 13–­14; and Robert Thomas, The Modern Practice of Physic, Exhibiting the Characters, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostic, Morbid Appearances, and Improved Method of Treating the Diseases of All Climates, 4th rev. ed. (London: Longman, 1813), 440. 129. Samuel Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” DeBow’s Review 11 (1851): 212–­13 and 331–­33.

Notes to Pages 91–96  227 130. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1958 [1844]), 61–­74 and 66 for quote. 131. On compagnonnage, see William H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 40–­61; and Cynthia Maria Truant, The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods and Compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). Neither the medical literature nor classic firsthand accounts of compagnons (such as Jacques-­Louis Ménétra or Agricol Pérdiguier) mention cases of nostalgia. 132.  Jean-­François Lemaire, Napoléon et la médecine (Paris: Bourin, 1992), 85 passim. 133. Napoleon Bonaparte, instruction of October 16, 1812, from Moscow, in Correspondance de Napoléon Ier (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1868), 24:311–­12.

Chapter Four 1. Jérôme Lasserre, Manuel du père de famille, ou nouvelles méthodes de l’allaitement artifi­ ciel, et de faire prendre aux enfants, et même aux adultes, les liquides dans certains cas (Agen: P. Noubel, 1822). 2. Lasserre, Manuel, 14. 3. Lasserre, Manuel, 1. 4. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of  Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 17:244. 5. Roper, “Slipping.” 6. Fritzsche, Stranded, 168 passim. 7. See, among others, Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Leonard V. Smith, The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); Stéphane Audoin-­Rouzeau, Combattre: une anthropologie historique de la guerre moderne (XIXe et XXe siècles) (Paris: Seuil, 2008); Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 8. See Forrest, Soldiers; and Napoleon’s Men; Petiteau, Guerriers; and Ecrire la mémoire; and Philip G. Dwyer, “Public Remembering, Private Reminiscing: French Military Memoirs and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars,” French Historical Studies 33, no. 2 (2010): 231–­58. 9. William G. Rosenberg, “Reading Soldiers’ Moods: Russian Military Censorship and the Configuration of  Feeling in World War I,” AHR 118, no. 3 (2014): 714–­40. 10. On Great War soldiers, see Martha Hannah, “A Republic of Letters: The Epistolary Tradition in France during World War I,” AHR 108, no. 5 (2007): 1338–­43. 11. Daniel Roche, Le peuple de Paris (Paris: Fayard, 1981), 274–­83; and François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Reading and Writing: Literacy in France From Calvin to Jules Ferry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 12. Forrest, Napoleon’s Men, 79–­184. 13. Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, 21 and 52. 14. Bell, First Total War. 15. Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, 8; Forrest, Napoleon’s Men, 161; and Leed,  No Man’s Land.

228  Notes to Pages 97–99 16. SHD 1 Kt 560, Papiers François-­Joseph Dumez, François Dumez, letter to his mother, from Assen, October 8, 1795. 17. Jean-­Antoine Bihan to his parents, November 22, 1812, from Douai, in E. Fairon and H. Heuse, eds., Lettres de grognards (Liège: Imprimerie Bénard, 1936), 356; and Joseph Ladrix, letter to his parents, October 9, 1796, from Mantova, in Jean Barada, ed., “Lettres de Joseph Ladrix, soldat de la Révolution,” Carnet de la Sabretache, 3rd series, 8 (1925), 95. 18. Archives départementales de la Savoie, L 1137 (letters 9 and 63), Chappel (?), letter to his parents, August 29, 1806, from Strasbourg; and  Jean-­Baptiste Araud (?), letter to his mother, n.d. 19. Louis Joseph Bricard, Journal du canonnier Bricard, 1792–­1802 (Paris: Delagrave, 1891), 90. 20. L. Larchey, ed.,  Journal de marche du sergent Fricasse de la 127e demi-­brigade, 1972–­1802 (Paris, 1882), 10. 21. Stendhal, Journal, December 12 and 20, 1801, in Œuvres intimes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 31–­32. 22. VdG 36/13, letter from medical officer François [?], n.d. 23. Letters from François-­Joseph Detiège to his parents, August 4, 1812; and from Jean-­ François Chalsèche to his parents, August 4, 1812, in Fairon and Heuse, Lettres de grognards, 278; and Auguste Bonet, letter to his mother, November 10, 1812, in Lettres interceptées par les Russes durant la campagne de 1812 (Paris: La Sabretache, 1913), 251. 24. Letters from Laurent Lévèque to his parents, October 2, 1806; and from Pierre Lejeune, to a friend, 12 Germinal Year IX (April 2, 1801), in Fairon and Heuse, Lettres de grognards, 136 and 123. 25. Marin Paumier, letter to his parents, April 7, 1794, in Arthur Chuquet, ed., “Episodes et Lettres de 1794,” Feuilles d’histoire du XVIIe au XXe siècle 9 ( January–­July 1913): 219; and Sargent Bernier, letter to his father, January 1, 1793, in E. Prot, ed., “Lettre du sergent Bernier, volontaire à la première compagnie du premier bataillon du Bec d’Ambès,” Revue historique et archéologique du libournais 27 (1959): 45. 26. Moulinet, letter to his parents,  June 28, 1793 from Strasbourg, in René Bouscayrol, Cent lettres de soldats de l’an II (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1987), 88–­89; and Jean Ritter, ed., “Un Jeune Strasbourgeois en Vendée. Lettres d’un volontaire au 8e Bataillon du Bas-­Rhin (1793–­ 1796),” L’armée et la société de 1610 à nos jours. Actes du 103e Congrès national des sociétés savantes Nancy-­Metz, 1978 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1979). 27. On foreign troops and linguistic diversity in the French army, see Christopher J. Tozzi, Nationalizing France’s Army: Foreign, Black, and Jewish Troops in the French Military, 1715–­ 1831 (Charlottesville: University of  Virginia Press, 2016). 28. Joseph Rousseau to his parents, from Strasbourg, December 22, 1793, in Ernest Picard, ed., Au service de la nation. Lettres de volontaires (1792–­1798) (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1914), 31. 29. SHD 1 Kt 560, Papiers François-­Joseph Dumez, Louis Dumez to François Dumez, from Lille,  June 21, 1796, passim. 30. Percy and Laurent, “Nostalgie,” 277. 31. Quoted in Bell, Cult, 169. 32. Archives Départementales de la Mayenne, 108 Jcj, Daniel Griveau, letter to his parents, from Lille, March 20, 1809, quoted in Forrest, Napoleon’s Men, 170.

Notes to Pages 100–104  229 33. Letter from Ferdinand Chantraine to his parents, November 3, 1810; and from Henri Depaifve to his parents, August 22, 1808, in Fairon and Heuse,  Lettres de grognards, 182–­83 and 40. 34. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1:355–­58. 35. Roper, Secret Battle. 36. On the army’s postal service, see Forrest,  Napoleon’s Men, 44–­45. 37. Pierre-­Ambroise-­François Choderlos de Laclos, Lettres inédites de Choderlos de Laclos, 2nd ed. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1904), 155–­56. 38. Biographical information on Gabriel Noël is available in Au temps des volontaires, 1792. Lettres d’un volontaire de 1792, ed. J. Noël (Paris: Plon, 1912); and Isabelle Roger-­Noël, “La Révolution aux frontières vue par un volontaire de 1792 à 1796,” Revue historique des Armées 164 (September 1986): 3–­15; and “La Révolution de Gabriel Noël: de l’adepte des Lumières au fanatique soldat de l’an II,” Revue historique des Armées 175, no. 6 (1989): 57–­63. 39. These two worlds map onto the two distinct utopian visions that animate Rousseau’s oeuvre according to Judith Shklar’s classic analysis in her “Rousseau’s Two Models: Sparta and the Age of Gold,” Political Science Quarterly 81, no. 1 (1966): 25–­51. 40. Private collection: Gabriel Noël, Letters to his godmother and stepsister, from Sierck, January 24, 1792, 6:30 a.m.; and from Maubeuge, August 10, 1792. 41. Noël, from Sierck,  January 24, 1792, 6:30 a.m. 42. Règlement concernant l’exercice et les manœuvres de l’infanterie du 1er août 1791 (Paris: Laillet, 1792), 26–­32. 43. Anonymous, “La vie du soldat français,” Mémorial des corps administratifs du département de la Seine-­Inférieure (Rouen: Imprimerie de S/ Noel, Year XIV [1805]), 10:183. 44.  Jean-­Simon Banneaux, letter to his parents, from Aywaille (Wallonia), 1813, in Lettres de grognards, 359. 45. Louis Pillaud to Clément de Ris, from Dusseldorf, September 6, 1796, in Picard, Au service de la nation, 186. 46. Noël, from the camp of  Mont d’Or, near Givet,  June 22, 1792. 47. SHD 1 Kt 560. Dumez, letter to his mother, from Nimègue, May 24, 1798 (and several subsequent letters); R. S. letter to Adrien Périot in Marseille, from Gjatsk (Russia), October 16, 1812, Lettres interceptées par les Russes, 78; Ritter, “Un Jeune Strasbourgeois en Vendée”; and François Dumey, “Lettres de campagne du sergent-­major Dumey de la 8e demi-­brigade, et lettres qui lui furent adressés,” Carnet de la Sabretache, 3rd series, 1 (1913): 658–­60. 48. Louis Valeyre to his parents, from Frickenfeld, June 18, 1793; and Amable Gaillot to his parents, June 22, 1794, in Cent lettres de soldats, 106–­7 and 201–­2. 49. See E. P. Thompson’s classic analysis, “Time, Work-­Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (December 1967): 56–­97. As others have shown, time discipline has emerged elsewhere and before the advent of the factory, including on farm fields in Tokugawa Japan and slave plantations in the American South. See Thomas C. Smith, “Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan,” Past and Present 111, no. 1 (1986): 165–­97; and Mark. M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 50. William Reddy defines an “emotional refuge” as a “relationship, ritual, or organization

230  Notes to Pages 104–111 that provides safe release from existing emotional norms and allows relaxation of emotional effort.” He lists Masonic lodges, salons, and affectionate marriage as examples of such refuges in which eighteenth-­century French men and women could escape the strictures of the Old (emotional) Regime. See Reddy, Navigation, 129 and 147–­54. 51. Noël, from Sierck, January 25, 1792, 5:30 p.m. 52. Nagy, Achaeans, esp. 35–­41 and 97–­102. 53. Noël, from Namur, December 4, 1792. Like other volunteers of 1792, Noël wrote about having “fulfilled” his duty to defend the patrie. 54. Leed, No Man’s Land, 164. 55. Noël,  January 30, 1792, 9:00 a.m.; and from the camp of  Malonge, November 28, 1792. 56. On wartime “brutalization,” see George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 57. On nostalgia as an emotional coping mechanism during the First World War, see Michael Roper, “Nostalgia as an Emotional Experience in the Great War,” Historical Journal 54, no. 2 (2011): 421–­51. 58. AD Savoie, L 1137 (letter 153), Claude Chabord, letter to his mother, from Lyon, June 14, 1815. 59. André-­Joseph Oury, letter to his parents, from Crema (Italy),  July 24, 1808, in Fairon and Heuse,  Lettres de grognards, 144. 60. Jean-­Pierre Soust, letter to his mother, from Bastia, May 28, 1811, in J. Staes, “Lettres de soldats Béarnais de la Révolution et du 1er Empire,” Revue de Pau et du Béarn, 8 (1980): 158. 61. Joseph Florkin, letter to his mother, January 24, 1812, in Lettres de grognards, 357. 62. AD Savoie, L 1137 (letter 87), Joseph Dupiel (?), letter to his parents, from Piacenza (Italy), May 28, 1811; and SHD 1 Kt 560, Dumez, letter to his mother,  June 11, 1800. 63. Bricard,  Journal, 290. 64. See Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth-­Century Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 50–­106; and Emma Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 65. See Forrest, Napoleon’s Men, 54–­55; Moran and Waldron, People in Arms, 18–­23; and, on the “Republican mother,” Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 122–­23 and 151–­91; and Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-­Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), esp. 81–­134. 66. On the evolution of these scenes of  “departing conscripts” in the nineteenth century, see David M. Hopkin, “Sons and Lovers: Popular Images of the Conscript, 1798–­1870,” Modern and Contemporary France 9, no. 1 (2001): 19–­36. 67. See, for example, Anne Verjus and Denise Davidson, Le roman conjugal. Chroniques de la vie familiale à l’époque de la Révolution et de l’Empire (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2011), esp. 41–­103. 68. Guerbois, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 3, 4, and 11. 69. VdG 29/7, Riquier, Mémoire sur l’hospice de Molsheim, Ventôse Year III (February 1795), and other reports from the same year. 70. Pinel expounded the moral treatment in his Traité medico-­philosophique sur l’aliénation

Notes to Pages 112–114  231 mentale (Paris: Richard, Caille et Ravier, Year IX [1801]), having become famous as the man who freed the insane from their shackles at Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière. On this “originative psychiatric paradigm,” see Goldstein, Console, 64–­119 (quote at 66). 71. Jacques-­Louis Moreau de la Sarthe, “Quelques observations sur les différentes circonstances de maladies, à la guérison desquelles les ressources pharmaceutiques n’ont point concouru,” Mémoires de la Société médicale d’émulation 2 (Year VII [1798]): 178–­215; reprinted as “Encore des réflexions et des observations relatives a l’influence du moral sur le physique, et à l’emploi médical des passions, des affections et des émotions,” La Décade philosophique (20 and 30 Nivôse Year IX [1801]): 69–­75 and 134–­141; and summarized in “maladie du pays,” Encyclopédie méthodique. Médecine (1824), 11:469–­71. 72. On tears in this age of feeling, see Anne Vincent-­Buffault, Histoire des larmes, XVIIIe–­ XIXe siècles (Paris: Payot, 2001). 73. Goldstein, Console, 117–­19. See also Lisa O’Sullivan, “The Time and Place of  Nostalgia: Re-­situating a French Disease,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 67, no. 4 (2012): 1–­4. 74. VdG 28/4, Anonymous, Etat sommaire de l’hôpital de Nancy en Juin 1793, n.d. [1793]; VdG 28/6, Marchand, Mouvements et observations des hôpitaux ambulants et sédentaires de l’Armée des Ardennes, Ventose et Germinal an II, n.d. [1794]; VdG 8/10, Béringo, Rapport au Conseil de Santé sur l’hôpital de Perpignan, 1 Floréal Year II [April 20, 1794]; VdG 29/3, Gouvion, Notice sur la nature et le caractère des maladies observées à l’hopital de Basle, depuis le 1er priarial jusqu’au 30 thermidor An 7, 14 Vendémiaire Year VIII [October 6, 1799]; Maillard, Compte rendu au citoyen Vivot, médecin en chef de l’armée d’Helvétie pour l’exercice des mois de fructidor, vendémiaire et brumaire, 12 Ventôse Year VIII [March 3, 1800]; VdG 29/4, Bourdette, Idées générales sur les maladies régnantes à l’armée du Rhin dans le courant du mois de floréal An IX, n.d. [May 1801]; and VdG 10, Desvignes, Propositions déduites d’observations faites à la Corogne pendant les années de 1812, 1813 et 1814, spécialement relatives à l’hystérie et la syphilis, n.d. [1814]. 75. Terrier, Histoire des maladies, 92–­93. 76. See, among others, Alan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 77. Guerbois, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” esp. 13–­14. 78. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (London: Penguin, 1990), 53–­73; and Goldstein, Hysteria, esp. 99–­111. On “traumatic memory,” see Young, Harmony of Illusions. 79. Terrier, Histoire des maladies, 92–­94; Edouard Petit, “Essai sur l’influence de quelques affections morales dans les maladies chirurgicales des armées” (Paris: medical thesis, Year XI [1803]), 6, 12, 15, and 17–­21; and M. Marquand, “De l’influence du moral sur le physique dans les maladies chirurgicales, et principalement dans les cas d’opérations,” Journal de medicine, de chirurgie, pharmacie 16 (1808): 100–­106. 80. Moreau, “Quelques observations,” 182n1. “Affectometers,” “kiss-­o-­meters,” and other instruments to measure emotions would become reality, at least temporarily, in the early twentieth century. See Plamper, History of Emotions, 182–­83.

232  Notes to Pages 114–117 81. Goldstein, Console, 106–­9. 82. Guerbois, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 55; Amable-­Gilbert Trion, “Réflexions sur l’hygiène militaire, et principalement sur celle qui convient aux soldats en garnison” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1814), 24; and François David, letter to his mother, April 11, 1795, from Mainz, in Bouscayrol, Cent lettres de soldats, 139–­40. 83. Percy and Laurent, “Nostalgie,” 276 and 279. 84. Pinel “Nostalgie,” 663. Pinel reproduced almost word for word the symptomatology already described by Guerbois (then Pinel’s student) in his thesis of 1803. 85. Marquand, “De l’influence du moral,” 106. 86. See Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007); and, for a recent reevaluation of the “sentimental family” debate, Kyle Harper, “The Sentimental Family: A Biohistorical Perspective,” AHR 119, no. 5 (2015): 1547–­62. 87. George D. Sussman, Selling Mothers’ Milk: The Wet-­Nursing Business in France, 1715–­ 1914 (Urbana: University of  Illinois Press, 1982). On the eve of the Revolution, Paris police forces estimated that 18,800 of the 20,000 babies born yearly in the capital were farmed out to rural wet nurses. 88. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979 [1762]), 44; and Jean-­Baptiste Greuze, La privation sensible (ou le départ en nourrice), 1780. 89. Jacques-­André Millot, Médecine perfective, ou code des bonnes mères (Paris: Collin, 1809), 2:590–­91. 90. Guerbois, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 14. 91. Mark S. Micale, Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 46–­47 passim. See also Vila, Enlightenment, 3 passim. 92. I borrow the expression from Christy Pichichero, “Le Soldat Sensible: Military Psychology and Social Egalitarianism in the Enlightenment French Army,” French Historical Studies 31, no. 4 (2008): 553–­80. 93. On changing norms of masculinity and the birth of a “martial” kind of manliness during the Napoleonic Wars in particular, see George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 50–­51; Brian Joseph Martin, Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-­Century France (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011); and Hughes, Forging, 108–­35. 94. Anonymous, “La vie du soldat français,” 201–­2. 95. VdG 10/13. Coindet, medical report on the epidemic that has killed 3,600 conscripts in Geneva since December 1812 (June 1813), with marginal annotation by Coste indicating “Add NOSTALGIA” and criticizing use of pharmaceutical remedies. 96. Pierre François Percy, Journal des campagnes du Baron Percy, chirurgien en chef de la Grande armée (Paris: Tallandier, 2002), 212; and Laurent and Percy, “Nostalgie,” 272. Coste was evacuated to Paris and put in charge of the Invalides. Another connoisseur in the matter, Gilbert, was forced to beg repeatedly for medical leaves or reassignments to assuage constant pangs of homesickness. When sent to Saint-­Domingue in 1802, he evinced a certain satisfaction in writing to his colleagues in Paris that “Le Breton” was doing just fine in the Caribbean (VdG 36/2, Gilbert, letter to the Health Council, 15 Germinal Year X [April 5, 1802]; and SHD 3 Yg 14608 [dossier Nicolas-Pierre Gilbert]).

