Storytelling, fairytales and autobiography: some observations on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French soldiers’ and sailors’ memoirs

Abstract

Drawing, in particular, on three memoirs written by French veterans of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, this article demonstrates how authors integrated fairytale motifs into their autobiographies. Their example raises questions about the role of storytelling among migrant male work-communities. Fairytales were more than compensatory fantasies for soldiers and sailors: they provided schemas by which they could understand novel experiences in strange surroundings and, through identification with the hero, they became inspirations to action. Storytelling permitted soldiers and sailors to present themselves to their peers from behind the mask of fiction, and to broach subjects too dangerous to be discussed openly, such as desertion. The dialectic between self-assertion in the tales (even if fashioned from the collective, ubiquitous matter of oral culture) and the communal expectations of the audience, helps historians understand the limits placed on the expression of individuality in traditional societies.

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