Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France
by Brian Joseph Martin
University of New Hampshire Press. 379 pages, $39.95
THE FIRST THING I liked about this book was its interpretative honesty. It is a work of solid historiography and level-headed literary analysis. The first third is devoted to a well-documented historian’s presentation of how Napoleon, with his widely publicized egalitarian treatment of subordinate soldiers in times of crisis and grief, radically changed French cultural images of what the relationship between soldiers of even different ranks could and should be. The remaining two-thirds is a clear, jargon-free study of how such friendships between military men were depicted by several important 19th-century French novelists. Although Martin is himself gay, he never tries to force a document or a literary text to speak of homosexuality when there is no convincing evidence. Rather, he shows how, during the course of the 19th century, the understanding of the erotic possibilities of those military friendships changed, developed, and varied with different authors and different texts.
Napoleon was no sentimental fool. He had served in the Royal French Army from his teens and saw how its effectiveness was impeded by a lack of coherence and cooperation in the ranks, a result of its rigidly hierarchical, class-based structure. Napoleon famously treated his generals like brothers. The most famous examples were Jean Lannes, Christophe Duroc, and Jean-Andoche Junot. While this fraternal treatment may have been sincere, it was also a public relations coup. Realizing that “soldiers are less likely to fight for abstractions like “honor” or “the nation” than for the friend standing beside them,” the Emperor and his generals, in a series of widely-read publications, “all argue that increased intimacy, mutual respect, and fraternal support among soldiers ultimately lead to stronger armies and greater success in combat.” Such relations between military men were not without an antecedent in medieval French legends like the one concerning Charlemagne and his nephew Roland, but their democratic disregard for class differences made them applicable to a far wider audience.
In the first third of this book Martin examines several memoirs of life in Napoleon’s army in which men of different rank and social position recall their relationships with superiors, inferiors, and equals. Friendships became very strong; “affection” and even “love” were frequently used terms. Couples were formed for mutual support, emotional as well as physical. None of these relationships seems to have been homoerotic, however, much less gay.
The rest of the book looks at the depiction of military relations in novels by some of the 19th-century’s major French writers: Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola. In several of these texts, especially some of those by Balzac, Martin shows that such relations occasionally fall into patterns of behavior and vocabulary derived from the world of heterosexual marriage, suggesting the difficulty 19th-century Frenchmen had with understanding this new way of functioning together as evidently non-sexual male couples. It’s unfortunate that Martin passes so quickly over Pierre Loti’s novel My Brother Yves (1883), which is far more clearly homoerotic than any of the other 19th-century novels with which he deals. It was a best-seller in its own day and for years to come, and played a significant role in shaping how the general French public viewed military friendships, at least in the navy, from that point forward. (The novel is now being turned into a feature film in France by Patrick Poivre d’Arvor. It will be interesting to see how he and script writer Didier Decoin, a great lover of Proust, deal with the homoerotic elements.)
With Proust and the 20th century we arrive at military friendships, if not couples, that are clearly homosexual—but that is outside the boundaries of Martin’s study. He does show, however, that by century’s end the French military, newly aware of the possibility that homosexual desire might develop under the cover of the very intimate friendships that it had long promoted, started a campaign of fitness in the ranks designed to prevent the entry of such “social toxins.” To be sure, French military policy was still far from the official homophobia that we have known in the U.S. until recently. One of their most decorated generals during Proust’s lifetime, Hubert Lyautey, was a “notorious” homosexual but still managed to rise to the rank of marshal, get elected to the French Academy, and be buried alongside Napoleon in Les Invalides in Paris. Nevertheless, when Proust’s narrator complains that he cannot keep up with the demands to be masculine being imposed on men of his generation, part of that is a reflection of the military’s determination to enforce a highly traditional concept of masculine behavior on soldiers in preparation for the next war, based on the belief that gay men couldn’t fight.
There is also a personal element to this book. Martin starts with a prologue called “Gays in the Military” that recounts his young life with a father who loved the military but was able to love his gay son as well. It makes for an appropriate entry into a book that does not settle for facile, simplistic, or hurried explanations but rather takes the time and patience necessary to consider each case in all its fascinating complexity. Napoleon, with his very public treatment of Lannes, Duroc, and Junot, made it acceptable and even laudable for two men to love each other, at least while they were in the military. How that love was defined would vary in interesting ways for the next hundred years, before the growing attention to homosexuality and the homophobia it entailed brought an end to a remarkable period for male-male relationships in France.
Richard M. Berrong is the author of In Love with a Handsome Sailor: The Emergence of Gay Identity and the Novels of Pierre Loti, a study of the homoeroticism in French writer Pierre Loti’s novels.