Notes to Pages 117–120  233 97. Jourdan Le Cointe, La santé de Mars, ou moyens de conserver la santé des troupes en temps de paix, d’en fortifier la vigueur et le courage en temps de guerre (Paris: Briand, 1790), 325–­28. This source is systematically misrepresented in the literature; it offered these ghastly measures only as a last-­ditch resort, and was primarily concerned with soldiers’ diets anyway. 98. Percy and Laurent, “Simulation des maladies,” Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (Paris: Panckoucke, 1921), 51:324. 99. Odile Roynette, “Signes et traces de la souffrance masculine pendant le service militaire au XIXe siècle,” in L’histoire sans les femmes est-­elle possible?, ed. Anne-­Marie Sohn and Françoise Thelamon (Paris: Perrin, 1998), 255–­89; and Bons pour le service, esp. 34–­40. More broadly on male intimate suffering, see Alain Corbin, “Le ‘sexe en deuil’ et l’histoire des femmes au XIXe siècle,” in Une histoire des femmes est-­elle possible? ed. Michelle Perrot (Paris: Rivages, 1984), 142–­54. 100. On these transformations, see John A. Lynn, Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. 18–­117; Gil Mihaely, “L’effacement de la cantinière ou la virilisation de l’armée française au XIXe siècle,” Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 30 (2005); and Thomas Cardoza, Intrepid Women: Cantinières and Vinvandières of the French Army (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), esp. 12–­90. 101. See, for example, Therrin, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 15–­16; and Ducrest de Lorgerie, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 9. 102. For examples of male hysteria in the army, see numerous medical reports in VdG 10; and Desvignes, “Propositions déduites d’observations faites à la Corogne.” On hysteria and its “re-­ gendering” in the early 1800s, see Micale, Hysterical Men, 58–­89; Goldstein, Hysteria, 46–­55; and more in general about the development of a “two sex” model of the human body, Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 103. Etienne de Jouy and Antoine Jay, Salon d’Horace Vernet: Analyse historique et pittoresque des quarante-­cinq tableaux exposés chez lui en 1822 (Paris: Ponthieu, 1822), 92–­100. On the iconography of the soldat laboureur and legend of the soldier Chauvin, see Nina Althanassaglou-­ Kallymer, “Sad Cincinnatus: Le Soldat-­Laboureur as an Image of the Napoleonic Veteran after the Empire,” Arts Magazine 60 (1968): 65–­75; and Gerard de Puymège, Chauvin, le soldat-­ laboureur. Contribution à l’étude des nationalismes (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). 104. Petiteau, Lendemains d’Empire, 88. This is a considerable amount for a country of roughly thirty million people, although not quite comparable to the five million Frenchmen (out of a population of forty million) demobilized after the Great War. See Bruno Cabanes,  La victoire endeuillée. La sortie de guerre des soldats français (1918–­1920) (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2004), 495. 105. On veterans, see Petiteau, Lendemains d’Empire; Isser Woloch, French Veteran; and Jean Vidalenc, Les demi-­solde: Etude d’une catégorie sociale (Paris: Rivière, 1955). 106. Honoré de Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert (Paris: Gallimard, 1974 [1832]); and Le médecin de campagne (Paris: Gallimard, 1974 [1833]). 107. See Natalie Petiteau, Napoléon, de la mythologie à l’histoire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2004), 33–­41; and Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon (London: Granta, 2004), 96 passim. 108. Jean-­Roch Coignet, Les cahiers du capitaine Coignet (1799–­1815) (Paris: Hachette,

234  Notes to Pages 120–122 1894), 381; and Elzéar Blaze, La vie militaire, sous le premier empire (Paris: Garnier, 1889), 426–­27. 109. Many of these presented acute signs of nostalgia. See Archives départementales du Val de Marne, AJ2 25–­27, État des militaires admis, floréal an VIII and fructidor an XII; and 4X 677–­79, 684, Registres d’observations médicales de la Maison de Charenton (1818–­1824); and Jean-­Pierre Falret, “Deux observations de nostalgie.” Between 1814 and 1822, ninety-­three active and demobilized soldiers were admitted to Bicêtre; by the late 1820s, almost one in six patients at Charenton were ex-­soldiers. See Petiteau, Lendemains d’Empire, 111–­14; and Jean-­Etienne Esquirol, “Rapport Sanitaire sur la maison royale de Charenton, pendant les années 1826, 1827, 1828,” AHPML, 1st series, no. 1 (1929): 119–­20; and Des maladies mentales considérées sous le rapport médical, hygiénique et médico-­légal, vol. 1 (Paris: Baillière, 1838). On veterans’ suicide, see Petiteau, Lendemains d’Empire, 111–­14; and Stéphane Calvet, Destins de braves. Les officiers charentais de Napoléon au XIXe siècle (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2010), 58–­63 and 408–­15. 110. Cited in Petiteau, Ecrire la mémoire, 257–­62. One need only look at Francisco Goya’s harrowing series of etchings The Disasters of  War (1810–­20) to realize just how horrifying this conflict could be. 111. Marc Desboeufs, Les étapes d’un soldat de l’Empire (1800–­1815). Souvenirs du Capitaine Desboeufs (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1901), 215. 112. Jean Stanislas Vivien, Souvenirs de ma vie militaire (1792–­1822) (Paris, 1905), 278. 113. Henri Ellenberger’s masterful The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1970) mentions nostalgia only in passing in the “ancestry” of dynamic psychology (p. 25). For a genealogy of trauma marked by discontinuities and structural repetitions (between mimetic and antimimetic views on trauma), see Leys, Trauma. 114. Desboeufs, Les étapes, 213–­14. 115. Martin, Napoleonic Friendship, and Jay Winter, “Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the aftermath of the Great War,” in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 40–­60. 116. Petiteau, Ecrire la mémoire, esp. 28–­31; and Dwyer, “Public Remembering.” Detailed inventories of nineteenth-­century memoirs list 1,679 touching upon the Napoleonic period (in either French or French translation) and over 2,000 if the revolutionary era is included as well. See Jean Tulard, Nouvelle bibliographie critique des mémoires sur le Consulat et l’Empire écrits ou traduits en français (Geneva: Droz, 1991); Jacques Garnier, Complément et supplément à la nouvelle bibliographie critique des mémoires sur l’époque napoléonienne (Paris: SPM, 1997). According to Dwyer, only 420 of these focus specifically on the wars. 117. M. Reynal, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1819), 8; R. Allard, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1820), 10; François Jacquier, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1921), 6; V. M. Besse, “De la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1828), 20; and Delmais-­Eugène Pilet, “De la nostalgie, considérée chez l’homme de guerre” (Paris: medical thesis, 1844), 16. 118. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 7–­11 passim; See also Odile Roynette, “La nostalgie du front,” in Retour à l’intime au sortir de la guerre, ed. Bruno Cabanes and Guillaume Piketty (Paris: Tallandier, 2009), 51–­65; and Stephen Garton, “Longing for War: Nostalgia and Australian

Notes to Pages 122–125  235 returned soldiers after the First World War,” in T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, eds., The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London: Routledge, 2000), 222–­ 39. Mosse defines the “Myth of the War Experience” as a tendency to look back upon war as a meaningful, even sacred event, and pinpoints its emergence to the Napoleonic wars. 119. Marie-­Étienne Maury, “Essai sur la nostalgie” (Strasbourg: medical thesis, 1826), 5. For more examples, see Roth, “Dying of the Past”; and “Remembering Forgetting: Maladies de la mémoire in Nineteenth-­Century France,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 49–­68. 120. Therrin, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 11;  J. J. A. Martin, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1820), 13; and Julien-­Vincent Huet-­Bienville, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1821), 5. 121. J. B. Masson, “De la nostalgie, considérée comme cause de plusieurs maladies” (Paris: medical thesis, 1825), 7. 122. Reynal, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 9–­10. Also Huet-­Bienville, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 5. 123. Leed,  No Man’s Land, 33. 124. It surely matters that Freud delved into the concept of the uncanny in 1919, at a time when observations of traumatized soldiers had forced him to fundamentally revise his understanding of war neuroses and reorient psychoanalysis as a whole “beyond the pleasure principle” (Freud, “Uncanny,” 217–­56). 125. Alphonse Daudet’s last “letter” from his famous mill in Provence, in which he describes blissful memories of military service as a young man, is titled “Nostalgies de la caserne.” Alphonse Daudet, Lettres de mon moulin (Paris: Gallimard, 1999 [1869]). See also Roynette, “La nostalgie du front.” 126. Sigmund Freud, introduction to Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Fenichel’s Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses [1919], in Standard Edition, 17:209–­10.

Chapter Five 1. Honoré de Balzac, Œuvres complètes, vol. 24, Correspondance, 1819–­1850 (Paris: Calmann-­ Lévy, 1876), 297–­98, 299, 371, 374, 468, 478 (my own translations). 2. Moïse Le Yaouanc, Nosographie de l’humanité Balzacienne (Paris: Librairie Maloine, 1959). 3. Honoré de Balzac, Séraphîta (Paris: Furne, 1846), 236; Le Curé de village (Paris: Furne, 1845), 700–­701 and 703; Les Célibataires. Pierrette (Paris: Furne, 1843), 385 and 439. 4. Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert (Paris: Furne, 1842), 125–­26, and 130–­32. 5. Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard (Paris: Le Divan, 1949 [1836]), 399. 6. Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (Paris: Calmann-­Lévy, 1908 [1883]), 173. See also Sylvain Venayre, “Du mal du pays au désir d’exil: les sens du voyage selon Edgar Quinet (1814–­1830),” in Voyager en Europe de Humboldt à Stendhal, ed. N. Bourguinat and S. Venayre (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2007), 429–­44. 7. Abel Pavet de Courteille, Hygiène des collèges et des maisons d’éducation des deux sexes (Brussels: Lithographie Royale, 1827), 173–­77; and Jacques-­Pierre Pointe, Hygiène des collèges (Paris: Baillière, 1846), 411–­14.

236  Notes to Pages 125–130 8. Colley, Nostalgia and Recollection; Dames, Amnesiac Selves; Wagner, Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia, esp. 35–­37; Austin, Nostalgia in Transition, quote at 30; and Bunke, Heimweh, 253ff. 9. René de Chateaubriand, “Sur le printemps d’un proscrit,” Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Pourrat Frères, 1836), 8:156; and Mémoires d’outre-­tombe, ed. Levaillant (Paris: Flammarion, 1948 [1848]), 3:400. 10. Balzac, Œuvres complètes, 372. 11. Honoré de Balzac, La recherche de l’absolu (Paris: Furne, 1846), 375; Béatrix. Première et deuxième parties (Paris: Furne, 1842), 354; and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, première partie (Paris: Furne, 1845), 371–­77. 12. Charles Baudelaire, “L’Invitation au voyage,” Petits poèmes en prose (Paris: Michel Levy Frè­ res, 1869), 49. 13. For long perspectives on romanticism (not just as an artistic movement), see William Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–­1200 CE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Norbert Elias, The Court Society. The Collected Works of Norbert Elias, vol. 2, ed. Stephen Mennell, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006 [1969]), esp. 230–­85; and Michel Lôwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 14. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. Rachel Gomme (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 276. 15. This process parallels the secularization and demedicalization of emotions in early nineteenth-­century Scottish philosophy of mind. See Dixon, Passions to Emotions. 16. Roger Cotter, Mark Harrison, and Steve Sturdy, eds., War, Medicine and Modernity (Phoenix Mill, UK: Sutton, 1998), 1–­21. 17. For the thirteen-­volume medical series of the Encyclopédie méthodique (Paris: Panckoucke, 1787–­1830), see Doublet, “Armées (Maladies des),” 3:279; Mahon, “Hemvé,” 8:138; Moreau de la Sarthe, “Médecine mentale,” 9:150; Biron and Chamberet, “Médecine militaire,” 9:335; Pinel, “Mélancolie,” 9:591; “Mélancolie Helvétique,” 9:600; Chamberet, “Militaire (Médecine, hygiène etc.),” 10:125; L. J. M., “Morosité,” 10:291; Pinel and Boisseau, “Nostalgie,” 10:661–­ 65; “Nostomanie,” 10:665; Moreau de la Sarthe, “Passions,” 11:428–­29; Moreau de la Sarthe, “Pays (Maladie du pays),” 11:469–­71; “philopatridalgie” and “philopatridomanie,” 11:646. For the sixty-­volume Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (Paris: Panckoucke, 1812–­22), see Fournier, “Armée,” 2:292; Vaidy, “Hygiène militaire,” 23:17, 51, and 80; Louyer-­Villermay, “Morosité,” 34:289; Percy and Laurent, “Nostalgie,” 36:265–­81; and F. V. M[érat], “Nostomanie,” 36:283. For the Dictionnaire de médecine et de chirurgie pratiques (Paris: Gabon, Méquignon-­Marvis, Baillière, 1829–­36), see Bégin, “Nostalgie,” 12:76–­84. 18. The student population at the Paris medical faculty grew from under nine hundred in 1797 to two thousand by the end of the Restoration, dwarfing its closest rival, Montpellier, whose enrollment hovered around one hundred. Parisian students filed between two and three hundred dissertations per year between 1815 and 1830. 19. Figures compiled from the BIUM and BNF library catalogs; Marie-­Gabrielle Abbatucci and Jean-­Claude Meurisse, Index général des thèses de psychiatrie parues en France du début du

Notes to Pages 130–131  237 XVIIe siècle à 1934 (Paris: SPECIA, 1985); and Charles Coury, “The Teaching of Medicine in France from the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century,” in The History of Medical Education, ed. C. D. O’Malley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 157. 20. For a representative sampling, see George Seymour, “Dissertatio medica inauguralis de nostalgia” (Edinburgh, 1818); Edouard Matthaei, “De nostalgia, dissertatio inauguralis” (Halle, 1844); Vinzenz Petrowitz, “Dissertatio inauguralis-­medica de nostalgia” (Vienna, 1839); Fran­ cesco Airoldi, “De Nostalgia dissertatio” (Milan, 1830); Gaetano Riboldi, “Cenni sulla nostalgia” (Pavia, 1839). 21. Karl Jaspers describes a short-­lived “heyday” of German Heimwehliteratur at the same time, with the publication of three important studies: Julius Heinrich Gottlieb Schlegel, Das Heimweh und der Selbstmord (Hildburghausen: Kesserlin, 1835); Joseph Zangerl, Das Heimweh, 2nd ed. (Vienna: Beck, 1840); and Willers Jessen, “Nostalgia,” in Encyclopädisches Wörterbuch der Medicinischen Wissenschaften (Berlin: Veit et Comp., 1841), 25:292–­323. See Jaspers, Heimweh und Verbrechen (Munich: Belleville, 1996 [1909]), 55. 22. Xavier Bichat, Anatomie générale appliquée à la physiologie et à la médecine (Paris: Brosson et Gabon, 1801), xcix, cited in Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1973), 146. See also Ackerknecht, Paris Hospital; and, for a collection of revisionist essays, Caroline Hannaway and Ann F. La Berge, eds., Constructing Paris Medicine (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998). 23. D. J. Larrey, “Mémoire sur la nostalgie,” esp. 168 and 191–­97; and “De la nostalgie,” Clinique chirurgicale, exercée particulièrement dans les camps et les hôpitaux militaires, depuis 1792 jusqu’en 1829 (Paris: Gabon, 1829), 1:vi, 323, and 355–­56. 24. F.-­V.-­J. Broussais, Recherches sur la fièvre hectique (Paris: Méquignon, 1803), 5, 56, 103–­5. 25. F.-­V.-­J. Broussais, De l’irritation et de la folie (Paris: Delaunay, 1828), esp. 243–­46, 331–­ 40, 399–­404, and 508–­33. 26. Bégin, “Nostalgie,” 81; Marie Nicolas Devergie, Clinique de la maladie syphilitique (Paris: F. M. Maurice, 1826), 1:129–­31 and 3:plate 141. Both Bégin and Devergie worked with Broussais at the Val-­de-­Grâce. Among his early student disciples, see Reynal, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 20–­21; Allard, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 15; Puel, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 12–­ 14; and Maury, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 10. 27. Laugier, “Observation d’une lésion organique du cervelet, suite de nostalgie,” RMMCPM 8 (1820): 182–­83; Devaux, “Observation sur une lésion au cerveau qui parait être la cause de la nostalgie,” RMMCPM 11 (1822): 251–­52; Peysson, “Histoire de la maladie qui a régné épidémiquement durant les trois premiers trimestres de 1829, dans l’hôpital militaire de Cambrai,” RMMCPM 28 (1830): 219; D.-­M. Vignard, “Extrait du rapport médical adressé au Conseil de Santé sur le service de l’hôpital du Lazaret de Marseille pendant les mois d’Août, Septembre et Octobre 1830,” RMMCPM 13 (1831): 263; and [François Fournier-­Pescay], editor’s comments added to the articles by Laugier and Devaux above (pp. 183–­84 and 252–­57, respectively). Broussais’s influence on medical students grew with his accession to the Paris medical faculty in 1830. See Jose Felicianus de Castilho, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1831), 20–­ 24; François-­Théophile Collin, “Considérations sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1832), 8; and Bertrand Calmel, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1836), 18 and 21. 28. E. Estienne, “remarques du rédacteur,” RMMCPM 13 (1823): ij–­xxxij.

