Nicolas Beaupré

Fellowship 2015

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Associate Professor in History (University Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand), former fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF, 2010-2015), he is also member of the Scientific Committee Governing Board of the Museum Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne (Somme). He specializes in the History of the Great War and of its cultural, social, political and literary legacies in both France and Germany. He is the author of Ecrire en guerre, écrire la guerre. France-Allemagne 1914-1920 (CNRS éditions, 2006, new ed. 2013), a book that received three prizes. Most recently he also published Les Grandes Guerres 1914-1945 (Belin, 2012), a 1200 pages long synthesis focusing on the era of the two world wars in France. One can also mention: La France en guerre 1914-1918 (Belin, 2013) and Les Français dans la guerre 1939-1945 (Belin, 2015).

His book Le traumatisme de la Grande Guerre. Histoire Franco-allemande 1918-1933 (Presses universitaires du septentrion, 2012) received the French-German Parliamentary Prize in 2013 and was first published in German under the title Das Trauma des Krieges (1918-1932/33). Deutsch-französische Geschichte Band VIII (WBG, 2009). Most recently Nicolas Beaupré edited, together with Heather Jones (LSE) and Anne Rasmussen (Unistra, USIAS), Dans la Guerre 1914-1918. Accepter, endurer, refuser (Les Belles Lettres, 2015).

His current research focuses on two main aspects: the history of post-war occupations after 1918 on the one hand and the history of temporalities and time experience in 1914-1918. This last topic is at the center of his USIAS Project for 2015-2016.

Book resulting from the project : En temps de guerre (1914-1918), Presses universitaires de France (PUF), 2023

^{(Crédit photo : Claude Truong-Ngoc)}

War Times: Experiences, Perceptions and Representations of Time during the Great War (1914-1918)

The past twenty years or so have been characterised by major upheavals in the history of the Great War. Cultural history has dramatically changed research on this conflict by laying emphasis on social actors and how they perceived the world at war in which they lived. At the same time, the historiography has become increasingly cross-national and transnational. This project, which will culminate with the writing of a 250 to 300-page-long essay, takes both of these paradigm shifts into consideration. Its main goal is to contribute to a better understanding of how men and women are situating themselves in a War-Time.

This project investigates how social actors experienced, perceived and represented time between 1914 and 1918. It considers whether they were aware of entering a new temporality of war, or even a new epoch. It also asks whether they saw this change as a ‘disruption’, a ‘shift’ or a ‘slide’ into war, as a ‘thickening’ of the thread of time or as a parenthesis opening. The implications of these representations are investigated. What effects of the distinctive has anonymous mass death on the perception and representation of their mortality and on the way they fit within time? How was time experienced on the battlefront and on the homefront, in occupied countries and in the different belligerent societies? How did the combination of an experience of time at a standstill and of nearly eschatological expectations placed in the end of the war work?