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Dis-abled by war: The never-ending war of 1914-1918

Gildas Brégain, Jean-Christophe Coffin et Henri-Jacques Stiker
p. 226-230
Cet article est une traduction de :
Mutilés de guerre: la non-fin de la guerre 1914-1918 [fr]

Texte intégral

1Between six and seven million men were maimed during the First World War due to the intense use of new weapons and gases that mutilated and disfigured bodies (Anderson, 2017). European governments then faced the question of how to provide for these men. The issue varied in magnitude in different countries. In Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, more than 800,000 war-disabled men required legislative provision whereas other countries (Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian Kingdom, United States) had to deal with 100,000 to 350,000 men disabled by the conflict. In each of these countries, war-disabled men formed organizations whose political positioning was often adversarial (apolitical, communist, social catholic, etc.). Because they had so many members, and because they spoke for war victims, these associations had significant influence on public authorities. Generally, these associations did not challenge existing social attitudes but prided themselves in promoting the sacrifice of soldiers and those who had been wounded (Gerber, 2012: xiii). However, there was great diversity between national contexts. In Portugal, the few thousand people who had been disabled by the war did not form an organization until the 1930s and, even then, continued to struggle to obtain social recognition as national heroes (Correia, 2017).

2Almost all of those disabled by the war were men, the majority being between 20 to 40 years old, however, some female nurses were included in the numbers. Many encountered difficulties in returning to jobs in agriculture/farming, trades, crafts, and industry. Although they had only been working for 10 or 20 years, significant number were forced to change career to provide for their families. Even while the war was ongoing governments had begun to provide physical rehabilitation (provision of prostheses) and vocational rehabilitation policies for those people who had been mutilated or maimed, these programmes had many limitations. To solve the problem of their continuing employment, in many European countries (Austria, Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy) aid organizations demanded that all employers whether public or private were forced to hire a certain proportion of disabled men. Several European countries (Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Poland) adopted legal measures between 1916 and 1924 that obliged private and public companies to employ war-wounded workers. Governments also provided other economic benefits to disabled people, such as “invalidity” pensions, free public transport, and cheap housing.

3The first studies on people wounded in the war focused on public policies, legislation and mobilization of organizations. More recent studies have investigated the relationship between the body and masculinity (Bourke, 1996; Carden-Coyne, 2009), the pain associated with lost limbs (Delaporte, 2002), the representation of the war-disabled in the media (Sumpf, 2015), the long-term psychological problems of soldiers (Derrien, 2017), and the material benefits of the charitable assistance provided to those who had been mutilated (Bartlett, 2018). Many of these studies focus only on national implications: France (Montès, 1991; Romien, 2005; Scales, 2008), England (Bourke, 1996; Anderson, 2011; Reznick, 2009; Carden-Coyne, 2014; Bartlett, 2018), Italy (Dalla Torre, 2015), Belgium (Verstraete & Everbroeck, 2014), Germany (Perry, 2014; Kienitz, 2008), Poland (Magowska, 2014), Portugal (Correia, 2017), USA (Linker, 2011).

4A small number of monographs (Cohen, 2001; Gehrhardt, 2015; Michl, 2007) plus the recent special issue of the First World War Studies Journal (Verstraete, Salvante & Anderson, 2015) provide comparative analyses of different national contexts. Historians have started to adopt transnational perspectives on this topic (Brégain, 2016). This trend is likely to continue as aid associations and medical doctors are demonstrating an increased interest in comparing the experiences and data of different countries.

5However, the vast majority of these studies focus on the war and the immediate post-war period, thus neglecting the medium- and long-term consequences of war on the lives of these individuals. The purpose of this special issue of ALTER journal is to shed new light on the life experiences of war-disabled people during the inter-war period, at both the national and international level. As Julie Anderson points out, national contexts are fundamental to understanding the nature of aid assistance policies and the life experiences of war-disabled people (Anderson, 2017). The five proposed articles examine four distinct territories (United Kingdom, French Colonial Empire, Metropolitan France, Belgium).

6These contributions provide a more complex understanding of the policies created to support people disabled by war. The articles show the heterogeneity of aid assistance policies, the many short-comings of these policies, and their impact on the living conditions of war-disabled men. The studies also highlight the uncertainties and limitations of available sources (associative journals, administrative reports, statistics, testimonies and autobiographies, etc.). As a result of these biases, these contributions provide much more information on the life experiences of white European people who were disabled by war while there is very little relating to the history of “indigenous” people from French, British and Belgian colonies, who were mutilated or maimed in the conflict.