238  Notes to Pages 133–136 29. Ducrest de Lorgerie, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 20; and J. Hippolyte Buisson, “Considérations sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1818), 20. Both de Lorgerie and Buisson were students of Percy’s and had served under him in Napoleon’s armies. 30. Gaspard Laurent Bayle, “Anatomie pathologique,” in Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (Paris: Panckoucke, 1812), 2:61–­78. On Laënnec, see Jacalyn Duffin, To See with a Better Eye: A Life of R. T. H. Laennec (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). On the emotional etiology of tuberculosis, see David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-­Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 23–­47. 31. The next three paragraphs draw from Duffin’s biographical work on Laënnec and Bayle. See in particular her “Sick Doctors: Bayle and Laënnec on Their Own Phtisis,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 43, no. 2 (1988): 185–­82. 32. Leopold Auenbrugger and Jean-­Nicolas Corvisart,  Nouvelle méthode pour reconnaître les maladies internes de la poitrine par la percussion de cette cavité (Paris: Migneret, 1808), 170–­78. 33. Gaspart Laurent Bayle, Recherches sur la phtisie pulmonaire (Paris: Gabon, 1810), 407–­11. 34. Castelnau, “Considérations sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1806), 10–­13. 35. Bibliothèque Universitaire de Nantes, Collection Laënnec, Classeur 2 lot a [B], feuillets 178r–­179v. René Laënnec, Manuscript lecture notes, Collège de France, 8th lesson, 2nd year, 1823–­24. 36. Moreau de la Sarthe, “Pays (Maladie du pays),” 470. 37. “Description de la nostalgie ou mal du pays dont BAYLE fut atteint, par Gaudefroy, jeune poète, mort en 1809, à l’âge de 32 ans,” in G. L. Bayle, Traité de maladies cancéreuses, ed. A. L. J. Bayle (Paris: Laurent, 1833), 1:l–­lviii for quotes. On romantic medicine and the limited penetration of Brunonianism in France, see George B. Risse, “The Quest for Certainty in Medicine: John Brown’s System of Medicine in France,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 45, no. 1 (1971): 1–­12; Barnes, Making of a Social Disease, 23–­47; and Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3. On the overlap between romanticism and mechanistic science in the first half of the century, see John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 38. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977). 39. E. Scribe and A.-­H.-­J. Duveyrier (Mélesville), Le mal du pays, ou la batelière de Brienz, in Œuvres complètes d’Eugène Scribe (Paris: Dentu, 1881 [1827]), 17:67–­116. 40. La Pandore, Journal des spectacles, des lettres, des arts, des mœurs et des modes (Decem­ ber 29, 1827), 4; Le Corsaire, Journal des spectacles, de la littérature, des arts, mœurs et modes (December 29, 1827), 2; Le Constitutionnel (December 31, 1827), 3. 41. Michel-­Jean Sedaine, Le déserteur, drame en trois actes, en prose mêlée de musique (Paris: Claude Herissant, 1769); Louis-­Sébastien Mercier, Le déserteur, drame en cinq actes et en prose (Paris: Le Jay, 1770); and Clemens Brentano, “Der Schweizer,” in Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (Heidelberg: Mohr and Zimmer, 1806), 145–­46. 42. Cesare Pugni, Il Disertore Svizzero, ovvero la nostalgia (Milan: Gaspare Truffi, 1831). 43. SHD Xg 54, dossier 5, Colonel Steiguer, letter to Monsieur Forrestier, general secretary of Swiss troops in Paris, from Strasbourg, May 28, 1818; and Colonel Ruttiman, letter to the minister of war, from Toulon, August 24, 1825.

Notes to Pages 136–140  239 44. Fritzsche, “Chateaubriand’s Ruins.” 45. Gaillardot, “Considérations sur la nostalgie,” 15; Martin, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 6; and Percy and Laurent, “Nostalgie,” 268. 46. See, among others, Pierre-­Urbain Brièt, “Essai sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1832), 5; C. Fraisse, “De la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1833), 5 for quote; and E. Poisson, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1836), 7 (where Hugo’s premonitory line on exile, “Oh n’exilons personne! oh! l’exile est impie!,” is quoted for the first time, barely a few months after the publication of his Chants du crépuscule). 47. See Fritzsche, Stranded; Sylvie Aprile, Le siècle des exilés. Bannis et proscrits de 1789 à la Commune (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2010); and, on policing, Miranda Spieler, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), esp. 60–­80. 48. AN F18 659, for Scribe’s manuscript, verified and annotated by the censor on Novem­ ber 27, 1827; and AN F21 972, for the censorship report drafted by the Ministry of the Interior on November 19, 1827, which authorized the play pending minor modifications (including a reduction in the prison sentence handed upon the fugitive littérateur). 49. F. R., “Nostalgie,” in Encyclopédie des gens du monde. Répertoire universel des sciences, des lettres et des arts (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1843), 18:558; Charles Laronde, “Nostalgie,” in Nouveau dictionnaire de la conversation, ed. Auguste Wahlen (Brussels: Librairie Historique-­ Artistique, 1843), 19:164–­65. 50. Journal des débats politiques et littéraires (March 10, 1828): 4; Gazette musicale de Paris, 4th year, 37 (1837); “Air (musique),” in Encyclopédie des gens du monde. Répertoire universel des sciences, des letters et des arts (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1833), 1:311; G. de Saint-­Fargeau, ed., Encyclopédie des jeunes étudiants et des gens du monde (Paris: Hachette, 1833), 1:124–­25; G. Olivier, “Chants populaires,” in W. Duckett, ed., Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture (Paris: Belin-­Mandar, 1834), 13:26; and P.-­J.-­R. Denne-­Baron, “Ranz des vaches,” in Dictionnaire de la conversation, 46:314–­15. 51. Louis Simond, Voyage en Suisse, fait pendant les années 1817, 1818, et 1819 (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1822), 1:449. On Simond and the figure of the tourist, see Venayre, Panorama du voyage, 209–­19. 52. Stewart, On Longing, 23. 53. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 37 for quote. 54. J.-­L. Alibert, Physiologie des passions, ou nouvelle doctrine des sentiments moraux (Paris: Béchet Jeune, 1825), 1:i. 55. Bell, Cult, 10–­12ff. 56. Alibert, Physiologie des passions, 1:1–­10 and 2:315–­27. 57. Castelnau, “Considérations sur la nostalgie” (1804), 5; Allard, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (1820), 5; Martin, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 5; J.-­P.-­Mezin Durantis, “Essai sur la nostalgie” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1820), 14; and J. Yvonneau, “Considérations médico-­ philosophiques sur la nostalgie, suivie de propositions sur quelques points de médecine et de chirurgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1821), 5. The first indications of this shift appear already in theses from the late Empire: Therrin, “Essai sur la nostalgie” (1810), 5; and Ducrest de Lorgerie, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (1815), 5.

240  Notes to Pages 140–144 58. See Williams, Physical and Moral; and Sean M. Quinlan, The Great Nation in Decline: Sex, Modernity and Health Crises in Revolutionary France, c. 1750–­1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 59. Quoted in Richard Holroyd, “The Bourbon Army, 1815–­1830,” Historical Journal 14, no. 3 (1971): 529. 60. J. N. C. A. Florance, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1814), 11. 61. Masson, “De la nostalgie,” 7. 62. Lôwy and Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide. 63. Alibert, Physiologie des passions, 2:325–­26; and Pilet, “De la nostalgie,” 18. 64. Jacquier, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 12. 65. Across the Rhine the German physician Karl Friedrich Heinrich Marx wrote of how railroads and steamboats had almost done away with the threat of nostalgia by putting an end to the “distressing sense of isolation” felt by rural communities across the world. K. F. H. Marx, Ueber die Abnahme der Krankheiten durch die Zunahme der Civilisation (Göttingen: Dietrich, 1844), 37. 66. Pilet, “De la nostalgie,” 18. 67. Stéphane Gerson, The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-­ Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 4–­5 passim. On the “modernity” of nineteenth-­century localities in France and Germany, see also Applegate, Nation of Provincials; and Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). On rural depopulation, urban pauperism, and policing of vagrancy, see Georges Duby and Armand Wallon, eds., Histoire de la France rurale, vol. 3,  Apogée et crise de la civilisation paysanne, 1789–­1914 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976), 70–­85; Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses (Paris: Plon, 1958); and Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 56–­60 and 173–­77. 68. Pauquet, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 8–­9; Yvonneau, “Considérations médico-­ philosophiques sur la nostalgie,” 5. 69. G.-­L.-­V. Pillement, “Essai sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1831), 5; and “Nostalgie,” in Dictionnaire de santé ou vocabulaire de médecine, ed. Jacques Coste (Paris: Gabon, 1829), 629. 70. Huet-­Bienville, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 8; and Roth, “Dying of the Past,” 15–­20. 71. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris, trans. Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 72.  Jean-­François Lacordaire, “Essai sur la nostalgie” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1837), 17. 73. See Goldstein, Post-­Revolutionary Self. 74. Poisson, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 8; Gabriel Andral, Cours de pathologie interne (Paris: Rouvier, 1836), 3:152–­53, 192–­93; Adolphe Garnier, Traité des facultés de l’âme, comprenant l’histoire des principales théories psychologiques (Paris: Hachette, 1852), 1:93–­94, 303–­5, 321 passim. 75. G. Spurzheim, Observations sur la Phraenologie (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1818), 152 and 327–­28; G. Combe, Essays on Phrenology (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1822), 216–­17; Jean-­ Baptiste Descuret, La médecine des passions; ou, les passions considérées dans leurs rapports

Notes to Pages 144–146  241 avec les maladies, les lois et la religion, 2nd ed. (Paris: Labé, 1844), 708–­9 passim; and J. Fossati, Manuel pratique de phrénologie (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1845), 250–­51 and 570. 76. V. J. F. Broussais, Cours de phrénologie (Paris: Baillière, 1836), 197–­211; Pilet, “De la nostalgie,” 25–­27. 77. De la Sarthe, “Pays (Maladie du pays),” 470. 78. J.-­E.-­D. Esquirol, Des maladies mentales considérées sous le rapport médical, hygiénique et médico-­légal (Paris: Baillière, 1838), 1:15, 209–­10, 268–­69, and 288; and E.-­J. Georget, “Nostalgie,” Dictionnaire de médecine ou répertoire général des sciences médicales considérées sous le rapport théorique et pratique (Paris: Béchet Jeune, 1826), 15:135. According to a student of his, Esquirol discussed nostalgia at length in his lectures at the Salpêtrière. See Allard, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie,” 18–­20. 79. On German pyromania and forensic Heimwehliteratur, see Jaspers, Heimweh und Verbrechen; and Zwingmann, “ ‘Heimweh’ or ‘Nostalgic Reaction,’ ” 58–­77. For French adaptations, see Frédéric Dubois, Histoire philosophique de l’hypochondrie et de l’hystérie (Paris: Deville-­ Cavellin, 1833), 229–­32; and Jean-­Christian-­Etienne Marc, “Considérations médico-­légales sur la monomanie et particulièrement la monomanie incendiaire,” AHPML, 1st series, 10 (1833): 430–­65. 80. Benoiston de Chateauneuf, “Essai sur la mortalité dans l’infanterie française,” AHPML, 1st series, 10 (1833): 267–­80, and tables 1 and 4. 81. Jean-­Baptiste Michel, Statistique médicale de l’hôpital militaire du Gros-­Caillou (Paris: Fortin, Masson et Cie, 1842), 61, 83, and 233–­42. 82. J.-­B. Beaufils, “Topographie physique et médicale de l’île d’Ouessant,” RMMCPM 6 (1819): 38–­39 and 45; J.-­V.-­F. Vaidy, “Tableau de la clinique médicale de l’hôpital militaire d’instruction de Lille pendant le deuxième semestre de 1820,” RMMCPM 12 (1822): 136–­37; Alexandre G. Mutel, “De la nostalgie” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1849), 16. 83. VdG 37/6, Coutèle, Mouvement médical de l’hôpital militaire de Vitoria,  July 1823; VdG 37/6, [illegible], Mouvement médical de l’hôpital militaire de Vitoria,  July 1823; VdG 37/2, Bartoli, Mouvement médical des hôpitaux militaire de l’Armée française en Espagne pendant le mois de février 1824; and multiple reports from Greece in SHD D2 2 and 7. On nostalgia and the emotions of those philhellenes who volunteered to fight in the Greek War of Independence, see Hervé Mazurel, Vertiges de la guerre: Byron, les philhellènes et le mirage grec (Paris: Les Belles lettres, 2013). 84. Pierre-­François Kéraudren, Mémoire sur les causes des maladies des marins et sur les soins à prendre pour conserver leur santé dans les ports et à la mer (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1817), 58. 85. François-­Etienne L’Haridon-­Créménec, “Des affections tristes de l’âme, considérées comme causes essentielles du scorbut” (Paris: medical thesis, Year XII [1804]); Kéraudren, Mémoire sur les causes des maladies, 63; M. Quenot, “Dissertation sur le scorbut” (Paris: medical thesis, 1822), 10; M. Da-­Olmi, Précis historico-­physique d’hygiène navale (Paris: Pillet ainé, 1828), 2–­3; and  Joseph-­Marie Laurent Long, “De l’hygiène navale” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1831), 12–­15. 86. J.-­B. Fonssagrives, Traité d’hygiène navale (Paris: Baillière, 1856), 715–­17; and Charles-­ Polydore Forget, Médecine navale (Paris: Baillière, 1832), 2:31–­36. 87. L. Borie, Traité des maladies et des infirmités qui doivent dispenser du service militaire, lorsqu’elles ont résisté aux traitements connus (Paris: Jourdain, 1818), 32.

242  Notes to Pages 146–151 88. U. Coste, “Observations sur la campagne d’Espagne en 1823, pour servir à l’histoire de la médecine militaire,” RMMCPM 16 (1825): 334. 89. Alexandre-­Jacques-­François Brierre de Boismont, De l’ennui (tædium vitae) (Paris: L. Martinet, 1850); and De la folie et de la folie suicide (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1856), 139 and 147. 90. Alfred de Musset, La confession d’un enfant du siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1975 [1836]), quotes at 20 and 36; and Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1999 [1830]). 91. Beaufils, “Topographie physique et médicale,” 39; Joseph-­Louis Mandilény, “Essai sur la conservation de la santé des gens de guerre” (Paris: medical thesis, 1820), 40–­41; Justin Santy, “De la nostalgie à bord des navires de guerre,” AHPML, 1st series, 16 (1836): 310–­17; and Fonssagrives, Traité d’hygiène navale, 715–­16. 92. Alfred de Vigny, Servitude et grandeur militaire (1835), in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 2:685. 93. Émile Marco de Saint-­Hilaire, Physiologie du troupier (Paris: Aubert et Cie, 1841), 11, 36, 48, and 59. 94. J. L. F., Physiologie du conscrit (Lyon: Lithographie Parceint, 1846), 3, 5, and 8–­9. 95. SHD D2 2. Letter from the corps’ quartermaster to the War Ministry, from the Peloponnese (December 1, 1828).

Chapter Six 1. On the military conquest of Algeria see Jacques Frémeaux, L’Afrique à l’ombre des épées, vol. 1, Des établissements côtiers aux confins sahariens, 1830–­1930 (Vincennes: SHAT, 1983); Benjamin Claude Brower,  A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara (New York City: Columbia University Press, 2009); and Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 2. For demographic data, see Marcel Yacono, “Peut-­on évaluer la population de l’Algérie vers 1830?” Revue africaine 98, nos. 440–­41 (1954): 277–­307; and Kamil Kateb, Européens, “indigènes” et juifs en Algérie (1830–­1962): Représentations et réalités des populations (Paris: INED, 2001), 16 and 30. On violence and extermination, see Brower, Desert; Abdelmajid Hannoum, Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and William Gallois, A History of  Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (New York: Palgrave, 2013). 3. Franciade Fleurus Duvivier, Solution de la question de l’Algérie (Paris: Gaultier-­Laguionie, 1841), 49. 4. Hélène Blais, “ ‘Qu’est-­ce qu’Alger?’ le débat colonial sous la monarchie de Juillet,” Romantisme 139, no. 1 (2008): 19–­32. 5. Kateb, Européens, 29 and 33. 6. Kateb, Européens, 33. 7. David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870–­1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). On the colonization of Algeria, see also Charles-­André Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, vol. 1, La conquête et les débuts de la colonisation (1827–­ 1871) (Paris: PUF, 1986); and Daniel Rivet, Le Maghreb à l’épreuve de la colonisation (Paris: Hachette, 2002). 8. Jean-­Christian-­Marc Boudin, “Etudes sur la mortalité et l’acclimatement de la population

Notes to Pages 151–153  243 française en Algérie,” AHPML, 1st series, 37 (1847): 378; and “Colonisation française en Algérie,” AHPML, 1st series, 39 (1848): 343. For similar figures in 1840 and the 1850s, see Tableau de la situation des établissements français dans l’Algérie, 1840 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1841), 40 and 61; and Tableau de la situation des établissements français dans l’Algérie, 1850–­1852 (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1853), 18 and 61. 9. For military mortality rates, see SHD 1 M 2357, Ministère de la guerre, “Renseignements sur la mortalité de l’armée depuis 1843 à 1878”; Tableau de la situation des établissements français dans l’Algérie, 1840, 61; Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8–­9; and Chateauneuf, “Essai sur la mortalité,” 277. Mortality rates for civilian settlers were also much higher than in France (Tableau de la situation des établissements français dans l’Algérie, 1850–­1852, 97). 10. Kateb, Européens, 37–­39. 11. Albert Fabre, ed., Histoire de la médecine aux armées, vol. 2, De la Révolution française au conflit mondial de 1914 (Paris: Charles Lavauzelle, 1984), 132. 12. [ Jean-­André] Antonini, Rapport médical sur l’Algérie (Paris: Imprimerie de Moquet, 1841), 41. 13. On the “para-­tropical” nature of diseases in colonial Algeria, see Anne Marie Moulin, “Tropical without the Tropics: The Turning Point of Pasteurian Medicine in North Africa,” in Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500–­1900, ed. David Arnold (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 161. On colonial medicine and the French army’s medical corps in particular, see Yvonne Turin, Affrontements culturels dans l’Algérie coloniale: écoles, médecines, religion, 1830–­1880 (Paris: F. Maspero, 1971); Patricia Lorcin, “Imperialism, Cultural Identity and Race in Colonial Algeria. The Role of the Medical Corps, 1830–­1870,” Isis 90, no. 4 (1999): 653–­79; and Claire Fredj, “Les médecins de l’armée et les soins aux colons en Algérie (1830–­1851),” Annales de démographie historique 113 (2007): 125–­54. 14. Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1991); Sophie Dulucq and Colette Zytnicki, “Penser le passé colonial français, entre perspectives historiographiques et résurgences des mémoires,” Vingtième siècle 86, no. 2 (2005): 59–­69. 15. For historical studies of “nostalgeria,” see Anne Donadey, “ ‘Une certaine idée de la France’: The Algeria Syndrome and the Struggles over ‘French’ Identity,” in Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in Twentieth-­Century France, ed. Steven Ungar and Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press, 1996), 215–­32; and Patricia Lorcin, ed., Algeria & France, 1800–­2000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2006). 16. VdG 982/11bis, Dominique Larrey, Instructions générales d’hygiène pour les troupes d’Afrique, 1830. 17. SHD 1 H 4, Mauricheau-­Beaupré, letter to the Conseil de Santé, from Algiers, September 2, 1830; VdG 67/12, Stephanopoli, Chevreau and Juvenig, Rapport sur les maladies qui ont régné à Alger pendant les mois de juin, juillet, août et septembre, 1831, October 15, 1831; and Jean-­André Antonini, Charles Monard and Pascal Monard, “Lettre médicale adressée à MM. les officiers de santé en chef de l’Armée d’Afrique,” RMMCPM 33 (1832): 230–­31. 18. SHD 1 H 11, Motifs qui ont nécessité le renouvellement des garnisons d’Alger et d’Oran, January 3, 1832.

