The Embattled Self: French Soldiers' Testimony of the Great War

by Leonard V. Smith

How did the soldiers in the trenches of the Great War understand and explain battlefield experience, and themselves through that experience? Situated at the intersection of military history and cultural history, The Embattled Self draws on the testimony of French combatants to explore how combatants came to terms with the war. In order to do so, they used a variety of narrative tools at hand―rites of passage, mastery, a character of the soldier as a consenting citizen of the Republic. None of the resulting versions of the story provided a completely consistent narrative, and all raised more questions about the "truth" of experience than they answered. Eventually, a story revolving around tragedy and the soldier as victim came to dominate―even to silence―other types of accounts. In thematic chapters, Leonard V. Smith explains why the novel structured by a specific notion of trauma prevailed by the 1930s. Smith canvasses the vast literature of nonfictional and fictional testimony from French soldiers to understand how and why the "embattled self" changed over time. In the process, he undermines the conventional understanding of the war as tragedy and its soldiers as victims, a view that has dominated both scholarly and popular opinion since the interwar period. The book is important reading not only for traditional historians of warfare but also for scholars in a variety of fields who think critically about trauma and the use of personal testimony in literary and historical studies.

Genres: World War I

232 pages, Hardcover

First published June 7, 2007

About the author

A specialist in modern French history, Leonard V. Smith is Frederick B. Artz Professor of History at Oberlin College. Smith earned his BA from Oberlin College in 1980 and his MIA (1982) and Ph.D. (1990) from Columbia University.

Reviews

[Brendan Hodge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leonard Smith's The Embattled Self is a fascinating sort of project. He is writing about First World War as experienced by French soldiers, but specifically he is writing about how their experiences were expressed through their writings during and after the war.

Smith breaks his book up into chapters based on the progress of the soldiers' experience of the war, and then on their changing understanding of its meaning. The first two chapters deal with the "baptism of fire" and with experiencing the violence of war. The last two deal with different types of narratives: The "genre of consent" deals primarily with narratives written during the course of the war in which soldiers grapple with their experiences and give them meaning based on the expected conclusion of the war: a better world, free of war. The final chapter deals with (primarily post-war) novels, and the way in which soldier-authors tried to give closure to the narratives of their experiences as they came to see what the post-war world was actually like.

Most good war histories quote from primary sources, but Smith does a unique service in breaking those works up into intellectual epochs base on whether the author was in his experience of the war at the time that he wrote. I found this hugely useful in placing different works that I've read in context.

And, of course, as a book about the writings of soldiers and veterans of the Great War, The Embattled Self is a tremendous resource for finding references to other sources.

This is definitely a work for specialists, but I found it very useful and would recommend it to others.