'Valour Knows Neither Age Nor Sex': The Recueil des Actions Héroïques and the Representation of Courage in Revolutionary France

The outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars prompted the production of wartime propaganda on an unprecedented scale. In France state-sponsored publications such as the mass-produced Recueil des Actions Héroïques et Civiques des Républicains Français reached an exceptionally wide audience throughout the Terror and inspired a variety of patriotic prints, plays, and paintings in the years that followed publication. This article argues that works such as this radically redefined the representation of courage in combat and left a lasting legacy on the representation of warfare well into the nineteenth century.