Napoleon,Jefferson, and the Louisiana Purchase

Why did Napoleon sell Louisiana to the United States? Unfortunately, he left very few written traces of his Louisiana policy and, therefore, historians disagree. Their explanations tend to emphasise one of three factors: the diplomacy of President Thomas Jefferson; France's coming war with Britain; or the impact of the black rebels of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). The most heated disagreements revolve around the differing assessments of the role played by Jefferson. This article argues that Jefferson played no role in Napoleon's decision to sell the colony. It acknowledges that the British were crucial, because war with Britain meant that Louisiana would be lost to France. But why was Louisiana undefended? The troops Napoleon wanted to send there never arrived. They went instead to Haiti. And they remained there. If black resistance in Haiti had collapsed quickly, as Napoleon expected, there would have been thousands of French soldiers in Louisiana by the spring of 1803, when the French war with Britain began. By defeating Napoleon, the men whom Jefferson deemed ‘cannibals’ made it possible for him to acquire Louisiana and achieve what an eminent US historian has called his ‘greatest triumph’.     

Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer and George Finlay

Abstract

The collection of Finlay Papers in the British School at Athens though throwing invaluable light on the character of George Finlay and on conditions in the Greece and western Europe of his day, are by no means complete in their coverage. The diaries cover only certain years; the Letter Book records mainly family and business correspondence; the actual copies of surviving letters both to and from Finlay—apart from Finlay to Leake or Leicester Warren—seem to owe their preservation to chance rather than policy. Yet Finlay was no less interested in the history of Trebizond than in Greek topography or in numismatics, and a stray survival among his papers seems to indicate that he had closer relations with Fallmerayer than is suggested by the almost total omission of any reference to him in the works on the Fragmentist (as Fallmerayer called himself). The editor of Fallmerayer's collected works, his best friend G. M. Thomas (the ‘carissimus Thomas’ of the Tagebücher), does mention the generosity of Fallmerayer's attitude towards Finlay's work on Trebizond, but that is about all.     

Political geographies, ‘unfaithful’ translations and anticolonialism: Ireland in Élisée Reclus's geography and biography

This paper addresses the role of Ireland and Irish republicanism in the geography, biography and political thinking of the French anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830–1905). This paper sheds new light on the construction of a scientific and political discourse, one which was radically opposed to external and internal colonialisms in the Age of Empire, analysing primary sources such as Reclus' texts and correspondence, along with his transnational networks. It draws on present-day debates on ‘geography and anarchism’, postcolonial Ireland and international circulation and localisation of knowledge. Finally, it is a contribution to evaluating the importance of the ‘British Isles’ as a place for production and reception of the geographical and political works by both Reclus and the other anarchist geographer Pëtr Kropotkin (1842–1921), scholars and militants who lived there in different periods of their respective careers.     

French radicalism through the eyes of John Stuart Mill

The paper attempts to highlight some under-researched aspects of the interaction between British and French radical political thinkers and activists during the period between the July Revolution of 1830 in France and the early years of the Third Republic. It focuses in particular on the decisive impact that the aftermath of the July Revolution of 1830 had for the perception of French politics by the most Francophile British radical, John Stuart Mill. In this context, Mill's astonishingly dense coverage of French affairs in The Examiner and the relation between that coverage and Mill's radical agenda at home are explored. The Revolution of February 1848 and the establishment of a Republic in France raised new hopes and led to a new round of Anglo-French radical co-operation and manifestations of fraternity. However, it was the frustration of the expectations raised by 1848 (fatally by the time of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d’état in December 1851) that had the most profound effect on the perception of French radicalism outre-Manche. A detailed analysis of which French ‘radical’ parties, factions and personalities attracted Mill's sympathies and support from 1830 to the beginnings of the Third Republic is offered, along with the reasons why Mill was attracted by some of the people and factions in question and not by others. The paper winds up with a few comments on Mill's strenuous efforts to contribute to Anglo-French mutual understanding and fellow-feeling and his strategies to that effect.     

