Les ruines de guerre et la nation française (1914 - 1921)
(2012)
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- Abstract
- (en) PhD in Contemporary History, research group HAR (Arts, History and Representations) Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense / PhD in History, Arts and Archeology, Research group about imaginaries, catholique university of Louvain-la-Neuve. “RUINS OF WAR AND THE FRENCH NATION (1914-1921)” This PhD work focuses on the material destruction caused by the Great War and more specifically on the way French society used the representations of ruins as a symbol of pain. As a first direct and visible consequence of conflict, ruins bear testimony to it, to its course, but also to the suffering of soldiers and civilian populations. Everybody, from the official military artist, the anonymous soldier to the ordinary citizen, evoked the material destruction, the desolate landscapes and the earth upheaved by artillery shells during the First World War. Photographed, drawn, filmed, exhibited in Paris, London or Geneva, the representations of ruins were shown in newspapers, they have been distributed as postcards and have also been reproduced in various works. These iconographic representations were used from the very beginning of the conflict to support the arguments used to mobilize populations and convince neutral countries of the validity of the war. They then became a way of making the conflict visible, but especially to testify the new violence caused by artillery. The Literary descriptions presented them as living, wounded bodies, as anthropomorphic transpositions of the soldiers whose bodies were rarely displayed. Targets of armed violence, symbolic bodies and fragile, ruins have embodied first of all the body of the warrior and subsequently the sacred body of the Nation. Once peace had been restored, the ruins were mobilized one last time to reinforce the demands for war reparations. They were also honoured through decorative ceremonies and valued through organized tourist tours. Since then the debate around ruins has been minimized to a question of their conservation as remnants of war.
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Citations
Danchin, E. (2012). Les ruines de guerre et la nation française (1914 - 1921). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/78078