Guerre totale et troubles mentaux

Total war and mental shocks. A. Becker. The doctors who examined "shell shocked" patients during the Great War had quickly to loose the impression they were malingering. But it was very dijficult for them to reconstitute the mental itinerary of their patients, to read them as a narration about helpless men and women taken in the chaos of war. On the contrary, they accused heredity, degenerescence and German barbarity much more than the conditions of total war, either at the front or in the prisoners camps for soldiers, in occupied territories or civilians camps for the general population. Social darwinism was adapted to the intellectual struggle: the "fitted" for brutality, the Germans, were totally prepared to try to destroy the French "race". Nevertheless the "good" race resisted and the traumatised (the one, who, at a certain point, failed to keep up with war, death, etc.) had to be hidden or desappear in oblivion.Becker Annette. Guerre totale et troubles mentaux. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 55ᵉ année, N. 1, 2000. pp. 135-151