Seminar: "You who never stopped defending the poor poilus of the frontline". Parisian soldiers approaching their député during the First World War

Gateways Event

Thursday 08 February 2018, 18:00 - 19:30

Prof. Marnix Beyen (University of Antwerp)

French soldiers of the 68th Infantry Regiment rest in their dugout at Artois, October 1915. © IWM (Q 49296)

The historiographical shift towards everyday practices of citizens and soldiers during the First World War has given a place of prominence to ‘ordinary’ people’s letters as historical sources. A type of letters that hitherto was neglected by historians, however, are those that were written by soldiers from the front to the members of Parliament of their local constituency. As I will try to show in this lecture, the intermediary position of the members of parliament between state and society makes these letters into a source of extraordinary value. They not only offer us a largely unfiltered view of the life at and behind the frontline, but tell us also much about the soldiers’ continuous concern for their kinship at the homefront, as well as about their political views and their expectations for the future. The focus of this lecture will be on Parisian soldiers, because the French electoral system created a particularly strong proximity between constituents and their députés in the French capital - and hence also an extremely large amount of letters are preserved.

Darwin Lecture Theatre 1, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7NX,