In their introduction to Les Guerres d'antan, Mathilde Bernard, Laurence Campa and Ninon Grangé outline the conceptual framework that led to developing this study, which crowns several years of joint research by researchers in history, literature, philosophy and history of art on the sources and models of war. This preliminary work made it possible to establish just how powerful imagination of the wars of yesteryear is in shaping contemporary wars, an observation that led to preparing a symposium in May 2022. (...) The participants of this event, for which the proceedings published here, took this premise as their starting point to query how past conflicts could return to the fore in, whether this was explicit or not, hushed up, denied, on the other hand yet still asserted, acknowledged, used knowingly and for what purpose. Different disciplines were once again highlighted to emphasize and explain the way in which past wars inform present ones. The researchers who were involved in writing this study worked on a long period of time taking a philosophical approach that goes beyond chronological boundaries, and as historians and literary scholars reflecting on a perspective that builds bridges between eras. (shrink)

The pirate is a figure that is both marginal to war – since he is excluded from it – and central – since he is regularly called upon to define it. From a few evocations of this figure by Bodin, Grotius and Hobbes, all of which are based on Thucydides, we want to bring to light a normativity that is specific and immanent to the space of warlike violence.

From the 16th to 19th and again in the 20th century, Till Eulenspiegel weaved his way through time and history. He became a legendary character of the Dutch Revolt embodying the freedom against the persecutions of Philip II of Spain in Charles De Coster’s version (1867) and the tale was given new significance during the First World War. Two Belgian artists (Paul-Auguste Masui-Castricque and Walter Vaes) referred to the legend in their engravings to deliver a message on the ongoing war. (...) By thinking about time and cultural parallelisms, this paper seeks to understand the stakes of evoking the Legend during the war and also after as do Romain Rolland – writing the preface to a German translation of the Legend in 1926 – and two other Belgian artists illustrating Charles De Coster’s text during the 1920s: Maurice Langaskens and Frans Masereel. (shrink)

The French defeat of 1871 against Prussia and its allies was experienced and felt as a deep trauma by contemporaries. The personal accounts (diaries and letters) of those who lived through the war but who did not fight, testify both to the multiplicity of their feelings in the face of a situation they did not understand, and to the mechanisms that they put in place in order to give meaning to defeat. The first of these is the use of the (...) past. In 1870-1871, civilians appealed massively to imperial and revolutionary memories, before invoking medieval imagination, which refers to the period they consider to be the darkest in history. These revisited and reinvested depictions attest to their distress when faced with a present that was no longer on a par with France’s glorious past. The defeat led to the collapse of the model of the victorious nation and gave rise to a powerful feeling of French inferiority. The latter was only overcome by creating a very negative image of the Germans (and especially of the Prussians); an image that would become one of the mainstays of the new French national identity construed as an inverted mirror of the new German Empire from 1871 onwards (see F. Roth, La guerre de 1870, Paris, Fayard, 1990, pp. 607-638). (shrink)

What can we expect from metaphysics? Defending metaphysics against its enemies and its enemies against themselves (Ideologists), according to Maine de Biran, requires a twofold struggle, capable of avoiding both the dangers of abstract metaphysics that only acknowledges a priori principles and refuses the title of science of principles to that which would be based on experience, and Condillac-inspired metaphysics, including Ideology, which acknowledges only one kind of experience, external experience. Biran builds a metaphysics of internal experience founded on the (...) discovery of an order of internal facts, which constitutes the basis of the thinking and acting being. The generating principle of our faculties, i.e. of our actions, is a dual fact, a primitive internal relationship whose terms are distinct without being separate, namely the so-called “hyper-organic” force and the resistance of our own body, identified with our very existence. Biran thus puts an end to ontological discourses when it comes to separating essences of soul and body, and promotes new empiricism.Positive metaphysics is neither logic nor general grammar, nor physiology, but the science of the primitive facts of the inner sense, a barely-born inner experimental science, namely psychology, that is analytical and synthetic, rational and experimental. (shrink)

In the history of war thinking, a transhistorical approach has emerged, with the value of not subjecting the theory to circumstances, particularly those fuelled by technical factors. This ambition was closely linked to Clausewitz’s theory, which was based on the difference between the historical character of “real war” and the transhistorical character of “absolute war”. Prior to Clausewitz’s theory, the transhistorical character had crept into the thinking on warfare in the modern era, which had developed a great deal around the (...) use of firearms, a character to which some theorists did not want to submit. During the First World War, the French army produced new weapons, such as tanks and aerial bombardment. It was therefore the ability to adapt to the historical circumstances of this war that was later considered to be the cause of victory, as the historian Marc Bloch later emphasised when he defined history as a “science of change”. After the Second World War, the major changes in warfare fuelled a tendency to refer to Clausewitz’s transhistorical theory in order to continue to think about war despite its major changes. The transhistorical approach was therefore a historical phenomenon. (shrink)

