Professor Brian Martin wins the Wylie Prize in French Studies for his book Napoleonic Friendship (An Interview)

Brian MartinBrian Joseph Martin, Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature has won the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies for his book Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011).
One of the most prestigious book prizes in the field, the Wylie Prize is awarded biennially to the best book in French social or cultural studies. The jury for this year’s prize includes prominent scholars from NYU, Harvard, Tufts, and Duke, who chose Napoleonic Friendship from among 65 books under consideration. The prize ceremony will take place at NYU’s Maison Française, 
at 16 Washington Mews in New York, on March 27, 2013, at 6:30 p.m., when Professor Martin will give a lecture titled “Queer Napoleon: from Napoleonic Friendship to Gays in the Military.” All are welcome.

Napoleonic Friendship by Brian Joseph MartinOne of the first books on “Gays in the Military” published following the historic repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in 2011, Napoleonic Friendship examines the history of male intimacy in the French military, from Napoleon to the First World War. Echoing the historical record of gay soldiers in the United States, Napoleonic Friendship is the first book-length study on the origin of queer soldiers in modern France. Reviewed in many prominent journals in both literary and historical studies, Napoleonic Friendship has been praised as “the postmodern military history that Foucault never wrote” (H-France Review) and “a remarkable contribution to historical, literary, military, and queer studies” (American Historical Association’s Committee on LGBT History).


What was your reaction when you learned of the award?

I was honored and humbled to win the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Studies for my book, Napoleonic Friendship, especially when I think of all those eminent scholars and books that have won the Wylie Prize before me, of the jury of scholars from NYU, Duke, Harvard, and Tufts who selected my book, and of the 65 other books in competition for the prize this year.

What influenced you to write about Gays in the Military?

The best answer to this would be to invite you to read the short seven-page prologue to my book, which is available in Sawyer Library, in the Center for Foreign Languages, and in the free sample pages of the book at both amazon.com and books.google.com. In this prologue (which is one of the parts of the book of which I am most proud), I explain that my brother Kevin and I grew up as young gay men in a military family, where our Dad (Master Sergeant Joseph Martin, who served for over thirty years in the Massachusetts Army National Guard) was a very supportive father of gay sons. I went to college in the early 1990s, during the initial debates on “Gay in the Military” and what became the homophobic military policy of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in United States. In fact, General Colin Powell (who was then the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responsible for crafting and then enforcing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”) was the commencement speaker at my college graduation in 1993, when I took part in a colorful protest of queer students, while my parents (nervously, then proudly) looked on, from a few rows back. From my military family, to my college years during the Gulf War and the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” debates, to my graduate years during the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to my years teaching at Williams and completing my book, amid the historical end of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in 2010-11, I have had a long and engaging fascination with military history and culture.

What challenges did you find in carrying out your research?

The first challenge was finding funding in order to travel to distant archives, and to have time to write and revise. I was very lucky to secure funding from a number of sources (including the Mellon Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Krupp Foundation, the Harvard Humanities Center, the Harvard Gunzburg Center for European Studies, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Williams College) in order to do years of archival research in France and the United States, and to complete the revisions for the book. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues at Williams (in the Romance Languages Department, the Center for Foreign Languages, the Dean of the Faculty Office, and the Committee on Appointments and Promotions) who supported me in so many ways during the revision and publication of my book.

The second challenge was bridging the gap between history and literature. The book examines relationships between soldiers in the French military from Napoleon to the First World War, by using two principal sources: non-fiction military memoirs (written by veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-German War of 1870, and the First World War), and military fiction (by Balzac, Stendhal, Hugo, Zola, Maupassant, and Proust). This interdisciplinary approach meant that many historians were skeptical of the literary texts, while some literary scholars were skeptical of the memoirs. In the end, I was lucky that the book received very favorable reviews, but the historians felt uneasy about the novels, and the literary scholars were unfamiliar with the memoirs. Institutions tend to praise interdisciplinarity, but scholars are often territorial about their individual fields. I’m a literary scholar and an historian wannabe, so this was both interesting and challenging.

