Servitude et grandeur militaires Reading Order

Servitude et grandeur militaires (Military Servitude and Grandeur, 1835) by Alfred de Vigny is the most important French prose work about the experience of being a soldier — three interconnected novellas about the dignity and misery of the military life, the condition of the professional soldier as a kind of monk condemned to servitude and silence, and the particular honor code that military service requires and distorts. Vigny served in the French army from 1814 to 1828 — the fourteen years that followed Napoleon's defeat, when the army was a vestige without a purpose, condemned to garrison duty and slow humiliation — and the book is partly an autobiographical account of the peculiar experience of military peace, the soldier who exists to fight and is not permitted to. The three novellas are unified by the figure of the officer who maintains dignity in degraded circumstances: Laurette (a young officer who must arrest and shoot a man whose wife does not know she is a widow); La Canne de jonc (a tale of Nelson and a French naval officer who must choose between duty and his own moral sense); and La Veillée de Vincennes (the officer who dies in an accidental powder magazine explosion, maintaining his composure to the end). The book is Vigny's clearest statement of his philosophical 'stoicism' — the idea that the heroic life consists not in action but in silent endurance of an impossible situation.