244  Notes to Pages 153–155 19. VdG 67/9, Hôpital de la Salpétrière, Algiers, Tableau synoptique des maladies observées pendant le 2ème et le 3ème trimestre de 1831, n.d. [1832]. 20. VdG 67/8, Guyon, Rapport sur la situation sanitaire, September 8, 1836; VdG 96-­1/2, [Auguste] Haspel, Hôpital militaire de Tiaret. Mouvement médical des mois d’avril et juin 1843, n.d.; Armand Jehannot de Bartillat, Relation de la campagne d’Afrique en 1830 (Paris: Dentu, 1832), 193, 200, and 214; Captain Forey, letter to Marshal Boniface de Castellane, November 4, 1839, in Campagnes d’Afrique, 1835–­1848. Lettres adressées au Maréchal de Castellane (Paris: Plon, 1898), 158; and Corneille Trumelet, Bou-­Farick (Alger: A. Jourdan, 1887), 130 for quote. 21. D.-­M. Vignard, “Extrait du rapport médical adressé au Conseil de Santé sur le service de l’hôpital du Lazaret de Marseille pendant les mois d’août, septembre et octobre 1830,” RMMCPM 13 (1831): 258–­60. 22. F.-­C. Maillot and J.-­A.-­A. Puel, Aide-­mémoire médico-­légal de l’officier de santé de l’armée de terre (Paris: Baillière, 1842), 142–­43; and P.-­A. Didiot, Code des officiers de santé de l’armée de terre (Paris: Rozier, 1863), 209–­12, 276, and 366–­70. 23. VdG 67/8, Rapport des officiers de santé en chef du corps d’occupation à l’intendant militaire de l’Algérie sur les hôpitaux, les évacuations et la création de dépôts de convalescence, 1841. 24. SHD 1 H 19, Monk d’Uzer, letter to the war minister, from Bône, March 25, 1833. 25. VdG 82/11, Louis Cazalas, Statistique médicale de l’hôpital militaire d’Oran, 1831–­52, 1853; and VdG 82/12, Etienne Louis Jourdain, Hôpital militaire d’Oran. Rapport statistique de l’année 1842, 1843. 26. Antonini, Rapport médical, 32. 27. Amédée Desjobert, L’Algérie en 1838 (Paris: Dufart, 1838), 75. 28. VdG 67/8, Circulaire des officiers de santé en chef du corps d’occupation sur les dépôts de convalescence, August 12, 1841. 29. VdG 77/2, Casimir Broussais, Récapitulation par nature des maladies des militaires qui ont été traités pendant le troisième trimestre de 1844, 1844. 30. VdG 83/2,  Jean Félix Hutin, Compte rendu de l’expédition de Tlemcen, February 27, 1842. 31. Pilet, “De la nostalgie,” 25–­27. 32. J.-­V. Malaper du Peux, “De la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1853), 5, 12–­13, and 22–­32. 33. A. Haspel, De la nostalgie (Paris: G. Masson, 1874), 105. 34. VdG 71/39, Payen, Rapport sur l’expédition conduite par le Général Bugeaud à Tlemcen, November 1, 1836; and SHD 1 H 41, anonymous [Payen], Rapport sur les maladies qui ont régné pendant la campagne de Tlemcen, 1836. 35. VdG 79-­1/20, Mayer-­Goudechaux Worms, Rapport sur l’Epidémie de Bône, September 21, 1833; and VdG 79-­1/23, Lieutenant Colonel Canteloube, Observations sur les maladies de Bône (Bône: Imprimerie Guérin, 1837). On the fight against malaria in Bône and elsewhere, see Prochaska, Making Algeria French, 87–­89; and William B. Cohen, “Malaria and French Imperialism,” Journal of African History 24, no. 1 (1983): 23–­36. 36. VdG 78/1, Joseph Victor Chatelain, Hôpital militaire de Mustapha. Division des fiévreux. Rapport trimestriel du service de santé de la médecine pendant les mois d’avril, mai et juin 1845, July 15, 1845; and Alexis de Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria,” in Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed.  Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 79.

Notes to Pages 155–159  245 37. Flavien Parisot, letter to Jean-­Baptiste Joux, from Ténès, December 12, 1852, in Flavien de Fignévelle: lettres d’Algérie et de Crimée d’un soldat vosgien (1850–­1855) (Grignoncourt: Editions Saone-­Lorraine, 1994), 72–­73. 38. Lucien-­François de Montagnac, letter to Elizé de Montagnac fils, from Oran,  January 23, 1839, in Lettres d’un soldat: neuf années de campagnes en Algérie (Paris: Plon, 1885), 58. 39. Pierre de Castellane, Souvenirs de la vie militaire en Afrique (Paris: Lecou, 1852), 15–­16, 87, 174; J. A. N. Périer, De l’hygiène en Algérie, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1847), 1:83, 88 and 2:104, 124–­25; Malaper Du Peux, “De la nostalgie,” 20–­21; and Louis-­Alexandre-­Hippolyte Leroy-­Dupré, “De la Nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1846), 25. 40. Thomas-­Robert Bugeaud, memo of March 23, 1844, in H. A. L. d’Ideville, Le Maréchal Bugeaud, d’après sa correspondance intime et des documents inédits (Paris: Firmin-­Didot, 1882), 3:235. 41. See Edouard Houssin, “Le Cafard est-­il une psychose coloniale?” (Lyon: medical thesis, 1916), 20–­21 (thanks to Charlotte Ann Legg, who first brought this source to my attention); Roynette, Mots des soldats, 55; and Dominique Kalifa, Biribi. Les bagnes coloniaux de l’armée d’Afrique (Paris: Perrin, 2009), 276–­78. 42. VdG 86/9, Frey, Hôpital médical de Boghar. Mouvement médical pendant le quatrième trimestre de 1852, 1853. 43. Barthélémy-­Prosper Enfantin, Colonisation de l’Algérie (Paris: P. Bertrand, 1843), 207–­8 and 404. For a similar analysis, cf. Etienne Cabet, Réalisation de la communauté d’Icarie (Paris: Bureau du Populaire, 1847), 301. 44. Bégin, “Nostalgie,” 76–­77. 45. C. Nodier, J. Taylor, and A. de Cailleux, Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France. Bretagne (Paris: Gide fils, 1845), 1:4; and Alfred de Courcy, “Le Breton,” in Les français peints par eux-­mêmes. Encyclopédie morale du dix-­neuvième siècle. Province (Paris: Curmer, 1842), 3:87–­88. On these stereotypes, see Catherine Bertho, “L’invention de la Bretagne. Genèse sociale d’un stéréotype,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 35, no. 1 (1980): 45–­62. 46. AN F9 222 Morbihan, dossier 10, letters and reports from the prefect to the War Ministry, January 15 and December 29, 1818; November 16, 1822; August 1827; and November 7, 1830; and AN F9 161, Aveyron, dossier 13, report from the prefect to the War Ministry on the levy of 1821, May 10, 1822. An 1837 report by the War Ministry advised treating the many deserters among new draftees with indulgence due to their indomitable homesickness: AN F9 55, Compte général de l’administration de la justice militaire pendant l’année 1834 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1837), 10. 47. Eric T.  Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and Michael A. Osborne, “Resurrecting Hippocrates: Hygienic Systems and the French Scientific Expeditions to Egypt, Morea and Algeria,” Clio Medica 35 (1996): 80–­98. 48. On “pathogenic places” and the “tropical menace” in liminal warm climates, including the Maghreb, see Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); and Jennings, Colonizers, 14–­15. 49. Jacques-­Joseph de Gardanne, Des maladies des créoles en Europe (Paris: Valade, 1784), vii, 15, and 60; Saint-­Méry, Description topographique, 1:528; and Louis-­Sébastien Mercier,

246  Notes to Pages 159–161 Néologie ou Vocabulaire des mots nouveaux, à renouveler, ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles (Paris: Moussard et Maradan, Year IX [1801]), 1:8. The Archives parlementaires reveal that there was much talk of acclimatization and slave labor among elected deputies from November 1789, when news of the first slave revolts in Saint-­Domingue reached Paris, to early 1794, when the National Convention officially abolished slavery. See the French Revolution Digital Archive (Stanford/BNF) at http://frda.stanford.edu/en/ap. On acclimatization, see also Warwick Anderson, “Climates of Opinion: Acclimatization in Nineteenth-­Century France and England,” Victorian Studies 35, no. 2 (1992): 135–­57; and Michael A. Osborne, “Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science” Osiris, 2nd series, 15 (2000): 135–­51. 50. Michel-­Étienne Descourtilz, Guide sanitaire des voyageurs aux colonies (Paris: C.-­L.-­F. Panckoucke, 1816), 61–­78 and 97–­111; and Antoine Joseph Dariste, Conseils aux Européens qui passent dans les pays chauds, et notamment aux Antilles (Bordeaux: Lavalle jeune et neveu, 1824), 6 and 18. 51. Michael A. Osborne, Nature, the Exotic and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 145. 52. Boudin, “Colonisation francaise,” 371 passim. Boudin detailed his findings in AHPML, 1st series, 35 (1846); 37 (1847); 39 (1848); 50 (1853); and 2nd series, 9 (1858); as well as in the Gazette médicale de Paris (see VdG 68/9). Among his many critics, see Victor Martin, Manuel d’hygiène à l’usage des Européens qui viennent s’établir en Algérie (Algiers: Dubos Frères et Marest, 1847); Victor Martin and Louis-­Edmond Folley, De l’acclimatement et de la colonisation de l’Algérie (Algiers, 1848); and Victor Martin and Louis-­Edmond Folley, Histoire statistique de la colonization algérienne au point de vue du peuplement et de l’hygiène (Paris: Baillière, 1851). 53. VdG 98/1, Pierre-­Jean Moricheau-­Beaupré, letter to the Central Health Council in Paris, from Algiers, September 2, 1830; Antonini, Rapport médical, 16; VdG 791/26, Goedorp, Recherches sur l’influence qu’exerce la constitution atmosphérique dans la production des maladies règnant à Bône (Afrique), 1839. 54. J.-­P.-­F. Thévenot, Traité des maladies des Européens dans les pays chauds et spécialement au Sénégal (Paris: Baillière, 1840), 277–­78. 55. Leroy-­Dupré, “De la nostalgie,” 5; Mutel, “De la nostalgie,” 17; J. R. H. Parron, “Essai sur la nostalgie” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1851), 32–­33; and Louis Jogand, “Essai sur l’acclimatement en Algérie” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1854), 15. 56. SHD Xb 648, Field Marshal Duvivier, Inspéction générale de 1840, 23e régiment d’infanterie de ligne, 1840; SHD Xb 681, Lieutenant General d’Hautpoul, Inspéction générale de 1841, 56e régiment d’infanterie de ligne, September 12, 1841; SHD Xb 641, Maréchal de camp Thiéry, Inspection générale de 1845, 16e régiment d’infanterie de ligne, September 13, 1845; and VdG 82/ nn, Caselli, Lettre à messieurs les membres du Conseil de santé des Armées, November 1, 1859. 57. SHD 1 H 72, General Valée, letter to war minister, from Algiers, September 6, 1840; and, for a much more cautious endorsement, Tocqueville, “Essay on Algeria,” 78–­80. 58. VdG 67/8, [  Jean-­François] Payen, letter to the war minister, May 10, 1837; and Rapport des officiers de santé en chef du corps d’occupation à l’intendant militaire de l’Algérie sur les hôpitaux, les évacuations et la création de ‘dépôts de convalescence,’ May 1841. 59. Jean-­Pierre Bonnafont, Géographie médicale d’Alger et de ses environs (Algiers: Brachet et Bastide, 1839), 98–­102 and 120.

Notes to Pages 161–164  247 60. VdG 67/8, M. Gaudineau, Mémoire présenté à Mr Bégin sur la création d’un dépôt de convalescence en Algérie, June 7, 1843. 61. Martin, Manuel d’hygiène, 159 and 209. 62. VdG 86/2,  Jean Lacroix and C. F. Finot, Hôpital militaire de Blidah. Rapport médical du 4e trimestre 1847, 1848. 63. Castilho, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie”; and Jules Guérin, “Revue bibliographique,” Gazette médicale de Paris 2, no. 39 (September 24, 1831): 334. 64. Charles-­Alexandre Morin, “Considérations générales sur l’acclimatement en Algérie” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1855), 29. 65. VdG 70/5, Tableau Nosographique à suivre pour la désignation des maladies dans les rapports sur le service médical de l’Algérie, n.d. [mid-­1850s]; and VdG 70/7, Marcel Charles Sierzputowski, Notes sur les diverses questions sanitaires et de colonisation, 1858. 66.  Jean-­Baptiste Moheau, Recherches et considérations sur la population de la France (Paris: Moutard, 1778), 244; and Leslie Choquette, Peasants into Frenchmen: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 195–­206. 67. Choquette, Peasants into Frenchmen, 2; James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–­1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 17; and Gilles Ha­ vard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 205. 68. See Emma Rothschild, “A Horrible Tragedy in the French Atlantic,” Past and Present 192 (2006): 67–­108. 69. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 89. 70. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Some Ideas about What Prevents the French from Having Good Colonies” (1833), in Writings on Empire, 1–­2. 71. Figures and statistics from Tableau de la situation des établissements français dans l’Algérie, 1840 (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1841), 96; Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie, 152–­53 and 158; and Xavier Yacono, Histoire de l’Algérie, de la fin de la Régence turque à l’insurrection de 1954 (Versailles: l’Atlanthrope, 1993), 94–­95. 72. On these colonization projects, see Claire Salinas, “Colonies without Colonists: Colonial Emigration, Algeria, and Liberal Politics in France, 1848–­1870” (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2005); Saïd Almi, Urbanisme et colonisation: présence française en Algérie (Sprimont: Mardaga, 2002); and Tarik Bellahsene, “La colonisation en Algérie: Processus et procédures de création des centres de peuplement. Institutions, intervenants et outils” (PhD dissertation, Université de Paris VIII, 2006). 73. See Maurice-­Henri Weil, ed., Oeuvres militaires du maréchal Bugeaud, duc d’Isly (Paris: Baudoin, 1883). 74. The Abbé Landmann’s numerous projects include Les fermes du petit Atlas, ou colonisation agricole, religieuse et militaire du nord de l’Afrique (Paris: Perisse Frères and Debécourt, 1841); Exposé adressé par l’abbé Landmann à Messieurs les députés sur la colonisation de l’Algérie (Paris: Schneider et Langrand, 1846); and ANOM GGA, L4, Mémoire sur la colonisation de l’Algérie par les enfants-­trouvés de France, September 28, 1860. 75. See Marcel Émerit, Les saint-­simoniens en Algérie (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1941); Osama W. Abi-­Mershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint-­Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in

248  Notes to Pages 164–166 Algeria (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); and Naomi Andrews, “ ‘The Universal Alliance of All People’: Romantic Socialists, the Human Family, and the Defense of  Empire during the July Monarchy, 1830–­1848,” French Historical Studies 34, no. 3 (2011): 473–­502. 76. Bernard Desmars, “L’Union agricole d’Afrique. Projet phalanstérien, œuvre philanthropique ou entreprise capitaliste?” Cahiers Charles Fourier 16 (December 2005): 39–­50. 77. Hildebert Isnard, “Les entreprises de fondation de villages dans le Sahel d’Alger (1843–­ 1854),” Revue africaine 82, nos. 3–­4 (1938): 243–­312. 78. Charles-­Robert Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, vol. 2, De l’insurrection de 1871 au déclenchement de la guerre de libération (1954) (Paris: PUF, 1979), 22–­23. On military penal colonies in Algeria, see Kalifa, Biribi. 79. See, for example, Alfred Legoyt, De la colonisation civile et militaire en Algérie (Sceaux: E. Dépée, n.d. [1846]). 80. Martin, Manuel d’hygiène, 181. 81. J. M. Landmann, Mémoires au Roi sur la colonisation de l’Algérie (Paris: Jacques Lecofre et Cie, 1845); and Exposé adressé par l’abbé Landmann. 82. M. Topin and Félix Jacquot, De la colonisation et l’acclimatement en Algérie (Paris: Dumaine and Masson, 1849), 110. 83. See ANOM F80 1177 and Archives de Paris (AdP) VD4 10, 2943–­77, for examples of certificates bearing results of this medical exam. 84. See Michael J. Heffernan, “The Parisian Poor and the Colonization of Algeria during the Second Republic,” French History 3, no. 4 (1989): 377–­403; and Yvette Katan, “Les Colons de 1848 en Algérie: mythes et réalités,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 31 (1984): 177–­ 202. The settlers’ ordeal is also documented in Vivant Beaucé,  Le journal du voyage d’un colon de 1848, ed. Maurice Bel (Nice, 1997); Maxime Rasteil, A l’aube de l’Algérie Française. Le calvaire des colons de 48 (Paris: Figuière, 1930); Norbert Truquin, Mémoires et aventures d’un prolétaire à travers la Révolution (Paris: Maspero, 1977); and letters of complaint sent from settlers to the Commission des colonies agricoles, in ANOM F80 1392. 85. On the construction of the villages, see Xavier Malverti, “Les officiers du Génie et le dessin de villes en Algérie (1830–­1870),” Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée 73–­74 (1994): 229–­44. 86. ANOM F80 1399, Blanchet, Rapport du moi de Janvier 1849 sur la situation de la colonie de Mondovi (1). 87. Eugène François, quoted in Rasteil, Calvaire des colons, 52; and ANOM F80 1392, letter from a colon of Saint-­Cloud to Ulysse Trélat, May 8, 1849. 88. Heffernan, “Parisian Poor,” 396; ANOM F80 1424, Colombani, Rapport de décembre 1849 sur la situation de la colonie agricole de Millesimo N. 2,  January 1850; and VdG 70/33, Antoine Paul Vaillant, Inspection médicale de 1851. Colonie agricole de Zurich, October 26, 1851. 89. ANOM F80 1390, instructions from war minister to the governor-­general of Algeria, July 2, 1849. 90. Louis Reybaud (Rapporteur), Rapport fait à M. le Ministre de la Guerre par la Commission d’inspection des colonies agricoles, Paris, November 16, 1849. Katan has concluded that single men amounted to about one-­third of the sample, that a majority of settlers had grown up outside of Paris, and that there is little evidence of politicization among the settlers as a whole. See Katan, “Colons de 1848.”

