French prisoner-of-war sociability in Hampshire during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Abstract Daniel Gordon in his monograph on Citizens without Sovereignty explored how, in eighteenth-century France, sociability enabled those without power in the ancien régime to organize and order social spaces where they could have autonomy and offset their political impotence. The idea that those without power could create an autonomous existence within the ‘gaps and interstices’ of that hierarchical, authoritarian regime offers a potential framework for thinking afresh about French prisoners of war held in Britain during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), when tens of thousands of captured French sailors, soldiers, civilians, women and children were held in sites across the country. This article will explore examples of the ways in which the prisoners of war found a sense of dignity and purpose in seemingly insignificant forms of sociability and benefited from the networks that underpinned the Transport Board’s organization of their captivity.