Shell-Shocked Intimacies: Gender Violence and Women’s Consent in French Culture and Literature of the First World War

The First World War generated a climate of exacerbated nationalism, deep-running anxieties over gender, and heightened masculinisation of suffering. In France, this volatile combination provided meaning to multiple ways of obscuring and trivialising diverse forms of gender-based violence and aggression towards women. The book retraces this cultural pattern by uncovering shifts and continuities in discourses on sexual consent and gender violence in the French culture and literature of the First World War. The research provides historical insight and critical depth to contemporary debates on sexual consent by arguing that the notion of cultural exception in gender relations is better accounted for through the country’s history of violence and militarization. Moreover, the research frames amour à la francaise, or the so-called French exception in gender relations, as a response to the brutalization in the war and post-war period. It highlights the fact that indifference to gender violence was a shared denomintor of the ‘French exception’ both now and then. It draws on a broad range of sources – including visual materials, literary works, judicial records, media sources, and testimonials – and tools from literary criticism, cultural history and critical discourse analysis to uncover a silenced past dominated by a male gaze for too long, revising in the process the historiographic outlook on gender relations and politics in the covered area.