>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC.
>> Jason Steinhauer: All
right, well good afternoon.
Thank you for coming.
My name is Jason Steinhauer,
a program specialist
at the John W. Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
Before we begin today's
program, please take a moment
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I will also make you aware that his
afternoon's program is being filmed
for placement on the
Kluge Center's website,
as well as our YouTube
and iTunes U playlist.
I encourage you to visit
our website loc.gov/kluge
to view other lectures delivered
by current and past Kluge scholars,
including several on military
history, veterans history
and lectures by past Kluge fellows.
Today's lecture is presented
by the John W. Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
The Kluge Center is a vibrant
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that brings together scholars and
researchers from around the world
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Today's lecture is titled
Before Trauma, Nostalgia
or the Melancholy of War.
Our speaker is Thomas Dodman,
now concluding his tenure
as a Kluge fellow at
the Library of Congress.
Thomas's research focuses on
the psychological impact of war.
His research draws on several
manuscript collections held
by the library of congress.
Thomas is tracing the origins
of the word 'nostalgia'
and in particular nostalgia
as a battlefield illness.
The terminology during the 18th
and early 19th centuries
designating a war-induced trauma
and perhaps a precursor
to what is today known
as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Dodman has used government records,
soldiers' letters, novels artwork
and more to provide insight
into the medical, military
and colonial history of this emotion
and the inner emotional lives
of our predecessors living at
the dawn of the modern age.
Thomas Dodman is assistant professor
of history at Boston College
and an affiliate scholar
at the Center
for European Studies
at Harvard University.
He received his Ph. D in history
with distinction from the University
of Chicago, and his MA and BA
from University College London.
Prior to his position at Boston
College he was an assistant
professor at George Mason
University, as well as a teacher
and lecturer at Sans Po Paris
and University of Chicago.
His first book is tentatively
titled The Making of Nostalgia: War,
Empire and Medicine in France
1680-1880 and is forthcoming
from University of Chicago press.
It is the subject of his
research here at the Kluge Center.
So please join me in
welcoming Thomas Dodson.
[ Applause ]
>> Thomas Dodman: Thank you, Jason.
I couldn't have said
it better myself.
Now I know what my
book is actually about.
Thank you very much
for organizing this.
Thank you to the Kluge Center
and to all of its members
for making my stay
here so enjoyable.
Thank you all for showing up
today here for this lecture.
All wars big and small are
catastrophes of one sort or another
for those who they affect.
To this day Francisco Goya's
depiction of the disasters of war,
of which you have many very, very
nice collections here at the Library
of Congress, remains one of
the most searing indictments
of the horrors unleashed
by military conflict.
In this case the guerilla warfare
and counter-insurgency
operations waged by Spaniards
and Frenchmen during
Napoleon's occupation
of Spain in the early 1800's.
This series of AT etchings captures
with gruesome frankness the
violence unleashed by a conflict
in which perhaps for the first time
the people became a participant
in war.
As Carl von Clausewitz famously
put it, inaugurating an era
of mass mobilization behind war
efforts and mass retribution
against civilian populations.
This was total war, Goya
seems to be telling us.
A war of destruction
and annihilation.
But what of its perpetrators?
What of this Napoleonic soldier
down here whose deeds speak
for themselves, and for the
insipient brutalization of warfare?
And who's relaxed in a
melancholy pose seems
to evoke what Hannah Arrant would
later dub the banality of evil.
Or does it maybe suggest something
else about how he actually felt?
I'm going to put that as a
question for the time being.
I don't think it actually does,
but it actually serves
my purpose if it did.
What I would like to do today
is explore a little-known aspect
of these wars, namely the inner
life, what I call the inner life
and the emotional history
of the soldiers
who fought during the Napoleonic
era in the early 19th century,
particularly French
citizen soldiers.
I approach this question
through the lens of pathology,
or the psychological and
emotional breakdown of these men.
Thus in a sense asking of them
questions more commonly formulated
in the context of 20th
century conflicts.
That is after the establishment of
military psychiatry as a profession
and a corps within most armies.
It is a difficult task,
both because of the dangers
of conceptual anachronism,
and I'll come back
to what I mean by that in a second.
And also because of the
dearth of sources of the kind
of qualitative ego documents
that characterize a
period before the advent
of mass literacy and mass schooling.
I approach this drawing from
research in two related projects
that I've been pursuing over
this past year as a Kluge fellow.
One, the broad medical history
of nostalgia in the 18th
and 19th centuries
that Jason referred to,
in which I am mercifully seeing
through to conclusion this summer.
Or at least my editor
is convinced that I am.
And a second project, a biography
of a French revolutionary
volunteer based
on his extraordinary
correspondence with his family.
And this is stuff, material that
I discovered last summer in France
in Clavans in a lovely little
hilltop village in a private archive
after having searched for these
letters for about three years.
It's kind of derailed a lot of
what I was planning to do here,
but it's also a very
exciting project that I sort
of feel compelled to
bring forth now.
So what I'm trying to do here
is bridge a little bit these two
projects in this lecture.
I'll start with this scene of
misery after the battle of Waterloo,
which of course we've
just celebrated the 200th,
sort of bicentennial of.
I am partly British and partly
French so there's only half of me
that actually celebrated it.
The other half has sort of
tried to forget the whole thing.
So the battle of Waterloo which
of course brought a definitive end
to the Napoleonic wars in 1815.
In A Soldier at Waterloo,
the military painter depicted a
distraught French grenadier sitting
on a sepulcher mound and a
half-buried fallen comrade.
At his feet lie scattered
debris of battle
and of the now-defunct
Napoleonic empire itself symbolized
down here by the Napoleonic eagle.