The motives behind the foreign political decisions of Frederick VI during the Napoleonic Wars

At the conclusion of peace at Kiel in 1814, the Danish state had to cede Norway to Sweden. Thus, Denmark was one of the greatest losers of the Napoleonic Wars. Denmark allied with France in 1807 after the British bombardment of Copenhagen and seizure of the Danish navy; Denmark stuck by Napoleon until the bitter end. After the crushing French defeat in Russia in 1812, King Frederick VI more than once received an offer from the Allies to change sides and break with Napoleon; however, he dismissed them. In Danish historiography, the king has therefore been seen as stubborn, incompetent, and motivated by a misconceived loyalty towards Napoleon. A more recent Danish historiographical trend stresses the fact that the Danish state was multi-territorial, and among other areas it contained the kingdom of Norway; consequently, this multi-territorial state formation was, in the mind of the Danish political decision makers, especially the exposed situation of Norway, dependent on grain imports and the subject of Swedish territorial ambition. But how did Frederick VI see things himself? What were his motivations for his foreign political decisions? Based on letters written by the king and instructions to Danish diplomats abroad it is argued that the grain provision and ongoing possession of Norway by the Danish state were crucial factors in the king’s decision to stick with Napoleon. This can be further nuanced: the king was expecting the wars to end with an international peace conference with Napoleonic representation, and so the king’s strategy was to stay loyal to Napoleon, in order to get his support for keeping Norway.     

The Price for Austria's Security: Part I — Joseph II,the Russian Alliance,and the Ottoman War, 1787–1789

This article examines Lyndon Johnson's handling of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nuclear-sharing issue and specifically plans for a NATO Multilateral Force during the first three years of his presidency. The article argues that although Johnson did not confront the nuclear sharing/Multilateral Force issue directly for the first year of his presidency, he subsequently made sensible policy decisions in the face of a number of challenges. These included pressure for a speedy resolution of the nuclear-sharing issue from within his own State Department and from the government of the Federal Republic of Germany on the one side, and opposition to the Multilateral Force from the British and French governments on the other. The nuclear-sharing issue is discussed in the context of challenges to NATO, most notably French President Charles de Gaulle's rejection of US leadership and his withdrawal of French forces from NATO's integrated military structure in 1966 and broader debates about nuclear consultation within the alliance. The article concludes that by using the advisory process well and through some deft diplomacy, particularly refusing to demand a quick resolution to the nuclear-sharing problem, the Johnson administration had effectively resolved the nuclear-sharing issue by late 1966.     

Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

This essay analyses the influence of Charles Baudelaire's and Théophile Gautier's fetishist poetics on the early works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If the crucial role played by the Victorian poet as a cultural ‘passeur’ between France and England has often been highlighted in recent criticism, his aesthetic delight in certain forms of sexual deviance such as podophilia has rarely been explored in relation to the verse of his French mentors. Swinburne, Gautier, and Baudelaire may have indeed shared this erotic fascination with feet: this is a fascination that was partly grounded in these poets' common interest in antique literary models, in particular in Sappho's poetry. Rather than extolling the Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ which some of his contemporaries set so high, Swinburne indulged in dangerously eroticised Dionysian aesthetics which were perceived as both ‘too Hellenic’ and ‘too French’. I argue that the fetishism of the poetic foot may be read as one of the keys to the Victorian poet's subversive shift away from the serenity often associated with Victorian neoclassicism in favour of a Dionysian energy that anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche's works.     

A Most Unmanly War: British Military Masculinity in Macedonia,Mesopotamia and Palestine, 1914–18

This article argues that the most severe crisis of masculinity among British and Dominion soldiers in the First World War did not take place on the Western Front. Instead, British and Dominion soldiers serving on the war's sideshows in Macedonia, Mesopotamia and Palestine believed most acutely that their manliness was in question. Unlike soldiers on the Western Front, they were not battling the main German Army, they were not fighting to liberate occupied France and Belgium, and their war was not to preserve the rights of small nations and the inviolability of international law. This article explores how military masculinity played out much differently on the war's peripheral fronts in two ways. First, it suggests that where a soldier fought mattered more to military masculinity than a soldier's method of enlistment or any other variable. British and Dominion soldiers were fully aware that the home front only considered France and Flanders as the real war, and they actively argued against this misconception to loved ones and in their memoirs. Second, this article demonstrates an additional crisis of masculinity on the war's peripheral fronts: the lack, or more often effacement, of non‐white colonial (Eastern Mediterranean and Arab) women. Not only was British and Dominion military masculinity under assault on the war's peripheral fronts, heteronormative sexual relations were also being transformed in a world where few, if any, racially acceptable women were available.     

Friendship and the Solitude of Greatness: The Case of Charles de Gaulle

The French statesman Charles de Gaulle was, and remains, something of an enigma. A genuinely great man, at first glance, he seems to tower above mere humanity. In studying de Gaulle's biographies and writings, the statesman and military man eclipses the human being without leaving his human bearing wholly behind. De Gaulle himself emphasized the solitude and sadness that accompanied the burden of human greatness. Yet de Gaulle, the self-described “man of character,” “the born protector,” was also a loving husband, a not terribly demanding or severe father, a faithful Christian, and a French patriot. There were profound limits to his solitude and self-sufficiency. His austere magnanimity coincided with moderation, even benevolence. He loved his country, strove for greatness, and sacrificed something of his private happiness for the public good. He was a complex man and soul, and perhaps a conflicted one.     

