War and the child’s gaze in revolutionary and Napoleonic literature and culture

ABSTRACT This article considers how the child’s gaze in Napoleonic culture functions as a multifaceted tool in the moral and political history of the Napoleonic Wars. Drawing from Stahl’s framework of the ‘weaponized gaze’ and, at points, multimodal discourse, I track how the youthful gaze has become an emblem of power and ethics in art and literature of the period. In the first two sections of the article, I explore how this gaze has been mediated and manipulated by adult narratives, used for a variety of purposes ranging from personal introspection to political broadcast. The first section considers the gaze within the context of children within war art, and the second moves to literature, forming new critical readings of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace in relation to the history of childhood. The final section of the article attempts to reclaim the child’s gaze through self-awareness and internalization, introducing examples of child authors of the Napoleonic period – Felicia Hemans (Browne), Marjory Fleming, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the Brontës – and considering how their writings, varying from patriotism to protest, imitation to epiphanic moments, create a parallel military history, useful for readers and critics of childhood, war and emotion in that they challenge our understandings of children’s agency and involvement. Overall, this article offers new ways of approaching children’s participation in war, demonstrating how their roles as muses, consumers and producers are intimately bound with the moral and emotional fallout of conflict.