The third challenge was discussing the evolution of homosocial and homoerotic relationships, without falling into either anachronism or misunderstanding. For example, the word “homosexual” was not invented until 1869, and our usage of the words “gay” and “queer” cannot easily be used to discuss nineteenth-century relationships or identities, or any period before the emergence of contemporary queer liberation movements, starting with the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969. It was also tricky explaining to some skeptics that I was not arguing that Napoleon himself desired men, or that all affectionate soldier pairs and buddies formed erotic relationships.

To offer a short anecdote, let me say that I am very much looking forward to giving the Wylie Prize guest lecture on March 27, at 6:30PM, at New York University’s Maison Française, since this will give me the first and (I think) last opportunity to use the title “Queer Napoleon,” which had been a possibility for the title of the book. This provocative title would have helped to gain even more attention, and perhaps helped sales, but it would have given the wrong impression that Napoleon himself was queer. We know from many sources that Napoleon desired and had intimate/emotional relationships with women. My book argues that major reforms in Napoleon’s meritocratic armies created conditions that made it possible for men to express admiration and affection for their fellow soldiers, which in turn lead to greater possibilities for those who DID desire men to express those feelings. In the book, I show many examples of this, from the memoirs of Napoleonic soldiers, to novels on nineteenth-century French soldiers by Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal, Maupassant, and Zola, as well as the legacy of this among homosexual soldiers in twentieth-century France, like those described by Marcel Proust during the First World War.

How have you incorporated this material in your teaching and campus life?

Let me answer this by offering a word of thanks. I am grateful to my colleagues in Romance Languages who all read my book manuscript and gave me valuable feedback, as well as to my colleagues and students in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Comparative Literature, the Women’s Center, and the Faculty Lecture Committee, who invited me to lecture on this work here on campus, as well as to the students in my course “French 202: War and Resistance: Two Centuries of War Literature in France, 1804-2004,” who have helped me rethink my work on military history and literature in France during the past several years at Williams.

As members and chairs of the Dively Committee for Human Sexuality and Diversity at Williams, Professor Chris Waters (in the History Dept) and I invited the celebrated gay military historian Allan Bérubé to campus in April 2006, to discuss his ground-breaking book, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (NY: Free Press, 1990), which was cited during the “Gays in the Military” debates in Congress in 1993. It was an honor to meet my intellectual hero and to have him visit Williams and my course on War Literature in France, especially since Allan died shortly after, in 2007, before my book was published in January 2011, the very month that President Obama succeeded in ending the discriminatory policy of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” For their inspiration, I am grateful to both Chris Waters and Allan Bérubé.

Can you comment on the significance of your scholarly work on gays in the French military and the historic changes taking place in the US?

Having grown up as a gay man in a military family, protested (both on campus at Harvard, in Boston, and in Washington DC) against “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” during the “Gays in the Military” debates in 1993, written this book on Gays in the French Military, and seen President Clinton try and President Obama succeed in ending the discrimination of queer soldiers in the US military, I was still amazed and delighted to hear President Obama speak openly about the Stonewall riots (that started the GBLT rights movement in New York in 1969) and the battle for gay marriage, in his inauguration speech this year, in January 2013. We’ve come so far in the twenty years since I finished college in 1993. I wish my brother Kevin had lived to see this. When Kevin died of AIDS in 1991, we could not have imagined a time when HIV would be (increasingly, though still inadequately) treatable, when queer soldiers could serve openly in the US and in many foreign militaries, when several countries and US states would have gay marriage laws, or when queer people would be openly elected as mayors (Paris, Berlin), senators (Wisconsin), and prime ministers (Iceland). But of course, there is still so much more to be done, amid the continuing violence against queer people all over the world, the absence of federal laws on gay marriage in the US and the great majority of the world’s nations, and rising HIV infection rates, especially among the young (who never saw the horrors of the 1980s and 90s, now mistakenly think of AIDS as a manageable disease, and practice unsafe sex), and among the poor (especially in developing nations, but also in wealthy countries like the US). I hope that when our seniors return to Williams for their twentieth college reunion (in 2033), they will see even greater strides (and have taken part) in the continuing struggles against homophobia, racism, misogyny, religious and ethnic intolerance, poverty, and social injustice.

How can I learn more?

For more on Napoleonic Friendship, I’d invite you to look at the copy in the Center for Foreign Languages, borrow the copy in Sawyer Library, or look at these online sources: