INTRODUCTION:

PERSPECTIVES IN FIRST WORLD WAR STUDIES

BY
PIERRE PURSEIGLE AND JENNY MACLEOD

The papers gathered together in this book were originally presented at a small
conference held in Lyon on 7 & 8 September 2001. The conference brought together
young scholars – defined loosely as postgraduate or postdoctoral – who work upon the
First World War at universities in seven different countries. 1 There were various
motivations behind the conference: an awareness of recent renewed interest in 1914-18, a
desire to explore the influence of perceived historiographical shifts, an ambition to lower
some intra-disciplinary boundaries, to foster international collaboration and comparative
history, and to share preliminary or more polished findings. The conference was
prompted, above all, by the perception that communication between historians who had
recently entered the fray was relatively weak.
More than 50 academics, including some of the historians who have been involved
the historiography of the First World War since the 1970s, joined together to discuss the
work of the newest scholars in the field. Some of their research is presented here to a
wider audience. The following fifteen papers reflect the individual undertaking of
postgraduate students and postdoctoral scholars, and represent a broad assessment of the
state of First World War studies in 2001.

As organizers and as editors, we will now attempt – somewhat untraditionally – to

distance ourselves from a project we coordinated. Our aim is to provide a critical
assessment of the intellectual and academic environment which made it necessary, and
prompted the questions we tried collectively to address.
The approach adopted here has been inspired by Gérard Noiriel’s Sur la crise de
l’histoire. 2 His book issued several important challenges to historians in their work.
Drawing from a wide set of philosophical, sociological and historical ideas, Noiriel
stresses the way in which the historical profession is not only involved in the production

1
In order to build upon the connections made at the conference, the International Society
for First World War Studies has been established. For further information, see its website:
http://doc-iep.univ-lyon2.fr/wwi/
2
Noiriel (1996). For a critical and yet fair appraisal of Noiriel’s book, see Kramer (1998).

1
of knowledge, and the creation of collective memory, but is simultaneously engaged in
power relationships. Noiriel’s ‘pragmatic approach’ attempts to resolve the traditional
tensions between theory and practice and to reinstate historical scholarship in its social
environment. Having observed the fissiparous tendencies at work within academia, he
urges historians to spell out their point of view, method and approach in order to
safeguard the unity of the discipline and ensure ongoing exchanges.
What, then, might be suggested as the particularities of our situation? In an
increasingly competitive academic job market, professional advancement depends on the
public submission of one’s research, peer-reviewing, and of course publication. These
activities establish one’s position within the historical community at large. By convening
a conference and selecting speakers (and ultimately the contributors to this book), we
took upon ourselves a responsibility with which junior scholars are rarely entrusted. In
further explaining our choices, we hope to stress both the characteristics and limits of this
project, as well as to suggest ways of moving forward towards a better understanding of
the conflict.
We will first attend to the recent renewal of interest in the First World War and
the relationship between the re-kindling of commemoration and the vitality of academic
activity. Then, we will present the state of historical studies of the Great War as we
perceived it in 2001 and the way in which we reflected our perceptions in our call for
papers. Its characteristics owe a great deal to intellectual trends and structural factors that
ought to be highlighted. Whilst this edited collection is not exhaustive, it nevertheless
reveals one of the strongest and most dynamic undercurrents in the history of modern
warfare: the emphasis on the cultural and social dimensions of the World War I
experience. The works presented here could therefore be rallied under the banner of the
‘new cultural history of the war’. In accepting a pre-existing label, we make no claim to
write as a new generation of historians, nor hold any pretension to a paradigmatic
breakthrough.

The contemporary relevance of an historical topic is unusually clear in the case of

First World War studies. The conflict continues to intrude on the public sphere of former
belligerent societies, and in many instances, historians have been called upon to engage in
controversies that have produced more heat than light. Indeed, it seems that World War I
has gained in importance since the 1990s. The growing interest in commemoration and

