Une « culture de guerre universitaire » ? L’expérience des professeurs de l’enseignement secondaire français mobilisés dans la Grande Guerre

• Main Author: Matthieu Devigne
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: TELEMME - UMR 6570 2011-05-01
• Series: Amnis
• Subjects: First World War; France; Secondary School; Teachers; War Culture
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/amnis/1387

This contribution aims to study War Culture in First World War France on the basis of a group of soldiers selected according to their civil profession and common academic background. This medium-scale approach leads to more general observations than the analysis of trench literature would, but it is more accurate than studying a large group of officers. This approach also makes it possible for me to explore how war orders and imperatives, such as killing or being killed, are understood and embraced by soldiers, who use them as performative tools contributing to build up their own reasons to “hold out”. Studying “War culture” thus means making sense of the complex relationships between the experience of fire and the civil culture of soldiers. More precisely, this paper explains how secondary school teachers (a contingent composed of little more than 500 men, among whom Marc Bloch, Jules Isaac, Charles Delvert and other former students of the Ecole Normale Supérieure) have employed their intellectual skills and cultural references to cope with the conflict, both accepting and rejecting some of its principles.