Would you like to visit Ukraine and Crimea right now? Or go see the ruins of Gaza and the sites of the October 7 massacres of the young people of the rave Supernova near Kibbutz Reïm, in the Negev desert?
The Visit Ukraine site, supported by several government services, promoted campsites in the Carpathians last summer by ensuring a “perfectly safe” stay, supported by a promotional video. Russian tourists continue to relax at the resorts of Crimea. And as for the Palestinian and Israeli territories, if the trend continues, they too should receive visitors soon enough.
The practice of tourism not only after, but during wars is so widespread that it has several names: black tourism, or dark, or morbid, or macabre. The most learned speak of thanatourism or necrotourism.
The name and the thing were dissected this week by two French academics, Yves-Marie Evanno (remotely) and Johan Vincent as part of the conference entitled Studying War, organized this week at UQAM. The meeting brought together around forty speakers from here and abroad, mainly from France, but also from Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Great Britain.
“It’s a historiographical and epistemological conference,” explains Professor Benjamin Deruelle, director of the War History Research Group at UQAM and organizer of the exchanges. We take stock of recent research, on the way in which this object has been studied since the 1950s.”
This date marks a break in the way of conceiving of war. The professor explains that a movement to reject the history of conflicts developed in Germany as in France after the Second World War. The United States and Great Britain, on the contrary, began a profound renewal of the field of study, which is now continuing everywhere, and often in English.
“The historiographies then mixed, ideas flowed, and in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, a lot of things were done. The new major conflicts of the 2000s have also influenced specialized studies. It therefore seemed to us that it was the moment to take stock of the progress, to look back a little, to see what was done and how it was done and what new perspectives are now available to us. . »
The Evanno-Vincent duo has been exploring the very original niche of dark tourism for years during conflicts, and not after the fact. He directed the collective work Tourism and the Great War published in 2019, which will soon be followed by an essay on tourist habits between 1939 and 1945.
“When we work on this theme, a certain tension arises,” said Mr. Vincent from the outset, then demonstrating the richness of the subject. “Most often, it is what war does to tourism that is discussed, and not so much what tourism does to war. »
As early as 1870, Parisians climbed hills to see the siege of the capital by German troops. As early as 1917, Michelin published maps for visiting the battlefields of the continuing slaughter. The morally dark subject also includes the case of German soldiers hiding in France after the invasion of the USSR or GIs from Vietnam on leave.
“For the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we are in a war of movement, for the moment, which does not yet incorporate the tourist dimension,” said Mr. Vincent, without cynicism, ending his presentation. He also recalled that tourism is already practiced around Israeli settlements in the West Bank…
The imaginations of the military thing
The program was full of presentations going in all directions, covering all regions, crossing all periods. Presentations dealt with prehistory, others with the situation in the 21st century.e century, with many roots in Roman Antiquity.
In the same session on Monday, the French researcher François Porte questioned “ancient war as an internal experience” by exploring the contributions of psychiatry to the study of conflicts in Antiquity, while his colleague Gaspard Delon studied “the screen wars” in contemporary productions. The day ended with a screening of the film We have to save the soldier Ryanpresented by Professor Delon.
“The benefit of this type of event is precisely that people talk to each other beyond chronological and geographical limits,” says organizer Deruelle. The idea is to get inspired. The idea is to see what the perspectives are, in what field these perspectives are developing, how they are developing. »
He himself works from anthropology to understand how imagination structures the way of perceiving the world and influences the way of conceiving the reality of war. He is interested, for example, in the way in which the chivalrous imagination structures social relations, and in particular the social relations which are formed at the heart of battles and violent actions. Or even the way in which social, sexual or ethnic otherness influences the way in which fighters behave with each other.
And now ? Contemporary imaginations and ideological currents from both the left and the right weigh on studies of Antiquity or the Middle Ages. Is this also the case in the study of more recent conflicts? Is it, for example, marked by new feminist or queer perspectives?
“I don’t think these are EDI considerations [égalité, diversité, inclusion] or to the wokes who create new perspectives, says the conference director. There are women who are interested in war and women who are present at our conference and who are not only interested in the history of women in conflicts. And then there are men who work on women at war. »
He recalls that the Frenchman Fabrice Virgili is recognized as one of the greatest specialists in rape in conflicts. “If today we have more women in this historiographical field, it is not linked to a desire for inclusion. It’s simply linked to the interest that women have today in this world, which is more developed than around forty years ago. »
An example. Researchers Marie Derrien (University of Lille) and Fanny Le Bonhomme (University of Poitiers) study “war through the prism of madness”. Long sealed and mutually exclusive, the history of psychiatric medicine and ancient military history began to intersect around fifteen years ago, notably thanks to the opening of private or medical archives in Germany such as In France.
“The psychiatric archive makes it possible to measure the shadow of war on individuals and their loved ones over a long period of time,” summarized M.me Derrien. She cited the case of countless German women raped at the end of World War II by Allied soldiers, still traumatized twenty years after the crimes, according to clinical reports. The demonstration provided numerous examples of soldiers or former soldiers suffering from post-traumatic shock.
The two researchers are now looking at the psychological repercussions of the Ouradour-sur-Glane massacre in June 1944, including through “radioactive transmission” from generation to generation. The ruins of the martyr village and the Ouradour Memory Center are places heavily visited by dark tourism for years…