2
the increased ‘social demand’ addressed to professional historians account, to a certain
extent, for the dynamism of First World War studies.
These trends can be illustrated by the situation in Australia. The experience of the
First World War, particularly the activities of the Anzacs 3 in the Gallipoli campaign of
1915, lies at the heart of Australia’s national identity. Numerous state-sponsored and
personal commemorative activities demonstrate this. On 25 April each year, the
anniversary of the early morning landings on the Gallipoli peninsula is marked as ‘Anzac
Day’. Dawn services are held across the country, followed by marches later in the
morning. Thousands of Australian backpackers in Europe include a visit to Gallipoli on
their itinerary each year. The Australian cricket team even made a pilgrimage there en
route to the Ashes series in England in 2001. Furthermore, upon his death in May 2002,
the last veteran of Gallipoli, Alec Campbell, was honoured with a state funeral. Yet, the
public importance of Gallipoli in Australia has not remained constant. There was a
discernible decline in interest during the 1960s and 70s, before the spectacular flowering
of commemorative activities with the 75th anniversary of the landings in 1990. 4
Given the importance of Gallipoli in Australia, historians are occasionally drawn
into public controversies on the subject. A recent example arose in the wake of a
conference, ‘Australia in War and Peace’ convened by the Australian War Memorial and
Curtin University and held at Canakkale, the nearest town to the Gallipoli peninsula. The
interesting and scholarly research on the military and cultural history of the campaign was
reported in the Australian newspaper as the ‘Charge of the rewrite brigade’.5 The story
was picked up by talk radio in Australia and the press in New Zealand, by which time the
supposedly self-styled ‘rewrite brigade’ were said to have called upon Australia to
apologise for the 1915 ‘invasion’ of Gallipoli and to have compared it to the British
invasion of Aboriginal land in 1788. 6 Yet, the academics drew no such political
conclusions. What they did do was to attempt to examine the basis of a story that is
invested with tremendous significance. Sober academic endeavour became hyperbole;
such is the resonance of the First World War in Australia and New Zealand.

3
A name derived from the acronym Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.
4
Macleod (2002). See also, Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli (Manchester University
Press, forthcoming).
5
Jonathan King, ‘Charge of the rewrite brigade’, The Australian, 20 December 2002.
6
‘Anzacs “should say sorry” for Gallipoli’, New Zealand Herald, 18 January 2003;
Martin Johnston, ‘Apology absurd for “invasion”’, New Zealand Herald, 20 January
2003; Christopher Pugsley, ‘Did historians have too much to drink?’, New Zealand
Herald, 24 January 2003.

3
 The public importance of historical debate may be heightened in a country that is
struggling to come to terms with its colonial and Aboriginal heritage and its new Asian
orientation and multicultural identity. 7 However, the First World War also remains of
central importance in countries like Britain and France that have a more richly
documented historical legacy to draw upon. Such is the depth of the scar inflicted by
previously unparalleled casualties of the war. As in Australia, World War I can prompt
public controversies. For example, the parallel debates aroused by military discipline. In
Britain, a campaign developed in 1997-8 to grant a posthumous blanket pardon for
soldiers who had been ‘shot at dawn’ in punishment for crimes in the war zone. 8 This
controversial issue was reignited by Julian Sykes’ and Julian Putowski’s historical
research. It promoted both public debate and further academic research that demonstrated
the limitations of their argument. 9 A parliamentary review followed, but concluded that a
formal pardon was impossible. The campaign continues. 10
In France – as well as in Italy – a similar controversy broke out during the
celebrations of the 80th Anniversary of the Armistice of 1918. At a ceremony held in
Craonne on 5 November 1998, the French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, asked for the
‘reintegration in the collective national memory’ of the soldiers who were shot ‘for the
sake of example’ in 1914-15 and those who mutinied in 1917. As Stéphane Audoin-
Rouzeau pointed out, the fierce debate that followed bore witness to the increasing
‘presence’ of the First World War in the French collective memory. This ‘presence’ is
paradoxical, however, since the renewal of societal and political interest in the conflict
has led to public discourse that is based on the victimization of the belligerent societies,
yet to a large extent this view remains at odds with the historiography of the conflict. This
gap prompted Audoin-Rouzeau to talk with regard to the 1998 commemoration of a
‘cognitive reversion (recul)’. 11

7
Prime Minister John Howard and his predecessor Paul Keating, provide a stark contrast
in their views on Australia’s history. Howard rejects the ‘black armband’ view of history
associated with Keating.
8
The campaign’s website is www.shotatdawn.org.uk
9
Sykes & Putkowski (1989). See also: Moore (1974), Babington (1983), Sellers, (1993)
and Oram (1998). Alternative views include, Pugsley (1991), Sheffield (1994), Peaty
(1999), Corns and Hughes-Wilson (2001).
10
Bond (2002), pp. 82-4.
11
Audoin-Rouzeau (1999). On the soldiers shot ‘for the sake of example’ see Offenstadt
(1999).

