Matt Perry,Memory of War in France,1914–45: César Fauxbras,the Voice of the Lowly

Matt Perry, Memory of War in France, 1914–45: César Fauxbras, the Voice of the Lowly, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; xi + 259 pp.; £55.00 hbk; ISBN 9780230594418

Matt Perry’s latest book promises an insight into the history of France at a time of enormous political, social, economic and cultural upheaval through the writings of César Fauxbras. Fauxbras – real name Kléber Gaston Gabriel Alcide Sterckeman (1899–1868) – was a World War One naval veteran, novelist, pacifist, left-wing activist, journalist, prisoner of war and observer of life in occupied Paris. As a participant in and witness of these fascinating yet distressing times, Fauxbras is an intrinsically interesting character, and Perry is to be praised for rescuing him from relative obscurity. Perry does not offer a biography of Fauxbras (in this sense his book differs from Carmen Callil’s account of the life of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who lived through similar events to Fauxbras but from a very different political perspective). ² Instead, he aims to use Fauxbras’ ‘writings and experiences to reconstruct a view of the world: to let him provide the basis for a microhistory of these years’ (4–5). Presenting him somewhat contradictorily as a unique yet representative witness, each of Perry’s chapters takes one of Fauxbras’ literary outputs as its main focus. We thus get a chronological view of Fauxbras’ life through his writings, although the narrative ends in 1945, meaning that we get no sense of how he remembered the Second World War.

The book has many positive points. The chapters on Fauxbras’ life in the French navy during the First World War and his subsequent writings on the Black Sea mutinies of 1917 provide a much-needed counterpoint to the better-known histories of life in the trenches and French army mutinies. Similarly, the chapter based on Fauxbras’ survey of his fellow prisoners of war in 1940–1941 uses a new source to shed light on this aspect of French wartime history. There is also a useful and thoughtful overview of theories of memory in the introduction, whilst the appendixes of translated extracts of Fauxbras’ writings will undoubtedly prove useful in the classroom.

But the book fails to satisfy in other areas. Perry’s use of Fauxbras as a witness is problematic. For a start, his portrayal of Fauxbras as a voice of the lowly and a ‘plebeian diarist’ (147) ‘attuned to the popular frame of mind’ (158) stretches the definition of lowly and plebeian. His father was a ‘shipping insurance agent who was able to maintain his family in relative comfort’ (2), and Fauxbras himself passed an accountancy diploma and became a published novelist and journalist. So although Fauxbras often fell on financial hard times, he was hardly an impoverished or exploited rail-worker, miner, or agricultural labour. Perry’s claim that Fauxbras acts as a voice of the people therefore needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Perry also fails to treat Fauxbras’ writings with sufficient caution and critical analysis. Although they were based, in part, on his own experiences and observations, can Fauxbras’ novels really be considered as ‘almost ethnographic’(4)? The status of literature as a historical source is obviously a huge methodological issue that lies beyond the scope of Perry’s book, but his analysis often treats Fauxbras’ writings as a reflection, rather than an interpretation, of events. In addition, more evidence is needed into Fauxbras’ methods. For instance, how did he research his realist 1930s novel on poverty, Viande à Brûler? And although Perry recognizes Fauxbras’ flaws, such as his misplaced belief that Hitler did not want war and the way in which his writing ‘homogenizes the diversity of opinion’, he nearly always presents his work as intuitive and insightful: Fauxbras quickly realized the evils of Stalinism, anticipated the Hitler–Stalin pact, profoundly understood the misery of poverty (unlike other writers), was intricately attuned to popular sentiments during the occupation, and his ‘agenda once again gained currency and interest’ during the events of May 1968 (180). Paying more attention to the reception of Fauxbras’ writings may have helped Perry to offer a more critical interpretation of his book’s central figure.

And finally, Perry’s attempt to place the individual at the heart of studies of memory is welcome, as it counterbalances the common focus on collective memory and sites of memory. His borrowing of ideas from cognitive psychology to treat memory as a ‘socially situated conscious process’ is also potentially illuminating and feeds into work on social memory (even if the desire to restore conscious agency to memory studies overlooks the role of the unconscious). But this theme and argument are underdeveloped in the book; in particular, Chapters 3, 4 and 7 have little to do with memories of war. Elsewhere, the book does not quite succeed in showing how a focus on ‘consciousness’ is more ‘fruitful’ (13) than studying sites of memory. Not least, to what extent do Fauxbras’ maritime novels allow us access to his consciousness, or are they more usefully seen as cultural representations of the war and sites of memory?

Despite these reservations, Memory of War in France provides a springboard for future social histories of memory and an engaging narrative of one man’s attempt to understand, critique and shape the testing times he lived through.