Gendering the Aesthetics of Peace: Women and Veterans in French Nouveau Pacifist Propaganda, 1915-1939
Open AccessMy dissertation discusses images of women and veterans in French nouveau pacifist propaganda following the First World War. I argue that early artwork created in the latter years of the First World War and the early 1920s maintained classical motifs that depicted women and veterans as passive figures of war-time violence. This narrative continued until the signing of the Locarno Treaties in 1925, when hopeful images depicting a world free from war came to dominate the pacifist discourse. These images used contemporary beliefs in women’s natural pacifism, based on their maternal instincts, to disrupt the narrative of women as passive victims of war, choosing instead to present them as active leaders of an international political and social movement. This shift mirrored nouveau images of veterans, who rose from their graves to come back and attack officials propagating militaristic ideologies and rhetoric. Depictions of French male conscientious objectors were included in these campaigns, as they provided an example of a way men could actively participate in creating a world without war. However, the rise of domestic and international fascism in the early 1930s fractured the nouveau pacifist leagues along political and ideological lines and disrupted their campaigns for peace. This rupture resulted in the same artistic motifs being used to promote a diverse range of pacifist agendas, leading to the loss of public confidence in pacifism as a viable political possibility. The increased power of the fascist movement eventually saw a return to passive grief motifs in the late 1930s, centered on a self-reflective mourning of the leagues’ failure to prevent the outbreak of a new war.
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Jannette_gwu_0075A_15928.pdf | 2022-10-04 | Open Access |
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