Poésie Grande Guerre: How Digital History Challenged Canons during the First World War Centenary

Abstract

Faced with the exclusion of French poetry of the First World War from literary periodisation, from historiography and from collective memory, the Poésie Grande Guerre Project took advantage of the scientific effervescence of the centenary years (2014-2018) to publish na online database relating poets, literary productions and war experiences. Rejecting the idea of establishing a canon analogous to the English one, the database takes inspiration from big data and corpus lingustic approaches, offering an overview of First World War poetry as a social category pointing towards a diffuse cultural practice. By examining Poésie Grande Guerre from its creation, and especially the engagement the project produces on social media, the present article is divided into three parts. The first one, dedicated to historiography, demonstrates how poetry was excluded from the two initial historiographical configuration of French studies of the Great War and how, despite being more accepted in the latest configuration, the digital element brought about by the centenary was the real catalyst for this corpus’s study. The second part, more theoretical,  examines how digital initiatives are part of a broader movement that questions not only individual canons but also the very processes of canonisation. Finally, the third part, of a practical nature, demonstrates how processes of data model construction and public engagement on social media were, more than a technique at the service of producing external knowledge, fundamental to the understanding of French poetry of the First World War. Thus, this study argues that digital tools defy literary canons and therefore move French historiography of the First World War towards a truly public and interdisciplinary historic poetics.