‘No More Fears, No More Tears’?: Gender, Emotion and the Aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in France

This article investigates why royalist popular culture in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars often depicted young mothers anxious for peace. Such representations reflected the brutality of the wars, women's relative prominence in anti‐conscription resistance and a cultural shift from revolutionary injunctions to wives and mothers to sacrifice their menfolk for the good of the nation to Napoleonic images of women as tremulous counterparts to virile soldiers. But the image of peace‐loving mothers in 1814 and 1815 was not simply a response to the devastation of war or a continuation of Napoleonic gender roles. Instead, it served distinctive purposes in a period of peace‐making and political transition, which entailed not only disentangling masculinity from martial valour but also strategically invoking feminine anguish or joy. The focus on Louis XVIII's role in rescuing mothers helped legitimise an unpopular monarch, who had gained power only with the help of foreign armies, and was returning to a country that had executed its last king. The image of grateful women and happy families also deflected attention away from contemporary problems – including the difficult return of veterans to a defeated country and the lasting grief of those who had lost loved ones in war – by focusing on the joy of mothers whose sons would remain safely home. This article draws on two different bodies of scholarship, rarely considered together – the growing literature on the history of emotion in the era of the French Revolution and studies of gender and war in the twentieth century, especially the First World War – and uses a variety of sources, from recruitment propaganda to songs, to show the specific ways gendered and emotional images could be deployed at transitional moments.