Couples Dans La Grande Guerre. Le Tragique Et L'Ordinaire Du Lien Conjugal

This work examines the repercussions of war on private lives, choosing as its subject French couples – married or not. Clémentine Vidal-Naquet brings us a book about conjugal bonds tested by the separation imposed by the Great War. She explores an eminently intimate experience, yet one widely shared since, in France, at least five million couples were kept apart by those four years of war. Although the author has drawn from multiple archives in her effort to relate both the collective and individual aspects of these conjugal experiences, she refers above all to letters, as an incomparable medium for conveying intimate thoughts. The book deals with many themes essential to fully understand this first global conflict: the importance and massive scope – for the first time in history – of letters exchanged during war, the replacement of men by their wives in business and in household management, the expression of desire and love during the conflict, death’s omnipresence and wartime mourning. The longing to resume lost daily lives, to share emotions and to express love or desire, shaped the war’s epistolary pact sealed between the couples. Through correspondence, their goal was just as much to maintain, as it was to invent, the normality of their daily conjugal lives. In a conflict, however, the relationship is transformed by the omnipresent threat of death. The heart of the matter is found in this tension imposed by the proximity of death and oblivion: to love better because of the war, to risk the worst yet talk of daily things, to think of the future, even when it is uncertain – in short, to simultaneously experience the tragic and the trivial.