The eighteenth century was a time of intense upheaval in France. The death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the subsequent reign of Louis XV saw the end of French political and martial hegemony on the continent. While French culture and language remained dominant in Europe, Louis XV's disinterested rule and military stagnation led to the disastrous defeat of the French army at the hands of Frederick the Great of Prussia in the Seven Years War (1756-1763). The battle of Rossbach marked the nadir of the French army in the Seven Years War. Frederick's army routed the French infantry that had bumbled its way into massed Prussian cavalry. Following the war, two reformist elements emerged in the army. Reformers within the government, chiefly Etienne François, duc de Choiseul, sought to rectify the army's poor performance and reconstitute France's military establishment. Outside the traditional army structure, military thinkers looked to military theory to reinvigorate the army from within and without. Foremost among the latter was a young officer named Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte de Guibert, whose 1772 Essai général de tactique quickly became the most celebrated work of theory in European military circles. The Essai provided a new military constitution for France, proposing wholesale reform to create an army that could face the Prussian juggernaut. His star quickly rising, Guibert became the toast not only of literary Paris but all of Europe. Guibert exerted an overwhelming influence on military theory across Europe for the next fifty years. His military theories laid the foundation for the French army of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. As other nations adopted French methods, Guibert's influence spread across the continent, reigning supreme until the 1830s. Guibert's importance to military theory is analogous to Voltaire's influence on European literature and culture, an area in which Guibert was not unfamiliar. Guibert was also a celebrated lover of women, most notably Julie de Lespinasse and possibly a young Germaine de Staël. To date, no work has been produced that provides a clear picture of the man, his place in society, his work, and his legacy. For these reasons, a study of Guibert's life and his career is a valuable contribution to French history.

Le peintre, soldat et mémorialiste Louis-François Lejeune (1775-1848) entendait faire de son corpus de peintures de bataille et de ses Souvenirs d’un officier de l’Empire (1851) des témoignages historiques de la période napoléonienne, destinés à la postérité. Or, cette conjugaison entre peintures et mémoires renvoie aussi à la dualité médiale de la propagande napoléonienne, qui diffuse un récit unique des événements militaires à l’aide d’organes d’information inédits tels que les Bulletins de la Grande Armée. Ce récit, déjà médiatisé comme étant historique, est repris en images par le mécénat impérial. Ce mémoire vise à démontrer comment Lejeune contribue à ce récit historicisant, d’abord à un niveau individuel en construisant son identité par rapport à sa participation aux guerres napoléoniennes, puis aussi à un niveau étatique. Son Bivouac d’Austerlitz, présenté au Salon de 1808, est une commande du gouvernement. Il sera question de la façon dont ce tableau de Lejeune s’insère d’abord dans sa carrière, ensuite dans son corpus de peintures de bataille, puis finalement dans le récit napoléonien sur Austerlitz. La forme épisodique du tableau, empruntée à la ligne narrative du 30e bulletin de la Grande Armée, où Napoléon rapporte la victoire d’Austerlitz, peut s’expliquer par la complémentarité voulue entre récit textuel et visuel. Ce tableau contribue ainsi à la construction historique de la bataille. Au milieu des transformations profondes du monde académique et de la hiérarchie des genres, la dualité peintre-soldat de Lejeune répond en tous points à la vocation historique attribuée à la peinture sous Napoléon. / Painter, soldier, and memorialist Louis-François Lejeune (1775-1848) conceived his battle paintings and his memoirs, Souvenirs d’un officier de l’Empire (1851), as historical testimonies of the Napoleonic period, destined for posterity. This twinning of paintings and memoirs mirrors the duality of Napoleonic propaganda as a whole, which disseminates a single version of military events with the help of unprecedented information tools such as the Bulletins de la Grande Armée. This written narrative, already thought of as historical, is picked up again in the paintings commissioned by the government. This master’s thesis argues that Lejeune contributes in a unique way to this historical narrative, first at an individual level by constructing his identity from his participation in the Napoleonic wars, and also at a state level. His Bivouac d’Austerlitz, presented at the 1808 Salon, was commissioned by the government as part of a larger order. It is shown that this painting fits first into Lejeune’s career, then into his cycle of battle paintings, and finally into the narrative of Austerlitz that Napoleon himself promoted. The episodic form of this painting can be explained by the deliberate pairing of written and pictorial narratives, which borrows from the 30th bulletin de la Grande Armée where Napoleon recounts the victory at Austerlitz. This painting thus contributes to the historical construction of the battle. As deep transformations threatened the academic genre hierarchy at the turn of the nineteenth century, the duality of Lejeune’s persona as soldier and painter helped promote the historical function given to paintings under Napoleon.