It looks rather like
the American eagle.
In the background there
are of course more corpses.
They litter the broken landscape
against the vibrant, romantic colors
of sunset which signal
both the end of the day
but also the end of an epoch too.
We, or at least I, don't actually
know that much about this painting.
The theme clearly possessed
the young Verne at a time
when it was quite dangerous to
show one's Napoleonic feelings.
This is the post-Napoleonic
Bonapartist restoration
and this definitely not a
good thing for him to do.
He wasn't allowed to display the
painting as he had done previously
and had to put it on show in his
artist's studio only in 1822 as part
of a dictate together with
The Soldier as Plowman
which you have here on the right.
Verne treaded carefully, suggesting
that a Napoleonic veteran
had traded sword for spade
and quietly returned
to farm the land.
This is in fact one of the
very first representations
of that apocryphal figure of the
soldier Chauvin, which is turned
into sort of legend in early
19th-century French songs
and literature and to which
we owe the word chauvinism,
to whom we owe the word chauvinism.
A Soldier at Waterloo circulated
widely thereafter thanks
to its reproduction as a cheap
print, which you can see here
on the left, which wisely
removed the Napoleonic eagle.
Suddenly it's not there anymore.
There are only two cannons.
Within the more tolerant
context of the July Monarchy,
so from 1830-1848, this
same picture even came
to adorn the second edition
of that Bible of Bonapartism,
Lascas's Memorial of St. Helena,
which you have over
here on the right.
As you can see, this is the front.
This is the first actual
page of text
with the same image on the top here.
And so of course this is the result
of the conversations between Lascas
and Napoleon during his
exile in St. Helena.
This is the second edition of
the book published in 1842.
The first edition that was
allowed in France at a time
when Napoleon's ashes had
just returned to Paris.
So it's part of the sort of
glorification of Napoleonic legend.
A Solider at Waterloo thus came
to be a potent symbol of the kind
of Napoleonic nostalgia
that pervades much
of 18th century French
political culture.
Nowhere more strongly of
course than among the legion
of disgruntled veterans
who survived and sort
of maintained this nostalgia
for their beloved emperor.
And you only have to
read the novels of Balzac
to really get a sense of this.
This is a nostalgia that we
are familiar with, the wistful,
thoroughly romanticized and
utterly benign longing for the past
that has been lost or
perhaps never quite was,
at least not in the embellished
version that we remember.
But this is not what nostalgia
actually meant in the early 1800's.
And no misty-eyed Bonapartist
would have described himself
as nostalgic at the time.
In fact, no romantic poet, nobody
would have described themselves
as nostalgic because it meant
something quite different.
A contemporary dictionary defined
the term thus: an illness caused
by a violent desire to
return to one's homeland.
In other words a technical
synonym for what we might call
in vernacular language homesickness,
a term that already existed
in French 'mal du pays'
an in German as 'Heimweh'.
What I would love to suggest
is that Verne's picture speaks
to this earlier medical
understanding of nostalgia
and actually fits into an
obscure iconographic tradition
of what was once defined as a
specific form of melancholia
or depression, affecting
soldiers in particular.
And the melancholy
of war as it were.
The soldier's pose strongly suggests
that Verne's painting was inspired
by the rich tradition
of representations
of melancholia reaching
back to the Renaissance.
And perhaps best identified
with Albrecht Durer's
famous Melancholia I,
which you have here on the right.
I think there are a number of
similarities, not just the pose.
But also the sort of objects
littered on the ground,
the presence of a skull and
corpses and the backdrop.
I think there's enough here
to suggest this may well have been
an influence, at least indirectly.
Verne was not the only
military artist who turned
to depicting the disasters of war
and inner lives of
soldiers at the time.
Albrecht Adams' study
of a wounded crevace
from 1812 is remarkable
similar in this respect.
You have it down here on the left.
I'm sorry the picture
is not all that good,
but hopefully you can just
about see it well enough.
In fact, the dog lying at his feet
may be seen not only as a symbol
of melancholy, which it is
of course, but also as a nod
to the concept of home and to Argos,
Odysseus's dog who is the first
to recognize his master
upon his return to Ithica.
Suggesting perhaps that this
soldier's melancholy thoughts are
actually homesick ones.
There is in fact a more nichey
sort of iconographic tradition
that explicitly depicts
homesick soldiers
in this very melancholy pose.
It starts with 17th-century
and 18th-century tales
of a Swiss herdsman's
song, the [French term]
which allegedly made burly Swiss
mercenaries stationed abroad
collapse should they
hear the melody.
And according to the legend
they weren't even allowed
to sort of play this melody.
Otherwise they would all just
drop dead from nostalgia.
As soon as they heard cowbells too
they would just sort of fall over.
And so these are the first sort
of attested cases of
death by nostalgia.
The tradition reaches all the way
to World War I postcards depicting
homesick men such as this one,
which you have here on the right.
Again, adopting the melancholy pose.
And it passes by very
similar images of homesickness
such as these ones here, which
are some wonderful examples here
at the Library of Congress.
These are images of homesick
soldiers during the American Civil
War, both this one and the next.
Which aren't quite the same
but I think really convey the
same sort of message ultimately.
Where all of these
soldiers suffered from,
at least up until the
American Civil War, died of--
the American Civil War was
really the last conflict
in which nostalgia is used in this
medical sense that I'm beginning
to sketch right now-- was this form
of melancholia known as nostalgia.
This is what they suffered from.
This is what they died from.
On the 18th of November 1793
following a year of intense fighting
with Austrian and Prussian
forces along the Belgian border,
the general in command of
the French Army was informed
by the war ministry of measures
necessary to preserve the ranks
as the troops dug into their
positions for the winter.
