Bibliographical Essay

It is somewhat surprising that the study of war violence is relatively new in research on the First World War. It was not until the 1970s and the publication of John Keegan's groundbreaking volume The Face of Battle (New York: Penguin, 1976) that military historians began to describe the battlefield from the point of view of combatants and the effects of the new weapons of war - artillery, machine guns, flamethrowers, etc.

For a long time, it was the immense body of war literature, produced both during and after the war, that bore witness to the extreme violence of the First World War. Photographs, documentary films, artifacts and the material culture of the conflict also led historians - more accustomed to work on written sources than on images - to change their approach; see Stephane Audoin Rouzeau, Les armes et la chair: trois objets de mort en 1914-1918 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2009). With these newly rediscovered sources, the violence of war is now at the centre of historical research. Historians of the First World War have used several approaches to study the violence of war. Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau et al. (eds.), La violence de guerre, 1914-1944 (Paris: Editions Complexe, 2002) and George Kassimeris (ed.), The Barbarization of Warfare (New York: New York University Press, 2006) compare the violence of war in the First and Second World Wars.

On combat as a bodily experience, the groundbreaking book is Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London: Granta, 1999). On the medical history of the Great War, the literature has been deeply revitalised since the 2000s: see, for example, Sophie Delaporte, Gueules cassees: les blesses de la face pendant la Grande Guerre (Paris: Noesis, 2001), and Mark Harrison, The Medical War: British Military Medicine in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). On the violence of war and shell-shock, see the Journal of Contemporary History 35.1 (2000), special issue: ‘Shell-Shock'.

The history of war violence includes the histories of the representation of the enemy, the mobilisation of societies at war, and the motivations of combatants. The concept of ‘war culture', introduced by Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker in ‘Violence et consentement: la “culture de guerre” du premier conflit mondial', in Jean-Pierre Rioux andJean-Franpois Sirinelli (eds.), Pourune histoire culturelle (Paris: Seuil, 1997), is at the core of this cultural approach. Also see Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 14-18:Understanding the Great War, and Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Recent research has led to a re-evaluation of the impact of war violence on civilians during the First World War. These studies may focus on the violence of the invasion period in the summer of 1914 (John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)), on sexual violence (Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, L'enfant de l'ennemi (Paris: Aubier, 1995)), on violence in occupied countries (Annette Becker, Oublies de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Hachette, 2003)), on the Allied blockade of Germany, on violence committed against prisoners of war (Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)), or on the question of refugees.

There are a great number of books dedicated to the Armenian genocide, its origins, its specificity in the history of twentieth-century genocidal violence, the reactions of contemporaries, and the memory of genocide: see especially Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Stefan Ihrig, Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), and Jay Winter (ed.), America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Finally, the idea of sortie de guerre which was introduced in France explores the processes and rhythms in which societies transition from war to peace. For a general approach, see Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Christophe Prochasson (eds.), Sortir de la Grande Guerre: le monde et l’apres-1918 (Paris: Tallandier, 2008). On the brutalisation of postwar societies, the standard book is George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). The question of demobilisation in France is discussed in Bruno Cabanes, La victoire endeuillee: la sortie de guerre des soldats franpais, 1918-1920 (Paris: Seuil, 2004). On violence in postwar Germany, see Mark Jones, Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918-1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). On the question of ‘war after the war' in central Europe and in Russia, see Robert Gerwarth and John Horne (eds.), War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence after the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).