lecture 16, "the great war, grief and memory"
bruno cabanes (john merriman)

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the great war, "grief and memory"

mass death and mourning a fact of life in France well before the end of the first world war: around 50% of the soldiers killed during WWI lost their lives in the seventeen month period from August 1914-December 1915.

one must also add the deaths of the Spanish Flu in 1918, which killed up to 20 million people(!)

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but these figures mean nothing, prof argues, if one does not consider them in relation to private and collective mourning. i.e., we need more than a statistical, demographic understanding of mass death.

the challenge, then, is to grasp this process in its fullness.

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first, who were the people who were mourning? who were these "communities in mourning"?

second, the specificity of mourning in the aftermath of WWI--it can be studied, in this sense, in a comparative perspective, as well.

third, examine the mourning process itself--the relationship between personal suffering, and collective mourning--how grief becomes a collective process.

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from a demographic perspective, this is difficult. war widows lost their benefits, and so vanished from the statistics in 1920 and 1921. the numbers then that you find about 600,000 widows and 760,000 orphans is very rough--and this is not to mention the extended families.

so the concept of "communities in mourning" is a very useful one, as a way to grasp the scale of mourning after WWI.

EVERY social structure went into mourning after the WWI, prof is arguing.

"circles of mourning," as well.

the first: fellow soldiers--"mourning the dead." what did soldiers do on armistice day? first tried to find the bodies of their fellow soldiers, in order to bury them.

notion, also, of the "survivor's syndrome"--guilt at having been spared. predominant amongst French soldiers after WWI.

the second: parents, grandparents, family, etc.--larger family group has, most times, been underestimated. mourning a lost relative becomes a way to participate in the conflict, in a distant sense.

the third: friends--the story of friendship in wartime still needs to be written--especially from the perspective of the history of bereavement.

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second larger point--specificity of WWI mourning.

the generational mourning had been reversed--a whole generation was lost. many people in the cities were suffering from depression (Emile Durkheim died of grief, only one year after his son's death in 1915).

death was also experienced by the soldiers in a very solitary way--must be seen specifically in the extreme violence of the war, and in light of the religious rituals that were prevalent in the war. one of the pervasive fears was of dying alone in no man's land, abandoned by comrades. soldiers who fell wounded between the lines lay dying for hours, sometimes days. (1/3 of the 20,000 men who died on the Sommes in 1916 might have been saved had they been seen to). and this added an unbearable toll to the bereavement. "horrible, pitiful deaths on the fields of honor."

all the traditional stages of grieving, as per the Catholic tradition, were eliminated--absence of dead bodies (around 30% of the dead bodies were completely destroyed, could not be identified; after 1918, bodies remained on the battlefield until the French gave permission to repatriate them, which did not happen until 1920!--they were arguing for the abstract equality of the mourning process, even as prof is stressing the specificity, as well)

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third point: new rituals, new traditions

the violence of the war experience, the absence of dead bodies required new ways of commemorating the dead.

two major cultural processes, in particular, as personal grief was translated into collective mourning

(1) the nationalization of mourning--in the 1920s and 1930s, the battlefields were converted into commemorative sites, through a network of military cemeteries, parks, etc. these new sites of memory were often represented in objects, paintings, pictures, and a number of ceremonies were organized to pay homage.

and they clearly played a role in forging a new conception of french national unity. on november 11th, each commune would name the dead from "the lost generation," at their respective war memorials (unity of time, space, action).

(2) the spiritualization of mourning--the 1920s and 1930s were characterized by a type of spiritual revival. prof giving one emblematic example.