Mothers, Marraines, and Prostitutes: Morale and Morality in First World War France

Abstract

A novel describing French women on the eve of mobilization for the First World War, the popular French author Marcelle Tinayre remarked: 'Woman's patriotism is not of the same nature as that of man. It does not possess the brutality of an instinct or the austerity of an idea. It's a sentiment ... that does not know the bloody drunkenness of battle. The France of women is above all the hearth, the spouse, the child.'1 Here was a patriotism grounded not in the abstract love of country or in ideas of duty and honour, but in home and family life. While this statement expresses one set of powerful ideas about the proper role of women in wartime, it is but one end of a wide spectrum of cues given to women during the First World War. Within hours of the declaration of war in 1914, the president, Raymond Poincare, had called upon the French to forge a union sacree to put aside their individual differences to fortify the nation against its enemies. Although the most obvious emblem of the union sacree was the political alliance between anti-clerical Republicans and religious Catholics, the maintenance of the union sacree, as Jean-Jacques Becker suggests, required constant effort, even after France had been invaded and the northern part of the country had been occupied by Germany. Thus, careful attention was given to keeping up the morale not only of soldiers but also of civilians and non-combatants. In an oft-cited example of the attention focused on civilians, in 1915 the cartoonist Forain depicted two trench-bound soldiers, known colloquially as 'poilus': one says to the other 'let's hope they hold on,' and, when asked to whom he refers, answers 'the civilians'.2 Like workers and the religious, women were among the not fully