Controversy : war culture

Cultural approaches to the Great War have played a key part in the renewal of First World War Studies. French historians were instrumental to this process, not least with the introduction in the 1990s of an important and much debated concept, that of “war culture”. In France itself however, the discussion of the “war culture” soon became the central if not exclusive focus of the scholarly debate. It soon degenerated into a full-blown controversy. The dispute does however raise a number of important questions for our understanding of the French and European experience of the conflict