The ministry was appalled at
incoming reports describing hordes
of deserters found
wandering on the highways.
And it ordered the general
to suspend indefinitely all existing
furloughs and special commissions.
New leaves were to be granted
posthumously, it added,
and only specifically in one
medical case: to sick men suffering
from nostalgia or mal du pays.
This is a time when the Prussians
are closing in on Paris and we have
to abolish all leaves except
for men suffering by nostalgia.
As astonishing as this may sound,
this was not a quirky fantasy
of some proto-romantic bureaucrat.
12 months later, following a year
of terror and mass mobilization
of unprecedented scale, the French
revolutionary government took steps
to extend the provision to hundreds
of thousands of French troops,
making this nostalgia and
almost talismanic diagnosis
with which military doctors could
release the men from active duty
and send them home on
a temporary furlough,
typically three months
medical leave.
Sometimes they would be reassigned
to a unit operating closer to home.
But this is really quite
a systematic operation
that was put in place.
These extraordinary
measures remained
in place throughout the
Napoleonic wars and right
up until the mid-19th century.
They were reaffirmed by government
directors' year after year.
Prompting physicians to estimate
that the condition was as widespread
as typhus and scurvy in the ranks
and that it might well have killed
up to 1 in 20 men in some regiments
as the revered Charles
de Gaulle noted in 1818,
no epoch has witnessed as
many cases of nostalgia
as the French Revolution and
the wars it precipitated.
Although we may be tempted to reach
for our copy of Homer's Odysseus,
we do not, for the term
nostalgia was then relatively new,
having only been around
since the late 1600's
when a 19-year-old
medical-- oh, sorry.
I forgot to show this.
This is the kind of
medical certificate
that a solider desperately
would have sought during the
Revolutionary wars.
You can't quite read it right
here, but here it explains
that this soldier is affected
by nostalgia and therefore needs
to be sent back home
for three months.
So this is the kind of evidence
that shows this was actually
real, a real concern.
So in the late 1600's, 1688 to
be precise, a medical student
at Faculty of Basil
coined this neologism
from the Greek roots 'nostos',
home, and 'algos', pain or longing.
Janus Hoffer, who's
dissertation you can see here,
thus sought to describe and
give legitimacy to reports
of Heimweh amount his
contemporaries,
especially the Swiss mercenaries
fighting Louis XIV's army.
Drawing eclectically from
posthumoral physiology
and psychology, he described
this new clinical entity in terms
of a passion of the soul and a
corruption of the animal spirits.
This is very much the
language of the time.
This was caused by an obsessive
longing for home or as he put it,
the sadness generated by the burning
desire to see one's homeland again.
So again you get the sense this is
very much a spatial homesickness
that he's talking about.
There's none of the sort of
temporal, diachronic sense
that we have with the
word nostalgia.
If left untreated, nostalgia
would breed melancholy
and consumptive wasting
away of organic faculties,
leading the patient
to death by exhaustion
or some other concomitant disease.
Although he never quite made it
into the annals of medical history,
nostalgia did successfully
establish itself
in 18th-century medical
circles, attracting the attention
of prominent Enlightenment
physicians such as Orso and Conte,
who wrote actually quite
extensively about nostalgia.
As the topological saying has it,
nostalgia truly ain't
what it used to be.
Just what it actually
was may be gleaned
from the only visual representation
of a deadly case of nostalgia
that I am aware of and that I
found in the prints division
of the French National Library.
This is an 1832 engraving entitled
Le Mal Du Pays, so homesickness,
by the military artist Belanger,
who was very close to Verne;
slightly later generation, but
all these people were very much
in the same sort of artistic view.
By adopting the standard motifs
from the iconography of illness
and of 18th century moral paintings,
that is interior domestic scenes
centered around a deathbed,
the somber atmosphere lighted only
by the surgical presence of a nurse,
Belanger clearly sought
to convey the idea
that mal du pays was
indeed a serious
and potentially fatal illness.
The patient's sorrowful expression
and again the presence of the dog
at his side served to underscore
nostalgia's well-established
connection to-- as sort
of the understanding
as an emotional disorder
and nosological connection
to melancholia.
At the same time, his
emaciated facial traits
and prominent skeletal chest
also suggest the physiognomy
of an infeebled sort of
chested person wasting away
to a suspect case of consumption,
or phthisis, pulmonary tuberculosis
which in the days
of pre-bacteriological
medicine throughout most
of the 19th century was
thought to be caused
by sad passions such as nostalgia.
This whole literature of how
nostalgia, including by the inventor
of the stethoscope Laennec.
He's convinced that nostalgia is
really what causes tuberculosis,
including among himself.
He eventually dies of
tuberculosis himself.
Beyond this immediate
clinical picture,
the condition is also clearly
identified in epidemiological terms
as a soldier's disease
caused by displacement.
The traveling trunks that you can
see here above the soldier's bed
and his cap, which is an early
model of the lightweight one
that the French troops adopted when
they sort of moved into Algeria
in 1830 and replaced the
iconic but impractical shackles
of the Napoleonic armies, help
situate this scene precisely
in Algeria during the 1830's.
That this was a form of homesickness
is also likewise evidenced
in the central chronotopic
marker of the composition:
the letter that this
[French word] holds onto,
having apparently just read it.
And it seems to point towards a
home symbolized here yet again
by the metanamical figure
of the faithful spaniel.
And specifically this is an
[French term], a Britany spaniel,
which raises suspicion that this
soldier is actually from Britain.
