Invalids and Mutilants: Classifying Bodies of Former and Potential Soldiers in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy

In the eighteenth century, the Habsburg monarchy implemented a care system for so-called ‘invalids’ – disabled soldiers of the Imperial army. At the same time, a discourse on ‘mutilants’ targeted men that had harmed themselves to escape military service. While both phenomena offer evidence of the physical traces left by war, Habsburg authorities constructed and classified them as opposing figures: invalids were increasingly praised as honourable men having sacrificed their health to the state, while mutilants were regarded as unmanly cowards. This article investigates how the line between mutilants and invalids was drawn in political discourse and in administrative and legal practices, with a particular focus on the role of the body and dis/ability, as well as the emotions and the idea of honour. Building upon research on European and early U.S. military welfare and eighteenth-century disability history, the article poses the question of the extent to which categorisations of male bodies in the context of war were standardised and/or medicalised in the Habsburg case, how the figures of invalids and mutilants were linked to the value of work, and how the classification, treatment and ‘administration’ of mutilants and invalids was intertwined with bureaucratization and state formation. The argument points to an appropriation of male bodies by the emerging state – which deemed itself entitled to use these bodies for its wars and prosperity.