Notes to Pages 166–168  249 91. M. Dutrône, Rapport fait à la commission des colonies agricoles de l’Algérie (Paris: E. Duverger, 1850), 66. As a former army physician and trained aliéniste, Trélat knew nostalgia rather well. See his Recherches historiques sur la folie (Paris: Baillière, 1938), 105. 92. Gustave Leroy, “les colons de l’Algérie,” in Claude and Josiette Liauzu, Quand on chantait les colonies. Colonisation et culture populaire de 1830 à nos jours (Paris: Syllepse, 2002), 17–­ 18; and Beaucé, “Journal du voyage d’un colon,” in L’Illustration 13 (June 2, 1849), 218. 93. ANOM F80 1792, F[rancois] Lacroix, letter to the war minister [Lamoricière], August 30, 1848. The village of Cheraga[s] lay twelve kilometers to the west of Algiers and was invested in 1842 by settlers from southern France (Var). 94.  Jean-­Christian Boyer, “Considérations hygiéniques sur les colonies agricoles de l’Algérie en général et sur Barral en particulier” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1851), 58. 95. VdG 70/28, Anonymous, Extraits du registre servant à l’inscription des colons malades, traités à domicile ou envoyés à l’hôpital au village de Damette, February and July 1949; VdG 70/30, Antoine Paul Vaillant, Inspection médicale de 1851: Colonie agricole de Ponteba, October 20, 1851; ANOM F80 1412, anonymous, Rapport sur la situation de la colonie de Millesimo 1, January 29, 1849; ANOM F80 1422, Lapasset, Rapport du mois de juillet 1849 sur la situation de la colonie de Montenotte et annexes, n.d.; and ANOM F80 1410, for the leave request for Mlle Julie Félicie Prost, from Castiglione colony [1852]. 96. Malaper du Peux, “De la nostalgie,” 18; VdG 70/34, Antoine Paul Vaillant, Inspection médicale de 1851: Colonie agricole de Ponteba, October 20, 1851; and VdG 70/30, Louis Théodore Laveran, Rapport sur l’inspection médicale des colonies et des dépendances agricoles d’Afroun et de Marengo, August 11, 1851. 97. VdG 70/43, Hippolyte Lagrave, Rapport adressé à M. l’Intendant militaire de l’Armée d’Afrique, colonies agricoles de Jemmapes, Gastonville et de Robertville, August 14, 1849. 98. VdG 70/34, N.-­F.-­G. Rietschel, Rapport médical sur les colonies agricoles de la Ferme, Ponteba et Montenotte. Inspection de 1849, August 4, 1849. 99. ANOM F80 1423, letter from Général Pélissier to the Minister of War, February 2, 1849; ANOM F80 1423, Rapport du mois de novembre sur la situation de la colonie de St. Leu et an­ nexes, n.d.; and Rapport du mois d’octobre 1849 sur la situation de la colonie de St Louis et an­ nexes, n.d. 100. Quoted in Robert Tinthoin, Assi-­Ben-­Okba. Un village de “Parisiens” en 1848 (Oran: Heintz Frères, 1949), 20. 101. Some 100,000 men and women were sent to Guiana and New Caledonia, and it is estimated that up to 800,000 soldiers transited through the French army’s penal institutions in Algeria. Over the same period, the British sent some 160,000 convicts to Australia. 102. On the Communards, see Bullard, “Self-­Representation.” For scattered contemporary sources, see H. Lauvergne, Les forçats considérés sous le rapport physiologique, moral et intellectuel (Paris: Baillière, 1841), 286–­87 passim; Notice Statistique sur la Guyane Française (Paris: Didot, 1843), 42; and Charles Ribeyrolles, Les bagnes d’Afrique: histoire de la transportation de décembre (London: Jeffs, 1853), 167, 177, 201, and 216. 103. See Sir John Bowring, Report on Egypt and Canada (London: Clowes and sons, 1840), 5–­6, 84, 88–­89, and 91; Louis-­Rémy Aubert-­Roche, “Essai sur l’acclimatement des Européens dans les pays chauds,” AHPML, 1st series, 33 (1845): 47; Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 32–­64; and Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men:

250  Notes to Pages 168–172 Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 202–­10. 104. François Vidal, De la répartition des richesses, ou de la justice distributive en économie sociale (Paris: Capelle, 1846), 386; and Jacques Rancière, La nuit de prolétaire: archives du rêve ouvrier (Paris: Fayard, 1981). 105. Louis-­René Villermé, “De la santé des ouvriers employés dans les fabriques de soie, de cotton et de laine,” AHPML, 1st series, 21 (1839): 362; and Tableau de l’état physique et moral des ouvriers employés dans les manufactures de coton, de laine et de soie (Paris: J. Renouard, 1840), 1:222–­23. 106. AdP VD4 3104 and 3107bis, Préfecture de Police, Tableaux nosographiques des maladies qui peuvent être cause de mort, 1821 and 1833. 107. APHP, Salpêtrière 6R 89, Certificats médicaux d’observation—­aliénés (1826–­1838); Salpêtrière 6Q2, Registres des entrées des aliénés d’office (registers sampled: 2 [1836–­39] and 13 [1848–­49]); Bicêtre 6Q2, Registres d’entrées des aliénés d’office (registers sampled: 1 [1839–­40], 4 [1842–­43], and 12 [1848]). 108. Auguste Haspel, Maladies de l’Algérie. Des causes, de la symptomatologie, de la nature et du traitement des maladies endémo-­épidémiques de la province d’Oran (Paris: Baillière, 1850), 1:59–­61; and Nostalgie, 17, 38–­39, 53, and 124–­29. Until the popularization of neurasthenia in the 1870s, the term surmenage had been used primarily in veterinary science to describe overworked farm animals. On the medicalization of fatigue in the nineteenth century, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 109. Achille Fillias, Histoire de la conquête et de la colonisation de l’Algérie (1830–­1860) (Paris: Arnauld de Vresse, 1860), 348–­49. Fillias first published this assessment in the early 1850s. 110. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); and Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas A. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). 111. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Second Letter on Algeria” (1837), “Notes on the Voyage to Algeria in 1841,” and “Essay on Algeria” (1841), in Writings on Empire, quotes at 23, 89, and 105. 112. Charles A. Gordon, “Observations on the Statistics of Diseases of the Brain and Ner­ vous System, as They Affect Soldiers, Officers, Women, and Children in India,” Medical Times and Gazette, October 17, 1857, 394; and F. J. Mouat, “Discussion” of  W. H. Millar, “Statistics of Deaths by Suicide among Her Majesty’s Troops Serving at Home and Abroad, during the Ten Years 1862–­71,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol. 37 (1874), 191. See also Waltraub Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj: The European Insane in British India, 1800–­1858 (London: Rou­ tledge, 1991). 113. Louis Lenoel, “La nostalgie,” in Mémoires de l’Académie des lettres et des arts d’Amiens 39 (1892): 321; Lucien-­Anatole Prévost-­Paradol, La France nouvelle (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1869), 409–­10; and Charles Dupont-­White, L’individu et l’état (Paris: Guillaumin, 1865), 260.

Chapter Seven 1. ANOM L3, Conseil Général du Finistère, Extrait du procès-­verbal des délibérations du Conseil général, November 28, 1848.

Notes to Pages 172–175  251 2. ANOM L5, Auguste Bourel-­Roncière, original plan of October 1851, subsequent correspondence and documentation, and 1854 prospectus for the Société Bretonne de colonisation. See also his Aperçu sur l’établissement d’une commune Bretonne en Algérie (Saint-­Brieuc: L. Prud’Homme, 1852). Bourel-­Roncière was a leading figure in the Breton cultural revival of the mid-­nineteenth century. See Jean-­Yves Guiomar, Le Bretonisme. Les historiens Bretons au XIXe siècle (Mayenne: Imprimerie de la Manutention, 1987), 115ff. 3. ANOM L5, Bourel-­Roncière papers. Exchanges with the ministry continued at least into 1858, but the project never got off the ground. See, Emmanuel Godin, “Greater France and the Provinces: Representations of the Empire and Colonial Interests in the Rennes Region, 1880–­ 1905,” French History 21, no. 1 (2007): 65–­84. 4. ANOM L1, L2, L3, L4, and L5 contain numerous such colonization projects submitted between 1846 and 1862. For a good example, see Noël-­Bernard Baillet, Formation de villages dé­ partementaux en Algérie et projet de société pour la création d’un village normand à Aïn Bénian (Rouen: Lebrument, 1851). On the Compagnie genevoise, which received lavish land concessions and fiscal advantages but collapsed amid charges of widespread fraud, see Claude Lützelschwab, La compagnie genevoise des Colonies suisses de Sétif (1853–­1956): Un cas de colonisation privée en Algérie (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006). 5. Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Paris: Didot, 1853); and Bénédict-­Auguste Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine (Paris: Baillière, 1857), 1–­46. 6. See Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 106; and, on fears and legislation about métissage, Emmanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 7. Donatien Thibaut, Acclimatement et colonisation. Algérie et colonies (Paris: Rouvier, 1859), 6 and 10. 8.  Jean-­Christian-­Marc Boudin, “Du non-­cosmopolitisme des races humaines,” Mémoires de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris 1 (1860–­1863): 93–­123. 9. M. Bodichon, Considérations sur l’Algérie (Paris: Comptoir Central de la Librairie, 1845); and Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: Tauris, 1995), 144 passim. 10. On the commission, see Marie-­Noëlle Bourguet, Bernard Lepetit, Daniel Nordman, and Maroula Sinarellis, eds., L’invention scientifique de la Méditerranée. Égypte, Morée, Algérie (Paris: EHESS, 1998). 11. VdG 68/1, J. N. Périer, Essai sur l’hygiène du soldat en Algérie, 1842; J. N. Périer “De l’acclimatement en Algérie,” AHPML, 1st series, 33/34 (1845): 314; and De l’hygiène en Algérie (Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie pendant les années 1840, 1841, 1842. Sciences médicales) (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1847), 1:45–­46. 12. Périer, Hygiène en Algérie, 2:104–­25. 13. Michel Lévy, Traité d’hygiène publique et privé (Paris: Baillière et fils, 1844–­45), 222–­27 and 525 for quote. On similar attempts at making “Frenchmen in soul and character” in French Indochina, see Saada, Empire’s Children, 76–­85. 14. Jogand, “Essai sur l’acclimatement,” 15; Nicholas Perrin, “De l’acclimatement” (Paris: medical thesis, 1845), 5; and Achille Ancinelle, “De l’acclimatement” (Paris: medical thesis, 1844), 20 and 32.

252  Notes to Pages 175–178 15. ANOM F80 1791 M. Constant, colonization project addressed to Napoleon III in September 1862. 16. VdG 67/8, M. Gaudineau, Mémoire présenté à Mr Bégin. 17. ANOM L4, T. Achard, Projet de colonisation présenté par M. Achard, membre du Conseil général du département du Bas-­Rhin (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1842). 18. ANOM L3, [Leopold Turck] Conseil Général des Vosges, Projet de colonisation (sent to the minister for war on June 11, 1845). Like Achard, Turck received praise but not financial help (in his case probably because of his known republican sympathies). 19. Leopold Turck, L’École aliéniste française. L’isolement des fous dans les asiles (Paris: Baillière et fils, 1864), 4–­5 and 15; and an open letter published in the periodical Lyon médical. Gazette médicale et journal de médecine réunis 15 ( July 18, 1869), 428–­29. Turck’s attack was dismissed by the Parisian alienist Delasieuve, who ridiculed Turck’s calculations and relegated “deaths by nostalgia [ . . . ] to the realm of fairy tales.” See Delasieuve, “Aliénés. Traitement des fous à domicile,” Journal de médecine mentale 9 (1869): 231–­34. 20. ANOM L3, Conseil Général de l’Isère, Extrait du procès-­verbal des délibérations du Conseil général, December 2, 1848; and M. Lieutaud, Société Angévine pour le placement des colons en Algérie (Angers: Cosnière et Lachèse, 1847), 4. 21. ANOM L3, Jean-­Baptiste Brunet, colonization project and correspondence with various departmental councils. The plan was debated in the chamber on June 19 (that is, three days before the barricades went up) and then again on October 2 and 24. See “Proposition relative à la colonisation de l’Algérie,” and “Proposition relative à la création de colonies départementales en Algérie,” in Assemblée Nationale Constituante, Impressions. Projets de lois, propositions, rapports, etc., 1848–­1849 (Paris: Imprimerie de l’Assemblée Nationale, 1849), 2:138, and 4:508 and 559. 22. Henri Cauvain, undated article from Le Constitutionnel, reprinted in François Ducuing, Les villages départementaux en Algérie (Paris: Schiller, 1853), 39. 23. ANOM F80 1177 and L3, correspondence between the prefect, the war minister, and the governor general. See also Victor Desmontès, “Vesoul-­Benian, une colonie Franc-­Comtoise,” Bulletin de la Société de géographie d’Alger et de l’Afrique du Nord 1903 (1904): 365–­427. 24. On the short-­lived Arab Kingdom, see Annie Rey-­Goldzeiguer, Le royaume arabe: la politique algérienne de Napoleon III, 1861–­1870 (Algiers: Société Nationale d’Edition et de Diffusion, 1977); and Abi-­Mershed, Apostles of  Modernity, 149–­200. 25. See Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie, 402–­6; and John Vincent Nye, “The Myth of Free-­Trade Britain and Fortress France: Tariffs and Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 51, no. 1 (1991): 23–­46. 26. Prévost-­Paradol, France nouvelle, 415–­16. 27. See Jean-­François Chanet, L’École républicaine et les petites patries (Paris: Aubier, 1996); and Anne-­Marie Thiesse, Ils apprenaient la France: L’exaltation des régions dans le discours patriotique (Paris: Ed. MSH, 1997). On the reproduction of native traditions in local institutions and social relations in North American colonies, see Timothy H. Breen, “Persistent Localism: English Social Change and the Shaping of  New England Institutions,” William and Mary Quarterly, 32, no. 1 (1975): 3–­28; and James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-­Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of  North Carolina Press, 1994). 28. Michelle Salinas, Voyages et voyageurs en Algérie, 1830–­1930 (Toulouse: Privat, 1989),

Notes to Pages 178–179  253 305–­42; Patricia Lorcin, “Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Algeria’s Latin Past,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (2002): 295–­329; Nabila Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine. Monuments, musées et politique coloniale en Algérie (1830–­1930) (Paris: Ed. MSH, 2004), 164–­65 passim; Diana K. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); and Caroline Ford, Natural Interests: The Contest of Environment in Modern France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 138–­63. 29. On the impact of French urbanism in Algeria—­in both its rationalist and more culturalist veins—­see Aleth Picard, “Architecture et urbanisme en Algérie: d’une rive à l’autre (1830–­1962),” Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée 73–­74 (1994): 121–­36; Malverti, “Officiers du Génie”; Saïd, Urbanisme et colonisation; and Seth Graebner, “Contains Preservatives: Architecture and Memory in Colonial Algiers,” Historical Reflections 33, no. 2 (2007): 257–­76. On French colonial architecture more in general, see Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). On colonial spas, see Jennings, Colonizers. 30. See, for example, Alexis Espanet, La pratique de l’homoeopathie simplifiée, 2nd ed. (Paris: Baillière, 1879), 298. 31. Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 32. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 33. Adolphus Slade, Turkey and the Crimean War (London: Smith, Elder and co, 1867),  275. 34. J.-­P. Chenu, Rapport au Conseil de santé des Armées sur les résultats du service médico-­ chirurgical aux ambulances de Crimée et aux hôpitaux militaires français en Turquie pendant la campagne d’Orient en 1854–­1855–­1856 (Paris: Victor Masson et Fils, 1865). 35. VdG 45, 46, and 47 contain dozens of medical reports mentioning cases of nostalgia. See, for example, VdG 47/1, [G.-­L.] Scrive, letter to Bégin, from Sevastopol, December 29, 1855; and VdG 47/14, hospital return for the month of August 1855 from the hospital of  Gulhane. 36. Antoine Benoist de la Grandière, De la nostalgie ou mal du pays (Paris: Delahaye, 1873), 40–­45 and 90–­95. 37. A heated debate between two physicians, Antonio Arella and Napoleone Alcinati, played out on the pages of the Giornale delle scienze mediche della società medico-­chirurgica di Torino in 1844–­45 (vols. 19, 21, 22, and 23). Over a four-­year period at the end of the 1860s, the newly created Italian national army recorded 203 cases of nostalgia, including 8 deadly ones (Grandière, Nostalgie, 90–­91). For military legislation on leaves, see Collezione delle leggi ed atti del governo del regno d’Italia, anno 1872, dal N° 649 al 1210 quinques (Napoli: Stamperia Governativa, 1872), 189 and 355. 38. Joseph K. Barnes, ed., Medical and Surgical History of the War of Rebellion, 1861–­1865, vol. 1, part 1 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1870–­88), 638–­39 and 710–­11. 39. De Witt C. Peters, “Remarks on the Evils of  Youthful Enlistments and Nostalgia,” American Medical Times, February 14, 1863, 75–­76; William A. Hammond, A Treatise on Hygiene with Special Reference to the Military Service (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1863), 127–­30; and Theodore Calhoun, “Nostalgia as a Disease of Field Service,” Medical and Surgical Reporter 11

254  Notes to Pages 179–181 (February 27, 1864, and March 5, 1864): 130–­32 and 150–­52. For studies of nostalgia during the American Civil War, see Albert Deutsch, “Military Psychiatry: The Civil War 1861–­1865,” in One Hundred Years of American Psychiatry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 367–­ 84; Donald Lee Anderson and Godfrey Tryggve Anderson, “Nostalgia and Malingering in the Military during the Civil War,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 28 (1984): 156–­66; Eric J. Dean Jr., Shook over Hell: Post-­Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 115–­34; Frances Clarke, “So Lonesome I Could Die: Nostalgia and Debates over Emotional Control in the Civil War North,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 2 (2007): 235–­82; David Anderson, “Dying of  Nostalgia: Homesickness in the Union Army during the Civil War,” Civil War History 56, no. 3 (2010): 247–­82; and Matt, Homesickness, 75–­101. 40. “A Death from Nostalgia,” New York Times ( July 29, 1898): 12. 41. The New York Times ran more stories on homesick men in Manila and Puerto Rico on January 13, 1902 (p. 2), and May 22, 1904 (p. 4). On nostalgia and tropical medicine in the Philippines, see Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 40–­44, 74–­77 passim. 42. M. Decaisne, “Observations recueillies pendant le siège de Paris,” Gazette des hôpitaux civils et militaires 134 (November 19, 1870); Ch. Girard, Contribution à l’histoire médico-­ chirurgicale du siège de Paris (Paris: Baillière et fils, 1872), 28–­29, 52, 89–­97; Henri Sueur, Etude sur la mortalité à Paris pendant le siège (Paris: Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1872), 28; Fernand Papillon, “Essais et notices: la nostalgie,” Revue des deux mondes 2, no. 15 (1874): 493–­94; and Raoul Chenu, “De la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1877), 38. 43. Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris, LC 10, Statistique de la morgue, année 1870, entry no. 769. I am grateful to Stéphanie Sauget and Ludivine Bantigny for sharing this source. 44. Statistique médicale de l’armée pendant l’année 1863 (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1865), esp. 48, 200, 246, and 282. 45. Coustan, Aide-­mémoire de médecine militaire: maladies et épidémies des armées (Paris: Baillière et fils, 1897), 322–­23; and Armand Corré, Traité clinique des maladies des pays chauds (Paris: Doin, 1887), 169 and 856. 46. Amédée Amette, Code médical (Paris: Labé, 1853), 209; J.-­B.-­M.-­N. Artigues, Etudes sur le recrutement et l’hygiène morale de l’armée (Parie: L. Martinet, 1863), esp. 58–­59 and 136–­55; Jean-­Léo Tarneau, “Des maladies simulées les plus communes, au point de vue du recrutement” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1855), 6ff.; Didiot, Code des officiers de santé, esp. 463–­67, 659, 840–­41, and 935; Edmond Boisseau, Des maladies simulées et des moyens de les reconnaître (Paris: Baillière, 1870), 147–­48; Georges Morache, Traité d’hygiène militaire (Paris: Baillière et fils, 1874), 86 and 127; L.-­J.-­E. Mesnier, Du suicide dans l’armée. Etude statistique, étiologique et prophylactique (Paris: Doin, 1881), 90–­95; Angel Marvaud, Les maladies du soldat. Etude étiologique, épidémiologique, clinique et prophylactique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1894), 91, 719–­20; “Instruction sur l’aptitude physique au service militaire (13 Mars 1894),” Journal militaire 105, 7 (1894): 379–­80; and “Instruction pour l’application de la loi du 1er avril 1898, portant adoption de la réforme temporaire (2 Juin 1898),” Journal militaire 109, 16 (1898): 904. 47. Louis Tailhade, “Considérations sur la nostalgie” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1850), 29 passim; Parron, “Essai sur la nostalgie,” 39; Malaper du Peux, “De la nostalgie”; and Oscar Devic, “La nostalgie ou mal du pays” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1855), 17–­21.