He is a [French term] and the
[French term] seemed to be the stuff
of legend just like the Swiss are
following epidemics of nostalgia
that allegedly decimated
entire companies
of conscripts during
the revolutionary army.
I think Belanger is
sort of signifying
that by choosing this
specific kind of dog.
Belanger chose to immortalize
the homesick trooper precisely
in that keenly awaited but often
bittersweet moment when mail
from France arrived,
momentarily bridging
that gap separating him from home.
While reinforcing the spatial
understanding of nostalgia
on the one hand a symptom
of a widespread anxiety
as to the crude mobility
of populations in areas
of economic development,
war and colonial expansion,
the letter also suggests I
think that what is really
at stake here is a more abstract,
emotional form of estrangement
that Belanger sought to convey with
the anonymous, faceless silhouette
in the background, the reifying
reduction of the patient
to a number above his head.
He's just patient 134.
And the compassionate presence
of a sympathetic nurse.
An incongruous female and maternal
figure who alone seems to be able
to touch and empathize
with this soldier
in what is otherwise a very
virile anonymous anomic universe
of the army.
As the polyphagous notion
of the [French term] also reveals
what the homesick person longed
for was not just specific
cartographic locale,
but also a living community of
people rooted in a particular place
and embedded in customs, social
networks and most of all memories.
It is very much like
Heimat in German.
It's a very loaded concept.
The medical discourse of
nostalgia is encapsulated here
in Belanger's poignant image.
It tells us something about how we
can reconstruct the emotional life
and experience from
soldiers of the past.
It reveals a little-known story
of psychological breakdown,
at once unique to this epoch and
yet uncannily similar to that
of warriors across the
ages, including today.
But what of trauma in all of this?
Does trauma even fit
into this picture?
Well, yes and no, as
historians often like to say.
The symptoms described
in the medical reports,
and which were typically subsumed
under the umbrella diagnosis
nostalgia, are telling in regard.
Headaches, insomnia, nightmares,
panic attacks, deliriums
and despair, as well as conversion
disorders described already then
as hysterical, which with
unexplained dysfunctional
neurological manifestations such
as temporary deafness, blindness,
aphonia, respiratory difficulties,
partial paralysis and
epileptic fits.
After 1815, many veterans
worked with frayed nerves wound
up in the first modern
psychiatric asylums in France
where they were diagnosed
with various forms
of what we would call
psychosis today.
Their memoirs speak poignantly of
recurring nightmares and flashbacks,
of endless visions of streams of
blood, severed limbs and expressions
of horror on mangled faces of the
dead people they were surrounded by.
And just like Verne's
Grenadier at Waterloo.
In other words, they speak of
intrusive traumatic memories.
In fact, there is little
to distinguish
from a symptomatological point
of view the Napoleonic soldier
diagnosed with nostalgia
from the shell-shocked
Tommy evacuated
from the wester front during the
first World War, or the veterans
of Vietnam and Iraq
diagnosed with PTSD today.
The most effective kinds
of treatments were
remarkably similar as well.
Before sending homesick
men home on leave,
Napoleonic medical
officers experimented
with a rudimentary abreactive cure
reminiscent of Freudian catharsis.
And countless other talking cures
that have been sort
of devised since.
All of which pretty much are geared
towards allaying painful feelings
by bringing repressed psychic
material out as it were.
I'd even venture so far as
to say that Verne's soldier
at Waterloo prefigures the kind of
physical and psychological scarring
of landscapes, bodies and minds
that so marks the artwork,
poetry and literature of those
who lived through the hell
of mechanized warfare
in 1914 and 1918.
And so here I think there are
analogies with the corpses.
Dead bodies on the
battlefield were not represented
in military artwork
up until this point.
So this is really the first time
you actually kind of see this kind
of factoring of bodies, which
of course we will find much more
present in World War I iconography.
I think the lunar landscape that
Nash painted here with the sort
of dawn at the back or the dawn
of a new age or the setting
of an old age is also something
that I think relates
to what Verne is doing.
And of course Otto Dix's famous
portraits, auto portraits,
which describe in graphic
detail his own decomposition
as a soldier experiencing
the horrors of war,
starts off with a similar
kind of melancholy pose
that I think also establishes
a nice connection with Verne.
So I think for all these reasons
this seems to be something
that suggests we might want to
speak of this as a form of trauma.
So yes, but also no.
No Napoleonic physician
actually spoke of all
of this in terms of trauma.
Nor could they for that matter.
Simply put, there was no concept
of psychogenic trauma
available at the time.
The word trauma existed but
it was only used exclusively
for physical trauma, so the
impact of bullets or wounds.
There wouldn't be this
psychogenic concept of trauma,
historians now agree, until the
last third of the 19th century
when theories of railway
spine, or nervous shock caused
by railway accidents paved the way
for Jean-Martin Charcot's
psycho-neurological accounts
of hysteria and in turn
the psychodynamic ones
of people like Freud and Brower.
Take for instance the legions
of hopeless conscripts whom the
medical officer Benoit Galloit,
whose dissertation on nostalgia
you see here, this is one example.
This is the first example of
about 75 medical dissertations
on nostalgia that I found so far
that French medical officers,
mostly demobilized army medical
officers defended throughout the
19th century as a way of obtaining
their MD and source to practice
in civilian life as well.
So these legions of conscripts the
medical officer struggled to rescue
from fatal nostalgia in
the army during the 1790's.
He compared their sense of
loss when joining the army
to the sudden weaning of an infant
from its wet nurse's
breast or its mother breast.
When I first saw that I said,
"Wow, Freud existed before."
He did. Yet upon second
reading you realize
that in no instance does Galloit
actually conceive of this likeness
in terms of childhood sexuality or
of the repetition of latent trauma
as we post-Freudians
inevitably would.
