War and the sentimental past: Memory and emotion in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War

Abstract

This thesis argues that the Franco-Prussian War provoked strong emotional responses that were encoded in the memory of the war. The management of this emotional response represented an important aspect for the establishment of the Third Republic's legitimacy. By uniting French citizens through a public memory of the warby means of commemorations, funerals, and narratives among others-the Third Republic fostered an intense national consciousness that emerged as a feature of French identity. In contrast to Eugen Weber's influential work Peasants Into Frenchmen, which emphasizes the development of "Frenchness" through interactions in social institutions such as the military and the educational system, this thesis argues that French men and women increasingly defined themselves as French through emotional expressions of their memories of the Franco-Prussian War. William Reddy's theory of emotion allows us to navigate these avenues and provides the methodological and theoretical approach to this paper. Juxtaposed to Reddy, this paper will integrate theoretical approaches developed for the memory of the First World War.

These memories acted as a feature that shaped the Third Republic's political and cultural landscape. More importantly, the memory of the Franco-Prussian War solidified the legitimacy of Third Republic in the way that a collectively recognized national narrative permeated French political and cultural life, both in Paris and the provinces. This does not suggest that a narrative of memory signified the only means in which legitimacy was created and reflected in a wide body of commemorative discourse. The national narrative of defeat never seriously threatened its legitimacy because it never existed. Instead, it allowed the growth of a powerful civic culture and behavior that contributed to the shared sense of a highly sentimental past. This process subverted the memory of defeat in favor of something entirely different. The lived experiences of the sentimental past gave way and supported the Republican past, present, and future. The Bonapartes and the Bourbons would never again seriously occupy a place in the political spectrum as legitimate heirs of this sentimental past. Even with Petain's brief experiment, his government represented all that was illegitimate about the French past. It was a moment perpetuated by foreign invaders, not the French people. From this point on, France succumbed to its own mythical legends of Republicanism. The power of these legends survived the Dreyfus Affair, the First World War, the global depression of the late 1920s and 1930s, and even the Second World War, while much of Europe succumbed to anti-democratic alternatives. The myth of sorts proved no less real for contemporaries of Belle Epoch France. The Franco-Prussian War perpetuated the beginning of this myth, and saw the French Revolution finally realized nearly a century later.

Date of Award	2010
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	Eastern Illinois University
Supervisor	David K. Smith (Supervisor)