Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars formed the geopolitical background of most of Jane Austen’s life. The French Revolution began in 1789 when Austen was thirteen years old, and Napoleon’s final abdication after the Battle of Waterloo occurred in in 1815, just two years before her death. Austen’s own family was directly affected through the naval careers of her brothers Francis and Charles, and her brother Henry’s service in the militia. Additionally, Austen’s cousin Eliza (a frequent visitor to the Steventon Rectory who later married Henry) lost her husband Jean-François Capot de Feuillide to the guillotine in 1794. 

In the early 1790s, when Jane Austen began work on an early version of Pride and Prejudice, there was a certain glamour and cachet to the raising of the army. When the British joined the conflict in 1793, in response to a call for aid from William V of Orange of Holland, British troops staged a mock invasion near Brighton for the benefit of highly appreciative spectators. In campaigning to be allowed to go to Brighton, Lydia was not a typical young woman, longing for the “glories of the camp” and its tempting opportunities for “flirting with at least six officers at once.”

47562_2.jpg

Jane Austen (1775–1817). Elizabeth Bennet; Or, Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, T.K. & P.G. Collins, printers, 1845. Reprint of the 1st American Edition.

Public documentation of the Napoleonic Wars often focused on a grandiose and patriotic vision, but as the war carried on for more than two decades and wounded soldiers brought home accounts of what they had seen, no one could remain entirely unaware of its darker side. Beneath the sparkling surface of regimental balls and staged invasions were real fears of an invasion and the possibility of the war coming even to villages like Longbourne.

Well-known in his lifetime for his portraits of important figures of the period, including the British Duke of Wellington, renowned Spanish artist Francisco Goya also documented the Peninsular Wars through a series of around eighty etchings, which remained unpublished until 1863. The series that became known as The Disasters of War is brutally realistic and prompts a visceral reaction of horror. There are no dashing heroes here, but only firing squads, torture, rape, and dead bodies. The titles of the two prints displayed here as reproductions translate as “With reason or without” and “And this also,” with the latter immediately following another print called “I have seen,” giving bleak insight into the inhumanity spawned by war.

NE2195_G72A51923_1.jpg

“Con Razon o Sin Ella.” Francisco de Goya (1746-1828). Los Desastres de la Guerra. Madrid: Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 1923. 6th Edition

NE2195_G72A51923_2.jpg

“Y Esto Tambien.” Francisco de Goya (1746-1828). Los Desastres de la Guerra. Madrid: Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 1923. 6th Edition

The Napoleonic Wars came to an end with the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815. Although the allied armies of the Duke of Wellington and Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, Prince of Wahlstatt, won the day (and the war), there were massive casualties on both sides. Numerous British tourists visited the battlefield that summer, and those unable to travel could do so vicariously through print media. This plate from Ackermann’s Repository depicts La Belle Alliance—where the two commanders met at the end of the battle—as it appeared about a week afterwards. The accompanying article notes that “the arable ground round about it is thickly covered with the graves of men and horses…Fragments of caps, shoes, arms, and accoutrements, remain strewed about.”

Out of a population that grew from ten to fourteen million between 1793-1817, approximately one million men and boys from the British Isles fought in the wars. When 350,000 men were demobilised in 1815, they constituted about one sixth of the male population between the ages of fifteen to forty. For every Captain Wentworth (or Francis Austen) to whom prize money brought financial stability, thousands of sailors and soldiers returned home to small or nonexistent pensions.

AckermanS1V14_1.jpg

The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions and Politics. Series 1, Volume 14. [London]: Printed for R. Ackermann, by L. Harrison. On loan from the private collection of James Ravin.

Abolition

Empire