Years of Plenty, Years of Want: France and the Legacy of the Great War

4—Shifting Ground

C H A P T e r 4 shifting ground The Great War laid waste to France. Broad measures stagger: the dead, 1.3 million; the severely wounded, 1.1 million; the damage to the region of the Western Front, 88.7 billion francs ($151 billion in 2011); the debt incurred prosecuting the battle, 177 billion francs ($301 billion in 2011); the losses from Bolshevik renunciation of tsarist obligations, 26 billion francs ($44.32 billion in 2011). The details numb: more than one-quarter of men aged between twenty and twenty-seven died, 600,000 widows and 750,000 orphans mourned, births diminished 1.4 million. To grasp the meaning of these statistics, imagine that the United states has just fought a war on its own soil for the last four and a half years and suffered losses comparable to France’s between 1914 and 1918. The population of the United states today is approximately 775 percent more than that of France then (310 million to 40); the economy of the United states today is 1,200 percent greater than that of France then ($14.5 trillion to $1.2 trillion). Applying these multipliers , the United states would have suffered 10.1 million dead, 8.5 million severely wounded, damage of $1.1 trillion, debt of $3.6 trillion , losses from foreign investment $312 billion, 4.6 million widows, 114 Y e A r s O F P L e N T Y , Y e A r s O F W A N T 5.8 million orphans, and a quarter of the men aged between twenty and twenty-seven dead. If this comparison is unconvincing, one blunt fact remains: the 1.3 million French who died in the Great War are more than the total number of Americans who have died in all the wars fought by the United states, from the American revolution to Afghanistan and including the Civil War.1 Harder to calculate in cost are intangibles: the war and its aftermath completed the destruction of the world the nineteenth century had made. Traditions waned, innovation waxed. Prudence and restraint were the essence of the French bourgeoisie and thus of the Third republic, but they were challenged now by growth and consumption . economic mobilization for the war crushed small enterprises in favor of large industries. Inflation in the 1920s and depression in the 1930s eroded inherited wealth. The rentier—who by living on dividends and interest could devote his life to the arts, to writing, to politics, to service—faded in significance. The long departure of men to the front had left women in charge and afterward unwilling to give up a new emancipation economic, social, and sexual. Workingclass militancy burgeoned, any deference to elites vanished after the communality of the trenches. New immigrants, encouraged to replace the dead, resisted assimilation. Artists deracinated Cartesian heritage to chase the dark specter of the irrational through Dada and surrealism. Domestic politics polarized and intensified with dangerous new enemies for parliamentary democracy, the Communists on the far left and fascist imitators on the far right. International relationships were a shambles. Defeated enemy Germany remained recalcitrant. Ally Great Britain declined collective defense. Turncoat russia portended communist subversion. Wartime savior America remained perplexed with economic might but political isolation. The time was out of joint: O cursed spite that wounded France was left to set it right.2 For French novelists confronting this broken world, the experience of the war raised questions of courage and fear, suffering and death, glory and shame. First among them was Henri Barbusse, a journalist who enlisted in 1914 at the age of forty-one. Assigned to an infantry unit, he faced combat for seventeen months until his in- Shifting Ground 115 juries required his transfer to a clerical post. There, he wrote Le Feu: Journal d’une escouade (Under Fire: The Story of a Squad), which was published in December 1916, won the Prix Goncourt, and sold nearly a quarter million copies. His was the first realistic account of battle on the Western Front and was based, he claimed, on notes he took while in the trenches. Nothing about the brutality of war is omitted, and the dedication reads, “To the memory of the comrades who fell by my side at Crouÿ and on Hill 119 January, May, and september 1915.” Through its sales and its tone, Le Feu may well have promoted the...