Absence And Agency Analysis: napoleon

Status: draft, systematic absence matrix.

absence_id	cluster_id	expected_presence	possible_absence	displacement_mechanism	claim_boundary
napoleon-absence-001	napoleon-05-soldier-sacrifice	The scale of death and suffering at Eylau and other engagements; the bodies of the dead and wounded.	Mass casualties are converted into glory and honor; the material reality of industrial-scale violence is suppressed.	Glory and destiny convert individual deaths into abstract historical capital.	Most clearly evidenced at Eylau; requires corroboration from non-bulletin sources.
napoleon-absence-002	napoleon-06-enemy-obstacle	Enemy populations as subjects — Prussian, Russian, Austrian civilians and soldiers — with their own perspectives and suffering.	Enemy is constructed as an obstacle to French destiny rather than as a people with their own historical agency.	Obstacle framing suppresses enemy agency and civilian experience of conquest.	A structural feature of the bulletin genre; requires non-French sources for the other side.
napoleon-absence-003	napoleon-03-emperor-embodiment	The coercive conditions under which soldiers served; desertion, dissent, and the limits of Napoleonic devotion.	The bulletins record only devotion and glory; dissent, coercion, and the social costs of perpetual war are absent.	Embodiment rhetoric naturalizes coercive military service as voluntary devotion.	Requires corroboration from non-official sources (memoirs, administrative records).

Absence claims are review questions until fuller annotation and historical corroboration show that an expected presence is systematically muted rather than merely outside the current sample.