Introduction: Volunteers, War, and the Nation since the French Revolution

Abstract

Historians have so far paid rather little attention to war volunteers in modern history. The phenomenon of the war volunteer has not been studied either in its comparative aspects or in terms of its development over time, and little is known about the numbers, motivations, and backgrounds of volunteers in many wars. While the relatively recent turn of military history towards the perspective of the common soldier, towards war experiences and war cultures, has generated a range of studies on conscription, conscientious objection, and desertion, 1 war volunteers have — except in the cases discussed below — rarely been studied in detail. This relative indifference of historians is particularly surprising in view of the central place accorded to volunteer movements in national myths of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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