This thesis explores the social and cultural impact of conscription, military honour, and wartime experience on the Habsburg Monarchy during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It illuminates the ways in which the Habsburg army’s military culture, its processes of recruitment, and its institutional displays of dynastic loyalty created Soldat Bürger - military servants of the Habsburg state. These were men whose corporate identity was founded on regional allegiances and dynastic loyalty, which combined to link the various parts of the Monarchy together and tie these places' prosperity and security to the dynasty’s triumph over Revolutionary and Imperial France.
As this work shows, military innovations established under Joseph II, and an accompanying military honour founded on patriotic service to the state, were integral to the Habsburg Monarchy’s ability to confront French power. Equipped with the motivating ethos of state citizenship (Staatsbürger), officers and soldiers alike were driven to fight by duty, virtue, and the community awarded to them as Soldat Bürger. This was a corporate identity and act of citizenship resting on utilitarian ethics of state service and enlightened sensibility, binding officers and men together as the dynasty’s military servants.
This thesis argues the wartime role and identity of regular soldiers became a focus for regional and dynastic patriotism, serving as an integral element in a narrative of the war and encouraging subjects to embrace and reaffirm their commitment to the Habsburg state and its pluralistic, organic hierarchies headed by Emperor Francis II (I). A central part of this narrative was the communication of the Soldat Bürger’s virtue and ascetic commitment to the values of monarchism and the security this granted the emperor’s subjects. These attributes of military service presented Habsburg dominion as essential, mobilising civilian populations in the fight against the political ideology of Republican and Imperial France.
