John Bull into Battle: Military Masculinity and the British Army Officer during the Napoleonic Wars

This book chapter explores military masculinity and the British army officer during the Napoleonic Wars. A dominant theme in recent scholarship on gender and war has been the tendency of societies to value military masculinity and its associated attributes more highly than the forms of masculinity associated with civic virtue. In this narrative the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are accorded a pivotal role, the mass mobilization required by the war effort contributing, it is argued, to the production of a newly virilized and martial model of gendered national identity. But Britain during this period saw neither the introduction of mass conscription nor the expansion of political rights, as this chapter argues, but the size of the armed forces did increase massively through voluntary enlistment into the regular army and the proliferation of national defence units. This militarization of British national life encouraged an ethos of ‘heroic endeavour and aggressive maleness’ and fed into a conception of Britain as an ‘essentially “masculine” culture caught up in an eternal rivalry with an essentially “effeminate” France’.