11:03 - 11:45: "The soldiers, as you may know, used to inform the families of the precise location of the burial place, including sometimes a photograph, sometimes a map, sometimes a description, so that the bodies could be found and reburied after the war. They described the dead soldier's last moments, they described the funeral tribute that had been made. Actually in doing so the first circle of mourning, the small primary group worked as a kind of fictitious family, a substitute for the relatives that were not present when the soldier was killed."
16:45 - 17:01: "As my colleague Jay Winter pointed out in a thought-provoking article on wartime demography published some years ago, many older people in Paris, in London, in Berlin were suffering from depression during the Great War."
21:10 - 21:31: "Obviously this solitary death was all the more unbearable as dying was not the socially invisible reality in the late twentieth century, but something accepted, something experienced at home in the company of relatives and friends."
22:24 - 22:49: "All the stages - and they are very important - all the stages that used to prepare a person for bereavement were simply eliminated. All the rituals that in ordinary life accompanied the first moments of loss were also eliminated. The first specificity was the absence of the dead bodies..."
28:00 - 29:33: "... the mourning process after WWI was an incredibly difficult and tortuous one, and it gave birth to a new commemorative activity... Up to now, I've addressed the notion of grief from the perspective of personal bereavement. But the expense (?) of mass death, the absence of so many dead bodies, the violence of the war experience itself also needed new forms of representation ... That's what Stéphane Andoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker explain in their book 1914-1918 Understanding the Great War, the words spoken at ceremonies, the images offered in inscriptions and commemorative monuments, the stained-glassed windows, the ossuaries have lasted to this day and through them we as historians can recall these endless commemorations where political liturgy and private bereavement were complementary. Political liturgy ends private bereavement..."
30:04: "nationalization of mourning" transformação dos campos de batalha em lugares de visita (?) ou peregrinação (?) nos anos 20 e 30. Relação entre os lieux de mémoire e a "unidade nacional francesa". Lugares de luto coletivo. substituição dos corpos pelos nomes, cujas inscrições eram tocadas.
34:57 - 37:54: "The other lieu de mémoire, the oversight of memory related to this nationalization of mourning is of course the commemorative invention par excellence of the Great War, the cult of the Unknown Soldier. In most countries, except Germany and except Russia, the cult of the Unknown Soldier was extremely popular in the 1920s. It appearead almos at the same time in Paris and London in 1920, in Washington DC, Rome, Brussels in 192, and in Prague and Belgrade in 1922. (...) On November the 10th, 1920, the Unknown Soldier's coffin arrived in Paris in a special train from Verdun. The coffin was placed for one night - and every step is important - the coffin was placed for one night at the Place Denfert-Rochereau which is of course symbolic, and you know probably why, because it was named .. for a heroic French commander of 1871, and so it symbolized the revenge of the French over the Germans. The next day, November the 11th 1920, the Unknown Soldier was brought to the Pantheon, which was first considered the natural place to bury it, because as you may know it's the burial place dedicated to the nation's great man. But according to most veterans, the Unknown Soldier was not a grand homme, was not a great man in the usual meaning of the word. So after a brief ceremony at the Pantheon the coffin was brought to the Arc de Triomphe. It had been draped with the French flag, it had been placed on a gun carriage, and it was surrrounded by mutilated veterans who were to symbolize the destroyed men and the destroyed families. Furthermore (...) the coffin was also accompanied by a fictitious family - a war widow, a mother and father who had lost their son and a child who had lost his father. This as if each French man, each French woman was to adopt the Unknown Soldier as a member of his or her family. And the ceremonies of November the 11th 1920 brought hundreds of thousands of weeping people into the streets of Paris, many encouraged to believe that the coffin that passed actually before them contained the body of the man they had lost.
