Acclimatizing to Alienation: Nostalgia in Colonial Algeria

Thomas Dodman

Long before the days of ‘nostalgerie’, nostalgie was already very much a feature of

French colonial rule in Algeria. There is even something of a poignant mirror effect

between the deadly epidemics of mal du pays (vernacular term for nostalgia) that

greeted French soldiers and colons as they first landed in North Africa in the 1830s,

and the loss and longing with which they left those same shores following the

traumatic denouement of colonial rule—a sort of return of the repressed which also

reminds us that while we are, today, merry consumers of postmodern nostalgia, back

in the 19th century people died of it. Indeed nostalgia really is no longer what it used

to be, and in this paper I will examine a historically specific form of the emotion, a

pathological form that was taken very seriously by the medical community during its

brief two centuries of existence from the late 1600s to the late 1800s. More precisely,

I wish to consider two contradictory outcomes of this very Janus-faced disease, when

it disappeared—or when it dropped out of medical usage and started to innocuously

shade in sepia the life of each and every one of us. This process occurred during the

early colonization of Algeria starting in 1830, when the suddenly rather passé medical

category nostalgia was folded into two brand new diagnoses: acclimatization

(acclimatement) on the one hand, and pathological fatigue and ennui on the other.

Although seemingly unrelated and even opposed on many accounts, these two

outcomes may be seen, I argue, as two sides of the same coin: while the former

effectively demedicalized nostalgia and turned it into a benign emotional state of

homesickness that could even be exploited for affirmative purposes (colonial and

patriotic), the latter undermines such processes of identification by revealing the

pathological surplus of alienation beneath this hollowed out emotional crust.

While it is possible to trace a feeling of homesickness back to Ulysses’

longing for Ithaca, the medical category ‘nostalgia’ (from the Greek ‘nostos’ (return)

and ‘algos’ (pain or longing)) is a late 17th century neologism that owed its initial

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fortune to famous cases of Swiss guards succumbing to regret for Alpine pastures

from distant European courts, and that became the soldier’s psychological ill par

excellence during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Before it fell out of

medical usage after the mid 19th Century, the popular diagnosis of nostalgia regrouped

a variety of symptoms—sadness, apathy, insomnia, flashbacks, epileptic fits,

emaciation, fatal ‘consumption’—that would later signal more famous military-

psychiatric diagnoses, from cafard to shell-shock and on to post-traumatic stress

disorder. Indeed if nostalgia wiggled its way (most often as a specific form of

melancholia) from its psychosomatic matrix into the asylums and early psychiatric

treatises of Pinel and his followers, it was primarily on the battlefield that the disease

was observed and treated by military health officers (physicians, surgeons, chemists

of army medical corps). While they understandably privileged the more immediate

and concrete, spatial dimension of the disease—clearly visible in the vernacular terms

of “mal du pays”, “homesickness”, or “heimweh”, and, in theory, curable with a

return to the familiar landscapes of one’s pays—they could not entirely evacuate a far

more abstract temporal and mnemonic dimension of soldiers’ longing for a lost

childhood, traditional forms of social intercourse, and ultimately an impossible return

in time. [or to the mother’s womb, as one HO intriguingly suggested..]. As

contemporaries were quick to point out, nostalgia was yet another disease caused by

the traumatic spread of modern civilization across rural France—although, crucially,

they soon realized that progress would also, eventually, cure from nostalgia by

successfully nationalizing French peasants once it reached the four corners of the

country.

*

From the moment French soldiers set sail for the North African coast in May

1830, military authorities were therefore confronted with the all too familiar problem

of nostalgia. The disease which had plagued the army since pre-revolutionary days

‘greeted’ French troops as they took control of Alger, and widespread “affections

nostalgiques” were soon blamed for the constant relapses of chronically ill patients

admitted to military hospitals (where nostalgia figured frequently on periodical tables

2

listing illnesses).1 As health officer Payen noted in 1836, two forms of the disease

were sweeping through the rapidly evaporating French ranks: a “primitive” nostalgia

that arose in a matter of days upon arrival in Algeria, and a “secondary” form that

matured more slowly through the hardships of active duty and endless periods of

idleness spent in hospitals.2

Although it often proved fatal in itself, nostalgia caused the greatest concern

when it pushed soldiers to commit suicide, or when it grafted onto (or indeed caused)

diseases such as dysentery, typhoid fever, and the ubiquitous intermittent fevers that

rose from the malarial marshes of the Mitidja plain. Occasionally, nostalgia even

assumed epidemic proportions when it spread like a virus among soldiers from a same

region, as was the case in 1838 in the 5th artillery battery stationed in Oran, where

some 39 young recruits from Brittany died in a matter of weeks of a nostalgia-induced

dysentery.3 (Ever since a similar epidemic that decimated the army of the Rhine in the

Year II, Bretons were, much like the Swiss, considered as naturally predisposed to

nostalgia due to their remote, rural lifestyles, and because they did not speak French).