Notes to Pages 181–183  255 48. Claudius Caire, “Essai sur la nostalgie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1852), 8. Nostalgia continued to be viewed as a specific form of melancholia across the English Channel. See John Bucknill and Daniel Tuke, A Manual of Psychological Medicine, 4th ed. (London: Churchill, 1879), 222–­25. 49. Emmanuel-­Eugène Blanche, “Dissertation sur la nostalgie” (Strasbourg: medical thesis, 1860), 2 and 4; and Sava Petrowitch, “De la nostomanie” (Paris: medical thesis, 1866), 7 and 9. 50. L.-­J.-­F. Delasieuve, “Des diverses formes mentales,” Journal de médecine mentale 5 (1865), 232–­46 (quote at 232); Archives Departementales du Haut-­Rhin, 3X 224–­25, Dr. Dagonet, “Etat des aliénés indigents du département du Haut-­Rhin placés d’office à l’asile publique d’aliénés de Stéphansfeld,” July 31, 1857; and Henri Dagonet, Traité élémentaire et pratique des maladies mentales (Paris: Baillière et fils, 1862), 682 and 729. 51. Henri Rey, “Nostalgie,” in Nouveau dictionnaire de médecine et de chirurgie pratiques (Paris: Librairie J.-­B. Baillière et fils, 1877), 117. 52. Charles Lasègue and Simon Duplay, review of Haspel’s De la nostalgie, in Archives générales de médecine, 6th series, 25 (1875): 760–­63. Lasègue—­whose renown at the time rivaled Charcot’s—­was not one to mince his words, and he famously disparaged hysteria as well, calling it “the wastepaper basket of medicine.” 53. Bulletin de l’Académie de médecine, séance du 24 juin 1873, 2nd series, 2 (1873), 700–­701. 54. Haspel, Nostalgie, esp. 3 (n1), 12–­13, 50–­53, and 67; and Grandière, Nostalgie, esp. 2–­3, 10–­12, 150–­53, 180, and 187. 55. V. Widal, “Nostalgie,” in Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales (Paris: G. Masson and P. Asselin, 1879), 13:361 and 363. 56. Chenu, “De la nostalgie,” 5. Chenu’s dissertation director was none other than Charles Lasègue. 57. The colons’ new self-­assurance is exemplified in publications such as Jules Duval’s Histoire de l’émigration européenne, asiatique et africaine au XIXe siècle (Paris: Guillemin, 1862), viii; and echoed in Jules Ferry’s belligerent speeches on colonization from the mid-­1880s. 58. Paul Leroy-­Beaulieu, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Guille­ min, 1882), 146. On the rise of the republican colonial doctrine, see the classic studies by Charles-­Robert Ageron, France coloniale ou parti colonial? (Paris: PUF, 1978); and Raoul Girardet, L’idée coloniale en France de 1871 à 1962 (Paris: Hachette, 2005). 59. On this period and fears of national decline, see Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-­de-­Siècle France,” AHR 89, no. 3 (1984): 648–­76; Nye, Crime, esp. 132–­70; and Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–­1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 60. On the similar process of “diagnostic reconceptualization” of hysteria at the time, see Mark Micale, “On the Disappearance of Hysteria,” Isis 84, no. 3 (1993): 396–­526. 61. S. Lubetzki, “La nostalgie et la neurasthénie,” Revue de psychiatrie (médecine mentale, neurologie, psychologie) 3, no. 5 (1900): quotes at 137 and 140; and review by Thomas in Revue neurologique 8, 19 (October 15, 1900): 922. 62. See Roynette, Bons pour le service, 302; and Jacqueline Lee Friedlander, “Psychiatrists and Crisis in Russia, 1880–­1917” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2007), 238–­45 passim.

256  Notes to Pages 183–187 63. The literature on shell shock and war psychiatry is vast. For excellent introductions see Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner, eds., Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–­1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 2001); and Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 64. Estève, “La nostalgie des militaires,” Gazette médicale de Paris 87 (1916): 122–­23. 65. “Nostalgie militaire,” Lancet (November 28, 1914): 1261–­62. 66. See Leed, No Man’s Land, 163–­92; and Roper, “Nostalgia.” 67. See, for example, M. Bachet, “Etude sur les états de nostalgie,” Annales medico-­ psychologiques 108 (1950), 1:559–­87 and 2:11–­34. 68. Edith Sterba, “Homesickness and the Mother’s Breast,” Psychiatric Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1940): quotes at 705 and 707. In a moving scene from John Huston’s 1946 film Let There Be Light, a hospitalized veteran of the Second World War explains his recurrent headaches and crying spells by telling the psychiatrists: “I believe in your profession it is called nostalgia,” to which his interlocutor responds, “You mean homesickness?” (an interesting role reversal on Johannes Hofer’s original attempt to medicalize Heimweh into nostalgie). 69. Franklin D. Jones, Joseph M. Rothberg, Linette R. Sparacino, Victoria L. Wilcox, Joseph M. Rothberg,  James W. Stokes, eds., War Psychiatry (Textbook of Military Medicine) (Falls Church, VA: Office of the Surgeon General, 1995), esp. 63–­83. 70. SHD 1 H 128, Major Cellé (?), letter to his general, from Mostaganem, April 10, 1849; Antoine Porot and Angelo Hesnard, L’expertise mentale militaire (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1918), 13; and Psychiatrie de guerre: étude clinique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1919), 65. I thank Patricia Prestwich for bringing these last two sources to my attention. An unapologetic racist, Porot was the founder of the “Algiers school of psychiatry” and later became the target of Frantz Fanon’s blistering critique in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). On psychiatry in French Algeria, see Richard C. Keller, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). On colonial troops in the French army, see Richard S. Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–­1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 71. Victor Le Goïc, “La nostalgie et son diagnostic” (Lyon: medical thesis, 1890), 11–­12; and A. Antheaume and Roger Mignot, Les maladies mentales dans l’armée française (Paris: H. Delarue, 1909), quote at 51. 72. Grandière, Nostalgie, 4; Rey, “Nostalgie,” 130; Widal, “Nostalgie,” 380; and Charles-­ François-­Alexandre Gueit, “Quelques Considérations sur la nature de la nostalgie, ses causes et son traitement” (Montpellier: medical thesis, 1874), 36. 73. Haspel, Nostalgie, 3–­4n1. 74. Bibliothèque de l’Académie nationale de médecine, anonymous, “De la nostalgie” (1872), i, 15, 63, and 77–­79. 75. Eugène Fritsch [Lang], La nostalgie du soldat (Paris: Imprimerie Jouaust, 1876), 4, 5, and 22–­24. 76. As made very clear in Constant’s 1862 colonization plan addressed to Napoleon III (ANOM F80 1791). 77. John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 80.

Notes to Pages 187–194  257 78. La Patrie (1871) quoted in Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie, 72; and Akhbar (1871) quoted in Georges Delahache, “Alsaciens d’Algérie,” Revue de Paris (December 15, 1913): 771. 79. Ageron, Histoire de l’Algérie, 76–­78 and 119–­121; and Yacono, Histoire de l’Algérie, 145. 80. ANOM L10, Conseil consultatif de colonisation, Rapport de la 3ème section sur une demande formulée par le conseil municipal de l’Alma, n.d. [1872]. 81. ANOM L10, Haussonviller. Société de protection des Alsaciens et Lorrains demeurés français (1878). See also Georges Delahache, L’exode (Paris: Hachette, 1914), 63–­70; and Fabienne Fischer, Alsaciens et Lorrains en Algérie: histoire d’une migration 1830–­1914 (Nice: Editions Jacques Gandini, 1999). 82. On Vidal de la Blache, see Jean-­Yves Guiomar, “Vidal de la Blache’s ‘Geography of France,’ ” in Nora and Kritzman, eds., Realms, 2:187–­209. 83. Augustine Fouillé, Les enfants de Marcel: Instruction morale et civique en action (Paris: Belin, 1898). 84. Delahache, “Alsaciens d’Algérie,” 790. 85. On “production of  locality,” both as an ideology and concrete social form, see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 178–­99. 86. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 263–­83; and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–­1918, revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 87. Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–­1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 88. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Afterword 1. Freud, “Uncanny,” 244. 2. Novalis: Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University of  New York Press, 1997), 131 and 135. 3. Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals (New York: Basic Books, 2013). 4. Routledge,  Nostalgia, 25–­42. 5. William H. Sewell, “The Capitalist Epoch,” Social Science History 38, nos. 1–­2 (2014): 3. 6. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Re-­Interpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 190–­216 and 286–­307. Postone explains “historical time” as the temporal expression of the immanent dynamism at the heart of capital in its mature development—­that is, with the production of relative surplus value. This logic results from the dialectical interaction between the two dimensions of labor under capitalism (value and use value), whereby increases in productivity increase the amount of use values created per unit of time but only lead to a temporary rise in the magnitude of value created in the same unit of time. For once the productivity increase is generalized across society; the magnitude of value is redetermined as the new base level of productivity, thus adding a cyclical dimension to a linear logic (much like when running on a treadmill or moving on an escalator).

258  Notes to Page 195 Postone’s analysis of the temporalities of capitalism thus differs from studies that focus only on the development of an abstract and alienating time (whether it be that of merchants, clocks, factory, rural, or slave laborers). 7. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963 [1852]), 15.

A r c h i va l S o u r c e s

A rc h i v e s nat i o na l e s ( P a r i s ) F7 3587: Police générale, conscription, an XII–­1815 F8 67 and 77: Police sanitaire, 1789–­1839 F9 55–­57, 161, 173–­74, 184, and 222: Affaires militaires, tribunaux, service de santé, recrutement, 1790–­1850 F15 257 and 1922: Hospices et secours, 1758–­1842 F18 659: Censure dramatique, an VI–­1830 F20 282 46–­49: Statistique des aliénés, 1860–­81 F21 972: Beaux-­arts, censure, 1804–­67 AF II 284: Hôpitaux militaires, an II–­an IV AF III 3131, 20, 51, 60, and 61: Demandes de congés et exemptions, an V AD VI 64: Textes administratifs BB18 72: Délits, conscription et recrutement, an VII–­1814

A r c h i v e s n a t i o n a l e s d ’ o u t r e - ­m e r ( A i x -­e n -­P r o v e n c e ) COL C11A 10: Canada, correspondance, 1685–­89 F80: Algérie 657: Police sanitaire, 1834–­51 1170 and 1177: Colonisation, 1841–­58 1253: Passages, 1835–­58 1303, 1304–­5, 1307, 1310, 1312, 1314–­22, 1368–­69, 1377, 1380–­81, 1385, 1390–­92, 1396, 1398–­99, 1407, 1410–­12, and 1422–­24: Colonies agricoles, 1848–­59 1791–­92, 1798, and 1802: Colonisation, 1835–­93 L: Gouvernement Général de l’Algérie L1–­12: Colonisation, émigration, concessions, 1832–­54 1L 100–­116: Centres de colonisation

260  Archival Sources

Service historique de la Défense (Vincennes) B1 319, 325, 348, and 355; B3 407; B5 35–­102 and 36–­10; B13 20, 307 and 308; B14 4: Révolution C2 167; C18 8 and 2: Consulat et Empire D1 67; D2 2, 6, and 7: Restauration G1 260: Second Empire 1 H 1–­4, 8–­11, 19, 22, 30, 41, 67, 72, and 128: Algérie, 1830–­81 1 Kt 457 and 560: Archives privées 1 M 1907, 1985, 2022, 2069, 2200, 2201, 2212, 2254, 2296, and 2357: Mémoires et Reconnaissances 5 M 34, 55, and 64: Copies de documents Xb 637, 641, 648, 681, 682, 695, 717, 723, 724, and 725: Inspections des régiments, 1830–­56 Xg 42, 45, 48, and 54: Suisses, 1705–­1830 Xr 12, 13, 14, 20, and 25: Service de santé, 1792–­1871 Xv 22: Volontaires nationaux, 1791–­97 Xw 7, 16, 29, 35, 49, 57, 58, 66, 73, and 83: Volontaires nationaux, 1791–­97 Ya 451, 458, 459: Archives administratives 2 Yb 737: Contrôle des officiers 16 Yc 237; 16 Yc 275; 17 Yc 17; 17 Yc 24; 17 Yc 113; 17 Yc 119; 17 Yc 146, 147, and 148; 20 Yc 5, 5bis, 6, 7, and 8; 20 Yc 15; 21 Yc 1bis; 21 Yc 2, 3, and 4; 21 Yc 616 and 621; 33 Yc 94; 34 Yc 47; and 34 Yc 2292: Contrôles de la troupe g 3 Y 14608, 16623, and 19309: Officiers de santé Yh 37, 93, and 245: Célébrités

Archives du Musée du Service de Santé des A r m é e s , V a l -­d e -­G r â c e ( P a r i s ) 1: Décès 11, 12, 21, and 8–­12: Service de Santé, 1781–­1866 22: Armée de l’Ouest 13: Hôpitaux militaires, 1794–­1875 19: Conseil de Santé des armées, 1795–­1870 21: Rapports 23: Emplois 25–­30: Hôpitaux militaires et service de santé (Nord, Moselle, Sambre-­et-­Meuse, Rhin, Ardennes, Helvétie, Danube, Pyrénées), 1792–­1800 301, 33–­36: Service de santé (Espagne, Italie, Egypte, Guadeloupe, Saint Domingue), 1792–­1804 37: Espagne, 1824–­27 38: Morée, 1828–­33 39: Anvers, 1832 40: Ancône, 1832–­38

Archival Sources  261 44–­48: Orient, 1854–­56 53: Mexique, 1862–­67 62: Guerre Franco-­allemande, 1870–­71 67–­68, 70–­73, 77–­78, 791, 80–­84, 86–­87, 89, 961, 982: Algérie, 1830–­1930 165: Hôpital militaire de Perpignan, 1825–­44

Archives de Paris (Paris) VD4 10 2943–­77: Documents officiels, colonisation Algérie, 1848–­49 VD4 11 3100–­3120: Préfecture de Police, santé publique, an XI–­1859

A r c h i v e s d é pa r t e m e n ta l e s d u H a u t -­R h i n ( C o l m a r ) 5M 1–­4, 26, 38, and 77: Santé publique, 1800–­1870 1X 26, 20, and 1818: Administration hospitalière, 1800–­1870 3X 38–­39, 222–­27, 236–­37, 244, and 266: Assistance sociale, aliéné, 1800–­1870

A r c h i v e s d é pa r t e m e n ta l e s d e l a S av o i e ( C h a m b é r y ) L 1137: Correspondance de soldats de l’Empire

A r c h i v e s d é pa r t e m e n ta l e s d u Val de Marne (Créteil) Archives de la Maison Nationale de Charenton AJ2 25–­27: Malades militaires, an VIII–­1813 4X 677–­79, 684, 689: Registres d’observations médicales, 1818–­27

A r c h i v e s d e l ’ A s s i s ta n c e Publique-H ­ ô p i ta u x d e P a r i s Hospice de Bicêtre, registres 1Q2 84–­85 and 93–­94 (entrées, 1791–­1828); 3Q2 30–­37 (décès, 1812–­38); 5Q 1 (entrées militaires, 1856–­57); 5Q 2 (sorties militaires, 1871); 5Q 14–­15 (entrées et sorties militaires, 1814–­15); 6Q1 1 (entrées aliénés volontaires, 1839–­40); 6Q2 1, 4, and 12 (entrées aliénés d’office, 1839–­40, 1842–­43, 1848); 6R 1 (observations médicales) Salpêtrière, registres 6Q1 1 and 7 (entrées aliénés volontaires, 1790–­1835, 1844–­50); 6Q2 1, 2, and 13 (entrées aliénés d’office, an X–­1849); 7Q 31 (décès militaires, 1814–­15); 6R 1, 21, and 56 (observations médicales, 1815–­55); 6R 89 (observations médicales aliénés, 1826–­38)

262  Archival Sources

Archives de la Préfecture de Police (Paris) LC 10: Institut médico-­légal, statistique de la morgue

P r i va t e c o l l e c t i o n Gabriel Noël, personal correspondence with his family, 1792–­96

B i b l i o t h è q u e i n t e r u n i v e r s i ta i r e d e s a n t é ( P a r i s ) Ms 2418. René Laënnec, letter to Mgr Dombideau de Crouseilhes,  June 12, 1814

B i b l i o t h è q u e u n i v e r s i ta i r e d e N a n t e s Collection Laënnec: Classeur I lot b, feuillets 167r–­179v (Hôpital Necker, 1819); and Clas­ seur 2 lot a [B], feuillets 178r–­179v (Collège de France, 1823–­24).

