Origine du nom de famille LONGUET (French Edition)

After the resumption of artistic activity in the capital in December , another Parisian authority exercised a form of censorship: In Army zones, control of information was even stricter. The penetration of newspapers from behind the front-line was closely watched in the combat zone. Conceived in the context of a war that everyone believed would be short, this system underwent significant changes, given the unprecedented stakes of a conflict that had settled in for the long term.

To discern, influence, and possibly correct the opinions of soldiers became an explicit objective of the ruling powers. The idea was to sound out regiments regularly and to intercept the most pessimistic letters. At the height of their activity, commissions of postal control were opening , letters — but out of the 5 to 7 million that were exchanged each week.

The government was also concerned to rationalise the propaganda effort. In January , he created the Maison de la Presse. Installed in Paris, it was equipped with telephonic and telegraphic apparatuses and with a postal office that enabled receiving and sending information throughout the world. The personnel writers, journalists, linguists, diplomats serving in the armed forces, etc.

More than two hundred magazines and foreign newspapers covering the main geographical areas involved in the conflict or areas that might become so were read and translated each week. How many ad hoc missions or services essentially ministerial or military were added to this centralised and vertical structure? These two sections derived from the desire to create new archives of the conflict, but also to ensure the dissemination on the home front as well as abroad of propaganda material.

The operators on the ground were bound by strict instructions and by the presence of a General Staff officer. The censorship office carefully combed through their productions before the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would release them for dissemination in the national and foreign press. Entertainment also entered into the propaganda framework, since the military authorities founded an Army Theatre that gave its first performance at the front in February The decisive actor in the propaganda effort, the State nevertheless relied on a very widespread dynamic of social mobilisation. Most especially, men of the press rapidly felt an ethical duty to inform, which was combined with a patriotic duty to mobilise minds.

The involvement of French intellectuals in the propaganda effort is just as manifest. All academic disciplines in the French universities participated in ideological mobilisation, convinced that the battle was also being played out on that terrain. Thus leagues, reviews, and associations proliferated, all invested in an effort at counter propaganda that was both prolific and chaotic. Artists who could not be mobilised also sought an outlet for their patriotism.

Abel Faivre produced posters for war bonds, while Jean-Louis Forain published his drawings in the press, before he enlisted in the Camouflage Section in The intention was to set up a collection of artworks about the conflict that would tour France in itinerant exhibitions. The first of eighteen such tours of war art began in February Ending the following December, this operation mobilised a hundred more or less well-known artists.

This engagement in propaganda has often been explained by a feeling of culpability, since the age of these established figures kept them out of the armed forces and hence any risk of death, whereas their sons and nephews were in uniform.

Jean Laville — Wikipédia

No doubt there is another explanation for this commitment: Profiting from this large-scale mobilisation, propaganda would utilise most of the old mediums as well as the new mass media. Paper was still the essential medium of propaganda discourses: The procedures utilised by the propaganda discourse were strongly classical: A German was brutal and barbarous, and incidentally drunk, dirty and thieving. These images became even stronger as the spectacle of a total war and the anomie of the fighting seemed to validate them every day. Thus as John Horne an Alan Kramer have shown, [19] French propaganda exploited the stories of Belgian or French refugees and dramatized the destructions by Germany houses in ruins and the Cathedral of Reims bombed.

The speed with which this system of representations was set up also illustrates the preponderance of the memory of and the Germanophobe sentiment maintained by the Third Republic. Paradoxically, the enemy was not the priority target of the French propaganda discourse. Certainly some cards and tracts were dropped over German trenches with the purpose of demoralising their occupants, but we do not know at what rate or intensity, nor especially with what effect.

It was more the neutral powers that focused the attention and reflection of French propaganda services. To ensure the maintenance of their benevolent neutrality or to provoke their entry into the Allied camp was much more than a minor stake in this war of attrition. The opening of the first season took place on 27 November, featuring great classic dramas like Les Fourberies de Scapin. In reality, the enormous propaganda effort that was deployed essentially targeted the French themselves, both civilians and soldiers.

Foremost, it was a matter of justifying the combat ideologically, of making it into a war to defend civilisation, but also of giving people confidence.