As deadly as in previous wars, what the Saint-Simonian leader Prosper

Enfantin called “la nostalgie africaine” was however particular in that it didn’t only

affect soldiers but also civilians (albeit living in a thoroughly militarized world).4

Indeed the first European settlers that emigrated to Algeria also suffered from deadly

homesickness (which, on the contrary, had hitherto been very rare among expatriates

in France’s first colonial empire). While Swiss colons such as those at Ameur-el-Aïn

provided predictable victims, it was the Parisian artisans of the ill-fated agricultural

colonies set up in 1848 that seemingly suffered most: as the director of the Ponteba

colony concluded in his medical report for the year 1851, widespread nostalgia bread

a sole objective: “Tous ceux qui restent encore aspirent à l’époque où, devenus

propriétaires de leurs lots, ils pourront vendre, réaliser, et revenir en France.”5

Health officers were not entirely powerless against outbreaks of nostalgia.

While several turned towards Broussais’ infamous leeches, most maintained faith in

the soothing effects of the moral treatment (a form of abreactive cure avant la lettre)

1 Steohanopoli et al, report Sept 1831 and Table of illnesses at Salpétrière hospital, 2nd and 3rd trimester of 1831, VdG cart 67 ; and Mauricheau-Beaupré, Rapport au chef, 2 Sept 1830, SHD 1H42 Payen, Rapport sur les maladies qui ont régné pendant la campagne de Tlemcen, 1836, SHD 1H41 and VdG cart 713 Marseilhan, Rapport général du mouvement des maladies pendant l’année 1838. VdG cart 804 Enfantin, Colonization de l’Algérie (Paris, 1843), 207.5 Blanc, Rapport du moi de Juin 1851 sur la situation de la colonie Suisse de…, 1851, CAOM F80 1391; and Vaillans, Rapport inspection de 1851, colonie de Ponteba, 1851, VdG cart 70

3

coupled to prophylactic measures such as exercise, entertainment and readings to

distract bored officers (General de Castellane insisted that cafés, theatres and libraries

be set up in every French outpost in order to avert the spread of nostalgia6). However

returning homesick soldiers home was in most cases deemed the only effective

therapeutic measure, and after protracted negotiations with the war ministry, the

medical corps obtained that costly evacuations from Algeria be maintained and

restricted to convalescent soldiers “atteints de nostalgie bien caractérisée”.7 While the

luckiest received a 3 month leave to return to their home, others were confined to

convalescent depots set up in Marseilles or Toulon for soldiers no longer requiring

hospitalization but needing a whiff of ‘French air’ before returning to active duty.

It was not long though before the idea of setting up convalescent depots in

Algeria itself began to surface, as France turned by the early 1840s to an active policy

of settler colonization and many—from Prosper Enfantin to Alexis de Tocqueville—

called for the pairing of military units and villages of civilian settlers. According to

health officer Gaudineau, such Algerian convalescent depots would be most effective

when set up in locations that enjoyed a similar climate to that of southern France, and

if they were integrated to fac-simile French villages of some 50 to 60 families. Thus,

Gaudineau argued, “les malades ne se sentiront plus exilés sur les sols de l’Afrique,

quand ils trouveront près d’eux l’image de la France, avec des familles françaises,

leurs jeux, leurs divertissements et leurs habitudes. […] La nostalgie disparaitra”.8

Yet, if a surrogate French ‘home’ could be recreated on the southern shores of the

Mediterranean, nostalgia clearly had little to do with actual spatial displacement; in

fact it seemed to be little more than a capricious and relatively easily allayed

emotional disposition—a symptom of the demedicalization that nostalgia had started

to undergo under the frontal attack of a new medical doctrine (one that Gaudineau’s

reference to climate alerts us to): acclimatization.

It is not my purpose here to give a detailed narrative of the otherwise

fascinating debate on acclimatization—a pseudo-science developed in the early 19 th

Century as the science of colonization, and which posited that new conditions of life

in different physical environments would provoke gradual morphological and

6 P.-L.-C. de Castellane, Souvenirs de la vie militaire en Afrique (Paris 1852), 17-9, 80, 174, passim7 Circulaire au officiers de santé, 12 August 1841, VdG cart 678 Gaudineau, Mémoire à Mr Bégin sur la création de dépots de convalescence en Algerie, 7 juin 1843, VdG cart 67.

4

physiological adaptations of the organism. Rather, I am interested in the consequences

of nostalgia being subsumed under acclimatization, a process that occurred during the

Algerian campaign and through a highly politicised debate on whether France should

(or indeed, could) pursue its Imperial policy.

The switch from nostalgia to acclimatization was, on the one hand, a simple

question of changing medical theories. Although isolated cases of nostalgia continued

to be diagnosed for several decades, Algerian medical reports from the 1840s

increasingly turned to physiological reductions such as Broussais’ ubiquitous

“gastralgie”, and eagerly swapped the rather quaint therapeutic properties of a return

to the “pays natal” with the neo-Hippocratic and seemingly much more scientific ones

of the “climat natal”.9 As a physician at Blidah military hospital plainly put it:

On a parlé de nostalgie, de passions dépressives, de changements d’habitudes etc… Tout cela peut bien jouer quelque rôle […] mais nous pensons qu’il y quelque chose de bien plus spécial et qui tient aux conditions physiologiques dans lesquelles se trouve l’individu par rapport au milieu ambiant.10

