In Situ (Dec 2014)
Un patrimoine mémoriel en expansion. André Pézard et la Grande Guerre : un éternel retour
Abstract
The papers of André Pézard (1893-1984) have recently been acquired by the French national archives. They provide rich documentation about the professional and literary activities of one of the most eminent italianists of his day, translator of Dante and professor at the Collège de France. He was also the author of a memoir published in 1918 under the title Nous autres à Vauquois, in which he bears witness to his own experience during the First World War. The archives of André Pézard give us information about the conditions in which he wrote this text. The diaries he had been keeping since his youth and went on writing during the war, form the basis on which his narration was developed after1917. To these diaries, kept in notebooks day by day, he adds several other documents that are ‘indexed’ in order to associate them as precisely as possible with events he lived through during the war. These photos and letters are mentioned in the diaries. These different sources are remarkably complete and throw much light on the daily life of the soldiers at this time. Pézard’s manuscripts also allow us to understand something of the literary re-composition that he worked on between 1917 and 1918. The genesis of Nous autres à Vauquois can be followed practically step by step. Memories of the war never left Pézard, as his archives show, and he pursued the work of documenting and correcting his own book each time it was republished. It was a book which enjoyed considerable success, in particular amongst veterans of the war. Pézard received many letters about it, not only from French people, but also from Germans, since his book was translated into German in 1932. These letters, carefully preserved with Pézard’s papers, all suggest how the generations that had lived through the war needed to keep the memory of it. The papers also comprise some documents that throw light on the historiographical posterity of Vauquois and on the long-term accumulation of documents that make up Pézard's war archives.
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