Rather he chalked this up to a
parallel experience of [French term]
which in French means both tearing
apart, physical tearing apart,
but also heartbreak, so a
sort of inner wrenching.
In other words, the physical
dislocation and melancholy mood,
homesickness, that simultaneously
affected the well-being of body
and soul according to
medical theories of the time.
And the reference here to wet
nurse needs to be contextualized
with the practice of
outsourcing children so to say
to rural wet nurses in 18th
and early 19th-century France
despite the vehement critiques
against it waged by numerous
Enlightenment figures,
including Cousseau of course.
Like so many of his
contemporaries, Galliot was steeped
in a loosely psychosomatic
medical philosophy fed by strands
of sensationalist psychology,
neurophysiology and medical vitalism
that afforded, and this is the
crucial part, a critical role
to feelings and emotions
in the genesis of disease,
including organic diseases.
Arguably much more so
than the first theories
of psychogenic trauma
would a century later,
because of their initial association
to a very physicalist
sense of shock.
There's a reason why the
physicians spoke of shell shock.
Because they thought it was actually
due to the explosion of a shell
and so there's a very physicalist
understanding of what this was.
So what I'm actually arguing is
that in a sense it was easier
to diagnoses war neurosis in the
18th century than it has been
in the 20th century
for these physicians.
Let me give you another
example to try
to highlight the potential pitfalls
of potential anachronism here.
This is what I was
alluding to before.
Like Galliot, Jerome Laseif was
another young medical officer
who treated numerous
cases of nostalgia
in the French army before being
diagnosed with the ill himself
and sent home to convalesce in 1795.
His health never actually improve
sufficiently enough for him
to return to active duty, and so
he received a permanent discharge
and set up a relatively
successful practice
in his hometown in
southwestern France.
Yet one can still find
him three decades later,
so long after the war is
actually ending, has ended,
trying to write a curist manual for
family farmers, which you see here,
in which he showcased a
sophisticated artificial mammal
designed for infant bottle feeding.
Which you've got a
nice example of here.
This was a booming
market at the time,
because of the continued
practice of rural wet nursing.
Laseif hoped to sell
his product thanks
to what he argued was
its faithful reproduction
through mechanical means of the
natural sensation of breastfeeding.
And he claimed to have achieved
that by devising an artificial
nipple made of natural sponge
and fine muslin cloth as opposed
to the sort of animal udder skin
that was used up until then.
And especially through a very,
very complex system of tubes
and special air inlets that would
actually reproduce the sort of sense
of suction with the
pressure involved.
This was vital, he insisted, in
a startling passage worth quoting
at length, thus these
are not my words.
Because, as he put it, the
pleasure that nature procures
to the wet nurse during
breastfeeding and which is aroused
as the child approaches her
breast, when she feels the effects
of suction provokes the
erection of the nipple
and the mammary gland secretion.
The milk then maculates
into the child's mouth.
The child in turn experiences
an orgasm of the salivary glands
through the movement of suction
and the sensation of the nipple.
Saliva may then flow in
quantities commensurate
with its important role
in the digestive system.
Passages such as these, moreover
when coming from a middle-aged man,
make us post-Freudians squirm.
At least they make
my students squirm
when I show it to them in class.
Yet we must resist the urge to read
into words and thoughts from an age
and sensitivity very
different to our own.
What Laseif is actually saying here
has nothing, absolutely nothing
to do with sexuality as we
understand it and the practices
and norms we take it to entail.
Laseif lived at the very end of a
world that preceded the invention
of sexuality as Michele Tofeaux
defines it, that is as an object
of scientific knowledge and a
causal agent in human behavior.
A development that Tofeaux
pinpointed quite precisely
to the 1830's, that is just
after the time of Laseif.
To understand what he really
meant, we must grasp things
like the persistent neoresuianism
of childrearing manuals
which I referenced with Galiot,
the importance of digestion,
of physical sensations of
emotions and nervous excitement
in contemporary medical beliefs.
There's a whole sort of
unpacking here of this language
that would need to be done
before one could actually try
to interpret it.
Only then might we begin to
speculate on the extent to which,
unknown to Laseif himself,
this research of his
into mechanical breast, which for
him, he saw applications for this
in orphanages, but also
in nonspecified institutions
without mothers.
The army? This kind of research
for him, we could speculate,
was a kind of reenacting
and a working
through of the trauma he
experienced as homesickness
on the battlefields of
revolutionary France.
We can sort of say that,
but we can't actually say that's
what he himself things he's doing.
As Freud says in The Uncanny,
a wartime concept incidentally
developed during the first World
War, there is a joking saying
that love is homesickness.
Little did Freud know that the
saying also has a prehistory
of hardly an amusing one.
Reconstructing the emotional lives
of these men therefore entails
treading very carefully and trying
in so far as possible to recompose
the conceptual and social worlds
in which they lived and then
which their nostalgia made sense
as the quintessential first
clinically defined form
of soldier's neurosis.
In the few minutes I have left,
let me turn to some preliminary
conclusions that I've drawn
from performing such an
exercise with reference
to this correspondence of a French
revolutionary army volunteer
that I've been working on of late.
I'm using here the letters from
his first year in the army.
There are about five years'
worth of these letters.
Several hundred of these, which
is what makes it so extraordinary.
[French term] which
you can see here,
sorry it's a very,
very poor reproduction.
This is one of his letters
that I'm working on.
He was 21 years old
when he volunteered
to join the second infantry
battalion of the Merc
in eastern France in 1791.
He would serve in the army for the
next six years, climbing the ranks
to become a cavalry lieutenant
before resigning and retiring
to his native village
[French name] in 1797.
