The Language Question under Napoleon by Stewart McCain

Author:Stewart McCain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Napoleonic officials like the Prefect of the Meuse-Inférieure saw conscription and military service as a means of breaking down local attachments of the kinds expressed by soldiers themselves. Military service, therefore, was a means of integrating the ‘new’ French who inhabited the annexed territories, especially the non-francophone ones, into a broader national community by spreading French language and culture.

The mere act of stationing troops in an area was thought likely to make the population more French, such was the influence of this vision of the military as a tool of cultural imperialism. In October 1803, Napoleon instructed the minister for war to garrison French troops in the Aosta valley, formerly part of Piedmont . The aim was “to attach to us, and to familiarise with the French language, this portion of the 27th Military Division”. 27 The same principle underpinned the project to establish camps of French veterans in the departments of the Rhineland and northern Italy. The idea was to construct ten settlements of veterans in parts of the Empire where there was a need to introduce French language and culture. Mathieu Dumas, the state councillor charged with passing the legislation, claimed that by placing a number of Frenchmen in the newly conquered territories, the settlements would serve “to spread and gradually acclimatise the national language”. 28 The policy itself was indisputably a failure. Of the ten settlements originally envisaged, only two were established, and these were plagued by breakdowns in discipline and the assimilation of the French veterans to local customs. 29 However, the episode reveals the role envisaged for military service by Napoleonic officials. Not only was military service a tool for the moral regeneration of individual soldiers, but it was a means of binding populations to the imperial project.

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