Combat and Culture: Imagining the Battle of the Nile

The French Revolutionary wars represented a significant escalation in the ferocity of international conflict in Europe. This ferocity was the offspring of ideology and of a struggle pitting the French nation, with its principles of popular sovereignty, liberty and equality, against the monarchies of Europe, embodying not just the defence of religion, morality, and of social and political order but also of rival identities of nationality and of freedom. The renewal of conflict between France and Britain in 1793 was marked on both sides of the channel by a propaganda campaign that demonized and dehumanized the enemy. 1 It was also marked by unprecedented legislation to mobilize the combatant societies for war, both materially and psychologically, and to repudiate the conventions which had served to normalize relations between states, even during conflicts. 2 In France, the 1793 decrees ordering summary execution of migr troops were extended to British forces in 1794. In Britain, correspondence with the enemy was declared an act of treason. While the impact of legislation and propaganda can be difficult to measure, there is evidence that these developments escalated the intensity of armed conflict. A surgeon attached to Moreau's army of the Rhine recalled how he had been called to treat fifty migr troopers at Dachau in 1796: "these unfortunates were horribly cut up, having been unwilling to surrender; they refused even to be tended to, persuaded that they were to be shot, according to the revolutionary laws." 3 The testimony of French soldiers indicates that the migrs' fears were justified. Alexandre Brault of the French army of the north recorded that migr prisoners were shot on the spot, and that he had witnessed the execution of over four hundred. As for the English and their allies, Brault proudly explained their discomfiture in the face of French aggression: "They say, rightly, that we have no military tactics and that this is not how one should make war...They are right to say that it is our republican method, the only one known to free men who have sworn to vanquish or to die, that will give us victory." 5 Historians have recognized the importance of the efforts made to condition the mentalities and behaviour of soldiers like Brault. The intensity of revolutionary warfare was the product of those efforts. What is not so commonly recognized, however, is that war fed on war, as the experience of military engagement was reported and reconstructed in contemporary media. In both England and France there were concerted efforts by the official media to repackage the experience of war to confirm and reinforce the mythologies that underpinned the respective nations' war efforts. The combatants were themselves, of course,

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