  • 1 Article titled “‘An uglier duckling than before’: Reclaiming agency and visibility amongst facially (...)

7First, Eilis Boyle examines how facially-wounded British ex-servicemen negotiated their male identity with physical disfigurement.1 In contemporary writing those mutilated by war are depicted as passive, desperate and sexually impotent victim, far removed from the male ideal of the mutilated hero. Although men with facial mutilation were a common sight in hospitals and medical facilities, it was often considered inappropriate for these people to be in public spaces. The population would avoid them or stare at them out of curiosity. However, the writings and testimonies of disfigured combatants reveal that they exercised some form of control over their own representation. Only a few mutilated people, the most disfigured, used masks to cover their faces in their interactions with the outside world. Facially-wounded ex-servicemen often asserted their masculinity through a variety of other means: by returning the other’s gaze; by refusing to be the object of a spectacle; by affirming that disfiguration was the result of patriotic war; by being aggressive; by challenging the image of the fragile victim; by affirming their capacity for seduction and sentimental relation-ships; by using humour. They thus manifest their right to visibility, while conforming to the male ideals of the time (heterosexual relationship, marriage, etc.), especially in close family circles. These facially-wounded ex-servicemen whose social identity had thus become defined by the military – and the sharing of a martial masculinity – “adapted their old (identities) to incorporate their new corporeality.”

  • 2 Article titled “Lois et expériences dans l’entre-deux-guerres, des invalides aux handicapés.”

8Stéphane Zygart argues that while the inter-war period has been claimed to be a period of “structural change in the living conditions of people with disabilities,” this was experienced more at the level of aspiration than at the level of concrete experience and representation.2 His analysis explores the extent of this change in two spheres: the relationship to work (with the introduction of the optional right to work, which could be combined with a pension) and the social representation of disability.

9He rightly points out the discontinuities or even the “breakdown” of medical and vocational rehabilitation policies during the inter-war period, due to the non-transfer of motor rehabilitation practices to other categories of disabled people. He insists that the “lack of univocity and globality” of these changes was due to the restrictive nature of legislation and the difficulty of application, the diversity of individual choices (those who worked and those who did not, for example) and the heterogeneity of individual trajectories, and, the persistence of a negative vision of disability as totally disabling by a part of the population. His philosophical perspective highlights the theoretical and ethical innovation resulting from their claims for the extension of disability rates beyond 100% disability (for example 180 degree for one who have multiple disabilities): first, “disability is not impotence […] because it means that it is a continuous and relentless confrontation, always with an uncertain outcome, between the power to act and what stands in the way”; the problems posed by disability could only be solved by personalized and daily support; pain needed to be taken into account in the assessment of disabilities.

  • 3 Article intitulé “Nation’s compensation for warwounds and work incapacities: The creation of a new (...)

10Marisa de Picker is interested in the different actors who contributed to the construction of policies to assist people who were war-disabled in Belgium. She points out the essential role of aid associations for people who were war-disabled (FNI and UNICG) in questioning the authorities, claiming rights and implementing professional re-education policies.3 These aid associations advocated for increased pensions, supplements for multiple disabilities or when an assistant is required, and securing the indexating of disability pensions to inflation. By combining both administrative and political negotiations and the threat of public demonstration, these associations succeeded in winning over parliamentarians and political authorities, who granted these measures in 1919 and 1926. The author analyses in detail the fate of disabled war civilians, which has largely been ignored by current historiographers. De Picker’s work demonstrates the differences in treatment between civilian and military disabled people in terms of vocational rehabilitation and pensions. Supported by case study illustrations, her article highlights the hierarchy that existed amongst those mutilated during the war and the many limitations of the assistance policies provided (pensions, rehabilitation, employment). She points out, in particular, the avoidance strategies of private employers of the legal obligation to hire people with disabilities. According to the author, assistance policies in this period are characterized by contradiction: on the one hand, they value physical recovery, return to work and the independence of disabled people in their discourse, yet, on the other hand, they reinforce the idea that disability is synonymous with a lack of productivity.

