Epilogue: Towards Reconstruction, 1914–1920

The epilogue sketches an approach to the subject of reconstruction, by demonstrating how contemporaries prepared for, imagined, and began the rebuilding of the front-line towns. It demonstrates that the issue of reconstruction arose early in the war itself, and pitted the proponents of modernization against those who advocated traditionalism and a return to pre-war normality, and professional architects and urban planners against local communities. It outlines the wide-ranging debates over the nature reconstruction should take, and describes the practical challenges facing civilians as they returned to their destroyed home towns after November 1918. It also discusses commemoration and the construction of public memory around the front-line towns in the years after 1918. It demonstrates that these issues were contested between front-line civilians and a variety of other actors who claimed ownership over the wartime legacies of these towns, from architects, to planners, reconstruction workers, veterans, and the families of those soldiers who died near them. It argues that although civilians from the front-line towns may have experienced the war as members of distinct ‘communities under fire’, this is not necessarily how they experienced the peace. The processes of cultural demobilization were slow, but as the years progressed civilians’ wartime identities eroded and fragmented. As the urban battlefields of the Western Front slowly transformed back into towns, the experiences of front-line civilians were pushed to the margins of collective memories of the conflict.

Civilian Identities under Fire

Chapter 2 charts the impact of militarization and military violence, in particular intense artillery bombardment, on civilian identities on both sides of the lines. It begins with a discussion of the Allied case, where a new form of civilian identity was clearly expressed in public representations. In both the national media and the local press, civilians at the front were represented in soldier-like terms, heroically resisting the enemy in their homes like the soldiers in the trenches nearby. Civilians at the front were urged to identify with the soldiers, but also with their local communities, which came under enemy assault. In this context, notable architectural features including churches, town halls, and cathedrals became rallying points. Private letters and censorship reports demonstrate that many civilians identified with these publicly constructed forms of identity, and used them to respond to the traumatic experience of bombardment. The result was that civilians at the front on the Allied side saw themselves as a distinct and privileged group within the national wartime community. Responses to artillery bombardment were more ambiguous under German occupation, where death and destruction came from Allied guns. The attempts of German propaganda to use bombardment to turn civilians against the Allied war effort were unsuccessful. But civilians’ reactions to Allied shelling, as they emerge in personal diaries, remained ambiguous and troubled, especially when Allied bombardment caused death and injury within the occupied populations.

The Social Impacts of Militarization

Chapter 4 explores the continuation, disruption, and transformation of economic activity at the front, as well as the consequences and meanings of this economic activity for the communities under fire. It charts the chequered economic activity that characterized the Allied side, where the local economies of some towns, including Reims and Arras, suffered considerably. In other cases, notably the coal-mining region of the Pas-de-Calais, production continued even under the shells. The chapter demonstrates how economic activity under fire was shaped by broader national patterns of industrial mobilization, state intervention in the economy, labour relations, and social welfare provision. The chapter also demonstrates how, in wartime, work and the economy gained added layers of meaning, with the context of bombardment charging debates around work and welfare. Civilians living at the front made demands in respect of wages and welfare payments on the basis of the sacrifices they made for the nation by remaining under fire. This further solidified the distinction between the front-line communities and the rest of the nation. The situation under German occupation was quite different. Here, the German army employed forced labour on a wide scale, and so work was a necessity. Yet resistance to work that might harm the French war effort was also a moral imperative. There were few ready solutions to this problem, and many occupied civilians attempted to navigate a difficult path between acceptance and resistance.

Occupation Regimes and Civil–Military Encounters at the Western Front

Chapter 3 uncovers the dynamics of the military occupation regimes put in place on both sides of the lines during the First World War, and demonstrates how they impacted civilian life in the front-line towns. It provides the first comparative analysis of military occupation on both sides of the Western Front, and argues that although some of the methods employed differed from one side of the lines to the other, the main objectives were fundamentally the same. In all cases civilian freedoms were curtailed on the basis of military necessity. It describes the German and Allied occupation regimes side by side, before moving on to a discussion of the face-to-face encounters and relationships that developed between individual civilians and soldiers. It demonstrates that three types of encounter between civilians and soldiers had particularly strong impacts on the social dynamics of urban communities on both sides of the Western Front. They arose from military indiscipline, platonic relationships, and sexual encounters. The chapter argues that although the German occupation regime was notably harsher than that on the Allied side, and forced civilians to navigate complex issues of resistance and collaboration, in both cases urban life near the front was profoundly shaped by the military presence.

