Two sociologists have studied the correspondence exchanged in the early 1960s by a couple of schoolteachers separated by war and then by death. Through this intimate journey, they trace the changes in French society.
“How can we make the banal and the everyday historical?” asked Daniel Roche in his review of Arlette Farge’s book on the lives of Parisians in the XVIIIe century, Fragile Life (1986). This question contains two: one on the approach, the other on the sources. What material allows access to the ordinary, to the infra-event, to “everyday life”? But also and above all, what to do with it and what to say about it? How to articulate the singular to the collective, the exceptional to the general? These preliminary remarks suggest how much the book by Fabien Deshayes and Axel Pohn-Weidinger, who define themselves as sociologists, poses to history the question of its status, its processes and, ultimately, its epistemology.
Echoes of the intimate
Two sociologists of “writings of few” (p. 9) come across, in a flea market in the north of Paris, the correspondence exchanged by a couple of schoolteachers. Bernard is the son of an engineer, Aimée is the daughter of Guadeloupean civil servants: they are a mixed couple from the France of the Trente Glorieuses, who met in 1959 in a Parisian school. Their love has, from the outset, an epistolary character, and the exchange of letters builds the relationship. They marry in 1961; a few months later, he is called to Algeria.
Correspondence is therefore invested with an almost magical power, that of reuniting in writing and reading the couple separated for 24 long months. The work of Clémentine Vidal-Naquet has already shown how the marital relationship is built in separation through correspondence, for soldiers of the Great War. Here, the two spouses suffer from the distance, but each for their own reasons: Aimée soon learns that she is pregnant, and her difficult pregnancy, coupled with the difficulties she encounters in the exercise of her profession, faced with parents of students who complain about this “black mistress”, make her fall into a cruel depression. For his part, Bernard, a reader of Freud and the authors of the new pedagogy, resistant to hierarchy and anti-militarist, is champing at the bit on his Kabyle “piton”.
The war plays a seemingly marginal role in the letters. In fact, it resonates with the echoes of the intimate, through the prism of which its events are read: the Evian negotiations announce both the ceasefire and the imminent reunion of the two lovers. On one occasion, the conscript lets out his torments in the face of the violence inflicted on the Algerians, before recovering himself and continuing to euphemize the reality of this war that does not say its name.
Aimée and Bernard are counting the days to see each other again: the birth will be the occasion for a leave that they are eagerly awaiting. But Aimée dies prematurely in childbirth, as does her child. The death is suspicious: a police investigation and an autopsy conclude that the maternity doctors are not responsible, but doubts remain in Bernard’s family, for whom the young woman was objectively neglected, out of racism.
The correspondence stops and we do not hear Bernard’s complaint, we know nothing of his anger. He returns to Algeria and finishes his service. The rest is outside the scope of the investigation. In a few well-constructed chapters, the reader witnesses the birth and end of a love story that unfolds almost before his eyes, a large space being left to the beautiful letters of the two lovers in love with literature, often quoted in full.
The silences of correspondence
Through the journey of this mixed couple, the two authors intend to tell us about a “French society in full mutation” (p. 25), the combat experience “from below” (p. 297) and “love in times of war” (p. 24). One of the attractions of their approach is, precisely, that it is fully part of the writing, which invites the reader into the “backstage of the investigation” (p. 11), in a narrative vein that several recent works have explored.
In addition to the 80 letters found, the authors drew on various archival funds, from the police headquarters, the army, the rectorate, in particular. They read the press and listened toINA the radio bulletins of the time, those which allowed the young woman to keep informed of the war that her husband was fighting far away. They conducted interviews with Bernard’s relatives and former conscripts from the same regiment.
In the silences of the correspondence, they use every means possible to restore an era, from pregnancy manuals to surveys on real estate prices, including weather reports. There is no question for the two authors of writing the story of the couple without placing it in a “complex network of relationships that united them to French society” (p. 25). The back-and-forth between individual history and collective history, finely embedded in the text, are also made possible by a solid and controlled bibliography.
During this work, conducted in the interstices of their respective doctoral research, the authors dedicate themselves to an investigation that enters their lives: overwhelmed by “the feeling of being the custodians of this story” (p. 24), they are “dazed” (p. 258) when they discover Aimée’s death. The emotion is palpable in many places in the book, and serves the quality of the writing. The most pertinent remarks are reserved for the intimate function of writing in the construction of the self, when the authors enter into the reasons of each of the two correspondents by analyzing the silences, the crossings out, the drafts never sent, in an approach that draws on the work of Philippe Artières and Jean-François Laé.
Focusing on the life of a couple over less than 3 years, this book contributes to broader fields such as the history of conscripts in Algeria, that of the war in metropolitan France or even the racism of French society in the 1950s and 1960s. In this respect, the authors’ bet is kept.
History or sociology?
By closing Love at Warwe will finally regret two things. First, in a rather prosaic way, that no collection of sources allows, at the end of the work, to summarize all of the numerous archival funds consulted. Then, a certain heaviness in the concluding remarks. A long epilogue explains what the investigation is sufficient to demonstrate, namely the interest of a “comprehensive” approach (p. 309) to write “the history of everyday life” (p. 302).
The vision of a “dominant military historiography” of the Algerian War (p. 301) is a caricature, as shown by the work of Claire Mauss-Copeaux and Raphaëlle Branche, cited elsewhere, or that of Patrick Rotman on conscripts. Similarly, the pessimistic remarks on the policy of archival preservation, which would condemn the historian of the future to “access only the scum of institutions, so much so that they will have been stripped of all the least formal and most unofficial traces” (p. 319), are rapid and insufficiently supported.
The other debate that this book opens is broader: it is that of the singularity of the disciplines of the social sciences. Is this a history book that the two sociologists are producing? Does the sole use of archival documents allow it to be described as such? Not really, because the authors also use archives in their respective works. Moreover, the interview is also a method specific to historians.
Both are interested in power relations, social networks, the construction of norms and categories: does this mean that there would be a desingularization of the social sciences through the strong return of narrative? The word sociohistory is not pronounced, but Love at War helps to explore this path.