The Family at War in French Culture, 1870-1914

Project Information

FAMWAR

Grant agreement ID: 837745

DOI

10.3030/837745

Project closed

EC signature date 8 November 2019

Start date 1 September 2020

End date 31 May 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 212 933,76

EU contribution

€ 212 933,76

Coordinated by

THE CHANCELLOR MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FAMWAR (The Family at War in French Culture, 1870-1914)

Reporting period: 2020-09-01 to 2022-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The Franco-Prussian War represents a traumatic moment in France's history and an important period marking the formation of modern Europe. Fought on French soil, the war provoked deep political and social changes. However, while the First World War is extensively studied, this 1870-1871 war is described as the 'forgotten war'. The EU-funded FAMWAR project will focus on the war's traumatic experience for the families, as well provoking mass separation and affecting gender relations. It will investigate how the family's experience of this war was represented in the cultural production in the period between 1870-1871 and the First World War.

The years 2014-18 have seen a vast reflection on the European experience of the First World War. One of the most successful aspects of this has been the way more traditional military and diplomatic history has dovetailed with the modern concerns of cultural, social and gender history. It is the aim of FAMWAR to apply these insights to what might be termed ""the war before the First World War"", namely the Franco-Prussian War. Fought almost exclusively on French soil, the war was a traumatic experience for France, not just politically (with the fall of Napoleon III's Second Empire; the birth of the Third Republic in September 1870, which would last until the Second World War; and the civil war of the Paris Commune in 1871), but also socially (in the two sieges of Paris, and in the battlefield experience and its effects on the provincial population). Wars, we know from the twentieth-century experience of two world wars, involve on all sides the mass separation, damage and reconfiguration of families; and in particular, the shifting of gender relations in and beyond the family. It is precisely the intensity of the twentieth-century European experience of war which has turned 1870-71 into what has been called ""the forgotten war"". Yet 1870-71 represents a key foundational moment in the invention of modern Europe (when France finally embraced republicanism for good, and Germany was born as a nation-state). How, we shall ask, was the family's experience of this war remembered in literature, journalism and iconography? It is the aim of the current project to correct that oversight, not least as the 150th anniversary of the war approaches, and not least because it is the experience of the Franco-Prussian War which French and German people carried, within living memory, into war in 1914.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

At the centre of the project has been the collaboration at the University of Cambridge between Dr Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier and Professor Nicholas White from 2020 until 2023. Their work on French literary fiction primarily from the period 1870-1914 has revealed the ways in which the genre of the novel acted as the primary cultural conduit for national self-reflection in the wake of military defeat and civil war in 1870-1871, particularly through fiction's analysis of the effects of the war on family relationships. The most renowned work of this kind, Zola's 1892 novel La Débâcle, the biggest-selling Zola novel in the author's lifetime, had been subsequently overlooked after the First World War by both scholars and the general public alike, and this has been rectified by a range of outputs by Nicholas White:

TALKS
‘L’Amour et l’amitié aux temps de la guerre’ (November 2020)
An online interview with US scholar Colin Foss on the Prussian Siege of Paris (February 2021)
‘Zola’s La Débâcle as a Transnational Media Event’(April 2021)
‘Of Constant Latitude: Pradier’s Strasbourg Statue and the Geographical Imaginary of Defeat’(November 2022)

ARTICLES
‘Zola’s “champ limité de la réalisation”: La Débâcle and the Commune’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 49.3-4 (2021)
‘Entre reliques profanes et religieuses : La Débâcle, Le Docteur Pascal et Lourdes’, forthcoming in Les Cahiers naturalistes, 97 (2023)

This research will culminate in his monograph: Émile Zola, guide de l'année terrible de 1870-1871.

The wide range of material in Marion Glaumaud-Carbonnier's research has shown that Zola's then famous novel could only be properly understood in this broader context, exemplified by her own outputs:

TALKS
‘Des fleurs aux canons : sur deux histoires de coeur dans le cadre du Siège’(February 2021). This produced the following online output: ‘Une idylle pendant le Siège : le cadre et le coeur selon François Coppée et Paul Alexis’.
‘Les héros expirés : grands-pères et monde d’hier pendant la guerre de 1870’(22-24 March 2021)
‘Frapper au coeur : tourner la page de 1870’ (April 2021). To appear in the conference volume under the title : ‘Losing the War and Losing Heart: 1870-71 and the Fiction of Defeat’.
‘Coucheriez-vous avec un Allemand ? Sexe, morale, patrie (1870-1914)’ (April 2022)
‘La guerre, mesdames. Juliette Adam et Hermione Quinet, témoins du siège de Paris’ (June 2023)

ARTICLES
‘L’empire des grands-pères : crise de succession dans les fictions de la défaite (1870- 1871)’, Dix-Neuf, 26 (2022), pp. 18-34
‘La veillée des vieux vaincus. Le spectre des survivants de 1870’, in Special Number on “Vieillards et vieillissement au XIXe siècle”, Elizabeth Emery, Florence Fix (ed.), L’Esprit créateur, 2024 [in preparation]
‘La relation des horizons. L’Alsace et l’Algérie, par les liens de la défaite (1870-1914)’ [submitted to Nineteenth-Century French Studies].

This will culminate in her post-doctoral monograph: Le Sentiment de la guerre. L’écriture de la défaite de 1870-1871. This builds on her earlier work on family fictions, the doctoral monograph which she has completed: Madame contre Monsieur. Le récit du divorce au XIXe siècle, accepted for publication in 2024 by Presses universitaires de Saint-Étienne in the series « Le genre en toutes lettres ».

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

One of the primary goals of the project was to move beyond the state of the art by exploring French culture after the war from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and thus to examine how literary fiction interacted with other modes of expression. Key to this aim will be the production of a forthcoming edited collection of conference essays from this variety of perspectives (with the Presses Universitaires de Lyon in 2024). This event brought into constructive interaction our team of 19th century literary researchers with major scholars from art history, musicology and sociology.

We were able to take advantage of other unexpected opportunities for public engagement: from 12 March-7 May 2022, MGC and NJW curated with Dr Fabry-Tehranchi a physical exhibition in the University Library open free to the general public, titled Caricatures of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune (1870-71). This exhibition was supported by a public talk as part of the Cambridge Festival 2022 on 31 March 2022.

The exhibition led to a follow-up exhibition in our Faculty Library (again open to the general public) from 23 March to 14 July 2023, for which MGC acted as scientific advisor. This allowed us to work with students on this material too, starting with translations of the text and legends of French caricatures into English.

Nos despotes...(Ancien Régime), En famille by W.Alexis, c.1871_Image@ Cambridge University Library