Chapter 2 brings to light a dozen desertion-themed plays and operas that followed in the wake of Le Siège de Calais. These works, which were performed during the Old Regime’s twilight, are analyzed alongside recent scholarship on military and early modern masculinities to tease out the theatricalization of an emerging martial culture that drew on emotional brotherhood and feminine exclusion. This chapter includes a comparative analysis of two versions of one play, Le Déserteur, a sentimental anti-war drame by Louis-Sébastien Mercier and an alternative version of the play that was dramaturgically “militarized” by Joseph Patrat for soldiers and sailors at the navy’s theater in Brest (Le Théâtre de la Marine). A close reading of variants, edits, and both textual and cultural manipulation presents war drama as a site of conflict in a larger intellectual battle where different factions in French society argued about reform cultures inside military and theatrical circles.

In addition to serving as instruments of pedagogy and moral instruction, commonplace books helped readers assert control over an ever-increasing quantity of printed material. During the eighteenth century, they were a perfect tool for making reading truly “useful.” Inherently idiosyncratic, the evidence from commonplace books is difficult to generalize; nevertheless, they capture the moment when readers appropriated Enlightenment ideas to address their own concerns. This chapter focuses on Thomas Thistlewood’s commonplace books to track his thinking about race and slavery as well as religion. Initially motivated by the need to learn about plantation management, his reading expanded from planters manuals to works that both promoted and challenged theories of racial difference, urged reform of the institution of slavery, and contained dire warnings of slave rebellions. Thistlewood’s readings on religion combined a deep skepticism of Christian orthodoxy with anxieties about divine justice and a search for personal transcendence, which culminated in his enthusiastic approval of the deism expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar.