History
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The historian specializing in the intimate has focused on a photographic album made by a former soldier and recounting his honeymoon in the footsteps of the Great War.
There are plenty of novels based on an object linked to family memory or that of a stranger. It is rarer for a historical essay. With Ash wedding, Camille Vidal-Naquet turned to an exceptional photographic album preserved at the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne (1). In 1920, the ex-poilu Debaecker gave his wife Berthe this heavy (eight kilos) picture book that looks back on the honeymoon trip taken a year earlier on the still smoking traces of the conflict. Visiting ruined towns and villages, contemplating expanses of shell holes, sleeping in makeshift hotels, one might think that this is a twisted idea. Wouldn’t it have been better to go to the Riviera or Italy? In any case, this three-week trip is part of the more general movement of war tourism. In 1919, it represented 75% of tourist visits to France according to historian Emmanuelle Danchin.
The “bet of the singular”
Clémentine Vidal-Naquet shows here how a story of the intimate during the war of 14 can be captivating. She has already worked a lot on the colossal correspondence during this conflict between the front and the rear. With Ash wedding, she takes us into a state of vertigin