4
 Whilst acknowledging the lack of any systematic comparative history of the
‘presence’ of the First World War, 12 Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker claimed that France
was the country in which this phenomenon manifested itself most forcefully. 13 We cannot
agree. Various statistics suggest a significant level of public engagement in Britain. In
1998 the Public Record Office received, on average, 130 questions each week about
soldiers of the Great War. 14 The same year, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission
dealt with more than 35,000 queries specifically related to the war. 15 Many of these
queries will have come from people investigating their family history. A more general
illustration is the British Legion’s annual campaign to sell poppies as an emblem of
remembrance for Britain’s war dead. Each November, this symbol is a pervasive
presence; featuring on the front pages of newspapers, on car stickers, and worn proudly
by politicians across the political spectrum. Although representing all wars, the poppy
remains closely associated with the battles in Flanders. However important the ‘shot at
dawn’ controversy was in France in 1998, it seems that it subsequently subsided whereas
in the British case, the popular commitment to the memory of the war is still being
channelled by charities and voluntary organizations. 16 And as the calls upon the PRO and
the CWGC demonstrate, this is a phenomenon imbedded in family memory as much as in
national commemorative forms.
Similarly, the comparative literary or cultural landscapes show a common pattern
rather than a French exception. The public success of novels like those of Jean Rouaud, 17
or Sébastien Japrisot,18 of the comic strips of Tardi, or of the recent films inspired by the
war experience,19 are undoubtedly significant, but they can barely substantiate the claim
of a uniquely French phenomenon. Indeed, some of the most successful recent English-
language literature has been based on the World War I experience such as Sebastian

12
Audoin-Rouzeau, Le Débat, (1999), 123
13
Audoin-Rouzeau, Becker, (2000), 10
14
R. Stummer, ‘The War we can’t forget’, Guardian, 5 November 1998, p. 12.
15
Moriarty (1999), p. 653.
16
The sale of poppies raised £21.3 million in 2001 for the British Legion’s charitable
work. www.britishlegion.org (accessed 24 March 2003).
17
Les champs d’honneur (1990)
18
Un long dimanche de fiançailles (1997)
19
For example, La vie et rien d’autre (1989) and Capitaine Conan (1996) by Bertrand
Tavernier, and La chambre des Officiers (2001) by Francois Dupeyron.

5
Faulks’ Birdsong or Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. 20 The popularity of Blackadder
Goes Forth (BBC TV, 1989), voted the number nine in 100 Great Television Moments of
the century 21 and of the re-broadcast of the 1960s documentary series, The Great War in
2003, in addition to less well received films such as The Trench (1999) or Deathwatch
(2002) and the BBC TV documentary The Trench (2002) also testify to enduring interest.
The First World War thus remains a powerful subject in several countries, both in
terms of public discourse and academic endeavour. In this respect, as the liveliness of
debates about military discipline or Gallipoli suggest, the relationship between history in
the public sphere and historical research ought now to be systematically and
comparatively addressed since it accounts for the conditions in which World War I
historians have been operating in recent years. For example, it has been recently
suggested that this renewed interest in the First World War may be interpreted as a
‘reaction against the overwhelming weight of the Second World War’ both in collective
memory and in the historiography. 22

In parallel to this public phenomenon, it has also seemed that the community of
scholars dedicated to the history of the First World War has grown significantly in recent
years. Random meetings with colleagues or students, and the experience of historical
conferences or gatherings, appear to confirm the vitality of academic activity in our field.
This impression encouraged the idea of the conference as a means to foster intellectual
exchanges in this growing community.
It may be useful here to chart the development of this subjective perspective
through a simple but significant indicator, the number of publications listed in one of the
major databases: Historical Abstracts. This database has been published since 1954 and
covers over 2,000 journals in the social sciences and humanities whose publications
interest historians across period and geographical area. 23

20
Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong (1993); Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the
Door (1993), The Ghost Road (1995). Birdsong sold approximately 1.5 million copies by
the end of the 1990s (Todman, PhD thesis, submitted May 2003).
21
Bond (2002) p. 86.
22
Becker and Rousso (2001), p. 14
23
Cf. ABC-Clio website at http://serials.abc-clio.com/ it must be noted that Historical
Abstracts excludes publications related to the United States and Canada which are
covered in a different database, America: History and life

6
Figure 1 here

Out of the 619,002 books and articles listed by the database, 6860 references were
explicitly related to the history of the First World War. As the figure above shows, the
overall increase in World War I publication is undeniable and on average 200 articles or
books were published annually between 1980 and 1999. Despite the structural limitations
and especially the linguistic imbalance inherent in this survey, it can at least be taken as a
conservative estimate of activity in our field. It is likely that the upsurge would be more
noticeable if it were possible to measure book sales or overall publications, including
fiction, referring to World War I. 24
Figure 2 here
Our first conclusion thus confirms a ‘common sense approach’ and the overall
increase vindicates our initial premises. Yet in relative terms, the steady increase shown
since the 1980s only means that First World War studies constitute between 1 and 1.5%
of the global historical production. World War I studies may indeed be a booming field,
but its growth took place in an environment which, related to the ‘democratization’ of
higher education, led to an increase in historical studies altogether.
It is possible that some of the surges in output on the graph correlate with the 50th,
70th and 80th anniversaries of the war. To speculate further requires this numerical
overview of academic activity to be placed within a broader intellectual context in order
to observe some historiographical trends. In a recent survey, David Cannadine
highlighted a ‘shift away from the search for causation to the search for meaning’ 25 as
one of the key developments in historical enquiry. This change is central to the influence
of cultural history on all varieties of historical scholarship. Miri Rubin has explained its
nature thus,

the ‘cultural turn’ is served by a hybrid of critical strategies which illuminate

modes of communication, the circulation of ideas and practices and the agency of
the individual, and which always attend to meaning. It is best when practised with
an awareness of the intellectual roots of its concepts and procedures, alert to the
allure of its rhetoric. To deal with culture is thus to deal by definition with the
mixing of categories, for it is the system of meanings which makes order, ranks

