Foreign sources on the history of the siege of Hamburg by the troops of the anti-French coalition in 1813–1814
Gladyshev Andrey
In the winter of 1813–1814, the allies of the anti-French coalition besieged Hamburg, which was defended by troops under the command of Marshal N. Davout. Napoleon attached great importance to this city at the mouth of the Elbe, and Davout stubbornly defended it, capitulating only after Napoleon's abdication. The siege placed a heavy burden on the shoulders of the population. After the end of the war, a discussion unfolded, with the figure of Napoleon's marshal at the center. Numerous, often anonymous, publications on this issue formed a large corpus of literature devoted to assessing his actions. However, the range of narrative sources on the history of besieged Hamburg is much broader than publications about the Marshal himself. The sources reflect a wide variety of aspects of the lives of the townspeople and the military. Not only the extensive range of written sources is noteworthy, but also the presence of a fairly significant layer of “women's literature” in it, which allows us to raise the question of the gender perception of the war. The sources at the researcher's disposal also contain material on the post-war problems of settling both material claims for damages incurred and reputational issues. They cover the processes of preparing Hamburg for the siege from the military, financial, food and medical sides, details of the evacuation of suburban residents and the subsequent forced expulsion of the poorest part of the city's inhabitants, describe the system of the French military-civil administration, the policy of requisitions in the city and the reaction to it. The authors left colorful pictures of the typhus epidemic that struck the city, the provision of hospitals, machinations in supplies by various officials, descriptions of life in the besieged city, the experiences of civilians and soldiers, their fears and hopes, relationships, perception of life and death. The sources considered often have a frankly subjective, polemical nature: feelings and emotions overwhelm them. But this is precisely what allows researchers to study the human dimension of war, giving military history an anthropological bias.
The study is sponsored by the Russian Science Foundation, project № 25–18–00510 “Relations between military personnel and civilians during the Napoleonic Wars”.