The interplay between veterans associations, state policies, and individual mourning worked to create different attitudes toward war in France and Germany. Paradoxically, while defeated Germany ultimately came to celebrate war as an occasion for individual and collective glory, in victorious France its perception as a site of personal and national suffering only intensified. The strand of veterans’ conceptualizations of the front as an opportunity to surpass the individual and discover the community of battle and fate throughcommon sacrifice became increasingly prevalent in Germany; whereas in France it was the veterans’ insistence on their right and duty to fight against war, having seen its true face and realized its inhumanity, that won the day. Thus the aftermath of World War I produced two kinds of (imagined) communities, whose common experience was articulated very differently, and whose glorification in their respective countries lent a great deal of weight to national perceptions of destruction. The French community of suffering was unified by common pain and sorrow, bound together by horror, determined to prevent such wars from ever happening again. The German battle community was united through sacrifice and devotion to a common cause, the comradeship of warriors, and the quest to extend its newly found values to postwar civilian society. Both creatures of war, the community of suffering envisions a future without international conflict, whereas the battle community perceives the front as a model for posterity. For both the present is a battleground between past trauma and future hopes, but they pull in opposite directions. Imbued with a missionary zeal, the one fights for prevention, the other for reenactment. For the one, war is hell; for the other, it is destiny. For the French, the front equals senseless destruction; for the Germans, the destruction of others would bring about their own resurrection. The community of suffering glorifies endurance and survival; the battle community ennobles comradeship and death.
The anciens combattants (French war veterans) venerated soldiers and abhorred war. This had a major impact on French conduct during the interwar period and following the debacle of 1940. The inability to envision another war as anything but an even worse butchery than 1914—18 was embodied by Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the single most influential military figure in France throughout these years. A staunch advocate of defensive strategy during the 1920s and 1930s, Petain eventually formed the collaborationist Vichy regime. If he personified the glory of World War I as the “victor” of the Verdun bloodbath in 1916, Petain owed much of his popularity, and his promotion to supreme commander of the army, to his acceptance of soldiers’ demands to cease suicidal frontal attacks in the wake of the disastrous Chemin des Dames offensive and the subsequent mutiny of 1917. Consequently, Petain came to be seen as a soldiers’ general, who, like so many of the men under his command, refused to contemplate the prospect of yet another massacre.
For most of the French, therefore, the ultimate justification for World War I was that it would remain la der des ders, the war that put an end to all wars. To be sure, not everyone shared this view; there were those who glorified war as the supreme test of individual manhood and national greatness, and as the appropriate arena for purging undesirable weaklings and foreigners and elevating the warrior to his rightful position in society and politics. But such fascist aestheticization of destruction and promotion of the warring state was relatively rare among interwar veterans, soldiers, politicians, and intellectuals alike, both on the Right and the Left. Ironically, following the debacle of 1940, fascists and pacifists alike could be found among the collaborationists. The near unanimous support for Vichy and collaboration with the Germans in the first months after the debacle had a variety of reasons, ranging from admiration for Nazi Germany and contempt for the decadent republic, to a sincere belief that it was better to make peace with the devil than to continue the war. It took the combined effects of mass deportations of Jews, beginning in summer 1942, the German occupation of the Free Zone in November of the same year, and especially growing economic hardship and the forced conscription of labor to Germany in 1943 to finally tarnish the glory of Petain and all that he stood for. It was only at this point that France’s fields of glory came to be increasingly populated by the Resistance, personified by yet another soldier, General Charles de Gaulle.