The Chevert: A History

The Chevert was built for Napoleon III's navy between 1850 and 1863. It served as a transport to supply French colonies in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its service was primarily in peacetime, never entering into battle. It entered the private merchant service in the early 1870s and in 1875 served William Macleay's scientific expedition to New Guinea, which became known as the Chevert Expedition. It subsequently re-entered the merchant service before being wrecked in a cyclone in 1880. Not yet lost to history, it served as an office and impromptu fortress in Vanuatu: firstly for the English and then for the French. Its final resting place was Port Sandwich, Malekula, Vanuatu. For a relatively small transport ship it attracted many more headlines than its weight might predict.     

The Death of Beauty: Goya's Etchings and Black Paintings through the Eyes of André Malraux

Modern critics often regard Goya's etchings and black paintings as satirical observations on the social and political conditions of the time. In a study of Goya first published in 1950, which seldom receives the attention it merits, the French author and art theorist André Malraux contends that these works have a significance of a much deeper kind. The etchings and black paintings, Malraux argues, represent a fundamental challenge to the European artistic tradition that began with the Renaissance, an essentially humanist tradition founded on the pursuit of a transcendent world of nobility, harmony and beauty—an ideal world outside of which, as Malraux writes, ‘man did not fully merit the name man’. Following the illness that left him deaf for life—an encounter with ‘the irremediable’, to borrow Malraux's term—Goya developed an art of a fundamentally different kind—an art, Malraux writes, ruled by ‘the unity of the prison house’, which replaced transcendence with a pervasive ‘feeling of dependence’ and from which all trace of humanism has been erased. Foreshadowing modern art's abandonment of the Renaissance ideal, and created semi-clandestinely, the etchings and black paintings are an early announcement of the death of beauty in Western art.     

The death of Sir Victor Horsley (1857–1916) and his burial in Amarah

Sir Victor Alexander Haden Horsley (1857–1916), the pioneering British neurological surgeon, passed away 100 years ago. He died young in his sixtieth year from the effects of heat stroke while serving as consulting military surgeon to the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in Amarah, modern-day Iraq, and was buried in the now largely abandoned “Amara War Cemetery.” By the time of his death in 1916, Victor Horsley had established himself as one of the most eminent innovators of modern neurological surgery. His pioneering researches in cerebral physiology earned him an early reputation in the field, and his experiences with vivisection allowed him to confidently operate on the brain and spinal cord at a time when surgical intervention of the nervous system was fraught with uncertainty. Outside the operating theatre, Horsley was a proud advocate for a number of sometimes controversial sociopolitical issues; national temperance, women’s suffrage, and medical unionism particularly interested him. He brought the same courageousness to the British army during the First World War, and labored tirelessly under considerable hardships to improve the conditions for soldiers. Otherwise robust and healthy, it was only through great self-denial and overwork that Horsley suddenly succumbed to the burning heat of Mesopotamia. He died as he lived—a fearless and painstaking fighter for the common man. His was a most beautiful life of unselfish devotion to others.     

A Good Soldier,but a Maligned Governor: General Sir Archibald Hunter,Governor of Gibraltar 1910–13

This article examines the governorship in Gibraltar of General Sir Archibald Hunter in the years from 1910 and to 1913. It highlights the difficulties that governors of strategically important British outposts, such as the imperial fortresses of Gibraltar, Malta and Bermuda, faced in discharging the dual roles of civil governor and military governor. Drawing upon evidence from Hunter's biographers, the National Archives in London and repositories in Gibraltar, this article examines the effect on the careful balance of interests between the Colonial Office, the War Office and the local civilian community when such a balance was tested almost to destruction by a governor more used to front-line military action than to colonial government. This article also sheds light on why Hunter's subsequent career was stifled—something that his biographers have hitherto failed to explain.     

Perilous shipwreck, misery and unhappiness: the British military at Tristan da Cunha, 1816–1817

After losing the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon was exiled to St Helena. As part of the arrangements to keep him secure, the British annexed the island of Tristan da Cunha to deny its possible use to French rescue forces. The military remained on the island for fifteen months, an unpleasant experience, especially given the loss of 55 people in the wreck of H.M.S. Julia in 1817. Using evidence from holdings in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, this paper studies the experiences of the British on the island during 1816 and 1817, illuminating the chaotic military operation and also the difficulties of habitation on Tristan da Cunha. However, the present population of the island traces its origin back to one of the garrison who remained there after 1817.     

