Bruno Cabanes, August 1914: France, The Great War, and a Month That Changed the World Forever (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)
Biography: Bruno Cabanes is the Donald G. and Mary A. Dunn Chair in Modern Military History at Ohio State University. Before coming to Ohio State, he taught at Yale University. Professor Cabanes is a historian of twentieth-century Europe, and more specifically, the social and cultural history of war.
Overview: A ground level portrait of how French society reacted and experienced the first month of the First World War, and how it changed society. For Cabanes, this book represents “an intimate history of the end of a world” (xiv) While most scholars view the fall of 1914 as the great turning point of the Great War, in fact it only took the French several days to weeks to realize the reality of modern warfare.
Central Thesis: Cabanes argues that August 1914 fundamentally shaped the war and French society. While its men and youth went to war in all of its inhumanity, French society went into mourning. (xvi)
Scope of Book. The book explores the outbreak of the war, mobilization, the horrors of the “Battle of the Frontiers,” and the looming threat of defeat.
- Cabanes discusses popular responses to the imminence of war and mobilization. He also looks at responses to political and military actions
- Cabanes makes clear the cultural context of military behavior, choices, and events. He notes that the Battle of the Frontiers occurred “at the very juncture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century wars, at the moment when the modalities of combat took on a new kind of violence” (100).
- A key aspect of this “intimate history” is the initial reaction of French people to the prospect, then the reality, of war. Cabanes eloquently describes how people greeted the first days of mobilization: “Silence, made up by turns of stupor and anxiety in the face of an uncommon event, accompanied by the inevitable march into the unknown”
- Initial chapters describe a sort of nationalistic euphoria as the French sent their sons off to train stations, and war to defend their country against the Boshe threat to their very existence.
- He describes how fear and rumors swept around the countryside—including “fake” news reports.
- Another chapter is devoted to the enemy within and how French citizens dealt with potential spies and foreign nationals. Both of these discuss the hysteria that comes from the opening of war. Witch hunts for spies and traitors, anti-German and anti-Jew violence, etc.
- He devotes an entire chapter to The Sounds of War and how silence befell the country as its men mobilized. He describes also the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of horses and their slaughter at the front, the resistence of French people living under occupation after Germans swept through, and how the French people mourned their soldiers deaths despite not having bodies to mourn.
- He writes the French counteroffensive in Septmber 1914, before settling into trench warfare, gas, and mass deaths at Verdun and the Somme, has overshadowed the feelings of defeat and despair felt during August.
- He does offer some analysis of Plan XVII and the Schlieffen Plan, but these do not factor into the overarching thesis.
Commentary: Overall a great, quick read that sheds light on the attitude and feelings within French society as the reality of modern warfare took over the country. His prose is excellent, but some issues with translation are evident. Regardless, this is an excellent study in how war affects a civilian population—both within its grasp and on the home front. The best part of this book is how it makes one feel like they’re actually in France in 1914.