The Coming of the Cossacks to France: The Metamorphosis of French Patriotism

The events of 1814–1815 in France were pivotal in the history of Europe and the world. During the collapse of Napoleon’s empire, when ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ often traded places, many French people were faced with the need to choose or change their life strategies. Professor A. V. Gladyshev’s new book, which is the subject of this review, raises several key questions that are now actively debated in the history of warfare within the framework of historical and anthropological debates. Drawing on a wide range of sources, A. V. Gladyshev reconstructs the contradictory situation in which French subjects had to choose between “betrayal” or “patriotism” towards “their” tyrant and the willingness to fight or accept the power of “foreign” liberators. The author focuses on the figure of the “Cossack”, who became not only a symbol of everything Russian, but also the embodiment of the virtues of the “noble savage”, or a symbol of social protest and the struggle for freedom.