Homesick epoch: Dying of nostalgia in post-revolutionary France

This dissertation traces the remarkable trajectory of a now-forgotten and quite lethal disease: nostalgia. From the coining of the term in 1688 to its unceremonious removal from medical taxonomies two centuries later, nostalgia was indeed a severe clinical condition, a "passion of the soul" identified colloquially as homesickness and akin to present-day forms of depression. It affected soldiers in particular and although common to all western countries was deemed particularly dangerous by the French, who grappled with its lethal effects from the outbreak of the Revolutionary wars to the laborious conquest of colonial Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century. At the height of its importance in the early 1800s nostalgia was the object of heated debates in medical circles. Within a few decades, however, physicians increasingly came to see it as an essentially benign emotional inclination and nostalgia became an indulgent leitmotif for young poets brimming with romantic angst. By the end of the century, French doctors had all but forgotten about the condition, leaving behind a term hollowed out of its original pathological meaning but promised to an illustrious afterlife as a general cultural category. Since then, and following the consecrated quip, nostalgia truly is no longer what it used to be.;Using previously unexplored archival sources from medical, military, and colonial archives, as well as the extensive opportunities for linguistic analysis offered by digitized textual sources, this dissertation charts the extraordinary rise and demise of this "transient mental illness" (Ian Hacking). Through four parts and nine chapters it follows the medical and extra-medical discussions that framed and subsequently undid a viable understanding of this condition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and engages in a detailed analysis of two specific case studies---the Napoleonic wars and the colonization of Algeria---where nostalgia produced its morbid effects only to eventually reveal a more restorative side. Working simultaneously at the level of intellectual history, of socio-cultural contextualization, and of ethnographic description, the dissertation provides a first, comprehensive account of nostalgia's medical past. Exploiting both the doctor's and the patient's view, it offers an overarching interpretation of the diagnosis as an attempt to grasp the emotional turmoil wrought by processes of modernization. It argues that for a significant proportion of the male population, such forms of disruption in daily habits were encountered in the army before elsewhere, thus forcing us to reconsider the role of the military in the genesis of modern forms of social relations. The dissertation also suggests that the naturalization of nostalgia into a relatively harmless form of longing reveals a peculiar dialectical movement at play. The miraculous drug that was found to cure people of their nostalgia was, surprisingly enough, nostalgia itself. For what had originally been seen as a pathological reaction to progress, came to be viewed as a desirable and restorative by-product of the same teleological historical narrative. In the process, nostalgia went from denoting a loss of authenticity, to connoting the thoroughly inauthentic---an antinomic duality it has preserved to this very day.