The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War
This incisive historical study probes the vexed issues of war and remembrance through the tragic story of Anthelme Mangin, an unidentified amnesiac World War I veteran who washed up in a French mental hospital in 1918. The Mangin case became a cause célèbre after a war in which hundreds of thousands of French soldiers had gone missing in action, buried or obliterated by artillery fire, or hastily interred in anonymous graves. Many families claimed him as their own long-lost relative, usually in spite of conclusive proof to the contrary; literary renderings styled him a reborn innocent, uniquely free from the memory, and therefore free from the trauma and hatreds of the war; he became a symbol of the mixed feelings of grief and guilt that France felt towards the soldiers whose lives were shattered in the conflict. Historian and political scientist Le Naour (A History of Sexual Behavior During World War I) draws on legal and medical files from the case, press accounts, personal letters, poems, novels and plays to illuminate French attitudes towards World War I vets; he explores the anguish and pathos of the families of the missing, psychiatric attitudes towards shell-shocked soldiers, methods for establishing identity, and the conflicting political significance assigned to the dead and missing by the left and the right. His treatment is limited mainly to the French context, but readers interested not just in World War I but in America’s own cults of the Vietnam MIAs and the missing from Ground Zero will find much food for thought in this acute, well-researched and moving study. Photos.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.