Acclimatization proved to be this special thing, and physicians accordingly introduced

an important analytical distinction between nostalgie cérébrale/morale and nostalgie

organique/physique, i.e. acclimatement.11 By the 1850s nostalgia was confined to the

‘moral’ rather than ‘medical’ section of monthly reports from the 1848 colonies, and

was even erased from official lists of illnesses to be found in Algeria.12

Yet what ultimately amounted to a demedicalizing of nostalgia did not occur

overnight nor in a vacuum. Indeed medical dissertations on nostalgia from the 1820s

had already started differentiating between nostalgia the noble, natural and universal

sentiment and nostalgia the pathology (caused by a harmful excess of this otherwise

natural instinct). In a clear turn towards a romantic sensibility, mal du pays was

increasingly seen through a nostalgic lens for it signaled a healthy attachment to land,

family and tradition in a progressive era of evanescent and increasingly anomic

relations. With the added distinction between nostalgia for the particular, local pays-

—typical of primitive, rural communities—and for the general patrie—a more noble

and sophisticated sensitivity of civilized nations—contemporaries could have it both

ways: nostalgia need not be pathological and could, actually, foster a symbiotic

9 A.-E.-V. Martin, Manuel d’hygi`ene à l’usage des Européens qui viennet s’établir en Algérie (Alger et Paris, 1847), 159.10 Leclerc, Mouvement medical hospital de Blidah, été 1847, VdG cart 8611 Medical theses Leroy-Dupré (1846), Mutel (1849) and Parron (1851)12 Anon, Tableau Nosographique à suivre pour la designation des maladies dans les rapports sur le service medical de l’Algérie, n.d. (années 1850)

5

relation between individual, concrete (local) communities, and imagined (national)

ones.13 Mal du pays was thus enlisted into what Stephane Gerson has recently called

the ‘cult of local memories’, and would soon provide a goal to late 19 th century

nationalism—namely the organic patrie of many ‘little patries.’

Demedicalized by the science of acclimatization and restored to the healthy

plains of emotional mal du pays, nostalgia could, paradoxically, henceforth play a

positive role in the colonization of Algeria by simultaneously mediating between the

centrifugal forces of national vs. local (colonial) identity on the one hand, and of

separation vs. assimilation vis-à-vis native populations on the other. A ‘healthy’

homesickness of French soldiers and settlers in Algeria would indeed signify both

strong attachment to the patrie and a sense of being rooted in a (new, Algerian) local

pays—a combination that fitted perfectly in the vision that French authorities from the

July Monarchy to the 2nd Empire nurtured for their new colony: an ideal France of

agricultural fertility and orderly cultivators that would settle the unsolved urban

‘social question’. At the same time, it also guaranteed that while nurturing this local

(and to a certain extent assimilationist) identity, Europeans would remain the civilized

colonizer in opposition to ‘primitive’ indigenous populations—amongst whom health

officers continued to diagnose cases of pathological nostalgia—therefore achieving

the balance between “créolisation” and ‘gallicisation’ that an 1840 official scientific

expedition to Algeria advocated.14

It was only after the failure of the 1848 colonies (populated by a ‘rabble’ of urban

artisans who fell prey to nostalgia) that the French authorities began to harness the

virtues of mal du pays for colonial purposes by turning, during the 2nd Empire, to the

creation of departmental villages of rural settlers sharing the same patois and customs.

Numerous such projects were in fact submitted from all over France from the late

1830s onwards, and ranged from the humble plan of a prefect to create a village of

corréziens and limousins, to grand scale, state funded enterprises to establish 86 3000-

hectare colonies, one for every French department (thus shaping Algeria into “l’image

de la France”15). In all of these projects, pathological nostalgia was to be defeated by a

more homeopathic dose of soothing mal du pays, for

13 Medical theses14 Perier, “De l’hygiène en Algérie” Exploration Scientifique de l’Algérie pendant les années 1840, 1841, 1842 (Paris, 1847), and VdG cart 68.15 Letter by Correze prefect to War minister (1847), and Turck, Colonisation project presented to conseil general of the Vosges (1845), CAOM L3

6

c’est une grande satisfaction pour le colon de retrouver en Afrique et auprès de lui les compatriotes dont il parle le patois, dont il connaît les usages, et avec lesquels il a une solidarité d’idée et de mœurs qui établit dans la petite agrégation une précieuse harmonie. […in other words] retrouver son clocher et l’air natal.16

Even proven hyper-nostalgics such as Bretons could henceforth become ideal

candidates for this form of emigration because of their hard working, tightly knit

communities of religious and placid peasants—qualities that prompted the author of

this particular plan Breton addressed to Louis Napoleon to discern on the Algérian

horizon the recreation of “la vielle société française.”17 Thus departmental

colonization went ahead and reached its zenith with the largely mythologized

“migration patriotique” to Algeria of Alsatians robbed of their pays in 1870—a time

at which the homesickness of an Alsatian soldier examined at the military hospital in

Oran prompted the physician to an unequivocal conclusion: a leave of absence for this

patriotic hero who cries the lost lands of Alsace-Lorraine.18

That nostalgia could thus somehow go from being deadly obstacle to positive

agent of colonization is as startling as it is partial a view. As a second, parallel

evolution in the medical discourse also reveals, this affirmative, identificatory

homesickness is a concept that is inadequate to its object insofar as it elides the

latter’s pathological core.

