Occupied France offers literary response
In May 1915, the war that was to end by the previous Christmas was still raging.
Then, on May 7, a speedy resolution to the conflict looked further away than ever when news broke of the sinking of the Lusitania off the Irish coast.
The acres of Lusitania- related material digitised at the French National Library (the BNF) and made available free of charge to the general public convey the vastness of the French coverage of this event.
From the moment the story broke, it filled the French press of all political persuasions. It was the lead story in Paris, the provinces, the colonies — including Algeria, Indochina, Martinique and Madagascar — but also in French-language news publications in cities from Geneva to St Petersburg. Within France, the story was covered equally extensively by newspapers and reviews published for specific readerships; these included Catholic parish magazines, La Tribune Juive, and La Nation Tchèque which was edited by the Czech independence leader living in exile in Paris, Edvard Benès.
Find more content related to the sinking of RMS Lusitania in our special report
The story was dissected by countless academic reviews focusing on engineering, transport, law, economics, philosophy and metaphysics. Given that in 1915, France was a newly literate country — compulsory primary schooling had been introduced under the visionary minister for education, Jules Ferry, in the 1880s — the story also featured in publications designed for the newly literate, such as Lectures pour Tous (Reading Material for Everyone), from mainstream Paris publisher, Hachette.
In 1917, children taking the primary school leaving examination (le Certificat d’Etudes) in rural Mayenne were asked to discuss the Lusitania sinking and to explain the words paquebot and torpille (ocean liner and torpedo).
The fact that young children in a remote area of France were expected to be able to answer these questions shows how deeply news of the event, and discussions around it, had penetrated.
The story was covered extensively not just in print media but equally in more ephemeral places such as political cartoons, songs, satirical magazines and postcards.
Photojournalism — always a strong tradition in France — played a major role in publicising the story, with photos from Queenstown (Cobh) depicting drowned babies, disorientated survivors and local onlookers filling mass- circulation magazines like Le Miroir and J’ai Vu.
Much of the coverage of the story itself follows similar lines across publications in France, Britain and America, with similar questions lingering over the following years: was there ammunition on board? What of Hugh Lane’s paintings? Could the wreck be re-floated? How could the Germans be forced to pay reparations? Human interest stories abound: who was on board? Who just missed being on board?
However, the French coverage of the story was in some respects somewhat different. The frequent references to the Pope’s position regarding the sinking are striking: did he — or did he not — condemn it? Writers align themselves strongly on opposite sides of this question.
One cannot help suspecting that, in the background, the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, which had ostensibly ended in 1905 with the formal separation of Church and State in France, still simmers.
More than that, however, what surely differentiates the French and Anglophone reporting is the stark fact that the French commentators, unlike their Anglophone counterparts, were writing from within an occupied country.
In France, for the second time within living memory, boots were on the ground; German forces had yet again breached France’s borders and were penetrating deep within her northern and eastern provinces. The very titles of some of the publications that reported the Lusitania story are evocative in this respect: Le Journal des Régions Dévastées, Le Journal des Mutilés.
The trauma of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, the loss of France’s Eastern provinces of Alsace and part of Lorraine, and scalding memories of the sight of German soldiers massing at the gates of Paris, were as raw as ever. Now, once more, the unimaginable had happened: the German army was on the move, and German flags were flying yet again over buildings and public monuments in France. Thus, on learning of the sinking of the Lusitania, French commentators react with fury and what can be described only as venom.
The Lusitania sinking quickly becomes a rallying call. We read of soldiers rushing to battle in places like Villers-Bretonneaux in Picardie, shouting ‘Lusitania, Lusitania’.
The ship’s name becomes a byword, a kind of shorthand for countless other atrocities. Again and again, the French journalists include it in a list of atrocities such as the bombing of Reims cathedral, the razing of Arras, the carnage in Verdun and the Somme, the destruction of the university library in Louvain, and the execution of nurse Edith Cavell.
An intense sense of immediacy is conveyed: although the Lusitania was sunk over 400km off the French coast, for the commentators this is as real and as close by as the killing fields of the Western Front. Years later, in the 1930s, the name Lusitania has lost none of its power: L’Humanité, the newspaper founded by the great Socialist leader, Jean Jaurès, equates the bombing by Franco’s forces of the Basque town of Guernica with the sinking of the Lusitania.
In the very recent past, the fate of the Lusitania has again featured prominently in French publications.
It is the main theme in a short story, Ni Fleurs Ni Couronnes (2007) by award-winning writer, Maylis de Kerangal (born 1967).
Here, a young man from a Co Cork village hears that a reward is paid for bodies recovered from the Lusitania wreck and, along with a mysterious young woman, sets out body-hunting. When they recover Vanderbilt’s body, a handsome reward enables them to strike out for new lives.
Alongside this, over the past two years, a series of three sumptuously illustrated graphic novels entitled SOS Lusitania has been published in France by Grand Angle. A boxed set of these three volumes is being produced to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Lusitania sinking.
Find more content related to the sinking of RMS Lusitania in our special report
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