Abstract
Two days after the Battle of Waterloo, from the town of Nivelles in what is now Belgium, the British Commander-in-Chief of the Allied forces, the Duke of Wellington, issued the following General Order:
As the army is about to enter the French territory, the troops of the nations which are at present under the command of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, are desired to recollect that their respective Sovereigns are the Allies of His Majesty the King of France, and that France ought, therefore to be treated as a friendly country.
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Notes
Notable exceptions include Marc Blancpain, La vie quotidienne dans la France du Nord sous les Occupations, 1814–1944 (Paris, 1983);
Thomas Dwight Veve, The Duke of Wellington and the British Army of Occupation in France, 1815–1818 (Westport, CT, 1992);
Volker Wacker, Die allierte Besetzung Frankreichs in den Jahren 1814 bis 1818 (Hamburg, 2001);
and Jacques Hantraye, Les Cosaques aux Champs-Élysées: L’Occupation de la France après la chute de Napoléon (Paris, 2005).
David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston, 2007);
and Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994).
This point was made over a century ago by Raymond Robin, ‘Des occupations militaires en dehors des occupations de guerre’, doctoral thesis (University of Paris, 1913). On the evolution of occupation during the revolutionary era, see also Peter Haggenmacher, ‘L’occupation militaire en droit international: Genèse et profil d’une institution juridique’, Relations internationales 79 (1994): 285–301;
and Philippe Burin, ‘Writing the History of Military Occupations’, in France at War: Vichy and the Historian, ed. Sarah Fishman et al. (Oxford, 2000), 77–90.
On the ‘war occupation’ of July to November 1815, see especially Roger André, L’Occupation de la France par les Alliés en 1815 (juillet-novembre) (Paris, 1924).
On the tradition of ‘making war pay’ and occupation before 1815, see especially Peter H. Wilson, German Armies: War and German Politics, 1648–1806 (London, 1998);
Michael Rowe, From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 2003);
John A. Lynn (ed.), Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present (Boulder, CO, 1993);
G. Jacquemyns (ed.), Occupants, occupés, 1792–1815: Colloque de Bruxelles, 29 et 30 janvier 1968 (Brussels, 1969);
and Jean-François Chanet et al. (eds), Le Temps des hommes doubles: Les arrangements face à l’occupation, de la Révolution française à la guerre de 1870 (Rennes, 2013).
On Austria in 1809, see Robert Ouvrard, 1809: Les Français à Vienne: Chronique d’une occupation (Paris, 2009); on Prussia from 1806 to 1808,
see Karen Hagemann, ‘“Desperation to the Utmost”: The Defeat of 1806 and the French Occupation in Prussian Experience and Perception’, in The Bee and the Eagle: Napoleonic France and the End of the Holy Roman Empire, ed. Alan Forrest and Peter Wilson (Basingstoke, 2008), 191–214.
Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, especially Preface and 578. The evolution from a natural-law to a positivist concept of war is discussed in Stephen C. Neff, War and the Law of Nations (Cambridge, 2005).
On the significance of this postwar peace settlement, see also Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order (New Haven, CT, 2000);
and Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York, 2012).
On the Treaty of Westphalia, see the final chapters of Peter H. Wilson’s The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (London, 2009).
On the development of the law of occupation, in addition to Neff, War and the Law of Nations, especially 190, see Eyal Benvenisti, The International Law of Occupation (Princeton, 1993);
Geoffrey Best, War and Law Since 1945 (Oxford, 1994);
David Kennedy, Of War and Law (Princeton, 2006);
and John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York, 2012).
On the development of war reparations, in addition to Neff, War and the Law of Nations, 211–214, see John Torpey, ‘“Making Whole What Has Been Smashed”: Reflections on Reparations’, The Journal of Modern History 73/2 (2001): 333–358;
and Luc Somerhausen, Essai sur les origines et l’évolution du droit à réparation des victimes militaires des guerres (Brussels, 1974).
On the reparations required by the Second Treaty of Paris see André Nicolle, ‘The Problem of Reparations after the Hundred Days’, Journal of Modern History 25/4 (1953): 343–354,
and Eugene N. White, ‘Making the French Pay: The Costs and Consequences of the Napoleonic Reparations’, European Review of Economic History 5/3 (2001): 337–365.
Carsten Holbraad, The Concert of Europe: A Study in German and British International Theory, 1815–1914 (London, 1970), 1.
On the multinational coalition against Napoleon, see Gordon A. Craig, ‘Problems of Coalition Warfare: The Military Alliance against Napoleon, 1813–1814’, in War, Politics, and Diplomacy: Selected Essays (New York, 1966), 22–46. On the Council of Allied Ambassadors, see the Protocols in The National Archives, London, (TNA) FO 146/ 6, 14, 15, 22, 23, 29, and 30, as well as Pierre Rain, L’Europe et la Restauration des Bourbons (Paris, 1908).
On the Concert of Europe, see Howard, The Invention of Peace, and Mazower, Governing the World, as well as Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (New York, 2007).
On the emergence of the idea of ‘Europe’ as a political entity in this period, see Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (New York, 1995), esp. 74–79.
The following points are based on research in municipal and departmental archives in the Nord, Meuse, Moselle, Ardennes, Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin as well as archives of the ministries of police, justice and war in Paris, especially AN, F7/9899–9904, as well as numerous local histories, particularly Blancpain, La Vie quotidienne, and Jean Breuillard, ‘L’occupation russe à Givet de 1816 à 1818, d’après les mémoires du Gen.-Baron V.I. Loewenstern’, Revue historique ardennaise 12 (1977): 47–77. For British court martial cases during this period, see TNA, WO 71/242–247 and WO 90/1 (Register).
Hantraye, Les Cosaques, 169. On the influx of British travellers to France in these years, see Victoria Thompson, ‘Foreign Bodies: British Travel to Paris and the Troubled National Self, 1789–1830’, Studies in Travel Writing 15/3 (2011): 243–265.
For examples of such socialization, see invitations from French authorities to British officers in Records of Military Headquarters in Calais, TNA, WO 28/17, and François-Simon Cazin, Les Russes en France: Souvenirs des années 1815, 1816, 1817 (Avranches, 1880).
For evidence of such intimate relations, see Veve, The Duke of Wellington, 77; William Lawrence, Mémoires d’un grenadier anglais (1791–1867), (Paris, 1897), Chapter 23;
and R. Wauthier, ‘Les Russes à Givet, 1816–1818’, Revue historique ardennaise 19 (1912): 155–161.
On the rejection of the model of 1815 in 1919, in addition to Neff, War and the Law of Nations, and Mazower, Governing the World, see Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York, 2003).
On the relatively gentler settlements, including occupations, after World War II, see, among numerous other works, Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of1945 (London, 2013);
and John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York, 2000).
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Haynes, C. (2016). Making Peace: The Allied Occupation of France, 1815–1818. In: Forrest, A., Hagemann, K., Rowe, M. (eds) War, Demobilization and Memory. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-40649-1_3
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