While embodying the values of supreme sacrifice and courage, the Unknown Soldier today has an archaic image. For what reasons ?
Quite simply because the French are no longer interested in history. To everything that founded our values. The history of France is a succession of kings, emperors, presidents. With constitutional systems, wars, some of which have been completely forgotten. An oversight embodied by this generation reset where one is in the immediacy, the futile. However, to be interested in the history of France is to be interested in its roots, in what we are, in what others have been able to do for us. To no longer remember is to forget. We no longer transmit this story, we no longer cultivate it.
In 1916, the Rennais François Simon, editor and president of the French Souvenir, suggested placing an unknown soldier in the Pantheon?
Simon, whose son Henry had died in action in 1915, had planned a plaque with the dates 1914-1917, believing the war was going to end. He wanted it to be an infantryman, unknown and to be honored in the Pantheon. His speech has little echo.
The idea of the common hero returns in post-WWII France. A France in mourning?
One and a half million soldiers died and 300,000 disappeared. Families want the bodies returned to them. By the law of July 31, 1920, the State authorized their transfer at its financial expense. Not all are found. A century later, one sometimes discovers a military identity plate during the construction of a work of art, at the bend of a path. The Unknown Soldier first represents the Hairy of 1914. The one who fought to liberate the territory. And all those who died.
At the end of October 1920, the case suddenly bounced back. So Britain is preparing to pay tribute to an anonymous soldier?
The first unknown soldier to be buried is the English soldier, the Unknown Warrior?, in Westminster Abbey, November 11, 1920, while the idea, French, dated back to 1916! It would have been a shame if the English dared us the pawn! Yet this is what happened.
The Republic, in 1920, also celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. And to associate the Hairy with the Republic, it is to anchor this one in the spirits …
After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, the Count of Chambord was given seven years to think about his return to the throne. Which did not happen. Forty years later, there are still royalist and Bonapartist deputies. Even if the majority of them are Republicans, inclinations to overthrow the regime appear. There is, between quotation marks, a national spirit – I am not saying patriot – which is quite significant. Articles from French Action by Charles Maurras, one of the newspapers with the highest circulation, testifies to this.
But, unlike the monarchy and the Empire, the Republic which governs “by the people and for the people” must salute the memory of the most humble?
Of course. However, the Unknown Soldier brings together all those who fought, be they sailors, airmen, artillerymen, naval troops, Foreign Legion, colonial troops, infantry. Whether they are a Vendée peasant, a Creuse aristocrat or a Parisian bourgeois. The project is also to rally the army to the Republic after the Dreyfus Affair and the scandal, in 1904, of the Affair of the cards, an operation of political and religious filing of officers suspected of anti-republicanism.
A major press campaign agitates Paris and it is a little in haste that the Unknown Soldier is designated?
In addition to the fifty years of the Republic celebrated at the same time – with the heart of Léon Gambetta, craftsman of his return in 1870, placed in an urn in the Pantheon – the controversy relates to the site of the burial of the Unknown Soldier: the Invalides , the Pantheon or the Arc de Triomphe. After heated debates between left and right, the Arc de Triomphe is acclaimed. Nevertheless, the ceremony will begin at the Pantheon under the accents of The march heroic de Saint-Saëns, before ending at Place de l’Étoile, place of the last resting place of the anonymous Poilu.
The day before, Corporal Auguste Thin, a grocery clerk in Port-en-Bessin (Calvados), had been responsible for designating the coffin in Verdun?
He had been contacted in extremis by the staff on November 10, 1920, because the first brother in arms selected had typhoid. Thin is provided with a new uniform. He must place a bouquet of wild flowers on one of the eight coffins containing the remains of unidentified soldiers who died on the battlefield. Placed in a wagon, the chosen coffin arrives at dawn on November 11 in the capital. As the press of the time said, an icy mist covers Paris. Catafalques, candles, guards of honor, tricolor flag, we honor the one to whom we must give glory for having accomplished heroic acts. Without ever knowing his identity.
The official burial, meanwhile, will not take place until January 28, 1921?
Yes, during a grandiose ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe. On the granite stone of the Vire quarries is inscribed: “Here lies a French soldier who died for the country, 1914-1918. “
And the eternal flame?
This is the journalist Gabriel Boissy, from The uncompromising, who defended the principle. It was inaugurated in 1923 by Minister Maginot, seriously wounded during the conflict, while Georges Clemenceau, the Vendéen, the priest-eater, to whom we owe the victory, was curiously “avoided”.
Since November 11, 1920, the armies no longer march under the Arc de Triomphe. Paradoxically, is the Unknown Soldier a symbol of peace?
No. He is a soldier who reminds us that wars are never clean, that they bring their share of civilian and military deaths. It is a symbol of hope for peace. Hope for peace. No peace.
The Little-Known History of the Unknown Soldier, Editions du Félin, 128 pages, € 16.
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