Verdun: The Soldier-Peasant
The French cult of the peasant—such a recurrent theme of Pagnol’s films— was strongly reinforced by the Great War, in particular the battle of Verdun. In the French collective imagination, the Great War is Verdun. On the Allied side the French fought alone, and Pétain, the general in charge, organized a rotation system so that no one served continuously at Verdun for more than a few weeks. As a result, most French soldiers fought there. For 300 days and nights raged a battle which concentrated all the horror of the war. Henri de Montherlant wrote: ‘If all the men who died here got up, there would be no place for them to stand since they were killed in successive layers.’2 The most chilling aspect for those arriving at Verdun for the first time was the haunted faces of the men whom they was relieving. As Antoine Prost puts it: ‘Like Auschwitz, Verdun marks a transgression of the limits of the human condition.’3 But unlike the Somme and Passchendaele where, for the British, a certain idea of heroism died in the mud, Verdun came to symbolize the glory of the war as well as its horror. This was not glory as conceived in 1914—soldiers charging with their bayonets gleaming in the sun—but the noble tenacity of the French peasant doggedly defending the soil of France, as he would his farm and family. French commentators claimed that the battle illustrated the virtues of the French peasant: the endurance of the Auvergnat, the abnegation of the Breton, the toughness of the mountain dwellers of the Pyrenees and Alps.4 Verdun was represented as the ‘shield’ of France, the victory of the ‘soldier-peasant’ over German steel.5
Although hardly a convincing explanation of why France won the war, as an explanation of the victory of Verdun, it was not entirely false. At Verdun, there were no proper lines of trenches, only jagged ‘lines’ of craters offering little protection. It was a battle of isolated groups of men, without orders, desperately clinging on to a crater or struggling from shell hole to shell hole. If the battle of the Marne was a victory of planning, Verdun was genuinely the battle of the ordinary soldier—the poilu—a battle over which the high command exercised little control: it was a victory of endurance. As the historian Gabriel Hanotoux wrote in 1920: ‘This was a war fought by men of the land … It is by the land, with the land, with men of the land, that France defends herself … This peasant, this Frenchman of the war, has become suddenly the archetypal Frenchman, the Frenchman of the peace.’6 ‘The peasant’, said Pétain in 1935, ‘accomplishes his military duty with the same tranquil assurance as he does his duty as a farmer … In the most sombre moments of the war, it was the determined and serene gaze of the French peasant which bolstered my confidence.’7 Since the late nineteenth century, conservative writers had deplored the exodus from the countryside and celebrated France’s perfect balance of agriculture and industry.8 But Verdun, the nightmare battle at the heart of this most modern of wars, gave new resonance to rural representations of French identity.
Ruralism was an important theme in the literature and painting of the 1920s. There was a vogue for regionalist and rustic novels such as Henri Pourrat’s Auvergne novel sequence Gaspard des montagnes, published between 1925 and 1931. The solid virtues which Pourrat ascribed to his hero from the Auvergne mountains, he later rediscovered in Marshal Pétain to whom he devoted a work of hagiography in 1942.9 In 1938, three out of the four main French literary prizes—Femina, Renaudot, and Interallié—went to rustic novels.10 After the war, there was a craze for the peaceable paintings of Utrillo, whose career had hitherto been undistinguished. In the words of the regionalist writer André Chamson: ‘Utrillo’s work depicts the resurgence of an almost abolished world … A world which orders itself entirely around the church and the small village hall.’11
Regionalism and ruralism influenced the post-war reconstruction of France. The art historian Paul Léon, who was in charge of architecture at the Ministry of Fine Arts, turned regionalism into the official doctrine of reconstruction. ‘Born without architects’, he wrote, ‘peasant architecture developed freely in our provinces like the natural product of the soil.’ In rebuilding France it was necessary to guard against ‘outside intrusions’. In architectural history, 1923 may be famous as the year of publication of Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, but more important at the time was the appearance of the first volume of Charles Letrosne’s Murs et toits pour les pays de chez nous which became the manual of architectural regionalism.12 Regionalism went hand in hand with a celebration of France’s medieval heritage, a theme which had acquired poignancy after the destruction of Reims cathedral by German artillery. The mutilated cathedral was depicted on innumerable cards and posters. After the war there was a neo-medieval revival in French church architecture.13
At the two world fairs held in Paris during the inter-war years—the Arts Décoratifs Exhibition of 1925 and the International Exhibition of 1937— regionalism was prominent in the French entries. This had not been true of previous fairs in 1889 and 1900 where it played almost no part. The 1925 Exhibition is remembered today for Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau which was one of the programmatic statements of modernism, but the Pavillon was hidden behind the Grand Palais, and pride of place was given to the regional pavilions and the miniature French village.14 In 1937 regionalism was even more pronounced. The exhibition organizer declared: ‘ I have chosen a watchword: regionalism. Never have the provinces been invited to participate so directly in an international event.’ At the heart of the exhibition, there was a regional centre depicting the life of twenty-seven French regions, and a rural centre containing a model village.15
Regionalism transcended political boundaries. In 1937 France was governed by a Socialist Popular Front government which backed the regionalist emphasis of the exhibition. The same government also set up France’s first museum devoted to folklore, the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires (ATP). The Rural Centre had performances by folklore groups (most of whom in fact came from Paris) and demonstrations by lacemakers and rural artisans. But regionalism did not necessarily mean nostalgia. The Rural Centre promoted the idea of rural modernization. It tried to avoid pastiche by portraying a model village with electricity and running water. The right complained because the village did not contain a church. Thus there were different readings of regionalism, but agrarian spokesmen were united in praising the fact that the exhibition had ‘for the first time in France placed rural France on almost the same level as that reserved for the rest of the country’.16
Dénatalité: The Disappearance of France
Not only was the peasantry a central representation of French identity, it was also viewed as central to the survival of the French nation: the land represented fertility and the peasantry incarnated the virtues of family. In November 1920, soon after the burial of the Unknown Soldier—by implication an Unknown Soldier-Peasant—there was a barrage of publicity for the presentation of the Cognacq-Jay prizes for the largest families in France. Much was made of the rural origins of the winning families.17 Having defended France with its blood, the peasantry would now repopulate her.