This figure of war was the physical and moral antithesis of the poilu ; it was supposed to unite all Frenchmen in unanimous reprobation and heap guilt on those who wanted to remain outside the conflict. Adults were not the only targets, since propaganda was also aimed at children. Therefore propaganda tried to strengthen the patriotic and moral unity of the country. Theatre plays and songs that might have an emphatic defamatory or naughty effect did not receive a visa from the Paris Police Prefecture.

The same fate befell communications that were thought to carry allusions to the violence of war or to the frightful living conditions at the front. In a great variety of tones and registers, French propaganda discourses did nothing by half-measures. The press , frustrated by the penury of information, sometimes dared to publish articles that were totally disconnected from reality. In its edition of 24 August , Le Matin predicted victory by proclaiming in a triumphal headline: Exaggeration and chauvinism quite often reduced propaganda to a grotesque caricature: Such statements soon alerted the French population to propaganda excesses.

In fact, Clemenceau criticised the shift from a censorship of military information — which was legitimate for him — to a censorship that was political and general. This is why his paper proudly proclaimed the items that had been chopped out, those white spaces that on the front page signalled to readers the presence of censorship. One expression quickly became popular to characterise the nature and quality of official information: The enterprise of disinformation and manipulation resulted among combatants only in vigilance and hostility, as witnessed by this letter from a soldier to his parents: However, with the usury of the war, especially after , the caricatured kind of propaganda tended to attenuate.

In November , the novel Le Feu by Henri Barbusse won the Goncourt Prize, an index of the need felt for truth and soberness about the war. Moreover, there were a thousand ways to get around censorship and the information scarcity. When the editorials of Clemenceau were censored, they were frequently sent in sealed envelopes to subscribers. The fissures that appeared in the Sacred Union in likewise had the effect of provoking the birth of many papers that were very attached to their freedom of speech, notably within the ranks of the Socialist minority.

Moreover, civilians and combatants were not without resources. After the French troops had Soldier Newspapers or trench newspapers; these little war gazettes, often ephemeral and printed under rudimentary conditions, were disseminated at the level of the regiment or division, but it was not rare for them to reach the home front.

Despite these challenges, those in power intended to keep prerogatives regarding censorship and propaganda.

A fix is available

A victim of the Anastasia cuts when he was editor-in-chief of his paper, Clemenceau, once he was named president of the Council in November , did not fundamentally question this practice. The testimony of General Jean Jules Henri Mordacq , his military chief of staff, confirms this.

Greedy for information about his former colleagues, Clemenceau had named as head of his civilian cabinet Georges Mandel , who seemed to master perfectly how to spread information among journalists: This regimen gave the best results. The basic issue is the impact and results of these propaganda discourses.

It is difficult to give a definite answer. That is certainly true, but the United States did not intervene in the conflict until two years later, in , in reaction to the outrage of the submarine warfare launched by Germany, but especially in response to the content of the Zimmermann telegram communicated to the White House on 1 March by the British information services.

Next, what can we say about the effect of censorship and of propaganda on the behaviour of the French? Was propaganda the causative factor or simply the reflection of the ideological cohesion of France during the conflict? Here, too, the answer is difficult. Undoubtedly, the censorship of sensitive events or information casualties, the mutinies of , or the strikes of spring helped to preserve, if not the reality, then at least the illusion of a Sacred Union in the eyes of the French.

We now know that the reality of French mutinies reached French public opinion only in a very diffuse and tardy way, as it reached the German general staff, which was thus not able to exploit this passing crisis in the French Army. Similarly, the working class strikes in the spring of were subject to a blackout on the part of a press that was strictly censored by the government. However, those in power had neither the ambition nor the means for a total control of information, which would have required thousands of additional censors.

In , he was expected to win against Defferre's successor Robert Vigouroux , but lost again. In , Gaudin stood for the post of Mayor along with maintaining his position as a senator. He won with an absolute majority of 55 City council men out of and was installed as Mayor of Marseille on 25 June On 6 October , he became Vice-President of the Senate. In , he was re-elected for a third time as Vice-President of the Senate.

In , he announced he would run for Mayor a fourth time.

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On 4 April, the municipal council in Marseille elected him as mayor for a new period with no opposing candidate. He has never been married. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Members of the Senate of France.

Jeanne Mélin

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