By now it has hopefully become apparent that the etiology of nostalgia

includes more than mere spatial displacement, and is best conceptualized in terms of a

traumatic change in lifestyles and networks of social relations. This is made quite

clear in the observations of health officer Cambay, who contrasted the nostalgic

soldiers he treated to the enchanted tourists he greeted while stationed in Tlemcen in

Western Algeria.19 Prosper Enfantin went a step further in suggesting that the

propensity to nostalgia varied depending on one’s habituation to different forms of

labor;20 an idea that his follower Milliroux, director of the Saint Louis agricultural

colony tested in practice by organizing “des escouades de travailleurs … [qui] 16 Letter from the directeur général des affaires civiles, F. Lacroix, to war minister accompanying budget for colonization venture, 30 August 1848, CAOM F80 179217 Letter by Bourel-Rancière (secretaire au congré agricole de Saint-Brieuc) to Prince Louis Napoleon, 2 October 1851, and Aperçu sur l’établissement d’un village de Breton en Algérie (1852), CAOM L5 18 VdG19 Cambay, Compte rendu du service des fiévreux pendant le 4e trimestre de l’année 1843, hôpital de Tlemcen, VdG cart 8320 Enfantin, Colonisation, 303

7

pourraient par leur travail simultané combattre l’ennui, tromper la fatigue. Mais

l’égoïsme quelque fois bien entendu est plus fort. La nostalgie naîtra du travail isolé,

et avec elle les maladies...”21 When they were not absorbed in largely inconclusive

debates on biological seasoning, health officers also saw an indirect link between

nostalgia and labor, in as much as their medical reports consistently started to replace

nostalgia with another new diagnosis: fatigue.

Fatigue was of course no neologism at the time. On the one hand, the classical,

‘salutary’ form of fatigue was still very much a feature of the Algeria campaign—

whether among rampant, but thoroughly bored officers, or in colonization manuals

where naïve settlers could learn that hard work would preserve them from nostalgia

and putrid miasmas (not to mention purgatory).22 Yet on the other hand, by the 1840s

HOs increasingly spoke less of fatigue as a desirable tonic than as a serious medical

problem. Their reports began to systematically record cases of pathological fatigue,

which even became a valid reason for being admitted to hospital—as was, for

example, the case at Boghar, where HO Frey admitted 69 cases of exhausted soldiers

out of a total of 241 patients during the 4 th trimester of 1852 (= nearly 1/3).23 Causes

were quickly identified in the exhausting marches, frequent land reclaiming or

engineering works, and psychologically draining terms of active duty to which

soldiers were submitted.

While this may not quite amount to what Anson Rabinbach has called

“modern fatigue” (primarily since there was no understanding of thermodynamics and

energy yet), it clearly is neither a traditional form of ‘purifying’ (religious) fatigue nor

a generic sense of lassitude. In fact, I would even suggest that it anticipates, in one

significant way, on a key dimension of “modern fatigue”—namely fatigue as

progress’ limit, as civilization’s point of entropy (an idea that the image of exhausted

French soldiers halted by fatigue in their mission to civilize primitive Africa renders

rather well). Moreover, this new form of pathological fatigue was not only considered

a physical illness, but rather co-opted much of the psychological symptomatology

previously ascribed to nostalgia and soon to be colloquially designated as cafard by

soldiers (and factory workers). For health officer Haspel (who incidentally wrote one

of the last major medical studies on nostalgia in 1873), this was a form of ennui,

21 Miliroux, Rapport du moi de Juin 1849 sur la situation de la colonie de Saint Louis, CAOM F80 142322 Lucien-François de Montagnac, Lettres d’un soldat : neuf années de campagnes en Algérie, (Paris, 1885), 142 ; and various colonisation manuals23 VdG 86

8

caused by excessive fatigue, and due to which troops were “surmenées” [1850!].24

Lieutenant-colonel Canteloupe identified a similar ennui among his soldiers and

blamed it on monotonous manual labour produced for no apparent objective;25 a

feeling that Robert Tinthoin, master cabinetmaker and colon at Assi-Ben-Okba,

apparently also shared while working on the wooden bungalows quickly set up in

barrack-style to house his fellow settlers—a task that procured him no pleasure and

rather led him to judge his craftworks “terriblement tristes dans leur uniformité

monotone.” 26

This ennui induced by fatigue is thus closer to that of Jacques Rancière’s

worker-poets than that of a René, an Emma Bovary or a des Esseintes. It is not, in

other words, the classical, existential spleen of the oisif, but rather a new despondency

that the famous French hygienist Louis René Villermé also discerned in the textile

manufactures he visited at the same time, and which reminded him of his days as a

surgeon in Napoleon’s armies: an

ennui résultant d’un travail borné à quelques mouvements qui se répètent avec une accablante uniformité dans l’enceinte d’une même sale. On m’a montré des malheureux dont l’état de langueur n’était attribué à aucune autre cause. Ils me rappelaient les nombreux conscrits que j’avais vus succomber autrefois à la nostalgie, loin des lieux où ils avaient été élevés.27

