Mobilizing the nation and the civilians' war

Abstract

The victory of the Marne and the “race to the sea” left France triumphant, but gravely weakened. In stark contrast to 1870, the armies of the Republic had thrown back the invader in the greatest feat of French arms since Napoleon. But all or in part, the departments of the Nord, the Pas-de-Calais, the Somme, the Aisne, the Ardennes, the Marne, the Meuse, and the Meurthe et Moselle, had fallen into enemy hands, and with them hundreds of thousands of French citizens. France had lost some of its most productive agricultural lands and its second most industrialized region. The occupied territories set the stage for the “totalization” of the war. For those living under German rule, deportations, forced labor, and martial law quickly blurred the line between soldiers and civilians. Northeastern France and Belgium became virtual German colonies, governed by repressive regimes directed toward economic extraction rather than production. In the rest of France, expelling the invaders and making the nation whole came to justify unprecedented and open-ended national mobilization. As the war totalized, the French confronted the shift from “the imaginary war,” dreamed of and feared before August 1914, to the real war, here and now. They had to face up to an extended confrontation and to the immense war effort that it engendered.