The rural exodus was deplored especially for its impact on birth rates. Family size was larger in the country than the towns. The regeneration of the nation had to come from the countryside. This was the theme of one of Pagnol’s most lyrical films of 1930s, Regain, which depicts the death and rebirth of a village whose last surviving inhabitant finds a woman and sets up house with her. Having become almost a savage, he is gradually domesticated, and in the last scene, as they are sowing their fields, she announces, to the strains of a stirring soundtrack by Arthur Honegger, that she is pregnant.
After 1918, concern about French population size started to become a national obsession. Despite a superficial climate of nationalist triumphalism, France’s post-war mood was one of pessimism and uncertainty, reflected in Paul Valéry’s remark in 1919 that the war had demonstrated the mortality of civilizations: ‘a civilization is just as fragile as a life’.18 Even the fervently nationalistic writer Maurice Barrès, whose chauvinistic war jou
rnalism ran to fourteen volumes, was haunted by doubts about the consequences of the war. In optimistic vein, he celebrated how the war had thickened the texture of French patriotism, creating a spiritual community between the living and the dead; in pessimistic vein, he wondered if France could ever recover from so many deaths.19 Such cultural pessimism, reflected in works like Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918), was widespread in post-war Europe, but only in France did it focus so obsessively on population.
The obsession was not surprising since no other great power had suffered a higher proportion of deaths in the war: 1.3 million Frenchmen had been killed. Such figures were especially alarming in a country where preoccupation about the population long pre-dated the war. Once the most populous state in Europe, France’s birth rate had started to decline at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This came to be conceived as a problem in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, especially during the 1890s, when for four years the number of deaths exceeded births. Between 1871 and 1911, France’s population increased by only 8.6 per cent, Germany’s by 60 per cent, and Great Britain’s by 54 per cent. Dénatalité became the most palpable evidence of French national decline.
The year 1896 saw the foundation of the National Alliance for the Growth of the French Population (ANAPF). Philanthropists established prizes for the parents of large families. The Cognacq-Jay prize offered 25,000 francs to ninety fathers of ten or more living children. Émile Zola, always a barometer of contemporary anxieties, treated depopulation in his novel Fécondité (1899). It tells the story of a country couple living in harmony and prosperity with a family of twelve children, while the other characters, living in the city, with only small families, all come to tragic ends. The moral was not only that large families are desirable, but that the countryside is fecund and the city sterile.20
On the eve of the war, the ANAPF had 2,900 members; 241 députés had joined the natalist group in the Chamber.21 But at this stage the ANAPF remained only an elite pressure group. Its effectiveness was hindered by uncertainty whether it should concentrate on reducing infant mortality or promoting incentives for large families. Natalist propaganda was also resisted in syndicalist circles where Malthusian ideas (the restriction of family size) had an audience: why bring up children to be factory labour or cannon fodder?22 Malthusianism chimed in with fears whether the drive for ‘quantity’ would lead to a decline in ‘quality’. Late nineteenth-century worries about population size fitted into a wider obsession with decadence and racial degeneration spawned by the social consequences of urbanization and industrialization. The three great scourges of the day were believed to be syphilis, TB, and alcoholism.23 The National League against Alcoholism had been founded the year before the ANAPF. In 1915 it got the government to outlaw the production and sale of absinthe.24
In many countries, concerns about racial degeneration had encouraged the development of eugenics. Since eugenicists in America and Britain advocated the restriction of births, even sterilization, their objectives potentially contradicted those of the natalists. But in France, where the Eugenics Society was founded in 1912, most eugenicists subscribed to the neo-Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This meant that the dominant strand in eugenics was not ‘negative’—restriction of births—but ‘positive’—measures to improve social hygiene. Not until the 1930s did the competing claims of ‘quantity’ and ‘quality’ diverge in the face of concern about immigration.25
After the war, natalists were no longer crying in the wilderness. Clemenceau announced during the debate on the Versailles Treaty: ‘If France gives up large families, one can put all the clauses one wishes in the treaty … France will be lost because there will be no more French.’ The ANAPF’s membership increased to 40,000 by the end of the decade. In 1920 parliament created a Conseil supérieur de natalité to advise on increasing the birth rate. Its vice-president, Fernand Boverat, was one of the ANAPF’s most energetic leaders. The ANAPF launched the idea of Mothers’ Day where deserving mothers were rewarded by the attribution of medals: gold for those with over ten children. This event was launched with great publicity in 1920, and in 1926 it was made official by the government. But Mothers’ Day never caught on and, until resuscitated by Vichy in 1941, it largely went unnoticed.26 The main success of the natalist lobby was the 1920 law increasing penalties for abortion, and prohibiting the sale of contraceptive devices or the dissemination of birth control information.
