"Insurgent Identities, Destructive Discourses, and ..." Topic

…Militarized Massacre: French Armies on the Warpath against Insurgents in the Vendée, Italy, and Egypt.

"This chapter examines discourses and practices around the repression of insurrection in the Vendée, Italy, and Egypt between 1793 and 1801. It demonstrates that soldiers' responses differed little despite the variation in place and the insurgents' identities. The crucial factor in the repressive violence employed was instead that civilian populations had taken up arms to resist the armies of the Revolution. In doing so they were considered to have placed themselves outside the norms of warfare and to have negated their right to be treated as either non-combatants or enemy soldiers. This placed them and their communities in a grey area which facilitated atrocity and massacre. The dehumanizing language used and the experience of escalating irregular conflict, whether peasant insurrection, urban uprising, endemic banditry, or a fusion of the three, informed and legitimized extreme violence against entire communities and even regions. It is also argued that this type of militarized massacre is one of the most important but under-appreciated legacies of the French Revolutionary Wars"
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Amicalement
Armand

Armand,

Can you provide a more specific link to the actual book itself, rather than to the publisher's main page? Without knowing the book's title, or the author's name, this link is useless.

TX!

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Paul :)

Also to Springer Book's main page… sigh.

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A 'taster' here:

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Paul :)

Thanks, Paul! Several chapters look interesting beyond the Vendee, even though they all bear the unfortunate hallmark of heavy-duty academic writing.