He was in many respects
an utterly unique soldier
of the French Revolution.
Born to poor peasants, he
was adopted by his godmother,
a local noblewoman steeped in
enlightenment writings and raised
with a stepsister, also adopted,
in the spirit of the [French term].
Far more educated than the
average Frenchman at the time,
he wrote long introspective, even
mockish letters to his godmother
and sister almost daily, seamlessly
passing from descriptions of battles
and bivouacs to his enduring
love for his sister and mother,
or his appreciation for
Condillac's writings.
Quite schizophrenic really.
Yet his emotional experience of
war was far from exceptional.
And in fact echoed many of the
concerns common to the rank and file
who couldn't write of it
in such eloquent fashion.
The difficult adaptation to
regimental life, the hardships
and constant need while on campaign.
The importance of finding good
comrades with which to share a bed,
cook a meal and look over each
other's shoulder in combat.
Noelle's letters provide access
to the psychological makeup
of Napoleaon's men, bringing
into sharper focus the constant
mood swings felt by countless others
from the boredom of garrison
life to the paroxysms of combat,
passing by that unrelenting
feeling of isolation and longing
to return home, or at least
receive news of home in a letter.
In fact, even when he
does depart significantly
from his fellow soldiers, for
example in his strong politicization
which is quite unique
really at the time,
he embodies the revolutionary's
ideal type warrior,
the bourgeoiesie citizen
who rushes to arms
at the behest of the fatherland.
Still, Noelle found it supremely
hard to live up to that ideal
of the cyclically minded
Spartan warriors sketched
by Enlightenment military reformers
and now summoned into existence
by the revolution's politicians.
As he realized upon
leaving his family nest,
an expression he uses systematically
throughout his correspondence
in December 1791, one did not
become a citizen soldier overnight.
For Noelle, as for
many other recruits,
the hyphen between these two terms
actually hid a chasm separating two
radically incommensurate worlds:
the civilian and the military.
And in between which he
soon found himself stranded.
Noelle's acculturation
to military life
in 1792 was extremely
testing to the young man.
He was garrisoned not far from
home, barely 60 miles away
and never actually strayed that far
from his native region throughout
his first year in the army.
Despite being surrounded by
fellow compatriots from Lorraine
and entrusted with the mess
group's meal responsibilities,
Noelle complained of having
"no real friends" in the army.
Letters from home were his lifeline.
He felt forgotten when no mail came
through, and reborn when it did.
Even hauled back from across
the river of oblivion.
Sort of overblown formula.
He kept his mother and sister's
letters on him at all times.
Literally in his shirt.
And he viewed his own letters as
an extension of his own persona,
repeatedly expressing a
wish to travel with them.
When he posts his letters he
says, "I wish I could travel
with these letters,
even beat them home."
In a flick of despair at
one point when he worries
about being taken prisoner
by enemy forces,
he actually burns all his
letters for fear they might sort
of fall in the wrong hands.
It's a fit that he
immediately regrets thereafter.
He did not have to fight much
during his first stint at the front.
He witnessed the famous
battle of Velni at a distance
and only received his baptism
of fire right at the end
of his first year in service.
Nonetheless, he found the discipline
of garrison life no less alienating.
His impressions about military
drill could have come straight
from Foucoure's pain yet again,
or more likely form
Condid's description
of the Bulgarian Prussian discipline
in Voltaire's eponymous work.
"I try to do the exercise
as a machine
and make sense of each movement.
They are all intended to make us
occupy as least possible as space
in the ranks without
disturbing the other men.
These exercises are without doubt
a good way of disciplining the body
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's a good lad,
has always been a soldier
and certainly knows how
to perform the drill.
But that's all he knows.
In everything else he does it is
as if he were still
wearing his uniform."
Noelle was hardly alone in
resenting the regimentation
of military [French term] and many
other recruits had a hard time
squaring the fact that they
were now rights-bearing citizens
and electors at that.
Being in the army actually gave
them the right to be active citizens
as opposed to passive citizens, even
if they didn't have much wealth.
But they still had to, per
regulation, learn 16 drill commands
and twice as many sequenced
movements simply
to charge and fire their muskets.
The revolution had
ostensibly redeemed soldiers
from their unflattering
status under the old regime,
the scum of the earth, the Duke
of Wellington's memorable phrase.
The point the Napoleonic
propaganda hammered away
in flattering comparisons
between boyish French soldiers
and "German automatons who
wage war like machines".
But few French soldiers,
whether volunteers or conscripts,
actually saw things that way,
especially when the revolutionary
fervor and genuine egalitarianism
that initially pervaded the army
gave way to draconian discipline
and the more conventional forms
of hierarchy during
the Napoleonic period.
For them, as for Noelle, this
was very much an experience
of alienation in the Marxian
sense of the term I think.
There are remarkable
similarities with the kind
of alienation he describes
in the workplace
that began in the 19th century.
The very day after having
dissected a military drill,
Noelle wrote his family in a
radically different fashion.
"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
have obtained a short leave."
This was the first time Noelle
mentioned the possibility
of returning home on furlough to
his beloved ones, barely a month
into his service, a thought
that offered momentary solace
by collapsing duration and distance,
but that would become a nagging
obsession in the coming months.
These two letters set
the parameters I think
of Noelle's interstitial existence
between two incommensurable
world separated both in space,
here and there, military and
home, and in time, past union,
current separation, future
hypothetical reunion.
They frame a structural
feeling informed
by pastoral themes quite clearly
so, and that pervades the remainder
of Noelle's correspondence with his
juxtaposed images of military life
on the one hand, nature and
family half on the other.
