La Guerre de Crimée n’aura pas lieu

Abstract

The Crimean War (1854–6) was, in the words of Eric Hobsbawn (2010), ‘the nearest thing to a general European war between 1815 and 1914’. Whereas it figures large in the national mythologies of Britain and Russia, in France it remains very much a footnote. This is despite the fact that it is the only nineteenth-century war the French ultimately won. But in the view of many, to quote Jules Michelet (1857), ‘La conquête du lama est dix fois plus importante que la conquête de Crimée.’ It would seem that the Crimean War has no place in the canon of culturally retained historical events that define modern French identity. Though news of the war in the contemporary press and popular literature was ubiquitous, it does not figure in the canonical literature of time. This paper considers how the Crimean War was and was not represented in French literature in the second half of the nineteenth-century.