  • 4 Article intitulé: “Reintegrating without changing colonial hierarchies? Ethnic and territorial ineq (...)

11In his groundbreaking study, Gildas Brégain shows that the legislation on assistance for war-disabled people applied only partially and heterogeneously to the territories of the French colonial empire.4 The nature and provision varied according to the number of war-disabled people present in each colonial territory, the political pressures exerted by associations of war-disabled people, and the choices of local governors as to whether or not they were sensitive to the case of war-disabled people. The war-disabled people in the French Empire were almost all entitled to a pension but only war-disabled people in certain territories (North Africa, 4 municipalities in Senegal), benefited from real opportunities for professional rehabilitation, employment in public administrations and free surgical and medical care. Again, worth noting are the clear differences in treatment between French and indigenous mutilated people. His study shows that the French authorities, out of political necessity, granted indigenous war-disabled people of certain territories of the Empire (North Africa, 4 municipalities in Senegal) economic rights equal to those of French citizens mutilated during the war. This desire for equal treatment disappeared at the end of the 1920s, however. Only a few indigenous war-mutilated people finally managed to change their status and become French citizens, with the French authorities remaining very reluctant to change the existing colonial hierarchy, even for those who had lost their physical health in France’s name.

12Clément Collard presents a pioneering study resulting from his thesis work. Based on a study of the 1924 law on the employment of the war-mutilated, whose genesis and application he explains, Collard analyses the contradictions of the policy of reintegration of war-disabled ex-servicemen into the labour market. He is interested in the reactions and statements of employers voiced by their representatives, both at a national level and through the various chambers of commerce. Based on rich documentation from under-exploited archives, his article demonstrates the reluctance of employers to hire war-disabled people and the hesitation of public authorities to intervene on this matter as partly due to the difficulty of measuring the number of people concerned by the reintegration policy, even though the law had defined a quota. The author considers that the authorities failed to define a need for employment, which meant that not only was the application of the law difficult but also that criticism of it was facilitated. Thus, between the declared voluntary status of employment and the lack of information about the employment needs of the war-disabled, the public authorities, to a large extent fostered a paradoxical situation.

13In sum, these five innovative articles provide precise data on the complexity of policies providing assistance to war-disabled people in several European countries and the French Empire. They also highlight the agency of war-disabled people who fought for their own rights and representation; and the inequality in status of war-disabled people (facially-wounded and not facially-wounded, French and indigenous, military and civilian wounded, etc.). The articles provide a framework for situating the individual trajectories of war-disabled people within the broader context of the assistance policies provided to them in different national contexts. These articles thus pave the way for future studies on the daily lives of those mutilated by war – on their return to civilian life, on their economic situation and impact on family life, and on brutality and male violence within couples.

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Bibliographie

Anderson Julie. 2011. War, disability and rehabilitation in Britain: “Soul of a nation.” Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Anderson Julie. 2017. Mutilation and disfiguration. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 1914-1918. Online: https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/pdf/1914-1918-Online-mutilation_and_disfiguration-2017-08-03.pdf.

Bartlett Emily Charlotte. 2018. Charity, material culture and disabled ex-servicemen in Britain, 1914-1929 (PhD thesis). University of Kent.

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Notes

1 Article titled “‘An uglier duckling than before’: Reclaiming agency and visibility amongst facially-wounded ex-servicemen in Britain after the First World War.”

2 Article titled “Lois et expériences dans l’entre-deux-guerres, des invalides aux handicapés.”

3 Article intitulé “Nation’s compensation for warwounds and work incapacities: The creation of a new welfare system for physically disabled veterans and civilians of the First World War in Interwar Belgium, 1918-1928.”

4 Article intitulé: “Reintegrating without changing colonial hierarchies? Ethnic and territorial inequalities in the policies to assist war-disabled from the French colonial empire (1916-1939).”

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Gildas Brégain, Jean-Christophe Coffin et Henri-Jacques Stiker, « Dis-abled by war: The never-ending war of 1914-1918 »Alter, 13-4 | 2019, 226-230.

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Gildas Brégain, Jean-Christophe Coffin et Henri-Jacques Stiker, « Dis-abled by war: The never-ending war of 1914-1918 »Alter [En ligne], 13-4 | 2019, mis en ligne le 27 février 2025, consulté le 15 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/alterjdr/8731 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alter.2019.09.006

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