And of course Noelle's constant
emotional seesaw in between.
Whichever way we characterize
Noelle's feelings,
we are struck with the
intensely nostalgic theme
of his correspondence, perhaps
even a sort of regressive tone.
The young man's longing for home
belied a more fundamental yearning
for his lost childhood and age of
innocence menaced by the prospect
of wartime brutalization.
"I have learnt the terrible
business of killing," he confessed
to his increasingly worried mother
after his first experience
of combat.
"But will always return
home gentle and human.
You know well that you did not
raise me to be a soldier forever."
So long as he did have to be one,
however, letters provided Noelle
with an emotional refuge in
which to reminisce, daydream,
in short escape even if
just for a few hours.
His nostalgia in other words
di not just make him suffer.
It also kept him going.
A coping mechanism as much
as an illness, and as such,
strikingly similar to
the flight into neurosis
which Sigmund Freud diagnosed
among those soldiers affected
by traumatic neurosis
during the great war.
Their peaceful civilian
ego needed to escape
from a newly acquired
warlike, aggressive
and parasitic ego acquired
as they became soldiers.
Freud posited that this
would lead them to a form
of primal aggression all the
way to childhood memories.
And I think there is
something similar to be said
in this ironic sort
of comical cartoon
that the French cartoonist Cham
made, again as a commentary
about the soldiers in Algeria.
This is a French soldier writing,
"Dear mom and dad," writing a letter
to his parents saying, "I've finally
captured the leader of the rebellion
and so I now think that France will
finally be able to conquer Algeria."
I think his sort of
despondent look actually sort
of suggests something quite
different about what the function
of writing to dear mom and dad
performed for these soldiers.
Although they did not
possess a working concept
of psychological trauma,
Napoleonic era physicians conceived
of nostalgia in these very
similar sort of Freudian terms
of two different egos battling it
out within what they would
have called the soul.
Pointing to parallels
between soldiers plights
and the baby child's
despair during weaning.
Arguing that what killed the
nostalgic was the persuasion
that his life habits
have changed forever.
Noelle was diagnosed with
nostalgia after a year in the front
and in an overjoyed letter home
announcing his imminent return,
he tellingly indicated that what
he felt he actually had was less
than le mal du pays and more le
mal du famlie, family sickness.
In the long run, things
worked out for him.
He nursed his family sickness
and shipped to the front
out of sheer patriotic duty,
repeating this sort of back
and forth for the next five years
until granted a definitive
discharge in 1797.
He found a more agreeable way of
serving the public good as mayor
of his local town and even managed
in a sense to erase the years lost
to war by marrying
his beloved stepsister
and returning to his life.
But for many others,
the war did not end,
even after immobilization
in 1814 and 1815.
The war raged on in their head
and in their inability to readapt
to civilian life, eventually making
them look back upon those days
of Napoleonic glory with
a hint of sick nostalgia.
A nostalgia for the regiment,
as their physicians suddenly
started diagnosing it.
A much more benign kind of nostalgia
that sort of sustained them
after a double displacement,
not just in the army,
but also in homecoming
that turned out not
to be a restorative
homecoming that they felt.
Ironically, after having been the
first victims of deadly nostalgia
on the front, these soldiers
now were the first historically
to actually taste the bittersweet
comforts of benign nostalgia
as we have known it ever since.
Blissfully unaware of the tail
of destruction in a catastrophe
and primal regression
that it emerged from.
Thank you very much.
[ Appluase ]
I look forward to your questions.
Yes, please.
>> Question: Well, I'm afraid
of falling in to anachronism,
but the description that
you give of nostalgia
as a sickness unto death is
very reminiscent of [inaudible].
And were accused not
sympathetically accused.
And yet the description
that you gave is so close
to descriptions I've read of
those Korean War people who died
for no apparent physical reason.
>> Thomas Dodman: Absolutely.
I think for me there is
obviously a continuity there.
The difference is in the way
the doctors actually conceive
of what is actually
happening to these soldiers.
What I find really interesting, and
what you're saying reinforces this,
is that ironically in this period,
in the 18th and early 19th century,
soldiers were actually much more
likely to get a sympathetic ear
from their physicians that soldiers
would throughout certainly the
second half of the 19th century
during the American Civil War.
Already there is a lot of
shaming going on of the nostalgic.
For lack of a better
word, Victorian manliness
of course has intervened
in the process.
But it's only really very recently.
PTSD only gets accepted
in the 1980's.
It's a very long road to sort of get
back to the same kind of sympathy
for these soldiers after this sort
of mid-19th century
break has happened.
>> Question: It's not at all
your period, but I'm curious
about the Civil War,
American Civil War.
The use of the term soldier's
heart, which was a sympathetic term.
And if you look at Oliver
Wendell Holmes's correspondence
with his family, their
astonishing resemblance to Noelle.
Patriotism and then a real
disillusionment with war.
>> Thomas Dodson: I think there the
similarities are very, very strong
and to a certain extent also
in the physicians' discourse,
from what I know, and this is mostly
from several colleagues of mine
who have worked on the
American Civil War case,
Susan Matte in particular
has written a wonderful book
on homesickness in American history.
There is a struggle going on
in the medical corps as to how
to treat these soldiers,
how to deal with them.
And there's a lot of looking back
to what the French
physicians did 50-60 years ago.
And on the other hand,
a very different approach
to shaming these people.
Yeah. Yes please.
>> Question: In talking about the
Napoleonic wars, you have a kind
of interesting natural experiment
because the French soldiers
in the Napoleonic wars, before
and after you had the
French colonial military.
