Rafe Blaufarb

Claudia Liebeskind

By highlighting the experiences of common soldiers and civilians, this volume by Rafe Blaufarb and Claudia Liebeskind presents a broad view of the Napoleonic Wars not found in typical military histories. The introduction recounts the key events of the wars and how they marked a shift in the modern notion of “total war” and provides necessary political and military background on the issues of recruitment and evasion, the military community, combat and its aftermath, the homefront, and demobilization. The rich collection of memoirs, letters, and popular engravings -- from familiar sources such as German infantryman Jakob Walter to an account of a French woman canteen worker -- offers contrasting voices, some offered here in English for the first time. These documents and images explore core civil-military interactions, including foraging, plunder, sexuality, violence, eating, religion, and commerce. Headnotes to the documents, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography provide pedagogical support.

A Brief History with Documents

Napoleonic Foot Soldiers and Civilians

Liz Clarke

Inhuman Traffick tells for the first time a story of enslavement and freedom that spans the entire Atlantic world. Beginning in 1829 off the west coast of Africa with the recapture of the slave ship Neirsée--previously seized by the British Navy in its efforts to suppress the "inhuman traffick"--and ending with the liberation of the African passengers who had been sold into slavery in the French Caribbean, Rafe Blaufarb puts a human face on the history of the transatlantic slave trade and the efforts to suppress it. He addresses a neglected aspect of this tragic history in the wide geographical and thematic contexts in which it took place--Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Atlantic Ocean--and situates the story in familial, social, economic, diplomatic, and military spheres. Inhuman Traffick shows how history is done by explaining how the documents on which it is based moved through time and space from the ships, African outposts, colonial buildings, and ministerial offices to the archives of present-day Britain and France. Blaufarb follows the ship, its crew, and its captives from the slave port of Old Calabar to the Caribbean and into the courts of Britain and France, where the history of the illegal slave trade, slavery in the Caribbean, and diplomatic history all come into focus. Students will be taken in by the vivid drawings and the rich narrative, but in Blaufarb's skilled hands, they will also find themselves immersed in a unique learning experience. Blaufarb not only presents the history of the ship and its captives, he takes the reader inside the project itself. He explains how he came upon the story, how he and his editor envisioned the project, and how he worked with illustrator Liz Clarke to craft more than 300 "cells" that comprise Part II of the book. He and Clarke even take the reader inside archives in France and Britain. This powerful combination of historical essay, graphics, primary-source documents, and discussion questions gives students insight into the Atlantic World plantation complex, the transatlantic slave trade, and the process of historical storytelling itself.

The International Struggle Against the Transatlantic Slave Trade - A Graphic History

Inhuman Traffick

This book crosses the chronological boundary of 1789 to bring the histories of the Old Regime, Revolution, Empire, and Restoration together.

Careers, Talent, Merit

The French Army, 1750-1820

Alan Forrest

Karen Hagemann

War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850

By calming revolutionary turbulence while preserving fundamental gains of 1789, Napoleon Bonaparte laid the foundations of modern France. But his impact reached beyond France's borders as well. His legacy of war, civil rights, exploitation, and national awakening reshaped identities across the European continent, while in the Atlantic world he destroyed the colonial order and helped plant the seeds of American power. In this collection of wide-ranging primary sources -- including confidential memoranda and correspondence, speeches, memoirs, letters, police reports, and songs, most of which appear in English translation for the first time -- Rafe Blaufarb situates Napoleon within his time while opening a broad perspective on the nature and impact of Napoleonic rule. His introduction provides a narrative of Napoleon's rise and fall and frames the key issues of Napoleon's life and times. Useful pedagogical tools include maps, illustrations, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography.

Napoleon: A Symbol for an Age

By calming revolutionary turbulence while preserving fundamental gains of 1789, Napoleon Bonaparte laid the foundations of modern France. But his impact reached beyond France’s borders as well. His legacy of war, civil rights, exploitation, and national awakening reshaped identities across the European continent, while in the Atlantic world he destroyed the colonial order and helped plant the seeds of American power. In this collection of wide-ranging primary sources — including confidential memoranda and correspondence, speeches, memoirs, letters, police reports, and songs, most of which appear in English translation for the first time — Rafe Blaufarb situates Napoleon within his time while opening a broad perspective on the nature and impact of Napoleonic rule. His introduction provides a narrative of Napoleon’s rise and fall and frames the key issues of Napoleon’s life and times. Useful pedagogical tools include maps, illustrations, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography.

What does it mean to own something? What sorts of things can be owned, and what cannot? How does one relinquish ownership? What are the boundaries between private and public property? Over the course of a decade, the French Revolution grappled with these questions. Punctuated by false starts, contingencies, and unexpected results, this process laid the foundations of the Napoleonic Code and modern notions of property. As Rafe Blaufarb demonstrates in this ambitious work, the French Revolution remade the system of property-holding that had existed in France before 1789. The revolutionary changes aimed at two fundamental goals: the removal of formal public power from the sphere of property and the excision of property from the realm of sovereignty. The revolutionaries accomplished these two aims by abolishing privately-owned forms of power, such as jurisdictional lordship and venal public office, and by dismantling the Crown domain, thus making the state purely sovereign. This brought about a Great Demarcation: a radical distinction between property and power from which flowed the critical distinctions between the political and the social, state and society, sovereignty and ownership, the public and private. It destroyed the conceptual basis of the Old Regime, laid the foundation of France's new constitutional order, and crystallized modern ways of thinking about polities and societies. By tracing how the French Revolution created a new legal and institutional reality, The Great Demarcation shows how the revolutionary transformation of Old Regime property helped inaugurate political modernity

Rafe Blaufarb

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