24
Todman (Phd thesis).
25
Cannadine (2002), p. ix.

7
 priority and suggests useful connections between things – real, felt, and imagined.
[…] contexts of use; use and practice are the ways in which we gain entry into the
world of meanings of those among whom we have never lived. 26

In the context of First World War studies, this agenda has reinvigorated research. A
decade ago, Jay Winter surveyed a series of recent books that constituted ‘a new cultural
history of the Great War’. 27 His later survey identified the significant trend inherent in
this new development as a shift from social history (‘the history of defiance’) to cultural
history (‘the history of consent’). 28 French historiography does not quite fit this pattern,
but nonetheless demonstrates the centrality of cultural history. In what has been described
as a somewhat ‘muted and artificial’29 controversy the French co-directors of the Historial
(notably Annette Becker & Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau) have disagreed with a small
group of historians 30 who refute their emphasis on ‘war culture’ as a critical concept in
the understanding of the conflict.

It has been observed that one of the weaknesses of cultural history is its
eclecticism and that the solution is to adopt a comparative approach.31 Furthermore, a
phenomenon such as the First World War requires comparison since it was, by definition,
a trans-national event, yet a truly exhaustive comparative study of the conflict remains a
daunting ideal. Given the scale of the conflict comparison can only be achieved in limited
fashion or through extensive coordinated cooperation. 32 The comparative study of the
cultural history of the war has been implemented by the scholars associated with the
Historial de la Grande Guerre. Behind their determination to gather together scholars
from different countries, lay the conviction that the system of representation of the
belligerent societies was the unifying factor which shaped the common experience of the
conflict through the mobilization of state agencies and civil societies, regardless of
nationalities and allegiances.

26
Rubin (2002), p. 90.
27
Winter (1992), p. 532.
28
Winter (1998), p. 88
29
Prost (2002)
30
Rousseau (1999); Cazals & Rousseau (2001); Abbal (2000)
31
Winter (1995), p. 10.
32
Winter and Robert (1997)

8
 However, despite its continuous influence on the historiography, the programme
of comparative history that Marc Bloch, himself a World War I veteran suggested, still
faces inherent difficulties and criticism which partly explains its minor status. The
response to our call for papers, which explicitly encouraged comparative history, offers
an illustration here. Out of the 92 proposals received, only a dozen were based on a
comparative study. This quantitative weakness of comparative history betrays the
difficulties associated with this kind of study. The necessity of immersing oneself in one
or two different cultures and more than one national historiography is a formidable
challenge. Moreover, the need to work in more than one language, not only requires
significant linguistic ability, but may in itself raise intractable problems. That is,
historians build their narrative and analysis on categories which belong to a particular
culture or at least to a linguistic area. In doing so, translation difficulties naturally crop
up, but they may also be symptomatic of a deeper historiographical problem with which
comparativists have then to grapple - the history of shell shock is a case in point.33
Michel Espagne has made further important criticisms of the comparative
approach. In his work, Espagne aims to break with the national perspectives that
dominate historical studies and which, he argues, amount to a ‘historiographical
ethnocentrism’.34 His programme of research investigates cultural contacts, processes of
cultural cross-fertilization, circulations, and supranational acculturation. However,
Espagne underestimates the heuristic value of comparative history and misrepresents it.
To focus on his fundamental premise, Espagne argues that,

To compare two objects means to oppose them in order to enumerate their

resemblances and differences as well as, by an unavoidable shift, to petrify the
oppositions […] the comparison comforts the national divide and makes its
questioning problematic

He thus implies that comparative history is limited to the study of national identity or
structures and hampers the breaking down of the nation as a cultural entity. 35 Yet the
individual comparative essays presented here suggest otherwise. Espagne views

33
See the special issue of the Journal of contemporary history (2000), 35, 1 and Winter
(2000).
34
Espagne (1999), pp. 35-36.
35
Espagne (1999) p. 36.

9
comparative history as a study of cultural structures; his focus on cultural transfers is such
that he seems oblivious to the usefulness of comparison in analysing a social or cultural
process. Whereas, the comparative history of the First World War is, first and foremost,
the history of a process of adaptation to industrial warfare.

