Great French War Culture - Essay Example

Lecturer: Topic: French war culture During the First World War, the Canadian and the French used posters as propaganda devices for the purpose of mobilizing resources such as man power to be recruited into the military and other fund raising purposes. This could have been attributed to the lack of means of communication such a radio that came to be invented later on and the existence of hundreds of these posters during the war with some print runs in the tens of thousands. The war culture of the French was realized when they had parades and all their work seemed directed towards anything but war that was tearing apart the France that so easily understood what they were getting into. When they used the word parade, it was a symbol and a sideshow set up alongside in the ballet which failed miserably, (Smith, Stéphane & Annette, 7); the culture that was seen as new and trying to shock the audience as it was radically new embrace for its own sake. It also involved costumes that were wild, irreverent music and non-classical choreography pointed to a violent rapture with the sentimental and patriotic aesthetic. War culture was evident as the nation-state remained the basic military, political, economic, social and cultural unit for the duration of the war with less regards to the universal ideologies that were coming in as the war became total. In other cases, the European states were forces to drag their empires into war to make their armies stronger in a bid to conquer the war. It ended to no small degree thanks to intervention from outside Europe, which is the United States and the conflict came to an end. The war was characterized by the involvement of European countries from the onset but it later came to absorb other parts of the world such as Russia. The European focus of the war mattered especially to the French in reflecting on the twentieth century given that the German defeat in 1940 suddenly and dramatically removed most of France and most of the French from the war. That is why the war was more accurately describe the conflict of the 1914 to 1918 as The Great War rather than World War I. The French nation was in crisis due to the bloodbaths of this war through the military defeat and the Nazi occupation if the Second World War; this is why the stakes were high for the French nation in this war. Another characteristic of the war is that the French found ways to cope and gaining solace in songs, movies, and images of ordinary people that they took to hear and gave them some reassurance of recovery. Evident is the power of popular myths and symbols at work throughout a critical period between the twentieth century for France and the French people carrying important messages of gritty self-reliance and cheerful humor. Such were embodied in personas of musical stars and poets such as Sarah Bernhardt; these celebrities and characters influenced the way in which the French redefined their lives and responded to Smith, Stéphane & Annette (9) assert that in the Great War, the western front played the role played by the eastern front in World War II which is the theatre where the outcome of the war was decided and France was the country where virtually the entire western front was located. The position of the western front and the character of the fighting that took place there made the Great War a life or death struggle for France and as such France to be sure had lost two large and prosperous provinces of Alsace and Lorraine in its defeat by Prussia in 1871. These regions were borderlands where people spoke German and Alsatian dialects at least as much as they spoke French though France managed to remain the same without these two territories. For the large swath of northeastern France conquered by Germans in 1914 was much of the French coal and steel production that landed into the German hands. The French could not stand another massive appropriation of national territory into German hands as a matter of principle. The turning point In order to remain France, the national community had to re-conquer both north eastern France and the older lost territories as well if the experience of total war would in time invoke the destruction of the national community that embarked on it. Based on this, the French had to justify practically an open-ended commitment to the war and to a vindictive and unworkable peace once it concluded France like all other protagonists in the war experienced a period of crisis due to the continued participation in the war as it could by no means be taken for granted. Parade premiered during a phase of national vertigo that lasted most of 1917 – mutiny at the front, strikes in the interior and bitter divisions in the government resolved by a quasi-dictatorship under the government of Georges Clemenceau. In the end, the national community proved remarkably adaptable and a revolution was up in the making from in and within. This involved the coming together of allies that made it possible for France to emerge from the war as part of the victorious group. It should also be noted that France tried but only succeeded partly in ending the war where an incomplete military victory led to a bitter peace that ultimately failed to resolve the conflict. Commemoration sought to console individuals in deep mourning and to construct a narrative of national triumph not actually there in the Versailles treaty of 1919 as a grieving France came to reject the war; it is ironical how France forgot and represses much of its experience in the Great War after World War II, only to return to the war and to traces of its abiding grief at the end of the twentieth century. War shaped the entire history of France not withstanding its predilection for diplomacy over military conflict as the regime was born out of war with Germany in 1871 and died at war against the same country in 1940. Conflict with the Reich in actual or potential haunted each of the 100 or so governments that presided over France in between as the French military revival after 1871 took place and his was against the back drop of the contentious and at times tortured relationship between the French army and the French republic, (Smith, Stéphane & Annette, 10) Parties and factions at all points on the political spectrum fought over the soul of the army where the Catholics and monarchists admired and advocated traditional military virtues of order over hierarchy. Militarism had roots o the political left as revolutionaries since time before the war echoed their opinion in the philosophy ‘Every soldier a citizen, every citizen a soldier’. This gave birth to the universal male conscription in which the republic ordered the entire population of young men to organize themselves in battalions bearing the banner ‘The French people risen against tyranny’ as this political culture profoundly shaped the French army and vice versa. Hence the French army of 1914 reflected a variety of antagonisms and compromises at work h the preceding decades As the admiration for militarism during the revolution was taking root, most republicans looked at the army with suspicion and few dared raise their voice against Napoleon who was the greatest guardian of the French glory. In the decades before 1914, there was a looming distrust of the professional officers who republicans saw as enemies of the regime which was at times true to the eyes of the world. General Georges Boulanger who was seen as a charismatic leader was in a position to achieve trust from both divides including the workers and socialists not to mention the monarchists. With this backing he led an unfocused and ultimately unsuccessful political movement against the republic and the result was the reinforcement of the republican suspicion of professional officers who went into politics. In perhaps surprising ways, the rise of the doctrine of the offensive in France also reflected the evolving compromise between the army and the republic as two principles lay at the heart of doctrine known in France as offence to the limit. This involved the primacy of attacking over defending and the primacy of moral over physical force as French planers believed that the best defense was a good offence where the safety of France lay in bringing the war to the enemy. A series of lectures went on in colleges depicting war as moral authority of the victors and moral depression of the vanquished; battle is the contest between the two wills. Tactically, the means to winning was getting close to the enemy as possible then attacking with one man as bayonet and accepting what other casualties would result. This tactic has been termed as dubious by most military historians, that is in the case for a country whose main military problem was a substantial demographic inferiority to its most likely adversary For the most of summer of 1914, internal rather than external crises dominated France even in its newspaper headlines as further ground work was laid following a speech in the senate. This speech laid out in scathing and accurate detail the material wealth facing the French military focusing mainly in its lack of heavy artillery. In the meantime, the wheel of secret diplomacy turned almost silently as the liveliest public scandal in France involved the trial of the wife of former finance minister who had shot the editor of a newspaper In general, the Franco-Russian alliance sought to deter Germany through the threat of an unwinnable two front war against a superior alliance as the Germans formed a pessimistic military response to this diplomatic problem. This made the two front wars a self-fulfilling prophecy and German planners reasoned that France could mobilize far more quick than Russia and had to be confronted first. The Germans hoped to knock out France before the Russian stream-roller could be fully mobilized and with the western front secured, the German forces could be deployed to the east; German had thus to invade France if Germany and Russia went to war, whether or not France played a role in the preceding diplomatic quarrel (Smith, Stéphane & Annette, 16). The determinism of the Schlieffen plan did not mean that French politicians and diplomats lacked activity in the summer of 1914; the president, Poincare played the central role in French crisis management and passed laws ending years of distrust and conflicts. Works cited Smith, Leonard V, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker. France and the Great War, 1914-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print Read More