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On 1 February 1793, the National Convention of Revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain and the Netherlands, expanding the list of France's enemies in the War of the First Coalition. Although British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger had predicted fifteen years of peace one year earlier, the French declaration of war initiated nearly a quarter century of war between Britain and France with only a brief respite during the Peace of Amiens. Britain entered the war amid both a nadir in British diplomacy and internal political divisions over the direction of British foreign policy. After becoming prime minister in 1783 in the aftermath of the War of American Independence, Pitt pursued financial and naval reform to recover British strength and cautious interventionism to end Britain's diplomatic isolation in Europe. He hoped to create a collective security system based on the principles of the territorial status quo, trade agreements, neutral rights, and resolution of diplomatic disputes through mediation - armed mediation if necessary. While his domestic measures largely met with success, Pitt's foreign policy suffered from a paucity of like-minded allies, contradictions between traditional hostility to France and emergent opposition to Russian expansion, Britain's limited ability to project power on the continent, and the even more limited will of Parliament to support such interventionism. Nevertheless, Pitt's collective security goal continued to shape British strategy in the War of the First Coalition, and the same challenges continued to plague the British war effort. This led to failure in the war and left the British fighting on alone after the Treaty of Campo Formio secured peace between France and its last continental foe, Austria, on 18 October 1797.

Autorisé le 31 décembre 1914, le 41e bataillon (canadien-français) du Corps expéditionnaire canadien était voué à suivre les traces du désormais célèbre 22e bataillon et à combattre à ses côtés sur le théâtre européen. Sept mois après sa formation, cette unité composée d’un amalgame hétéroclite de francophones et de volontaires étrangers fut pourtant dissoute, succombant à une vague d’insubordination marquée par un nombre record d’infractions, des désertions par centaines, plusieurs délits de corruption, une épidémie d’ivrognerie et deux homicides. Aussitôt oublié, le dossier du 41e fut rouvert une première fois en 1974 par l’historien Desmond Morton, qui imputait l’échec de l’unité à l’incompétence de ses officiers. Nous jugeons cette interprétation recevable quoique limitée, car si Morton a prouvé de façon convaincante l’inaptitude des gradés du 41e, son approche traditionnelle à l’histoire militaire nous en dit peu sur les mécanismes qui permirent la propagation de l’insubordination parmi les hommes du rang. Ce mémoire, qui se réclame de l’approche microhistorique, vise à réorienter l’analyse du point de vue du simple soldat, en insistant sur les facteurs sociaux, culturels et circonstanciels qui provoquèrent la désintégration prématurée de l’unité. Reposant sur un corpus inédit composé, entre autres, des rapports de cour martiale et des dossiers de service du 41e bataillon, cet effort de réinterprétation révèle une absence généralisée de cohésion au sein de l’unité. Dans le cas insolite du 41e bataillon, la discipline apparaît ainsi comme étant fonction de la qualité des relations interpersonnelles de ses membres plutôt qu’uniquement liée aux qualités individuelles de leurs supérieurs. / Authorized on December 31, 1914, the 41st Battalion (French-Canadian) of the Canadian Expeditionary Force was destined to follow in the footsteps of the renowned 22nd Battalion and fight on the western front. However, only seven months after its formation, this multiethnic unit made up of French-Canadian and foreign volunteers was disbanded due to a wave of insubordination that included a record number of infractions, desertions by the hundreds, several corruption scandals, widespread drunkenness and the cold- blooded murder of two Canadian servicemen. Long forgotten, the case of the 41st Battalion was examined for the first time in 1974 by historian Desmond Morton, who attributed the unit’s failure to the shortcomings of its officers. We find this interpretation acceptable, albeit limited. While Morton convincingly demonstrated the incompetence of the Battalion’s officers, his traditional approach to military history fails to unveil the mechanisms by which indiscipline was allowed to spread among the rank and file. This thesis, grounded in the micro-historical approach, shifts the analysis from a top-down to a bottom-up perspective, emphasizing the social, cultural and circumstantial factors which played into the unit’s collapse. Drawing from unpublished sources including court-martial reports and personnel record files of the 41st Battalion, this study reveals a widespread lack of cohesion within the unit. In the strange case of the 41st Battalion, discipline thus depends not only on the individual qualities of the officers, but also on the quality of interpersonal relationships among the rank and file.

This thesis examines the ways that African Americans in the mid-twentieth century thought about and practiced masculinity. Important contemporary events such as the struggle for civil rights and the Vietnam War influenced the ways that black Americans sought not only to construct masculine identities, but to use these identities to achieve a higher social purpose. The thesis argues that while mainstream American society had specific prescriptions for how men should behave, black Americans were able to select which of these prescriptions they valued and wanted to pursue while simultaneously rejecting those that they found untenable. Masculinity in the mid-century was not based on one thing, but rather was an amalgamation of different ideals that black men (and women) sought to utilize to achieve communal goals of equality, opportunity, and family.

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