Undeniably, there is still a long way to go before comparativists can claim a major
part of scholarly production. Many intellectual and professional hurdles remain in the
path of comparative history but there is hope that the structure of the profession may be
changing in its favour. The Historial de la Grande Guerre has been influential here. It is
not simply the type of history it physically embodies or fosters financially that has
achieved this. The Historial’s impact lies primarily in the communication and teaching
dispensed by its founders and scholars. Through their publications and their other
activities in the public sphere, 36 the body of scholarship which can be associated with the
Historial has influenced both historical production at large and the teaching of Modern
European History. 37 The collective and individual curricula embodied in this book have
clearly been shaped by the Historial’s agenda. In a more direct way, many of our
contributors were or still are supervised by historians who have been contributing to the
Historial’s development since its foundation. The Historial also provided moral and
material support to the editors in the run-up to the Lyon conference. For these reasons, the
issues discussed at our conference were closely aligned with the Historial’s main
preoccupations, that is, the challenge of thinking about the Great War in terms of the
entire century and the entire world, and of viewing the war’s cultural aspects as the heart
of the conflict.38
Yet if the vertical links between established and younger scholars may be detected,
horizontal links at the lower levels are less readily established. The youngest scholars
largely remain ignorant of their peers in other institutions. There are many reasons for this
relative isolation; they include the individualistic culture that predominates in intellectual
circles, the lack of funding in history departments for travel, and the dominance of
established scholars at conferences and seminars. All of which leaves relatively little

36
Jay Winter was the co-producer, co-writer and chief historian for the PBS series The
Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century, shown on the BBC as 1914-18:
The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century; special issue of Le Monde in
1998 dedicated to the war
37
Horne (2001) p. 70
38
Audoin-Rouzeu, Becker, Becker, Krumeich, Winter (1994), p. 8.

10
space for the newest historians to submit their work to critical assessment, even when
they have the confidence to do so. One of the crucial motivations behind the Lyon
conference was the ambition to create a forum dedicated to this purpose. The conference
thus presented an opportunity to view the research being conducted on World War I by
the youngest cohort of the profession.

With the aforementioned observations in mind, we thus intended to reflect in our

call for papers our desire to address the issues raised by the history of the Great War in an
interdisciplinary and comparative approach by organizing an event at which different
generations of scholars would get together and exchange ideas. Our call for papers
identified four themes and a specific set of questions resulted from each of them.
1- Waging war:
To what extent have cultural and military historians truly colonized each other's
areas as the epigraph to the Cambridge University Press series ‘Studies in the
social and cultural history of modern warfare’ suggests? 39 Can the social history
of war be studied without a thorough engagement with events at the front or vice
versa? Does the recent and provocative Niall Ferguson's Pity of War 40 point to an
original and proper way to combine military, economic, diplomatic, political and
cultural history?

2- Communities at war:
From the individual to the state, how did the different levels of social organisation
deal with the conflict and its consequences? What kind of solidarities,
discrimination and mobilisation processes were at work in 1914-18? What
relationship was established between military and civilian needs? Can new light
be shed in this way upon the economic and political life of the belligerent
societies?

3- The First World War and the intimate:

The ‘totalizing logic’ of the Great War meant that it pervaded the most intimate
spheres of the belligerent societies. How did the conflict impinge on sexual

39
Jay Winter’s Sites of memory, sites of mourning. The Great War in European cultural
history inaugurated this series in 1995.
40
Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London, 1998).

11
 morality and gender relationships, on individuals and families? From shellshock to
home front anxieties and mourning process, how were the variegated sufferings
faced? How did contemporary medical science and practices cope with the war?

4- Intellectual responses to the war:

What kind of artistic, literary and scholarly responses did the war provoke? Where did
the dividing line run through these different responses? What should be deemed as
paramount: degree and qualities of participation in the war effort, nationality, or
intellectual generation?

The responses elicited by this appeal illuminated the range and diversity of the research
being carried out in our field at the time. It is now up to the reader to determine if the
papers we selected,41 which form the basis of this book, live up to the challenges issued
by our call for papers. They illustrate both the editors’ subjective preferences and some
significant aspects of the history of the First World Was as it is currently being written.
The most important division that is traditionally drawn in the historiography of
war is that between military and cultural history. Our collection illustrates some ways in
which this division is being bridged. For example, the coming together of military and
socio-cultural histories has given credence to the notion of the ‘home front’ in
historiographies whose national language has no direct equivalent. In French for instance,
‘l’arrière’ (the rear) is the closest translation, but it misses the critical point now raised by
the historiography of the conflict: the blurring of boundaries between soldiers and
civilians during the Great War whose ‘totalizing logic’ 42 determined the social responses
to the war. Thus the scrutiny of the mechanisms of social and cultural mobilization in this
collection leads to a reconsideration of the distinction between combatants and non-

