Citizenship, Mass Mobilization and Masculinity in a Transatlantic Perspective, 1770s-1870s

The paper explores the interrelationship between the emergence of new ways of mass mobilization with volunteers, militias, and universal conscription, the rise of notions of gender as a universal, natural binary opposition, and of the notion of men as universal male political subjects in particular in the Age of Revolutions, in particular the American Revolutionary Wars, the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars, the Revolution of 1848/49 and the Wars of Nation-building and Nation-keeping in the mid of the nineteenth century. Especially the introduction of universal male conscription-cum-citizenship during the French Revolution and the wars it spawned started a transnational dynamic of dispersion. The French model of the citizen-soldier, often considered to be effective in military terms but politically dangerous, was introduced and transformed in other contexts. Where it was rejected, it nevertheless made its presence felt in what became a conscious refusal of the model of modern citizen-soldier army in favor of other, perhaps less effective but politically more reliable, modes of mobilization. Always controversial and never fully implemented, even in contexts where it was supposedly fully endorsed, the model of universal conscription loomed large in the background of all nineteenth-century debates over military reform and political citizenship.