Stories and Memories of the Great War in France. 1914–2018
Chapter 1 (HI)STORIES AND MEMORIES OF THE GREAT WAR IN FRANCE 1914–2018 Nicolas Offenstadt Y•Z The historiography of the Great War cannot be fully grasped, as is gener- ally the case, without appraising the place and social function of the war’s memory in society as a whole.1 In spite of a very strong institutional base, professional historians have always had competition, here, from people who have seen themselves as legitimate narrators of the war. Military people, fi rst and foremost: the generations of those who served in 1914– 18 have gradually been replaced by historians with a military background who were not actively engaged in World War I and who still have a con- siderable foothold in the domain. In the 1960s, the volume about the war (“military operations”) in the series L’Histoire du XXe siècle (The History of the 20th Century), edited by the historian Maurice Baumont for the Sirey publishing house, was put in the hands of General Louis Koeltz, who had served in the 2ème Bureau (France’s external military intelli- gence agency) in 1914–18. Roughly at the same time, the great publish- ing house Fayard brought out the Histoire de la Grande Guerre (History of the Great War), written by two offi cers who had not known that confl ict, General Fernand Gambiez and Colonel Maurice Suire. More recently, in the Inventaire de la Grande Guerre (Inventory of the Great War) published This open access library edition is supported by the Max Weber Foundation. Not for resale. 12 • Nicolas Offenstadt by Larousse in 2005 and presented as a form of reference dictionary, out of forty-fi ve authors, eight were offi cers and seven were researchers in military institutions.2 Up until the fi ftieth anniversary of the war, war veterans (anciens combattants) also turned themselves into historians of the Great War by distancing themselves a little from their own experi- ences in order to broaden their outlook—men such as Jacques Meyer, René-Gustave Nobécourt, Victor Bataille, and Pierre Paul produced their version of a historical assessment of the war.
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