41
Eight of our speakers chose not to appear in the present collection, some of their works
have since appeared in scholarly journals or as books. (Aaron Cohen ‘Meta-myth-
making: the Memory of Russia’s First World War 1917-1939’; Santanu Das ‘“Kiss me
Hardy”: Intimacy, Gender and Gesture in the First World War Trenches’; Susan Grayzel
‘Militarizing Civilians: Gender and Cultural Responses to Aerial Bombardment during
the First World War’; Eric Lohr ‘Russian Economic Nationalism during WW1: the
campaign against Enemy Aliens in the Imperial Economy’; Jenny Macleod, ‘The
Persistence and Renewal of the Romance of War: Britain, Australia and Gallipoli’; Helen
McCartney ‘Local identity and motivation in war’; Andrew Parsons, ‘The British
response to Chemical Warfare in WW1’ and Dan Todman ‘Sans peur et sans reproche:
the death of Sir Douglas Haig, January 1928’.)
42
Horne (1997) p. 3.

12
combatants and envisions societies as agents of warfare as much as victims of the
conflagration. It therefore refutes the argument, at the heart of the collective memory of
the Great War, that the experience of the conflict was solely one of victimization. 43
Tammy Proctor’s paper on an intelligence service in occupied Belgium, which saw the
militarization of both men and women, illustrates this point precisely. Similarly Susan
Grayzel’s conference paper explored the way in which aerial bombardment targeted the
home and created notions of ‘civic virtue’ and heroism that were available to both men
and women.
Such papers typify both the influence of the rise of women’s and gender history,
and the colonisation of military history by cultural history, just as Jay Winter called for
the jettisoning of ‘outworn distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, and between
both the political, economic and military history of the day. In the 1914-18 conflict, all
were mobilized; all were transformed.’44 Military history has benefited from the extra
breadth this has brought to the discipline, 45 but there are limits to this colonisation.
Although war must rate as one of the central shaping experiences of humanity, an
historical topic that must be explored in all its aspects, the attentions of cultural historians
and social historians before them have not served to draw military history fully into the
body of the kirk. Witness the decision, acknowledged by the editor, to omit military
history with others from a survey of What is History Now? 46 The failure to include
operational military history here, despite the intention evidenced in the call for papers to
give military history equal weighting to other genres, reflects the paucity of proposals
from this area, the editors’ taste, and ultimately a serious flaw for which Mike Neiberg’s
study of civil-military relations in Britain, France and the U.S. and Michelle Moyd’s
scrutiny of racism in the German Officer Corps partially compensate. They respectively
illustrate the potential of a comparative approach, and the way in which attention to
cultural themes can enrich military history.
Despite their diversity, it is possible to discern some other themes running through
our chapters. Several of them reflect the attention paid by the historiography to the

43
‘dans la conscience mémorielle, mieux vaut être victime qu’agent de souffrance et de
mort. Celle-ci est, toujours reçue, toujours anonyme, n’est jamais donnée : on en est,
toujours, la victime’Audoin-Rouzeau, Becker (2000) p. 9
44
Winter (1998), p. 92.
45
Bond (1991), p. 9.
46
Cannadine (2002), p. vii. Operational history in France is even more peripheral in the
historical profession. Alexander (2001), pp. 191-5.

13
pervasiveness of the war which seeped into the intimate and issued dramatic challenges to
every belligerent society whose very humanity was then at stake. In the wake of seminal
studies by George Mosse, Joanna Bourke, and Paul Lerner, 47 Anne Duménil’s paper on
suffering and military discipline, André Loez’s on soldiers’ tears, Jessica Meyer’s on
shell shock and masculinity and Hans-Georg Hofer’s on shell shock and multi-ethnicity
address the psychological consequences of the conflict and provide us with rigorous yet
sympathetic analyses of individual suffering in wartime. Although their respective
preoccupations are somewhat removed from these studies, Jean-Yves Le Naour’s paper
on decadence and regeneration, Emmanuelle Cronier’s on soldiers on leave, Matthew
Stibbe’s on a community built by civilian internees, Susanne Terwey’s on anti-Semitism,
and Pierre Purseigle’s on the mobilisation of local communities interestingly supplement
them. They cannot be rallied under the banner of ‘social psychology’ but they nonetheless
show how the mental and emotional aspects of the war experience are now being
systematically encompassed in the social history of the conflict.
Taken as a whole, the following studies demonstrate that it is not only its sheer
size and its industrial and technical dimensions that make the First World War of
outstanding importance in modern history. The conflict impinged so dramatically upon
individuals, challenging their definitions and assertions of self so extensively, that a
collective, if not necessarily concerted, historical endeavour has been prompted in order
to understand the intimate dimension of the war experience. In this undertaking, World
War I historians face a thorny question, that of the articulation of the collective and
individual levels of experience. This issue is likely to beleaguer cultural historians for
some time to come, as witness the debates about micro-history and the relations between
social and cultural history.
This willingness to unravel the arcane lineaments of the war experience takes
place amidst changes in the usual scale of historical explanations. 48 This is obviously
implied in the turn towards comparative methods. What may be more significant here is
an equal commitment to reconsider the very chronology of the conflict.49 Tracing aspects
of the conflict back into the 19th century and onwards to the advent of the Second World
War is vital to understanding the First World War in context.

