In 2011, the Performance and Theatre Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired an archive of materials relating to the French prisoners of war held at Portchester Castle from 1810 to 1814. This archive consisted of scripts, playbills, and abstracts from the prisoners’ Théâtre des Variétés built and operated in the basement of the castle’s keep. These materials have provided new and unique insights into the experiences of Napoleonic prisoners of war and have served as a catalyst for this first major critical study of Napoleonic prisoners-of-war theatricals. The majority of the theatre’s sociétaires were captured in the French defeat at the Battle of Bailen in July 1808. This study will be charting the journey of these French prisoners through their captivity in Spain, the Baeleric Islands, and Britain. While this particular group of prisoners has been the subject of previous historic surveys, their theatrical endeavours have been sidelined or relegated to footnotes or dismissed as a way to pass the time. In this study I will draw the prisoners’ theatricals to the centre of critical discussion examining their repertoire in greater detail underlining the vital role that theatre served in the prisoners’ emotional and psychological survival in captivity.

Although historians have acknowledged the importance of gender as a factor in the social and political life of post-revolutionary France, and bibliographical studies have revealed that vast quantities of memoirs were composed during the half century after the outbreak of the Revolution, the lives of women between the late 1790s and the 1830s, and the works in which they wrote about their lives and about the age in which they lived, have hitherto attracted relatively little attention from literary critics and historians. Previous research, moreover, has concentrated on women as writers of poetry and fiction, on the portrayal of women in novels, and on their position in society as it was defined by legislators, doctors, philosophers and the authors of manuals on female education and conduct. As a result, the diversity of women's writing and the complexity of their lives as historical subjects during this period have often been obscured. It is this diversity and complexity which are revealed by studying memoirs. This thesis examines women's memoirs from both a literary and a historical perspective, focusing on the relationship between gender, genre and historical circumstances. It argues that women wrote memoirs and wrote them in the way they did because of the political and social conditions of the age in which they lived. A short introduction outlines the reasons why the memoirs written by women in the first decades of the nineteenth century have been neglected: the preoccupation of literary scholars with memoirs of the ancien regime; the memoir's apparent lack of depth compared to 'true' or 'literary' autobiography; the weakness of most women's memoirs as sources of information on political and military affairs for the Revolution and Empire; and the narrow focus of recent women-centred histories. The rest of the thesis is an attempt to fill in some of these gaps.

This thesis explores Vercors's writings, with particular reference to his moral and political attitudes, from 1942 to the present. It includes his clandestine wartime publications, the subsequent development of his theory of human 'rebellion', with its strong ethical connotations, and the various polemical and fictional texts in which, in the post-war period, he expresses support for communist aims and for progressive causes such as anticolonialism. Vercors's chairmanship of the CNE in the mid-1950's is examined through his memoirs as well as through his articles and speeches of the time. After the author's overt withdrawal from fellow-travelling in 1957, his more selective political commitment is traced through the remaining years of the Algerian conflict, while the memoirs and other works of reflection that have appeared in the latter part of his career recapitulate the overall development of his political attitudes and reveal certain changes of view. Vercors's more general theory of human value has, on the other hand, remained constant, and he offers it as a starting- point for better understanding between men of all nations and ideologies. The analysis follows this broad chronological pattern, first in relation to the moral elements, then the political; but there is frequent cross- reference between the two aspects, in keeping with the author's own emphasis on their close interconnection in his outlook. The extent of his combined fictional and non-fictional output is such that three successive chapters are devoted to the exploration of his moral attitudes, then three, similarly, to the political responses. There is also reference, where appropriate, to critical commentary on Vercors's work and to other background sources; and the appendices contain Vercors's direct response to specific questions put to him during the preparation of the present study. This thesis is intended to contribute to the field of modern French studies through its comprehensive coverage of Vercors's writing in two major areas of commitment.

An analysis of the thought of Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte) with regards to his literary tastes and influences as part of his wider philosophy. The thesis considers how the literary influences to which Napoleon was subject impacted upon his aesthetic ideas and in turn affected the nature of his rule.