Emergency powers are shaped by representations of war. For proof of this, we not only need to observe the origins of a large part of this kind of law, but also the more or less explicit model provided by war in many interpretations of emergency legislations, at least since the French Revolution. Nevertheless, from the outset, this relationship has been particularly ambivalent. It remains ambivalent today, when governments apply emergency legislations during the fight against terrorism or during the health crisis, (...) which were both escorted by heavy war rhetoric. And yet, never has the war model seemed so far removed from the real changes affecting the management of crisis, particularly in terms of temporality. On the contrary, this management reflects an increasingly continuous administrative handling of emergencies – often referred to by the ambiguous formula of “permanent state of emergency”. It is this tension between a transformation of the temporality of emergency legislations, and the use of a whole rhetoric that continually refers to an apparently anachronistic, discontinuous model of war that this article seeks to address, by attempting to think through the relationship with time that is paradoxically expressed in it. More specifically, the aim is to shed light on a curiously nostalgic representation of the “wars of yesteryear”, based on the Derridean concept of the spectre. (shrink)

After publishing his first collection of poems entitled Interrogation (1917), Pierre Drieu La Rochelle returned to writing on the First World War in La Comédie de Charleroi (1934). The writer examined the moral and political significance of the “last war” in a retrospective manner in this collection of autobiographical short stories that he published just before his conversion to Fascism. However, Drieu did not treat his experience of the war as a distant memory. On the contrary, his texts are characterised (...) by emotivity, as if he was attempting to relive the very moment of his war. From this point of view, we examine the style and narrative structure of “La Comédie de Charleroi”. In this short story which opens the book, Drieu created a poetic narrative by mixing narrative prose and lyricism, and thus undermined realistic chronology. By means of this poetic narrative, he wrote his memory of the “last war” and, at the same time, expressed his “cry” which was the leitmotiv of his first collection of poems. This literary experience seems to have had an ideological consequence, as shown in Socialisme fasciste (1934). (shrink)

Aragon lived through two wars directly, and his relationship with them was different: most of what he wrote about the First World War was written forty years later, in Le Roman inachevé, whereas the Second World War led immediately to the poems of Crève-Cœur and Les Yeux d’Elsa, and then to those of the Resistance. A different relationship to time, then. But precisely because of the upheavals it brought to both historical and everyday experience, the illusions it shattered and the (...) heartbreak it caused, the war immediately confronted the poet with a diffraction of temporality: the time of boredom and forced inaction, time of death, setting in time of repetition, time of life slipping away. Occasionally, also, time of hope. (shrink)

Throughout the Middle Ages, the Trojan legend was used as a benchmark for writing about war. But, it was in the backdrop of the Crusades, in particular the Fourth Crusade (1204) and its aftermath, that it becomes a fully significant archetype. On the one hand, the Trojan War featured in the narrative of contemporary conflicts and, on the other hand, the Trojan narrative was expanded on and updated, so as to express and reflect on ongoing conflicts. Through a distinct geographical (...) overlap between Troy and Constantinople, the ongoing war is portrayed in the way it coincides with the very locations of the past conflict, generating a reflection on the causes of the war that offers a cyclical vision of time and calls for stratigraphical comprehension. These textual and iconographic resonances between Troy and the Crusade shape questions and uncertainties about war and make the myth a matrix that is poetic, historical and political. (shrink)

Given remote warfare technology, a diagnosis is often made: modern warfare would lead to a derealization and even a loss of war experience. This paper takes the unease that this diagnosis triggers as its starting point, insofar as it reveals certain attachments to war that have been nurtured throughout modern times. From trenches to drones, the act of lamenting the loss of war experience marks the history of modern warfare. This paper looks at the eminently-modern, active expectations, that haunt this (...) act: the anticipation of an experience heightened by war, linked to the quest for life that is more intense. By following in Walter Benjamin’s footsteps, it seeks to decipher the way in which these expectations are linked to the emergence of new feelings, passions and obsessions that touch on the experience of modernity. (shrink)

Francis de Lorraine, an important Catholic military leader of the first war of Religion, is mentioned in two chapters of the Essays which relate his behaviour outside the siege of Rouen (I, 23) and during the battle of Dreux (I, 45). Montaigne compares the conduct of the Duke of Guise with that of Augustus, then with that of Philopœmen and Agesilaus, in two parallels based on borrowings from Seneca and Plutarch. The analysis of chapters I, 23 and I, 45 allows (...) us to grasp Montaigne’s judgement of this controversial figure and the way in which his assessment is elaborated in the mirror of ancient conflicts. The evocation of the battle of Dreux, if it justifies the temporisation of Francis de Lorraine, who did not engage while the Constable of Montmorency was in trouble, suggests the possible moral imperfection of an effective choice. The anecdote of the siege of Rouen, on the other hand, celebrates the virtue of an ineffective clemency, which did not allow the Duke of Guise to escape assassination but demonstrated his moral value and the strength of his faith. Although Montaigne therefore praises the qualities of the Catholic leader, the parallels do not obscure the gaps of a portrait that does not offer the details expected in a ‘life’, a narrative form praised in the Essays, and instead make the silences and uncertainties evident. (shrink)