DANS LA GUERRE (1914-1918): ACCEPTER, ENDURER, REFUSER INSIDE THE WAR (1914-1918): ACCEPTANCE, ENDURANCE, REFUSAL

Colloque organisé par l’Historial de la Grande Guerre
Conference organized by the Historial de la Grande Guerre.

Péronne, 7-9 novembre 2008

The dichotomy between ‘consent’ and ‘coercion’ has acquired a certain importance in recent debates on the experience of societies during the First World War. This conference hopes to reformulate the problem of the popular involvement in the conflict with a different approach. The intention is to avoid an overly rigid opposition between consensus and rejection. This is all the more important in that people during the war, whether soldiers or civilians, were never reduced to passive cyphers but kept their ability to make independent responses. Thus a terminology in three parts is proposed in order to explore the experiences of contemporaries faced with the war – acceptance, endurance, refusal. The median term, endurance, allows the complexity to be investigated of a conflict that defied predictions and whose heavy price in terms of suffering and loss of life called into question the connection between ends and means. ‘Endurance’ describes the reactions of many inside the war in relation to a phenomenon that seemed to engulf their temporal and spatial horizons.

However, there was no consecutive evolution of the three terms – from acceptance through endurance to refusal. For everything turns on the multiple senses of the three terms and on the possible overlap of each with the others. The near universal acceptance of the war in August 1914 was followed rapidly in the Russian and Austrian cases by a certain refusal on the part of ethnic minorities or reservists who had never imagined that they could be called up for war. Similarly, the refusal of the majority of mutineers in the French army in 1917 consisted of a clear rejection of the High Command’s inability to resolve the tactical impasse on the western