47
Mosse (1996), Bourke (1996), Lerner, (1996)
48
Jacques Revel, Jeux d’échelle
49
Prochasson (1998)

14
 The central debate in the chronology of the cultural history of the war has opposed
the traditional and the modern. Paul Fussell, Modris Eksteins and Samuel Hynes 50 have
argued that the conflict constituted a profound break which forced social and cultural
modernity on to the world. Whereas Jay Winter has pointed to the continued consolatory
power of ‘traditional’ forms of imagining warfare. 51 In their works, Stefan Goebel and
Susanne Terwey present two arguments based respectively on the resonance of
medievalism in German commemorations of the war and on the combination of anti-
Semitism and Germanophobia in Britain, which lead, in this respect, to different
conclusions. Dissonances of this kind speak to the complexity of the social responses to
the conflict.
Olivier Compagnon also examines the idea of the war as a watershed. This chapter
encompasses the conflict in Latin America’s modern cultural history and assesses its
position, contrasting it with traditional European perspectives. This paper also prompts
another challenge: that of adjusting the scale of analysis to the geographical dimensions
of the conflict and recovering the aspects that made this a world war. Our papers thus
look beyond the Western Front and beyond the three main belligerents. Ismee Tames
explores the intellectual challenges that war posed in a neutral country. It is disappointing
that we were not able to include more papers in the conference and in the book from
neutral and non-belligerent countries, Italy and the Balkans are also notable absences
from the line-up.

In an interview published in 1996, Paul Fussell said of his book The Great War
and Modern Memory, ‘It’s really about the Vietnam War as much as it is about the First
World War’. 52 Fussell’s remark illustrates that, as Jay Winter has pointed out, the new
cultural history can be seen as the product of a generation that began writing about the
Great War in the shadow of Vietnam. 53 Similarly, Pierre Nora has compared the
‘historiographical upheaval’ of the First World War to the reappraisal applied to the
French Revolution a decade ago, describing it as ‘the generational advent of an
international team, German, English, French, and through a collective and original

50
Fussell (1975), Eksteins (1989), Hynes (1991).
51
Winter (1995).
52
Paul Fussell interviewed by Sheldon Hackney in ‘The initial shock… A conversation
with Paul Fussell.’, Humanities, November/December 1996. The interview can also be
read online at http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/1996-11/fussell.html
53
Winter (1998) p. 91.

15
experience’, that of the Historial. 54 Building on Kuhn’s definition of a paradigm and on
Noiriel’s ‘pragmatism’, the perspective adopted here has stressed the social dimensions of
our historiographical undertaking. Moreover, the priority given to young scholars in our
project is likely to raise a similar kind of question for one may indeed wonder if the
collection presented here comprises the work of a new intellectual generation. However
gratifying this would sound, it does not.
If an ‘intellectual generation’ is based on the notion of engagement and
commitment to the social and political life of one’s time,55 it is difficult to identify a
unifying political factor. Where the 1960s were marked by ideological quarrels and the
heyday of social history, or the 1970s by liberation movements and the rise of gender
history and the linguistic turn, it is more difficult to identify a political movement with a
similar intellectual legacy in the 1990s. War in Europe did make it back to the headlines
in this decade, at the very time when most of us were entering higher education. Yet, it is
difficult to see war in the Balkans as the defining moment of our generation. How this
conflict played out in terms of the study of the First World War - beyond glib
observations on the implications of assassinations in Sarajevo - is a story which remains
to be told. One exception may be that the creation of the European Union has encouraged
historians to view 1914-18 as a transnational event. Beyond this, the collapse of
communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the claimed triumph of liberal capitalism in the
‘end of history’, 56 provided the ideological backdrop against which we started exercising
our citizen’s rights but it would be near to impossible to identify common political
grounds on which our relationship to History has been built. Although the idea of a
politically apathetic ‘Generation X’ is an unfair caricature, it is the case that our approach
to historiographical controversies is not obviously motivated by political agendas. Nor
did particular national historiographical debates spill over into our collective discussions.
Indeed, this may point to a characteristic of international gatherings of the sort. While the
fierce debate which in France pits the respective advocates of the schools of ‘consent’ and
‘coercion’ rings somewhat hollow beyond French academic circles, the controversy
prompted by Niall Ferguson’s Pity of War although explicitly mentioned in our call for