The biography of Ignatios the Deacon: a reassessment of the evidence

Abstract

The recently published critical editions of three of Ignatios the Deacon's works, his correspondence and two of his hagiographical texts, may have enhanced our familiarity with an important scholarly figure, but have apparently not established a consensus as regards his educational curriculum and ecclesiastical career. This is not surprising in view of the lack of explicit information on crucial periods of his life and the wide diversity of the literature associated with his name. However, the discussion has become all the more confused as some of Ign.'s autobiographical references have been called into question (to my mind, not reasonably) or not taken into account in their entirety. Setting aside the divergences between the biography sketched by Cyril Mango and that by myself, which mainly concern the tentative period of Ign.'s episcopate and the period he became skevophylax, a very different interpretation of Ign.'s biographical data has been offered by Georgios Makris, the editor of the Life of St. Gregory the Decapolite. And a more recent reconsideration of his biography, presented in the Berliner Prosopographie der mittelalterlichen Zeit and published in full length by Thomas Pratsch in this journal, without radically disputing the basic chronological framework of Ign.'s lifetime as proposed by Mango, has tried to rearrange the scattered pieces of his puzzling career. Several hypotheses regarding Ign.'s ecclesiastical career were also put forward by Michel Kaplan in his inquiry into Ign.'s letters dateable to his period as metropolitan of Nicaea. Finally, in his posthumously published History of Byzantine Literature, Alexander Kazhdan, demonstrating excessive skepticism, distinguished the author of the anonymously preserved correspondence from Ignatios the Deacon, as well as denied him the composition of other works that have been assigned to him. The purpose of the present note is to re-assess the biographical evidence provided in Ign.'s own work.     

Indigènes after Indigènes: post-war France and its North African troops

This article focuses on North African soldiers who served in the French army of occupation in western Germany after its liberation in 1945. Taking as its starting point Rachid Bouchareb's 2006 film, Indigènes, the article contrasts claims the film made about the memorial exclusion of the colonial soldier with his surprising centrality to French accounts of their own military exploits. Using publications issued by the army for its internal readership and archival records of the military occupation's day-to-day activities, the author argues for a modified understanding of the French Republican notion of assimilation that is able to take account of the prolific representation of the North African soldier, and his accommodation, in Cold War Germany.     

Gabriel Hanotaux and French Grand Strategy, 1894–8

This article seeks to reappraise the strategic vision of Gabriel Hanotaux, the French Foreign Minister from 1894 to 1898. Most of the scholarship on Hanotaux has focused on his African policies, since shortly after he left office French and British forces engaged in a standoff at Fashoda on the Nile, marking the nadir of pre-war Franco-British relations. This article moves beyond Africa and argues that Hanotaux's foreign policy had a global dimension, particularly apparent in China, and that this is essential to understanding French grand strategy in the period. At the same time, though, Hanotaux's main focus remained European. His interest in the wider world was meant to serve European ends, not least in enabling him to manage the Franco-Russian alliance, France's most important pre-war diplomatic alignment. Hanotaux's political position, though, was weak, and this inhibited the execution of his grand strategy. Moreover, the constraints under which he operated facilitated the continuities that existed between his policy and that of his generally more esteemed successor, Théophile Delcassé.     

Mountbatten,the royal family,and British influence in post-independence India and Burma

One of the unexplored themes in the career of Mountbatten is why more use was not made of his services in similar contexts in the years after his Indian viceroyalty and governor-generalship. This article examines his influence in private and unofficial capacities in his dealings with post-independence India and Burma in the 1960s and early 1970s. In India it considers Mountbatten's efforts on behalf of the Indian princes when Indira Gandhi's government threatened their privy purses and privileges. In Burma it discusses Mountbatten's attempts to persuade Burma to return to the Commonwealth and his influence over General Ne Win, Burma's military ruler. Mountbatten was unsuccessful in both cases. By contrast in Burma, Princess Alexandra was better placed to represent British interests, suggesting perhaps that we should look more closely at the role of members of the royal family in promoting Britain's foreign policy.     

Roger Scruton's Conservatism: Between Xenophobia and Oikophobia

The English philosopher Roger Scruton calls himself a functional anthropologist. That means he defends the lifeworld—the relational, moral world in which we all must live—against the educated derision of the monstrous entity often called the self-conscious intellectual or elitist cosmopolitan. My focus here is to examine Scruton's defense of the nation—as the civilized mean between xenophobia and oikophobia—and religion as indispensable forms of social belonging. I conclude by offering the beginnings of an American and Catholic correction to his British form of liberal conservatism.