*

It is of course somewhat ironic that after causing the sorrow and death of so

many, pathological nostalgia should have itself not survived France’s colonization of

North Africa. The disease’s phasing out in medical reports from Algeria was mirrored

in the metropole, where physicians lost interest in an emotion progressively confined

to feuilleton rubrics and literary tropes. Yet the historical specificity of this disease

cannot be grasped in terms of the simple passing of medical fashions; it is otherwise

imbedded in changing forms of social mediation. As we have seen, while some health

officers turned away from nostalgia to embrace physiology and the theory of

acclimatization, others translated much of the nostalgia diagnosis into what I would

argue are embryonic foundation stones of labor medicine (the implication being that

labor medicine owes much to military medicine). Tocqueville (who observed

24 Auguste Haspel, Maladies de l’Algérie (Paris : 1850), 59-61.25 Canteloube, Observations sur les maladies de Bône, (Bône 1837), VdG cart 791

26 Robert Tinthoin, Assi-Ben-Okba. Un village de « Parisiens » en 1848 (Oran, 1949), 1927 Villermé, Tableau de l’état physique et moral des ouvriers, (Paris, 1840), II :222-3.

9

nostalgia among French troops during his first trip to Algeria in 1841) clearly sided in

the latter camp: as he noted, “l’expérience prouve que ce qui est insalubre en Afrique,

c’est bien moins le climat que les conditions dans lesquelles on vit.”28 In the struggle

to create favorable living conditions, a demedicalized, largely emotional mal du pays

may well have provided a means for fostering a colonial identity grounded in

traditional and patriotic values. This, however, was to neglect the surplus of

nonidentity, the pathological core that the subsumption of nostalgia under modern,

labor-induced fatigue ultimately reveals as being one of alienation.

* * *

[The following section is a separate piece that I have written primarily as a thought exercise to clarify some ideas that I am trying to develop into what might be called a fully-fledged theory of the army as a site of labour. Although this may ultimately have to be put aside for a separate project, I currently hope to integrate these considerations into the dissertation—more precisely in the final chapters where I seek to bridge between nostalgia in the army and the very early beginnings of labour medicine in the civilian world (something that I will develop on in the presentation). ]

A central hypothesis that the dissertation unfolds posits that the psychological

condition being referred to as “nostalgia” by physicians should be grasped as a

concrete manifestation—a pathological manifestation—of what Marx rather abstractly

names “alienation”. If receivable, this hypothesis offers an innovative perspective on

the transformations brought about by capitalism on French society that may enable an

overcoming of traditional, concretist debates on France’s oft-noted lack of

industrialization and ‘proletarianization’ until the 20th century.29 The validity of this

hypothesis rests first and foremost on being able to prove that this specific form of

pathological nostalgia is consequent to working in a new labour process and an

experience of spatio-temporal dislocation that cannot be simply reduced to being in a

foreign country or even more so an ill-defined sense of revolutionary rupture.

28 Tocqueville, ‘Travail sur l’Algérie (1841)’, in Sur l’Algérie (Paris, 2203), 117.29 In other words, rather than quantitatively chart the degree of transformation of French society by capitalism in material terms (industrialization and proletarianization), I attempt, in a more qualitative vein, to identify this transformation at the level of social interaction and, more precisely, of inter-personal forms of mediation.

10

This kind of analysis requires a refined empirical verification that immediately

runs into a serious practical problem: the obvious and classical object of study for

such an analysis—namely the development of a modern, industrial labour-force—

cannot be used for this purpose, or at least not without great difficulty. Although

various kinds of workers (excluding artisans) were consistently listed among the

social groups susceptible of contracting nostalgia by 19th century medical theses and

encyclopaedia articles, and despite the growing interest shown for them by hygienists

starting in the 1830s, labour-related psychological conditions were simply not an

object of study until the end of the century (when fatigue became an important topic

in this sense). They therefore did not fall under the purview of physicians and

psychiatrists likely to diagnose and examine potential cases of nostalgia. While

research on nostalgia, and particularly on the collapsing of nostalgia into ennui and

fatigue, in colonial Algeria provides some elements for bridging between the military

and civilian worlds, I am confronted with a scarcity of available medical sources.

Luckily this major hurdle in the research process opens up unforeseen

possibilities in a different direction. Indeed there is an area where much ink was spilt

on nostalgia by both physicians and those who suffered from it: the army. From the

revolutionary wars to the siege of Paris in 1871, nostalgia was the soldier’s disease

par excellence, and here it got all the attention it deserved from the most open-minded

and well-trained doctors of the time. At this point the dissertation poses a second

major hypothesis upon which rests the central methodological approach adopted: in

modern societies, the army is a site of labour on a par with the sphere of material

production, and as integral part of the social totality, it provides an object of study

from which broader social trends may be extrapolated. In other words, the dissertation

proposes to unfold and generalize the hypothesis of nostalgia as a socially general

form of alienation through a refined empirical study of the disease within the military

(using both medical discourse and private writings of the soldiers who suffered from

nostalgia). Crucially, this approach does not serve mere heuristic purposes. Rather, it

is a specific research objective of this dissertation to show that, contrary to what

disciplinary segmentations and widespread perceptions suggest, the army is an

integral, and in many respects formative, part of society taken as a whole.30

30 At the theoretical level, this argument relies largely on an understanding of the modern social whole as a totality ‘in the making’. By virtue of its dynamic and expansive nature, ultimately rooted in the generality of commodity–producing labour, capitalism and its particular form of social mediation is a movement of totality. See Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, and Postone, Time.