Do you see any difference in
medical trajectories for soldiers
in the colonial wars versus those
who fought between 1795 and 1815?
The battles are different.
>> Thomas Dodson: The battles are
completely different, absolutely.
The warfare is a very
different kind of warfare.
What's very interesting with the
1830's, 1840's and 50's in Algeria,
which is a period that I sort of
worked on in conjunction with this,
is that you can clearly
see physicians trying
to use the same kind of discourse,
the same categories of analysis
that their predecessors used
during the Napoleonic wars,
but it doesn't quite seem to work.
It only works to a certain extent.
This is a very different
kind of war, much more sort
of a Guerilla warfare
to put it simply.
Long periods of inactivity so they
start thinking of nostalgia more
in terms of boredom,
which again sort
of brings us towards similar
configurations in wars
like Vietnam for example.
I think there's a similar sort
of discourse there of the boredom
of war to a certain extent.
But what really then changes
is the medical epistemologies
of the time are shifting so
radically by the mid-19th century
that the discourse of nostalgia
actually gets completely subsumed,
completely wiped under the
pseudoscientific discourse
of seasoning theories.
So all of the sudden soldiers who
are not adapting well to conditions
in Algeria are not sort of suffering
because they're far from home,
but they're suffering because of
a different climate in Algeria.
And so there's a sort of much
more materialist medical discourse
that literally wipes away
the conditions or possibility
for this much more
kind of psychological,
emotional medical discourse,
basically invalidating it.
I mean, doctors say, "We
used to talk of nostalgia.
Now we can leave that to the poets.
Let's do hard science and
talk about seasoning."
It's part of this moment when
this opportunity is foreclosed
because of changing
codes of virility,
because of changing
medical theories.
And also in part because I think
the changing nature of war.
I think there isn't
the same kind of--
the French 19th century army
obviously is a very different army
to the Napoleonic army.
It's not such a mass army.
In Algeria it's a max of
100,000 people at a time,
as opposed to being an army
of several million people
as it is during the
Napoleonic period.
These are not officially conscripts,
though technically they kind of are.
But the configuration of what
it means to be in the army,
the kind of discipline
that they're subjected
to I think is quite different.
So I think there are
differences there.
>> Question: Did you by chance
encounter the literature
from an anthropologist who was
very serious about the army?
>> Thomas Dodson: No, I haven't.
I should.
>> Question: And he
essentially comes
to a similar conclusion
as your romantic era.
Your more romantic era and
Napoleonic era explains why.
He's an anthropologist [inaudible].
>> Thomas Dodson: And
this is Marlowe?
It rings a bell but
I should look at it.
Okay, thank you.
I should look at that.
>> Question: Very much like your
discussion, it's very much parallel
to his anthropological and
psychiatric view of nostalgia too.
They had people in
the US army discarded
in World War II for
psychiatric injury.
>> Thomas Dodson: Right.
I mean, World War II is sort
of this really dark era.
>> Question: In the
Napoleonic era it resulted
in mass casualties
in a similar light.
>> Thomas Dodson: Thank
you for the suggestion.
I'll have to look at that.
One more?
>> Question: I'm curious
about irony and how
that might come up through this.
>> Thomas Dodson: Yes.
In this picture here I think
there's a lot of irony.
>> Question: Yep, because
of the disillusionment
as well as the glory of war.
Have you seen that?
>> Thomas Dodson: It's not
explicitly there except
in some very rare occasions.
The French officer/romantic author
Alfred Vigny rights a little bit
about that.
He was a royalist who got into
the army after Napoleon's fall
and never quite-- he sort of
exemplifies this generation
that could never live up to the
glory days of the previous one.
So he's constantly trying
to sort of make his path
through the army a
sort of glorious one,
but he misses out on
the one campaign
that the French actually do
during the 1820's in Spain again,
and he's not even able to go.
And eventually in his quite
clearly autobiographical writings
that he publishes on his
experience, he contrasts.
He says toward the end that all
he could do was be jaundiced
and frail suffering from
homesickness in his army depot.
So I think there is a sense
whereby, well it shifts.
There's also a moment of rapture.
Because up until this point,
up until this revolutionary
Napoleonic period,
to be nostalgic is a sign
of a man of sensibility,
someone who can shed tears.
A sort or Rousseauian person who
is wonderful in that respect.
And afterwards, after this
sort of 19th-century break,
it become much more a kind of
weakness of the lack of glory.
I think it can be in
that perspective.
But this is sort of a sidetracking
answer to your question.
It's not something
that comes up very much
in the sources I have to say.
But I think it's very present here.
I think there's irony in this.
I'm getting a bit of a forceful
reading I think of this cartoon.
I'm not sure if it has much to do
with nostalgia, but
there's something.
It's not just, "Look how silly
our soldiers in Algeria are,"
that they actually think
that a child is the
leader of the resistance.
That child I think
represents something more.
And the fact that he's writing
a letter to his mom and dad
about it I think is indicative
of this something more.
I mean it's all about mothers
and sons as far as I can tell.
>> Jason Steinhauer: We
will have to stop it there.
Please join me in thanking Thomas.
[ Applause ]
Just a quick announcement.
We are back next week in our normal
space across the street in LJ119
for the third of our three-part
Bloomberg dialogues on astrobiology.
We have an active astrobiology
research program
and next week we'll be
examining the intersection
of astrobiology and the arts.
So please join us for that.
We also do have an event survey
that the entire institution
is undertaking at the moment
to learn more about our
events and get your feedback.
So if you are willing to
help us out with that,
please fill out the
survey and you can drop it
on the table on your way out.
Thank you again for joining
me and thank you, Thomas.
>> Thomas Dodson: Thank you.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.