B i b l i ot h è q u e d e l ’ A ca d é m i e nat i o na l e de médecine (Paris) Anonymous. “De la Nostalgie.” 1872

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abd-­el-­Kader, 150 abdomen, as seat of nostalgia, 131 absolute war, 71. See also total war acclimatization, 159–­62, 164–­65, 173–­75, 181 acedia, 146 Achard (mayor), 176 Achilles, 104 Adam, Adolphe, 137 Adam,  Jean-­Baptiste, medical leave for, 79, 80 African Americans, 179 Ahu-­toru (Tahitian), 141 Alembert,  Jean le Rond d’, 47 Algeria, 11, 149–­78; ancient Roman roots of, 177; casualties of French invasion of, 150; colonizing of, 150–­51, 160, 162–­78, 186–­89; French invasion of, 149–­50; French reform projects in, 164; nostalgia in, 152–­58, 166–­68, 186, 188–­89; official name of, 162; trade with, 177; tropical climate of, 159–­61 Ali, Mehmed, 168 Alibert,  Jean-­Louis, 138–­41, 175 alienation. See estrangement aliénistes, 144–­45, 176, 181 Alsace, 30, 41, 63, 65, 176, 185–­87

amalgame, 64, 86–­88, 99, 217n6 amour de la patrie (patriotism), 143–­44 amour du pays (love of country), 139–­45 anatomy, pathological, 130–­33, 146 Ancillon, Charles, 23, 207n34 Andral, Gabriel, 181 animals, nostalgia experienced by, 141 animism, 52 Antonini,  Jean-­André, 154 apodemic arts, 33 Arabs, 150, 165, 174 Aristotelianism, 25, 26 Armée d’Afrique, 151–­58 artificial mammal, 93–­94 artisans’ corporations, 91–­92 atmospheric theories, 12, 26, 46–­47, 53, 159, 160. See also climatic theories; environmental theories Audriet, Pierre, 80 Auenbrugger, Leopold, 59, 133 Austen,  Jane, 124 authenticity, of nostalgia, 5, 138 Avicenna, Medical Canon, 19 avoir le cafard (to have the blues), 156, 183

264  Index bacteriology, 159 Balzac, Honoré de, 119, 124–­26, 135, 138, 158 bands of pays, 85–­90 barbers, 57 Barbey d’Aurévilly,  Jules-­Amédée, 126 Barère, Bertrand, 99 Barrès, Maurice, 185 Barthez, Paul-­Joseph, 54 Battle of  Nations (Leipzig, 1813), 72 Baudelaire, Charles, 126 Baudens, Lucien, 156 Bayle, Gaspard, 133–­35, 136 Beard, George, 129 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 50 Bell, David, 71 Bellangé, Hippolyte, 156–­58; Le Mal du pays, 157–­58, 157 Benjamin, Walter, 147 Béranger,  Jean, 120 Berbers, 150, 165, 174 Bercé,  Jean-­Yves, 73 Bernard, Simon, 154 Bernardin de Saint-­Pierre,  Jacques-­Henri, Paul et Virginie, 139–­40, 226n127 Bertsch,  Jacob, 21 Bichat, Xavier, 130 Bihan,  Jean-­Antoine, 97 Bismarck, Otto von, 189–­90 bleedings. See leeches and bleedings blues (mood). See avoir le cafard (to have the blues) Bodin,  Jean, 47 Boerhaave, Herman, 47, 52, 54 Boilly, Louis, La Lecture du Bulletin de la Grande Armée, 98 Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon I Bonnafont,  Jean-­Pierre, 161 bottle-­feeding, 93–­94 Boudin,  Jean-­Christian-­Marc, 151, 160, 174 Boukhalfa, Algeria, 187 Bourbon monarchy, 149, 162 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9 Bourel-­Roncière, Auguste, 172–­73, 177

Boym, Svetlana, 7, 201n22 brain, as seat of nostalgia, 131, 144, 154 Braudel, Fernand, 100 Brentano, Clemens, 50, 136 Breteuil, Baron de, 60 Bretons, susceptibility to nostalgia of, 86–­87, 88, 99, 113–­14, 124–­25, 158–­59, 172–­73, 179–­80 Breuer,  Josef, 113 Bricard, Louis Joseph, 97, 106 Brierre de Boismont, Alexandre-­Jacques-­ François, 146 British army, nostalgia in, 60, 69–­70, 171 British imperialism, 159, 162, 171, 178 Broca, Paul, 174 Broman, Thomas, 57 Broussais, Casimir, 154 Broussais, François, 130–­31, 144, 146, 154, 237n26, 237n27 Brown,  John, 135 Bruno, Giordano, 29 Buffon, Georges-­Louis, 141 Bugeaud, Thomas-­Robert, 150, 156, 163 Buisson, Hippolyte, 131, 133 bulimia, 55, 56 Bullard, Alice, 8 Bunke, Simon, 8 Bureaux Arabes, 164 Burton, Robert, 29; The Anatomy of Melan­ choly, 28 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 93, 147 Cabanis, Pierre-­Jean-­Georges, 75, 114, 138, 140, 222n57 Cabétiens, 164 cafard. See avoir le cafard (to have the blues) Cange,  Jean-­Pierre, death certificate of, 78 capitalism, 9–­10, 193–­94, 257n6 Caribs, 139 Carnot, Lazare, 67, 84–­85, 86 Cartesianism. See Descartes, René, and Cartesianism Cartwright, Samuel, 91

Index  265 Castellane, Boniface de, 156, 160 Castelnau, C., 134 Catholicism, 30–­31 Cavaignac, Louis-­Eugène, 165, 166, 176 Chamberet,  Jean-­Baptiste Tyrbas de, 68 Charcot,  Jean-­Martin, 113, 181 Charles X, 139, 149 Chateaubriand, René de, 7, 126, 136 Chateauneuf, Louis-­François Benoiston de, 145 chattel slavery, 90–­91 Cheyne, George, 50, 54 childhood, 50, 52 Choiseul, Duc de (Étienne François), 163 cholera, 152, 155, 166, 167, 178 Christian socialism, 164 chronic asthenia, 135 citizen-­soldiers, 10, 13, 36, 71, 74–­75, 101–­4 civilian populations, as victims of  war, 72 civilization: as cause of diseases, 54, 147; disappearance of nostalgia associated with, 184–­85; patriotism linked to, 143–­44 Civil War (US), 4, 8, 13, 117, 179 classes dangereuses (dangerous classes), 143, 164 Clausewitz, Carl von, 71 Clauzel, Bertrand, 150, 153, 164 climatic theories, 158–­62, 167, 175, 179. See also atmospheric theories; environmental theories clinical nostalgia: in Algeria, 152–­58, 166–­68; archival sources for, 8–­9; conditions of possibility of, 12–­14, 123; descriptions of, in French soldiers, 75–­77; disappearance of, 2, 3, 14, 182–­86, 189; dissertations written on, 128–­30, 129, 180–­81; Émigrés as victims of, 136–­37; explanations of, 11–­12, 22–­23, 44, 75–­76, 131, 133, 154; golden age of, 4, 10, 124–­30, 142; Hofer’s dissertation on, 21–­26; incidence of, 4, 68–­69; as instance of medicalization, 2; methodological approach to, 5–­6, 9; persistence of, 145–­46, 178–­80, 183–­84; physiological

causes of, 22–­23; practices of, 9; slaves as victims of, 90–­91; sociological features of, 11; soldiers as victims of, 4, 10–­11, 13, 35, 45–­47, 59–­62, 76, 122–­23, 146–­48; symp­ toms of, 1, 23, 59, 111, 113; treatments for, 24, 111–­13, 154–­55, 161; vaudeville on, 135–­ 37; victims of, 11, 12, 91, 168, 170. See also nostalgia clocher natal (village, church tower, and community), 172, 175, 183 Cochon de Lapparent, Charles, 82, 86 Colbert,  Jean-­Baptiste, 177 Collard, Pierre-­Paul Royer, 142 Colombier,  Jean, 60–­61, 67, 85, 89, 216n71 colonialism. See imperialism and colonialism colonies agricoles, 165–­71, 188–­89 colons de ’48 (rural settlers), 150–­51, 163–­71 commissaires des guerres (administrators), 81–­82 Committee of Public Safety, 68, 82, 84 common sensorium, 26, 28 comorbidity, of other diseases with nostalgia, 81, 153, 155, 157, 167 Compagnie genevoise des Colonies de Sétif, 173 compagnonnage (corporations of  journeymen), 91–­92 Condé, Prince de, 30 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 101 Condorcet, Marie-­Jean-­Antoine-­Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de, 36, 209n49 conscription. See levies convalescent depots, 161, 175 coping, nostalgia as means of, 10, 14, 104, 122, 123 Coqueret, Pierre-­Charles, On doit à sa patrie le sacrifice de ses plus chères affections, 106–­7, 108 Corvisart,  Jean-­Nicolas, 133 Corvisier, André, 37, 73, 209n49 cosmopolitanism, 142, 159 Coste,  Jean-­François, 116, 232n96

266  Index counterinsurgency, 72, 148. See also guerrilla warfare Cousin, Victor, and Cousinianism, 139, 140, 144, 181 creolization, 159, 174–­75 Crimean War (1853–­56), 178 Cross, Malcolm, 7 cruelty, 117 Cullen, William, 7, 55–­56 cult of  local memories, 143 cult of sensibility, 49, 109 Daston, Lorraine, 7 Daudet, Alphonse, 235n124 David,   Jacques-­Louis, Oath of the Horatii, 106 death. See fatalities, attributed to nostalgia death certificate, 78 De Horne,  Jacques, 62, 67, 216n75 Delahache, George (Lucien Aaron), 188–­89 Delille,  Jacques, 50, 134 demi-­soldes (soldiers on half-­pay), 119–­20 demobilization, 118–­22 Denonville, Marquis de, 59 Desboeufs, Marc, 121 Descartes, René, and Cartesianism, 19, 20, 25, 26, 29, 49 deserters, 34, 64, 67, 84, 89, 135–­37, 222n66, 225n106, 245n46. See also malingerers Desjobert, Amédée, 154 Dictionnaire de l’académie française, 125–­26 Dictionnaire de médecine et de chirurgie pratiques, 128 Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, 128 Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales, 182 Dictionnaire universel françois et latin (Dictionnaire de Trévoux), 47 Diderot, Denis, 47 discipline. See military discipline Disertore Svizzero, ovvero la nostalgia, Il (vaudeville), 136 displacement. See estrangement

Doctrinaires, 142–­43, 144 Dollfus,  Jean, 187 draft, military. See levies dreams, 39–­40 Drévillon, Hervé, 73 Dubois (private), 100 Dubois-­Crancé, Edmond, 86 Dubos, Abbé, 47 Ducros (medical officer), 84 Duffin,  Jacalyn, 133 Dumez, François, 99 Dumez, Louis, 99 Dumouriez, Charles François, 67 Durer, Albrecht, Melencolia I, 118 dysentery, 152, 153, 155, 166, 167 Ecole de santé, Paris, 111 Egypt, 69 Eliot, T. S., 16, 191 Ellenberger, Henri, 234n113 Émigrés, 136–­37 emotion: conceptions of, 3; instruments for measuring, 114, 231n80; nostalgia linked to, 3–­5, 14–­15, 44–­52, 126, 133, 157; of soldiers, 115–­18. See also passions of the soul emotional refuges, 104, 229n50 Encyclopédie, 47, 49, 53 Encyclopédie méthodique, 68, 112, 115, 128, 134 Enfantin, Barthélémy Prosper, 158 English malady, 54 Enlightenment: cosmopolitanism characteristic of, 159; and European General Crisis, 30; and the imagination, 40; and medicine, 39, 45, 57; and the military, 36, 73, 90, 101; and nature, 50; and nostalgia, 44–­45; scholarly network in, 44; and sen­ sibility, 27; and wet-­nursing, 93 ennui, 61, 76, 97, 120, 124–­25, 146–­48, 156 environmental theories, 44, 46–­47, 75, 167, 170. See also atmospheric theories; climatic theories Epic of Gilgamesh, 1

Index  267 epidemics, of nostalgia, 4, 13, 66, 69, 74, 77, 89, 146 erotomania, 55, 56 Espir, Gabriel Gaston, 180 Esquirol,   Jean-­Etienne-­Dominique, 144–­45, 241n78 Estienne, Emiland, 68, 131 estrangement (alienation, displacement), as contributing factor to nostalgia, 3, 11, 13, 23, 33–­34, 76–­77, 85, 91–­92, 97–­100, 123, 155, 158, 168, 170, 181 exile, 136–­37 Falconer, William, 54 Falret,  Jean-­Pierre, 69 family: emotions connected with, 115; military’s recreation of, 89–­90, 156; nostalgia as desire for, 53–­54, 104–­9 Fanon, Frantz, 255n70 fatalities, attributed to nostalgia, 1, 4, 10, 23, 44, 59, 68, 78, 78, 145–­46, 170, 179, 180 feeling. See emotion Ferry,  Jules, 185 fevers, 152, 153, 155, 159 Ficino, Marsilio, 29 Fienus, Thomas, De viribus imaginationis, 28 Fillias, Achille, 170, 173 First World War: Freud’s psychoanalytic theories concerning, 123, 191; homesickness as shameful in, 117; psychiatric treatments for victims of, 112–­13; psychological experiences of soldiers in, 156, 183; soldiers’ writings from, 95–­96; traumatic experiences in, 6, 73; violence of, 72 Flaubert, Gustave, 149 Fodéré, François, 83 Fonssagrives,  Jean-­Baptiste, 146 Foot Grenadiers, 88 Forrest, Alan, 77, 95 Fort, Remy, 59 forward psychiatry, 111–­13, 183 Foucault, Michel, 11, 74, 114, 130, 221n52

Fouillé, Augustine, Les enfants de Marcel, 188 Fouriéristes, 164 Fournier de Pescay, François, 131 français peints par eux-­mêmes, Les, 158 France: and Algeria, 149–­78; colonialism of, 4, 149–­50, 162–­78, 182–­83; nostalgia associated with, 12, 22, 171, 182. See also French army; French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–­1815) Franco-­Dutch War (1672–­78), 31 François I, 30 Franco-­Prussian War (1870–­71), 179, 181 French, Roger, 21 French army: composition of, 76, 77, 87; demobilization of, 118–­22; letters from soldiers in, 95–­106; levies for, 71, 76, 77, 87–­89, 103, 136, 217n6, 222n66; line infantrymen in, 37, 60, 61, 71, 217n6; mortality in, 145, 180; nostalgia in, 4, 60, 178–­80; organization and recruitment of, 37, 61, 64, 85–­90, 217n6; and provincial militias, 37, 61, 209n49; soldiers’ experience in, 37, 73–­74, 89–­90 French Guiana, 163 French Restoration (1814–­30), 89, 120–­21, 128, 136, 140–­42, 145, 149 French Revolution, 67 French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–­1815): casualties of, 72; clinical de­ scriptions of nostalgia from, 75–­77; composition of army in, 76, 77, 87; demobilization after, 118–­22; family and emotions in time of, 93–­123; ideology and psychology of, 71–­ 72; levies in, 71; medical leaves in, 81–­85; methods of warfare in, 70; nostalgia in, 10, 66–­69, 235n118; recruitment practices in, 85–­90; scale of, 71–­72 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 94, 113–­14, 123, 172, 191, 235n124 Frevert, Ute, 2 Fricasse (sergeant), 97 Fritsch, Eugène, 186

268  Index Fritzsche, Peter, 7, 95 Fusilliers-­Grenadiers, 88 Gabriel, Roger, 167 Galenism, 25, 27 Gall, Franz Joseph, 144 Gambart, Claude, 84 Gambetta, Leon, 186 Gastaldy,  Jean-­Baptiste, 47 Gaudineau,  J.-­A., 161, 164, 175 Gelfand, Toby, 56 gender, associated with nostalgia, 115–­18 General Crisis, of seventeenth century, 29–­32 Georget, Etienne-­Jean, 145 Gerson, Stéphane, 143 Gessner, Salomon, 50 Gilbert, Nicholas, 65, 99, 232n96 Girondins, 67 Gobineau, Arthur de, 173 Goffman, Erving, 11 Goldstein,  Jan, 39, 57, 112 Goodman, Kevis, 33 Gowland, Angus, 29 Goya, Francisco, 72 Grandière, Antoine Benoist de la, 181–­82, 184–­85 Greek War of Independence (1821–­29), 147–­48 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), 189–­90 Greuze,  Jean-­Baptiste, 49; Painful Separa­ tion, 115; Ungrateful Son, 106, 115 Gribeauval,  Jean-­Baptiste de, 70 grognards, 96, 113, 118 groin ulcer, 132 Guerbois, Denis, 75, 78, 86, 109, 113–­16, 120, 129; “Essai sur la nostalgie, appelée vulgairement maladie du pays,” 109, 110 guerrilla warfare, 150. See also counterinsurgency Guibert, Comte de, 70 Guinier, André, 74 Guizot, François, 142, 144

Hacking, Ian, 4 Haller, Albrecht von, 44, 47, 52–­54 Harder,  Jacob, 20–­21, 25, 43–­44, 53, 117, 210n2 Harvey, William, 25 Haspel, Auguste, 155, 168, 170, 181–­82, 185, 186 Haussmann, Georges-­Eugène, 178 Haussonville,  Joseph, Comte d’, 187 Haussonviller, Algeria, 187–­89, 188 Heidegger, Martin, 168 Heimat, 225n105 Heimweh (homesickness), 3, 22, 27, 35, 38, 50, 52, 59, 123, 191, 208n45, 237n21. See also homesickness hemvé (homesickness), 47 Herrliberger, David, portrait of  Johannes Hofer, 17 Hippocratic medicine, 26, 75, 159 Hobbes, Thomas, 29 Hoche, Lazare, 80 Hofer,  Johannes, 3, 10, 16–­43, 17, 91, 117, 138, 187–­88, 191–­92, 256n68; birth of, 19; Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe, 3, 16, 18, 20–­26, 43–­44, 205n8; education of, 19–­20; medical career of, 41; political career of, 21, 41 Hofer,  Johannes (son), 41 Hofer,  Josué, 41 holistic approach, 25–­26, 49, 52, 114 Home Insurance Building, Chicago, 190 Homer, 1, 175 homesickness, 3, 50, 52, 77, 97–­100, 157–­58, 175, 191, 256n68. See also Heimweh (homesickness) homme machine, 26 homme sensible, 27, 48 hospitals, 58 Huber, Ferdinand, “Der Herden-­Reihen—­ Ranz des Troupeaux,” 51 Hugo, Victor, 137 Huguenots, 30–­31, 207n34 Humboldt, Alexander von, 126

Index  269 humoral medicine, 20, 24–­25, 75 Hundred Days, 140 Huston,  John, Let There Be Light, 256n68 Hutin,  Jean Félix, 154 Huysmans,   Joris-­Karl, À rebours, 170 hydrotherapy, 159 hygiene: in Algeria, 164, 166; of hospitals, 58; medical, 61; mental, 146–­47; moral, 156; of soldiers’ conditions, 60, 72 Hynes, Samuel, 96 hypochondria, 55, 129 hysteria, 5, 56, 113, 117–­18, 129, 255n52

journeymen, 91–­92 July Monarchy (1830–­48), 118, 121, 128, 140, 142–­43, 145, 149, 162–­63, 168, 176, 177 Juncker,  Johann, 52, 55

idée fixe, 28, 155 Idéologues, 111, 112, 138 Iliad (Homer), 1 images d’Épinal (cheap prints), 106, 109, 118, 147 imagination, 22, 28–­29, 39–­40, 52, 114–­15, 191. See also powers of the imagination Imperial Guard, 88 imperialism and colonialism: climatic and racial factors in, 159–­60; French, 4, 149–­ 50, 162–­78, 182–­83, 186–­89; government programs for, 165–­66, 175–­78; indigenous troops associated with, 184. See also Algeria incendiary nostalgia, 145 industrialization, 142, 240n65 Isabey,   Jean-­Baptiste, Départ des volontaires, 109 Italy, 69, 98, 178–­79, 253n37