11

The intimate connection between army and industry long antedates the Cold

War military-industrial complex, and was a much discussed topic throughout the 19 th

century in particular.31 Here I will not consider the otherwise essential contributions

made by utopian socialists, military reformers, the first industrial managers and

physicians, but rather stick to a select but nevertheless important range of major social

theorists that, brought together, provide an analytical framework for the dissertation’s

methodological premise put forth above. This analysis will in turn serve as a

springboard towards a reconceptualization of the army in modern society.

Max Weber’s celebrated analysis of modern society as determined by

increasingly pervasive forms of rationalization and abstraction provides an ideal point

of departure for our analysis insofar as it repeatedly links army and labour via their

common ties to bureaucracy. For Weber, a capitalist money economy and a large

standing army are at one and the same time two historical preconditions for the

emergence of bureaucracy and two of the greatest beneficiaries of bureaucratic

organization. Indeed both simultaneously require, and further, the technical norms,

abstract rule, hierarchy and rational calculations that make the superiority of this form

of authority over traditional and charismatic ones.32 Weber’s detailed analysis of the

historical process whereby bureaucratization emerges in both the capitalist enterprise

and the modern army is interesting for our purposes precisely for the homology thus

drawn between these two spheres. In both, there is a parallel process of centralization

of the means of production that spans the 17th and 19th centuries. Indeed in the army

just in the factory, private warlords and then the state increasingly take over the

provision of weapons, supplies, and uniforms, prompting Weber to note that soldiers

are “separated from their “means of production” in the same way as the workers are

separated from theirs by the capitalist enterprises.”33

31 For useful longue-durée historical perspectives see McNeil, The pursuit of power : technology, armed force, and society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago, 1982); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990-1980 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); and Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Time, (London, 1994).32 Max Weber, Economy and Society, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1978), 2:963-73 and 1:215-24.33 Weber, 2:973-83, quote at 983. Weber also places civil servants and teachers alongside soldiers in comparing them to workers. As he further points out, the nationalization of the army is no different from that of the railway, and the original meaning of the word “regiment” was after all that of an economic management unit in production (2: 982).

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This last quote—in which Weber suggests at least the possibility of speaking

of “commodified soldiers” as one does of “commodified labour”—compels us to take

a further step in outlining homologies between the modern army and labour process.

This step leads, to paraphrase Marx, below the surface of manifest relations and into

“the hidden abode of production” where the labour process unravels the secret of how

capital produces and is produced.34 As Marx himself points out in the crucial section

on cooperation in Capital, the capitalist commands in the sphere of production as the

general does on the field of battle, and “an industrial army of workers under the

command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and N. C. O.s

(foremen, overseers), who command during the labour process in the name of

capital.”35 Marx’s customary metaphorical language should not belittle the essential

homologies he sees uniting the soldier’s and worker’s labour process.36 As he told

Engels in an 1857 letter, “more than anything else, the history of the army

demonstrates the rightness of our views as to the connection between the productive

forces and social relations.” What Marx had in mind was a number of areas where the

army innovates before industry, including the introduction of wages, use of machinery

and division of labour.37

It is hardly coincidental that division of labour should also be identified by

Adam Smith as that which ties together modern industry and armies. In The Wealth of

Nations, the father of political economy ties the development of society to that of its

necessary means of defence, pointing out that the transition from agricultural to

manufacturing activity necessitates the establishment of a standing army with soldiers

that are both trained and remunerated for their service. Developing his argument

further, Smith argues that, just as in the pin factory, division of labour is critical to the

efficiency and strength of the army, especially in modern times once machinery and

34 See Karl Marx, Capital I:279-80. The transition between parts 2 and 3 in the first volume of Capital mark the point where Marx exits the sphere of circulation and enters that of production in order to unravel the secret of relative surplus value. 35 Marx, Capital I:449-50.36 As Michelle Perrot observes, many retired officers of the Napoleonic armies found employment as foremen in manufacture plants. See Michelle Perrot, 37 Marx, letter to Engels, 25 September 1857, Marx/Engels Collected Works, 40:186 (1983). Marx makes a very similar point in his preparatory notes in the Grundrisse, where he even suggests, as does Weber, that changes in the army prefigure those in the sphere of production: “War developed earlier than peace; the way in which certain economic relations such as wage labour, machinery etc. develop earlier, owing to war in the armies etc., than in the interior of bourgeois society. The relations of productive forces and relations of exchange also especially vivid in the army.” (Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (London, 1973), and compare Weber, 2:1155-6 (quote below)).