From Towns into Battlefields

Chapter 1 explores the topography of the urban battlefield, and provides an urban history of the Western Front. It describes how Arras, Reims, Nancy, Lens, and other towns were progressively transformed into battlefields in the period after August 1914. It describes the transformation of urban space by the First World War, through artillery bombardment, the fortification of these towns by the militaries, and the proliferation of military weaponry and defensive architecture. It discusses how civilians changed their routines to adapt to the urban battlefield, and argues that as much as possible civilians at the front aimed to maintain a semblance of normality. This was encouraged by local authorities, and represented as a form of heroic resistance in the face of the enemy. The chapter charts the physical impact of urban warfare near the front, and describes the extent of urban destruction during the period of the stable Western Front. It also charts the transformation of the civilian population of the front, through discussions of evacuation policies and the scale of civilian death and injury.

Introduction

The introduction sets out the main lines of argument of the book, and introduces the four case studies—Nancy, Reims, Arras, and the coal-mining region of the Pas-de-Calais. It provides relevant historical context and situates the work within the existing historiography. It pays particular attention to the new cultural history of the First World War, and the literature surrounding the relationships between local communities and nation states in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. It introduces the main civilian experiences of war discussed in the book—artillery bombardment, military occupation, and forced displacement. It concludes by outlining the main aims of the book, which are to explore how, on the one hand, war placed these civilian populations at the forefront of a broad process of militarization and how, on the other, it shaped their attitudes towards their bombarded home towns and the wider national community.

Communities in Exile

Chapter 6 discusses the relationships of refugees from the front-line towns to the bombarded communities they left behind. It outlines the size of the refugee populations from the front-line towns, and maps their destinations within the French interior. It demonstrates that most refugees from the front-line towns experienced forced displacement alongside others from their home communities, and that this geography of displacement allowed refugees to remain socially, emotionally, and imaginatively involved in their bombarded home communities. In this way, refugees remained members of the front-line communities, even while displaced. To date, the refugee history of the First World War has focused on the attitudes of the state and host communities in the interior towards refugees. This chapter, in contrast, makes a significant contribution to the historiography by focusing on the attitudes and actions of refugees themselves. Using refugee newspapers, diaries, and a previously unknown collection of letters, it argues that refugees from the front-line towns were not merely the passive recipients of state and charitable aid, but could actively shape the conditions of their exile by remaining invested in their abandoned home towns and making appeals based on their French citizenship.

Feeding the Front-Line Towns

Chapter 5 examines the importance of food for survival at the front. The urban battlefields at the Western Front experienced particularly acute problems of food supply. This chapter explores why this was so, and the solutions implemented. But it also moves beyond bureaucratic measures, to consider the meanings attributed to shortages on both sides of the lines. In wartime, food was a key issue that tested both the state’s ability to manage limited resources equitably, and peoples’ willingness to endure sacrifices and shortages for the national effort. In France as a whole, popular debates around food supply centred on what could be considered acceptable levels of sacrifice. But near the front on the Allied side, civilians developed a localized moral economy structured around their experiences of military violence. They demanded that the state acknowledge their additional suffering under fire by granting them additional entitlements in terms of rationing, and acting swiftly to root out hoarding and speculation. Civilians on the occupied side could not make such demands, especially in a context where food supplies were tightly controlled by the Commission for Relief in Belgium and the German Army. Here, food supply was necessary for material survival; but those involved in supply risked moral reproach for the contacts they were required to nurture with the German authorities. Here, the context of occupation shaped attitudes towards food supply, and public officials and private citizens were judged harshly for perceived indiscretions in their dealings with the occupiers.

Conclusion

The conclusion draws the various arguments of the book together, and makes a final case for the importance of the topic. It reaffirms how the book has presented an alternative picture of the Western Front—one that is urban rather than rural, and one where the soldiers are not the sole inhabitants of the battlefield, but share it with civilians. It discusses how the historiography of the First World War has demonstrated that the conflict ‘militarized’ civilian identities. But it also points out that, up until now, there has been little acknowledgement of how this was a variable process, with some civilians militarized to a far greater extent than others. The conclusion points to the wide-ranging social impacts of the experiences studied in this book. Direct encounters with military violence, and especially the traumatic experiences of artillery bombardment, military occupation, and forced displacement threatened the integrity of France’s front-line communities. War scattered communities and destroyed the physical spaces they inhabited, strained social and family bonds, generated considerable material hardships, and killed and wounded thousands of civilians. And yet, despite these intense and prolonged physical assaults on local communities, a sense of community identity remained intact throughout the war, and was of crucial importance for how civilians navigated the pressures of life in the battle zones. War did not, in other words, destroy the front-line communities, but transformed them, and shaped the sense of belonging felt by civilians.