54
Nora (2000) p. 243
55
Sirinelli (1988)
56
Fukuyama (1989)

16
papers, fared no better in this respect57. Such debates indeed remain circumscribed
within national boundaries just as the debate about the ‘learning curve’ which animates
the anglophone military historiography of the First World War does not seem to find an
echo on the continent.58

At any rate, neither the editors nor the collective would claim to have given birth
to a new paradigm. Indeed, there is not even agreement among us on key concepts. For
example, the editors continue to disagree over the idea of ‘war culture’ and its ‘matrix’
function. While the importance of the wartime system of representations is acknowledged
in many of the papers here, there is divergence on the degree to which cultural aspects
might have counterbalanced or determined other factors which like technology or
innovation held sway over the way the conflict ultimately was waged. As Dennis
Showalter observes,

This point is particularly significant within the context of an historiography

increasingly stressing compliance rather than cozening or coercion as the crucial
element in maintaining support for the war effort. Emotional investment in national
identity certainly was important. […] One might also suggest, however, that
Verdun, the Somme, and the endless battles of the Isonzo were all manifestations of
morale sustained by a culture of competence and a technology of everyday whose
proper functionings were as crucial to the Great War as any of the more obviously
martial manifestations of the machine age. 59

The importance of the coming together of military and cultural history lies in the new
perspectives it has prompted both disciplines to encompass. In their respective works,
military and cultural historians have been incorporating previously overlooked factors,
and have consequently refined their traditional approaches to the First World War.
To a large extent, the following collection illustrates a common willingness to address the
complexities of the war experience and to engage critically with all quarters of the

57
Reviews by Prior and Wilson (2000) and by Jay Winter (with the author’s reply) at
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/ferguson.htm
58
Bond (2002); Sheffield (2001)
59
Showalter (2002), p. 82.

17
historiography. The distinctions once drawn between a French school concerned with a
history of the representations of the war and its German and Anglo-Saxon counterparts,
respectively presented as the study of the presence of the war in the political sphere and
as the history of wartime mass and popular culture, have now lost their relevance.60
Although these themes remain central in World War I historiography, the circulation
between different national historiographies and their cross-fertilization are now too
important to allow these sorts of national distinctions. A comparativist attitude can only
further undermine such boundaries. However variegated, our approaches seem to have
broken with the traditional opposition between the idea of function and the idea of human
agency. Setting aside philosophical arguments about determinisms and individual
freedom (as well as their political offshoots), the cultural historians of the Great War
acknowledge this critical tension and recognize the necessity of taking agents seriously.
In a context where the growth of state apparatus and coercive instruments were
conspicuous, representations are not only uncovered as delusions of the ‘truth’ or by-
products of propaganda, but also account for the meaning given to events and social
practices. 61 In line with the overall evolution of historical studies, World War I historians
thus address the ‘social construction’ of the war experience. 62 In this process, as this
collection illustrates, the ‘multivocality’ of cultural history is once more asserted.
This last qualification leads us back to Gérard Noiriel and the historiographical
crisis he engages with. The historiography of the First World War now presents a
complex picture of the conflict and draws on multiple approaches to a common object.
Yet, the splitting up of the historiography regretted by Noiriel for the divisive tensions it
has brought about does not in this case constitute a crisis. Indeed, the vitality of First
World War studies lies in a renewed commitment to Lord Acton’s call to ‘study problems
in preference to periods’. 63

As Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau pointed out, the goal of understanding the Great

War seems out of reach, a nagging issue in the cultural historian’s consciousness. 64 The

60
Audoin-Rouzeau, S. et al. (1994), 7
61
Dosse (1997), 266
62
Berger and Luckman (1966),
63
Lord Acton, Lectures on modern history, London, Macmillan, 1906
64
‘Tout se passe en effet comme si nous voulions, plus que jamais auparavant,
comprendre la Grande Guerre. Mais sans avoir désormais, peut-être, les moyens d’y
parvenir jamais’ Audoin-Rouzeau (1999), p. 130. Some military and international

18
bewilderment brought about by this conflict undoubtedly accounts for the energy
dispensed in studying it. Yet, by introducing the following collection, we would like to
strike a more hopeful note than the gloomy tone induced by the 1998 commemorations.
In many respects, a proper understanding of the Great War may seem a remote prospect,
rendered all the more difficult by a century’s distance from the attitudes which made the
slaughter possible. Nonetheless, we remain convinced that we present here a set of
chapters which offer a significant contribution to our field. We hope that our project has
laid foundations which will encourage sociability amongst the newest World War I
historians. A network has been formed that will enable the sharing of a set of common
reference points and the exchange of ideas.
The contributors to this book may be seen as a cohort who are implementing and
elaborating on earlier insights. Such a mobilisation both tests and pays tribute to our
mentors’ hypotheses and previous works. In doing so, we will continue to pursue that
demanding ambition of the total history of a total war.

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