La Barollière (colonel), 85 lace wars (guerres en dentelles), 72 Laclos, Pierre-­Ambroise-­François Choderlos de, 100 Lacroix, Frédéric, 166–­67 Ladrix,  Joseph, 97 Laënnec, René, 69, 99 Laënnec, Théophile, 133–­34 Lamarck,  Jean-­Baptiste, 159 La Mettrie,  Julien Offray de, 47 Lamoricière, Christophe de, 165, 166, 176 Lancet (  journal), 183 Landmann,  J.-­M., 164 language, 87, 98–­99 Larrey, Dominique-­Jean, 130–­31, 152 Las Cases, Emmanuel de, Mémorial de Sainte-­Hélène, 118 Lasègue, Charles, 181–­82, 255n52 Lasserre,  Jérôme, 63–­66, 80, 93–­94, 114, 120 Lavisse, Ernest, 185 leaves of absence. See medical leaves Lecomte (citizen), 112, 116 leeches and bleedings, 1, 24, 32, 131, 154 Leed, Eric, 122 Leroy-­Beaulieu, Paul, 182 Le Tellier (war minister), 37 Lethière, Guillaume, La patrie en danger, 107, 109 letters, 95–­106; citizen-­soldier model eluci­ dated by, 101–­4; health as subject of, 97;

Jacobins, 82, 86 James, William, 3 Janet, Pierre, 113 Jaucourt, Louis de, 47 Jazet,  Jean-­Pierre-­Marie, after Horace Vernet, Le Soldat de Waterloo, 118, 119 Jennings, Eric, 159 Jourdan,  Jean-­Baptiste, 67 Jourdeuil, Didier, 67 Journal de médecine militaire, 61–­62

Kabyle Berbers, 174 Kant, Immanuel, 50, 52, 73, 121 Keats,  John, 134 Kéraudren, Pierre-­François, 146 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert, 87 Koselleck, Reinhard, 40–­41, 127 “Kühe-­Reyen” (song), 48

270  Index letters (cont.) homesickness as subject of, 97–­100; psychological ramifications of, 100, 102, 156, 158; subjects of, 96 levies, 71, 76, 77, 87–­89, 103, 136, 217n6, 222n66. See also recruitment, national vs. regional focus of Lévy, Michel, 175 Linnaeus, Carl, 54–­55, 141 literacy, 95–­96 local folklore, 143–­45. See also pays (country; native land); villages/rural communities Locke,  John, 48 Loi Jourdan-­Delbrel, 77 Lorcin, Patricia, 174 Lordon, Frédéric, 75 Lorentz,   Joseph-­Adam, 63–­66 Lorraine, 185–­87 Louis XIV, 31, 37–­38, 41, 58, 67 Louis XV, 41, 60 Louis XVIII, 139, 141 Louis-­Philippe, King, 138, 149 Louvois (war minister), 37 Lubetzki, S., 183 Lynn,  John, 88 lypemania, 43, 129, 145, 168, 181 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 36, 208n49 madness, 22, 27, 54 Mahabharata, 1 Mahois, 139 Mai (Polynesian), 141 Maier, Charles, 7 Maillot, François, 155 Maine de Biran, François-­Pierre-­Gontier, 139 “maladie du pays,” 22 malaria, 152, 153, 155, 163 mal du pays (homesickness), 4, 22, 35, 47, 59, 60, 67, 147, 153, 157, 160, 166, 181, 182 mal du pays, ou la batelière de Brienz, Le (vaudeville), 135–­37 male hysteria, 117–­18 malingerers, 60, 81, 83, 146, 180. See also deserters

Mallet,   Jean-­Baptiste, Le sacrifice à la patrie, ou le départ du volontaire, 109 malnutrition, 157 Manenc (surgeon), 85 Marie Louise (conscripts), 89 Martinet,  Jean, 37 Marx, Karl, 74, 91, 193, 195, 221n52 Marx, Karl Friedrich Heinrich, 240n65 masculinity, 116–­17, 147, 179 mass warfare, 72 materialism, 26, 44, 46, 139 Matt, Susan, 8 mechanistic theories, 20, 25–­26, 39, 44, 46, 47–­48, 52 médecins physiologistes, 131 medical geography, 159–­60 medicalization of society, 2, 128 medical leaves, 60, 67–­68, 78, 79, 80–­85, 146, 153–­54, 179 medical officers, 65, 81–­85, 174, 217n14 medicine: eighteenth-­century, 56–­58; seventeenth-­century transformations in, 16, 20, 24–­25; tropical, 159. See also mil­ itary medicine melancholia, 5, 16, 27–­28, 33, 54, 55, 56, 118, 129, 145, 157, 168, 181, 255n48 Mélesville (Anne-­Honoré-­Joseph Duveyrier), 135 memory, 40, 112, 122 mental hygiene, 146–­47. See also moral hygiene Mercier, Louis-­Sébastien, 135 Mexico, 179 Micale, Mark, 116 migration, 34 military. See British army, nostalgia in; French army; soldiers; standing armies; Swiss mer­ cenaries; US army, nostalgia in military discipline, 13, 36–­38, 73–­74, 221n52 military medicine: in Algeria, 151–­54; and clinical nostalgia, 59–­62, 68, 128–­29, 151–­ 54; overview of, 58; professional/institutional features of, 58, 60–­62, 81, 178; racial

Index  271 theories in, 174; role of, in eighteenth-­ century medicine, 58, 128–­29 militias: Enlightenment championing of, 73; provincial, 37, 61, 209n49; Swiss mercenaries as type of, 35, 73 Ministry of  War, 145, 163 miscegenation, 173–­74 Mitchell, Timothy, 168 mobility, as cause of nostalgia, 33–­35 modernity, 5, 7, 9, 122, 182–­90 Moltke, Helmuth von, 190 Monk d’Uzer (field marshal), 153 monomania, 4, 125, 129, 145, 155, 168, 181, 182 Montagnac, Lucien-­François de, 156 Montagnards, 67, 80–­81, 84 Montaigne, Michel de, 29 Montesquieu, Charles-­Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de, 47, 159 Montmorency, Charles François de, 48 Montpellier medical faculty, 54–­55, 75, 114, 128–­29, 133, 236n18 moral hygiene, 156. See also mental hygiene moral treatment, 111, 114–­17, 131, 145, 154–­55, 179, 182, 230n70 More, Thomas, 208n49 Moreau de la Sarthe,  Jacques-­Louis, 112, 114, 115, 116, 134, 145 Morel, Bénédict-­Auguste, 174 Moricheau-­Beauchamp, René Pierre, 76 Mosse, George, 122, 235n118 mothers, 105–­9, 115–­16 Mulhouse, 10, 16, 19, 30–­32, 32, 34, 37–­39, 41–­42 music, 48–­50 Musset, Alfred de, 146 Napoleon I, 70, 71–­72, 85, 87–­89, 92, 99, 118, 134, 161 Napoleon III, 150, 166, 175, 177 Napoleonic Code, 163 Napoleonic Wars. See French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–­1815) National Assembly, 85, 102, 176, 182 National Convention, 68

national diseases, 54 Native Americans, 139 naturalization of nostalgia, 2, 3, 6, 9, 10–­11, 14, 123, 143–­44, 194 navies, nostalgia in, 60, 146 nervous symptoms, 50, 53–­54, 111, 113, 131 nervous system, 44, 48, 49, 54 neurasthenia, 4, 129, 170, 183, 250n108 Noël,  Joseph-­Louis-­Gabriel, 85, 101–­5, 107, 109, 113, 115, 116, 121, 123 nostalgia: anatomical seat of, 130–­31, 132, 133, 146; cerebral/mental vs. organic/ physical, 160; classifications of, 45, 54–­56, 162, 183; as demedicalized emotion, 3–­5, 126, 142, 185; etymology and terminology of, 1–­2, 3, 22, 46, 47, 59, 123, 125–­26, 200n14; gendering of, 115–­18; historical origins of, 2, 3, 16, 19, 21–­24, 27, 45, 61, 208n45; as historical problem, 5, 7, 191–­95; meanings of, 3, 6, 126–­28, 127, 135, 138; methodological approach to, 15; naturalization of, 2, 3, 6, 9, 10–­11, 14, 123, 141, 143–­44, 194; paradoxical features of, 7, 9–­10, 75, 122, 189; positive valuation of, 175–­78, 188; primitive vs. secondary, 155; scholarship on, 6–­9; simple vs. complicated, 55, 61; spatial features of, 3, 14, 22, 33, 39, 77–­78, 80, 193; temporal features of, 14–­15, 39–­41, 122–­23, 126, 193–­94; true vs. false, 83, 117, 214n43. See also clinical nostalgia Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), 191 occupational medicine, 45, 59 Odyssey (Homer), 1, 137 Ogle, Vanessa, 190 Old Guard, 88 ordre mixte (mixed order), 70 Osborne, Michael, 159 Ovid, 137 Paracelsus, 19 parasitology, 159

272  Index Parent-­Duchatel, Alexandre, 145 parents. See family Paris Commune, 67, 180 Paris medical faculty, 56–­58, 75, 76, 128–­30, 133, 138–­39, 236n18 Parisot, Flavien, 155 passions of the soul, 3, 29, 59, 139 pastoral tradition, 50 pathomètre (instrument for measuring suffering), 114, 231n80 patriotism, 139–­44 pays (country; native land), 4, 98–­99, 173, 175–­78, 183, 186, 225n105. See also local folklore; mal du pays (homesickness); villages/rural communities pays chauds (warm climes), 159 Péguy, Charles, 186 penal convicts, 168 Percy, Pierre-­François, 64, 89–­90, 92, 99, 109, 114–­15, 121, 128, 136, 238n29 Périer,   Joanny-­Napoléon, 174–­75 Petiteau, Natalie, 95, 119 Pfyffer, Ludwig, 208n45 philosophes, 73, 101 philosophy, 191 phrenology, 144, 154 physicians, 57–­58 physiognomy, 144 Pichichero, Christy, 61 Pilet, Delmais, 142 Pillbox (pseud. Edward Hopley), “Nostalgia,” 170 pineal gland, 26 Pinel, Philippe, 56, 77, 85, 109, 111–­12, 114, 115, 121, 128, 131, 144, 230n70 Plamper,  Jan, 15 plants, nostalgia experienced by, 141 Platter, Felix, 28 Polignac,  Jules de, 149 Porot, Antoine, 255n70 Porter, Roy, 54 Portugal, 162 Postone, Moishe, 193, 257n6

post-­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 113, 120, 184 pothopatridalgia (ache of  longing for homeland), 46 powers of the imagination, 28, 32, 52 primitivism, 139 Pringle,  John, Observations on the Diseases of the Army, 60 prints. See images d’Épinal (cheap prints) proletariat, 168 Protestant Reformation, 30 Proust, Marcel, 4 psychiatry, 144–­45 psychotherapy, 111 PTSD. See post-­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) pulmonary phthisis. See tuberculosis Pussin,  Jean-­Baptiste, 111 pyromania, 145 race, 90, 159, 164, 173–­75, 179, 184, 255n70 railway spine, 113 Ramazzini, Bernardo, 43; De Morbis Artifi­ cum Diatriba (Diseases of  Workers), 59 Ramus, Petrus, 19 Rancière,  Jacques, 168 ranz des vaches (music), 48–­50, 51, 112, 136–­ 38, 212n28 recruitment, national vs. regional focus of, 85–­90 Reddy, William, 84, 229n50 Reinhard, Marcel, 8, 73 Remy, Charles, 120 Renan, Ernest, 125 repatriation, of nostalgia victims, 25, 33, 80, 116–­17, 146, 153–­54 representatives on mission, 81–­83, 217n4 Rey, Henri, 181 Reybaud, Louis, 166 Reynal (physician), 121, 122 Rhineland, 2, 3, 10, 30–­31 Ribot, Théodule, 3–­4 Richardson, Samuel, 49

Index  273 Richelieu, Cardinal Armand  Jean du Plessis, 36 Riquier (surgeon), 111, 113 Rivers, W. H. R., 112 Robespierre, Maximilien, 81 romanticism, 50, 128, 134–­35, 142 Roper, Michael, 100 Rosen, George, 8 Rosenwein, Barbara, 90 Rostand, Edmond, 63, 65 Roth, Michael, 8 Rousseau, George S., 25 Rousseau,  Jean-­Jacques, 2, 48–­50, 53, 73, 101, 115, 138, 211n21 Rousseau,  Joseph, 98 Royal Academy and the College of Surgery, 57 Royal Society of Medicine, 57 Royaume Arabe, 177 Roynette, Odile, 73, 117 rural communities. See villages/rural communities Rush, Benjamin, 60 Russia, 69, 72, 98, 183 Russo-­Japanese War (1904–­5), 183 Sagar,  Johann, 55 Saint-­Domingue, 69, 162 Saint-­Hilaire, Émile Marco de, 147 Saint-­Just, Louis Antoine de, 63, 64, 86, 90, 217n4 Saint-­Simonians, 164 Salon des artistes indépendants, 190 Sami (Laplanders), 139 Sauvages, François Boissier de, 55, 61, 214n43 Scheer, Monique, 9 Scheuchzer,  Johann Jakob, 46–­47, 52–­53, 54, 160 Schmitt, Carl, 71 Schumpeter,  Joseph, 194 “Schweizer, Der” (song), 136 Scribe, Eugène, 135–­37

scurvy, 146 seasoning. See acclimatization Second Empire (1852–­70), 150–­51, 176–­77 Second Republic (1848–­51), 176 Second World War, 184 Sedaine, Michel-­Jean, 135 Senancour, Étienne Pivert de, 50, 137 sensationalist philosophy, 27, 48, 75, 139 sensibility, 48–­49, 53–­54, 75, 114, 116. See also cult of sensibility Service de santé des armées, 58 Seven Years War (1756–­63), 61 Sewell, William H., 9 shame, connected with homesickness, 117, 147, 179 Shaw, Christopher, 7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 134 shell shock, 6, 73, 92, 113, 117, 183 sick leaves. See medical leaves Simond, Louis, 137–­38 slaves, 90–­91, 159, 162 Smith, Adam, 73 Société Bretonne de colonisation, 172–­73 Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 174 Société de protection des Alsaciens-­Lorrains demeurés Français, 187 Société médicale d’émulation, 76, 111, 138 Société royale de médecine, 62 soldiers: departures of, 106–­7, 107, 108, 109; emotions of, 115–­18; letters from, 95–­106; military life and experience of, 37, 73–­74, 89–­90, 102–­4, 151, 155–­58, 183–­84; nostalgia for war felt by, 95, 121–­22, 235n118; postwar life of, 120–­22; as victims of nos­ talgia, 4, 10–­11, 13, 35, 45–­47, 59–­62, 122–­ 23, 146–­48. See also military discipline Sontag, Susan, 135 Sorel,  Julien, 146 soul, 26, 139. See also passions of the soul space: modern, 190; nostalgia linked to, 3, 14, 22, 33, 39, 77–­78, 80, 193 Spain, 69 spirits, 25–­26, 28

274  Index Stahl, Georg Ernst, 52, 55 standing armies, 13, 36–­37, 60, 73–­74 Stanislas, Vivien, 120 Starobinski,  Jean, 8, 16, 25 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 97, 125 Sterba, Edith, 184 Stewart, Susan, 138 Strasbourg medical faculty, 128 Stuppa, Pierre, 37, 38 Sudanese conscripts, 4, 168 suicide, 90, 120, 145, 146, 153, 156, 180 surgery and surgeons, 56–­58 surmenage (burnout), 170, 250n108 Swiss mercenaries, 4, 10, 35–­38, 45–­47, 48, 208n49 Switzerland: Mulhouse’s relations with, 30–­ 31; music of, 48–­50; nostalgia associated with, 12, 22, 23–­24, 26, 48–­51, 53–­54, 135–­ 36, 158; and pastoral tradition, 50 Sydenham, Thomas, 54 symptoms, 1, 23, 59, 111, 113 Tell, William, 137 temporality: associated with capitalism, 9, 193–­94, 257n6; modern, 40, 189–­90; nostalgia linked to, 14–­15, 39–­41, 122–­23, 126, 193–­94; transnational standard of, 189–­90 Thévenot,  Jean-­Paul, 160 Third Republic (1870–­1914), 143, 151, 177, 186–­87 Thirty Years War (1618–­48), 30–­31 time. See temporality Tissot, Samuel Auguste, Avis au people sur sa santé, 59, 215n60 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 155, 163, 170–­71, 177 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 144 total war, 70, 96. See also absolute war transient mental illness, 4 trauma, 113–­14, 120, 128, 184 travel, 33 treatments, 24, 111–­13, 154–­55, 161. See also medical leaves; moral treatment; repatriation, of nostalgia victims

Treaty of Aix-­la-­Chapelle (1748), 41 Treaty of  Westphalia (1648), 30 Trélat, UIysse, 165–­66, 249n91 tropical medicine, 159 tropics, 159 Trude (private), 155 tubercles, 133, 134 tuberculosis, 59, 133–­35, 157, 167 Turck, Leopold, 176, 252n18, 252n19 typhoid, 152, 153, 180 typhus, 166, 178 uncanny, 122, 235n124 Union Agricole d’Afrique, 164 University of Basel, 19–­20, 205n8 urbanization, 141–­43 US army, nostalgia in, 60, 179. See also Civil War (US) Utopian socialism, 164 Vallée, Sylvain Charles, 163 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de, 31, 58 vaudeville, 135–­38 Venayre, Sylvain, 8 Vernet, Horace, 120, 156; The Soldier at Wa­ terloo, 118, 119, 121; Soldier Laboureur, 118 Vidal, Fernando, 26 “vie du soldat français, La” (pamphlet), 116 Vigny, Alfred de, 147 villages/rural communities, 53, 76–­77, 86–­90, 161, 173. See also local folklore; pays (country; native land) Villermé, Louis-­René, 145, 168 vitalism, 12, 26, 54, 75, 133 Voltaire (François-­Marie Arouet), 73 Von Heers, Henrich, 28 Voyages pittoresques et romantiques, 158 Wagner, Richard, 50 Waquet,  Jean, 73 war and warfare: ideology of, 71–­72; methods of, 70; nostalgia for, 95, 121–­22, 235n118; scale of, 71–­72; soldiers’ experience of, 37,

Index  275 73–­74, 89–­90, 102–­4, 151, 155–­58, 183–­84; violence of, 72. See also French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–­1815) War of Austrian Succession (1740–­48), 41 War of the League of Augsburg (1688–­97), 32, 41 Washington, George, 60 Watteau de Lille, François, Le Départ du volontaire, 106, 107 weaning, 113, 115, 184 Weber, Max, 74, 221n52 Wellington, Duke of (Arthur Wellesley), 103

wet-­nursing, 93–­94, 113, 115–­16, 232n87 Whytt, Robert, 50, 54 Willis, Thomas, 25, 49; Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes, 28 Woloch, Isser, 119 Wordsworth, William, 50 workers, as victims of nostalgia, 168, 170 Zimmermann,  Johann Georg, 54 Zwinger,  Johann Rudolf, 38 Zwinger, Theodor, 20–­21, 25, 43, 45–­48, 53, 210n2 Zwingli, Ulrich, 30