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improved firearms enter the fray. It is on this basis that he favours a standing army—

where division of labour and training is possible—over a people’s militia.38

Both Smith and Marx therefore see division of labour as introducing efficient

forms of cooperation in the sphere of production and in the army. They also see a

further commonality that follows from the logical introduction of machinery. As Marx

states, machinery and large-scale industries—“great labour-barracks” as he calls them

—bring to the fore similar forms of military and industrial discipline:

The technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour, and the peculiar composition of the working group, consisting as it does of individuals in both sexes and all ages, gives rise a barrack-like discipline, which is elaborated into a complete system in the factory, and brings the previously mentioned labour of superintendence to its fullest development, thereby dividing the workers into manual labourers and overseers, into the private soldiers and the N. C. O.s of an industrial army.39

On this particular subject, Marx is not only in agreement with Smith, but also with

Weber. Indeed in the latter’s analysis, discipline is the linchpin to the rationalization

of both army and capitalist production, the necessary condition for the increasing

concentration of the “means of warfare” visible from the 17th century armies of

Maurice of Orange and Gustavus Adolphus to the 19th century heirs to Napoleon’s

formidable forces. As Weber suggestively remarks: “Military discipline gives birth to

all discipline. The large-scale economic organization is the second great agency

which trains men for discipline.” In other words, “military discipline is the ideal

model for the modern capitalist factory”.40

More so than anyone else, Michel Foucault provides a fine-detailed

breakdown and analysis of the ways in which discipline exerts itself on the body in

modern society.41 Although they have somehow been partially eclipsed by the

presumably more glamorous bodies of sick patients, madmen and prisoners, the docile

bodies that Foucault speaks of in the remarkably detailed central sections of

38 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York, 2003), 879-88.39 Marx, Capital I:552 and 548-9. For Smith, division of labour in the army entails “regularity, order, and prompt obedience to command.” (Smith, 889). 40 Weber, 2:1154-6, quotes at 1155 and 1156.41 Foucault is of course much less convincing when he shifts from descriptive to explanatory modes of analysis, and reveals all his functionalism and incapacity to explain historical change when vaguely gesturing towards reasons why a disciplinary society emerged in the 18th Century. (Very briefly, Foucault claims that the emergence of discipline is related, in some non-specified way, to changes in the economy, law and scientific knowledge and, more specifically, is to a rising demography what capitalism is to accumulation of capital—namely mere governmental strategies of management).

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Discipline and Punish are first and foremost those of soldiers and factory workers.42

They provide most of the examples of the many different ways in which discipline

exerts its “microphysique du pouvoir.” The barrack and the manufacture/factory thus

become prime sites for rational distribution of space and disciplinary surveillance.43

Likewise factory time and military drill both serve to regulate gestures, providing for

the full usage of time and maximized efficiency through exercise.44 Ultimately,

Foucault even draws commonalities between industrial productivism and military

tactics, relying on Marx’s observation that cooperation multiplies exponentially

offensive or defensive powers of army units just as it does for productive forces.45

Incidentally, this last point touches directly upon the question of efficiency and

therefore temporal constraints—an issue that was hotly debated in the second half of

the 19th Century and that brought together military and civilian doctors, engineers and

politicians in the widespread concern for a maximised and useful occupation of time

that would efficiently mediate between physical work and fatigue (the latter being the

diagnosis that generally replaced nostalgia in the nosological tables of military health

officers).46

The disparate elements teased out of this analysis of largely formal

homologies between the labour process in the army and in the sphere of production

42 The soldier’s body is clearly the paragon that Foucault constantly has in mind—suffice it to point out that he starts the section on the docile bodies with the late 18th century soldier as prime example, and ends virtually every chapter in this section with a reference to Count Guibert, the late 18th military reformer whose work best encapsulates much of what Foucault describes. Although not quite so preeminent, the factory worker is also much more visible that the patient or the schoolboy, and one cannot help but notice the numerous, barely concealed footnotes referencing the chapters on the transformation of the labour process in Marx’s Capital. 43 Foucault, 143-50 and 173-7.44 Foucault, 151-63.45 Foucault, 164-70. As he does several other times in this section, Foucault here approvingly quotes Marx on the beneficial values of cooperative work both in the army and in industrial production: “Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry, or the defensive power of an infantry regiment, is essentially different from the sum of the offensive or defensive powers of the individual soldiers taken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workers differs from the social force that has developed when many hands co-operate in the same undivided operation, such as raising a heavy weight, turning a winch or getting an obstacle out of the way.” (Marx, Capital, I:443).46 Historians of the army and of labour have noticed remarkably similar trends in late 19th century medical discourse concerning the fear of idleness and the necessity of fully occupying time. See especially Odile Roynette, Bons pour le service. L'experience de la caserne en France à la fin du XIXe siècle (Paris, 2000); Alain Ehrenberg, Le Corps militaire. Politique et Pedagogie en démocratie (Paris, 1983); Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor. Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, (Berkeley, 1992); Alain Corbin, “La fatigue, le repos et la conquête du temps” in L’avènement des loisirs, 1850-1960 (Paris, 1995); and E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,’ Past and Present 38 (1967). Clearly these parallel trends beg to be related for they both derive form a shared concern for productivism, and as the dissertation will show, have important implications for such a temporally-determined disease such as nostalgia.

