Building my website I rely on contemporary sources, books, magazines and newspapers in german, as the website is german. I have no reason to complain since there are an abundance of publications. Not surprising since german was spoken all over central Europe, and Napoleon waged his wars all over the place.
But since there is a discussion about the necessity of reading french books, I have a good question.
When it comes to contemporary sources, I wonder whether my choise wasn’t so bad after all?
Can french sources (publications) meet up with the sheer number of sources in german? And are these as versatile as the german ones.
Tell me, since I am not able to explore french sources in dept, due to my poor understanding of french.
Alfred.
The website used to be N a p o l e o n W i k i . d e but is continued under the name Von der Bastille bis Waterloo.Wiki :
https://von-bastille-bis-waterloo.wikia.org/de/wiki/Von_Bastille_bis_Waterloo._Wiki
At the forum of Napoleon Online I keep the world since 2010 informed:
http://forum.napoleon-online.de/forum/quellen/web/1973-napoleonwiki
There is another website Epoche Napoleon / Von der Bastille bis Waterloo. But that's not mine.
Thank you John, one particular part of your reply is very interesting, and should bring us to the point I wanted to get to. One I wasn’t aware of. That is the relative small number of Austian memoirs. Likewise there are very view Dutch memoires too, I know, at least published. For my website excerpts from memoirs are also valuable, especially when early ones, but I didn’t come across many till now. Most I used till now were civilian, from travelers. And I am very fond of those, as a useful source to flavour my articles.
My question wasn’t so much on the language German. It was about books and newspapers published back then. That the number of publications in central Europe might possibly exceed those published elsewhere, and as a consequence being published in the German language, and therefore, are a much larger pool of information on the affairs going on in Europe.
Recently I came across a book that listed all publications banned by the Habsburg autorities. Verzeichniss der Bücher, welche bey der k. k. Bücher-Censur in Wien . . . . Many books French (hostile nation), but many more German books, some quite trivial titels.
We all know there was a severe censorship under the rule of Napoleon. How much did that affect publications we are interested in? I collect books from the napoleonic era, I started with books published in Dutch over here. Although here many many books were published since bookprint evolved, little was published during the French rule on (foreign/military) affairs. The number of political magazines dropped to zero. Quite different in Germany, on my website you can view a list of magazins, but there were even many more.
For historians and researchers all sources are important, but for my website I stick to to contemporary publications. And in German there are many many more than I can cope with.
Alfred.
Dear Alfred, others have already commented on the utility of having more than one language in general, so no need to reiterate those important points.
However, another reason that French is essential is that most diplomatic correspondence and much military correspondence of the period was written in French. For example, as Austrian ambassador in Paris, Metternich reported back to Minister Stadion in Vienna in French. Even if you've no Russian, you can find enormous amounts of French language material in published Russian accounts because they give the original French (say the tsar to his ministers such as Rumiantsev and sometimes to his generals) as well as Russian translations. The Prussian king and queen writing to the tsar and on and on.
As to the body of memoir literature, there are at least two other considerations: marketability and literacy.
First, the vast outpouring of memoirs in France, Britain and Germany (Prussia and smaller states) make an interesting contrast to Austria. Seems clear there was a market for such material in those countries, some even went into multiple printings. Not too surprising. Was grand-père at Austerlitz? You mean Dad met Wellington? Old Onkel Hans fought for Napoleon and then against him? etc. But this does not seem to have been the case in the Habsburg empire, where there are comparatively few published memoirs (well, very few indeed given the numbers of Austrians who served).
Second, makes one also wonder about the levels of literacy in various armies. Was that also a factor in subsequent memoir writing? If old Heinrich or Jean-François or William was not literate, pretty difficult to keep a diary or write letters home to mama and papa.
One of the reasons the American Civil War is so rich for research is that so many common soldiers had some level of basic literacy (and sometimes high levels of erudition such as the private in the 9th NY who quoted Goethe). Even if their spelin wuz not always the best, they wrote and many wrote a lot. The same was likely the case with Prussians/Germans in 1870-71, British in the Crimea, etc. as education for common people became more...well, common.
Regrettably have neither the skills nor time to investigate these issues.
In the best tradition of academic snobbery: I recall in graduate school that three of us studying under Don Horward--Mike Leggiere [everyone and everything Prussian], Llewellyn Cook [Schwartzenberg], and I [Lannes, who also made me learn Spanish, for obvious reasons, but I balked at Portuguese] looked down on the West Point officers on the fast track who were relegated to Wellington's Despatches or working on various British admirals in the Peninsula [where else?] because they only knew English.
Like most things in life, it comes down to communication And understanding. As H-K said, learning a language also opens up the culture and broadens your understanding. It is a refusal among British and American authors to learn other languages as English and its Americans dialect have become the world lingua franca. Prior to that, French was the universal language, especially of the intelligentsia, so that it retained some of its hold while various French regimes encouraged the telling of tales during the 19th century (Not much changes from Homer’s time). Then the events of the 20th century closed off the German-Russian records, leaving French as the dominant account of the Continental fighting. Chesney in his Waterloo lectures remarks on the beauty of the French languages and of course, the more glorious it was the better for those memoirs published in the 19th century.
This memoir writing has thus also helped with French domination - the other nations did not produce anything like as many and even fewer were published in a legible script. Sharpe will also win out over rather worthy campaign histories - why not believe in the Guard in a square when the French won at Marengo anyway and doing the research is much harder.
In reality, we can only make a contribution (Peter’s mistake was to think he should be the only author on Prussia) and it is usually best to work with others with a deeper understanding of the other side to produce good battle accounts. It is really the open door scenario - 99% cannot do original work, so they look for for subjects with plenty of material in their own or second language. Hence the mass of works on Waterloo compared with the longest work on Wagram being 25k words by an American with no French or German language complete accounts at all. So, do your thing and others will build on it.
I believe strongly that languages are the holy Grail for studying history, each language will open a new world.
In case you look for Napoleonic times and Central Europe - German is not a bad language there by that you cover a lot of different points of view, Austrians would report differently - compared to Saxons for example and by that you gain already different perspectives.
For me French is very important because there is such a rich material out there and I would find it very difficult to gain good knowledge about the French Army without speaking French.
As speaking of today English is of course the holy Grail, German is as good as much ignored and people are not interested to read first hand accounts in German nor about German armies, look at the podcast views, Prussian Army and compare to French Army, there is no interest in the Prussian Army nor any German Army at all.
Alfred, I am not sure I am really qualified to answer this as I do most of my research in French sources and my German is almost non-existant. Perhaps someone who speaks both French and German will give you a better feel. However, French information, memoirs, accounts of campaigns and battles, uniforms and regulations extend well beyond the time I can devote to their study. Perhaps the notable exception is the Waterloo campaign on which, for reasons we discuss in the ‘Waterloo Remembered’ section, the French wrote rather less.
So, there is no end of French information available, but that is not to say that given the percentage of the European population that spoke German and were directly or indirectly drawn into the Napoleonic Wars, it must far exceed French speakers, and because of the number of minor German states that existed at that time, each will have kept their own archives, reports, orders etc., so I am sure the amount of information in German probably exceeds that in French. I particularly envy the detailed military studies of the various campaigns that were produced by Prussia; the level of detail appears exceptional; I just wish my German was better!! ‘Noch ein mal bier bitte’!