A Certain Sense of Service: The Writing of Military Experience in Petitions, From the Hundred Years War to the American Revolution

In many aspects, the act of submitting a petition to an authority was a form of political communication that required the petitioners to adopt the language of bureaucracy. In order to support their demands, petitioners usually used a series of legal and rhetorical techniques to elaborate their discourses, following the advice of the clerks, lawyers, or public writers who helped them to compose their petitions. Yet, their strategy of “calculated conformity” to the ideology of the State, characterized by using a posture of humility, does not always prevent them from expressing elements of subversion or defiance to power. In this paper, I will adopt an exploratory, long-term perspective by comparing a set of fifteenth-century petitions granted in France, England, and the Burgundian Low Countries, with a series of petitions presented to the first Federal Congress of the United States in 1789-1791. More specifically, I will focus on petitions submitted by soldiers, a category of population that has often been favored by the benevolence of the authorities. I will show that, even though late medieval European petitions and eighteenth-century US petitions were the products of very different institutional, political, and legal contexts, the petitioners used similar strategies when writing their demands. For medieval and modern soldiers, the mention of their military service and their experience at war was indeed a decisive argument in the construction of their petitions, because it demonstrated their deference to the monarch or the State. The paper will also feature a methodological note on both the interests and the limits of comparing documents that have been produced in different periods. Indeed, the term “petition” has been forged by historians to qualify a vast amount of documents that had many different designations, taking the risk of ignoring the legal and institutional context in which those documents were produced. In that sense, adopting a long-term perspective on the petitioning phenomenon does not prevent scholars from a critical examination of the characteristics and specificities of each document