After 1918, natalism was not confined to conservatives. Malthusianism lost ground even in syndicalist circles.27 Only fifty-five députés voted against the 1920 abortion laws. Left and right differed not over the desirability of natalism, but over how to promote it. Some conservatives wanted to grant extra votes to parents of large families in proportion to the number of children they had. A proposal to implement this ‘family vote’ was only narrowly defeated in parliament in 1923. The original inspiration behind the family vote was to strengthen family ties, and only incidentally to increase family size. But if ‘familialism’ and natalism were distinct in origin, after the war they increasingly converged. The family vote became one of the major themes of the ANAPF’s propaganda, although the urgent need to increase births meant that French culture maintained considerable tolerance towards illegitimacy.28
Proponents of the family vote were not in favour of female suffrage. A female suffrage bill was narrowly defeated in the Senate in 1922, and although it was periodically resuscitated, it never again came close to becoming law. The opposition came partly from anticlericals suspicious about the influence of the Church over women.29 But conservative natalists also opposed a measure liable to distract women from their natural role as mothers. Boverat claimed that in countries where women had the vote, the birth rate had declined.30 The emphasis which French eugenicists put on childcare also gave a scientific legitimation to the idea that women must devote themselves fully to motherhood.
Old Mother or New Woman?
During the war, the major contribution of women to the victory had been in the factories, but official propaganda preferred to portray women allegorically, as ‘Marianne’ and ‘Victory’, or as nurses, wives, and mothers. There was a vogue for postcards celebrating motherhood and reminding the poilu of his second duty to the country. On one card, a returning soldier, greeted by his wife with the words ‘now you can rest’, replies ‘impossible: preparing the class of 1936’; in another, a soldier is congratulated on having given a good thrust of his bayonet, from which three babies dangle. These cards remained popular during the inter-war years, contrasting with similarly humorous cards in Britain where babies were portrayed negatively as the end of romantic bliss.31
The reaffirmation of woman’s maternal destiny was fuelled by male anxieties over the blurring of traditional gender boundaries during the war.32 Women wore shorter skirts and shorter hair; they seemed bolder and threatening. The more ‘masculine’ women threatened the sexual identity of the returning males, all the more so because the nature of the combat had sapped masculine self-esteem. Far from being heroes, charging with bayonets at the ready, the poilus spent much of the war trapped in mud, waiting for shells to rain upon them: the experience was one of passivity and emasculation. The novelist Drieu la Rochelle wrote of his own experience of the war: ‘I was reduced to making vain gestures … I felt the Man in me had died.’33
Masculine insecurity was heightened by soldiers’ fear of female infidelity. One celebrated treatment of this theme was Le Diable au corps (1923) by the young prodigy Roland Radiguet. The novel is the story of an adolescent who has an affair with the wife of a soldier at the front. This amoral adventure of sexual initiation was the nightmare haunting the imagination of many soldiers. Radiguet sent his novel to the war novelist Raymond Dorgelès who was appalled by its cynicism. Dorgelès had himself been the victim of such an affair and the theme of sexual infidelity runs through his writing. In his post-war novel Le Réveil des morts, the hero marries a war widow and graduall
y realizes their affair had started while her husband was alive at the front. He comes to identify with the dead husband and reject the perfidious wife. In this book, another kind of female treason makes its appearance: women in the occupied part of the country, who fraternize, even sleep, with German soldiers. But as one character says: ‘women will be women’.34 Resentment of women was also stoked by anti-war writers who accused them of manufacturing the shells which killed the soldiers.
After 1918, the ‘new woman’ came to symbolize the poilu’s sense of estrangement from the post-war world.35 No one was more conservative than the poilu with his fund of nostalgic images of a world that was ending—the world depicted in the famous song ‘Madelon’. When the novelist Georges Duhamel wrote of the loyal wife ‘who maintains a radiant home … and spins at her wheel behind the door, awaiting our return’, he was describing a world in which the poilu desperately wanted to believe.36 In André Lamandé’s novel Les Lions en croix (1923), the woman’s betrayal of the hero during the war mirrors the betrayal of all the hopes of the veterans after the war: his life becomes an obsession to find her and exorcize her memory.
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