Quand la « drôle de guerre » mobilise la Première Guerre mondiale : les représentations culturelles de 1914 – 1918 chez les combattants français
When the Phony War mobilises the memory of World War I: cultural representations of 1914–1918 in the French soldiers’ writings

Summary/Abstract: 1939 till May 10th, 1940 was a strange period during which both armies faced each other without fighting. Approaches to this period have not been renewed since 1990 and Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac's study on the French people in 1940. The discovery of new sources in the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale et Contemporaine and the Service Historique de la Défense, of soldier newpapers, allows us to write a new historical study of the representations and the mentalities of French soldiers during World War Two. Representations of the First World War during the « drôle de guerre », through the legacy of the culture de guerre, modeled the thinking of soldiers and officers. The conduct of the war and the perception of the differents actors – fighters and civilians – were under that influence. Because of the absence of battle, the First World War's culture de guerre was used by government, propaganda departments and Supreme headquarters to mobilize the soldiers in a war that they did not understand. But if the First World War was omnipresent in the representations of war among French soldiers from September 1939 till May 1940, the reality of war was totally different. The gap between thinking and action finally led to strategic and military errors that ended with the French defeat in June 1940.

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