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hardly amount to a fully fledged reconceptualization of the army as a site of labour

subsumed under capital. However, the similitude in terms of overarching processes of

rationalization and separation form the means of production (or of “warfare”, as

Weber calls them), as well as in forms of division of labour, discipline and temporal

constraints within the hidden abode of the production process itself, certainly provide

important elements towards this objective.47 Clearly central categories of capital such

as value and commodity are missing in this analysis, yet they could be reintroduced,

albeit in an abstract way, through the perspective of accelerating temporal constraints

and their obvious connection to the valorization process at the very heart of

commodity-production in capitalism. Moreover, from the standpoint of this critique

(and indeed of this dissertation), the actual materiality of the sphere of production is

not a key concern, and is subordinate to the forms constitutive of the labour process

itself. In this sense, commodification of the soldier as labour power (a doubly-free

worker free to sell his labour-power), is the linchpin of the analysis, and suggests

adopting Marx’s categories of formal and real subsumption. Very briefly, Marx uses

formal subsumption to describe a situation in which labour has been commodified,

and in which the valorization process intervenes without yet revolutionizing the

material form of production itself (in other words mainly through generating absolute

surplus value). Real subsumption, on the other hand, entails the material overhaul of a

mode of production increasingly moulded by the imperative to generate relative

surplus value.48 Speaking of the transformations of the labour process in terms of its

subsumption under capital helps avoid the pitfall of concretizing arguments that

equate capitalism with the industrial plant. It may also help address the thorny issue of

similar transformations of the labour process in the army. The transformations

brought about from the drilled and disciplined armies of Gustavus Adolphus of

Sweden and William I of Prussia to those of Napoleon—where the army corps was

first introduced, enabling a maximized fighting capacity of fully independent and

autonomous armies, yet with no determinant change in the war machinery or

equipment used—would thus correspond to the phase of formal subsumption.

According to this model the army would only be really subsumed under capital once

modern machinery becomes the determinant factor in the production of violence and

47 To these formal similitudes one should add another, critical element: following the revolutionary and Napoleonic caesura, the army becomes a prime site of social mobility for an increasingly large section of the male population.48 Marx, Capital, I: 645 and 1018-38.

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moulds soldiers to its own image—something that can be seen to happen in embryo in

Crimea and the American Civil War, but which truly comes into being half way

through World War One.49

By leading us away from concrete misidentifications and pointing us towards

the labour process itself as well as the socially mediating role that it has in capitalism,

an analysis of the army in terms of subsumption under capital also brings us back to

our original hypothesis of nostalgia as alienation, and more precisely as a

psychological reaction that attempts to bridge the gap opened up between newly

subsumed and pre-capitalist forms of social mediation. As a tentative conclusion, I

will therefore outline an analysis of the correspondence of a French soldier during the

Revolutionary wars in these terms—or more precisely in terms of temporal

constraints.

The description that Joseph Noel (a volunteer visibly educated in the finest of

Rousseauian traditions) gives of his new world in a letter to his beloved step-mother

written upon arrival in the army could very well have been taken straight out of

Foucault:

Je tâche de ne pas faire l’exercice comme un machine et je me rends raison des mouvements ; ils tendent tous à faire occuper à l’homme qui est sur le rang le moins de place possible sans toutefois être gêné ni gêner ses voisins. Ces exercices sont sans doute une bonne chose pour dresser le corps et pour acquérir de l’adresse, mais je ne crois pas que tout cela donne de l’esprit à ceux qui le font pendant toute leur vie. On en peut juger par notre sous-lieutenant. C’est un bon garçon ; il à été toujours soldat, sait très bien faire l’exercice ; mais il ne sait au monde que cela.

As Noel continues, “Voici un genre de vie tout actif. On n’a guère le temps de

s’ennuyer : les gardes, les piquets, les corvées, les travaux du camp remplissent la

journée et l’on dort d’un bon sommeil pendant la nuit.” What is most striking about

these descriptions of the military labour process is their quasi-industrial, accelerated

tempo. In contrast, the spatio-temporal coordinates that Noel adopts when directly

addressing or relating to his beloved step-mother and sister are very different: “le

temps était doux et la lune était brillante. Je regardais l’astre avec mélancolie. Je me

49 Essential to the formulation of this analysis are two articles by Robert Epstein, ‘Patterns of Change and Continuity in 19th Century Warfare,’ The Journal of Military History, 56:3 (1992), and by Michael Geyer, ‘German Strategy in the Age of Machine Warfare, 1914-1945’, in Peter Paret, ed. Makers of Modern Strategy, from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, (Princeton, 1986).

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disais : il éclaire aussi ma mère et ma sœur.” To use Bakhtinian terms, we could say

that Noel contrasts the industrial tempo of army discipline to a more idyllic, pastoral

chronotope where nature and family fuse in emotional outbursts: “J’ai été me

promener une heure sur une montagne voisine. J’aurais bien voulu que nous y

fussions tous les trois ensemble […]. Je croyais déjà voir les arbres verdir […]. D’ici

là j’aurai sans doute obtenu un petit congé.” As the last reference to a desired leave of

absence suggests, the melancholic mood in which Noel is plunged by the rift between

his present and past conditions is that of nostalgia: “Ce n’est pas la maladie du pays

que j’ai, mais c’est peut-être bien celle de la famille.”50

50 Joseph Louis Gabriel Noël, Au temps des volontaires, 1792. Lettres d’un volontaire de 1792, (Paris, 1912)

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