The duty invites you once again to the back roads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up all summer long like a postcard. Today, we are interested in the lessons of the history of war to understand current conflicts.
I am a historian, of war. For many of my fellow citizens, I am above all a “cloud shoveler”. The history of war struggles to establish itself as a relevant, or even legitimate, field of research in the academic and civilian worlds, as we often confuse the researcher and his object of study. Indeed, by working on this theme, the historian would not only maintain an unhealthy attraction to this subject, but also the validity of war itself.
Since the First World War, in the French-speaking world—this is less true of the English-speaking world—military history has been commonly accused of promoting a “helmeted and armoured truth”, according to Marc Bloch, in the service of the army, feeding nationalism and hatred between peoples. In the collective imagination, it remains a dusty history, reeking of mothballs and old uniforms; a history that is only interested in great battles and great men; a history that remains a prisoner of a tasteless event narrative.
However, the study of war and military facts has undergone profound renewals since the middle of the 20th century.e century. Three generations of historians have worked on the transformations of its objects, its methods, its sources and its issues. They now seek to understand the complex and ambiguous relationships between armies and societies, to grasp the real weight of war on human communities, or to understand the experience of those who live and suffer it.
Thus, after having become a “new military history”, it has now become a “history of war”. Researchers now consider war as a total social and historical fact, as a particular moment in which specific relationships are formed between states, peoples, groups and individuals, and as an essential prism for understanding the life, organization and evolution of societies of the past and present.
Studying the wars of the past allows us to better understand the world in which we live, the international tensions that run through it and the conflicts of which we – the civil society of North America – are, fortunately, but for how much longer, distant witnesses.
To understand the war in Ukraine, to take just one example, it is not enough to go back to the Russian invasion of February 24, 2022, or even to that of Crimea in 2014 or to the independence of Ukraine (1991) after the explosion of the Soviet bloc. This conflict is rooted in a much more distant tradition that mixes historical, cultural and religious considerations. The Russian national novel considers kyiv as the cradle of the Eastern Orthodox faith, and Vladimir the Great, prince of Kievan Rus’ who made it his capital and received baptism there (988), as the father of Christian Russia.
The links with Ukraine mentioned by the Russian authorities, even if they serve active propaganda among the population, are therefore not limited to them. They provide a historical substrate for territorial claims. They thus find their place among the justifications for the “special intervention” presented to the international community and among the political and strategic considerations that motivated its commitment. Historians and anthropologists have shown how social and political imaginaries carried the ideas and values of human groups, and how they nourished their memory, their representations and their collective identity, to the point of sometimes becoming a driving force for their action.
History thus teaches us less to judge, even if each citizen can have his convictions, than to note the central role of the historical imagination and memory among the springs of war and its brutality. The depth of history allows us to approach controversial current topics with a critical distance and in a less passionate manner, to study them by analogies with situations of the past to better discover their specificity or, on the contrary, their banality, and finally to grasp the long-term processes in which they are part.
It is certainly easier to address the issue of religious, racist, sexist or homophobic violence perpetrated by combatants in the context of the religious wars of the 16th century.e century, as in those of the intervention of Canadian armed forces in Somalia (1993) or recent conflicts in the Near and Middle East.
How can we understand, moreover, the current “crisis of military misconduct” that is tarnishing many Western armies without considering that a particular virility has been constructed there on the fringes of developments in civil society? How can we grasp the relationship to democracy and citizenship of these soldiers who step out of their reserve duty or engage in political movements, such as the “freedom convoy”, without considering the way in which governments have endowed them, since the end of the Middle Ages, with a hybrid status, both inside and outside society?
Finally, history, as a critical gaze, guards against the misappropriation of the past and disinformation. The history of war is indeed also that of the way in which the history of conflicts is shaped and reshaped. If contemporary wars are inserted into history, their imperatives also restructure the memory of past conflicts.
The history of the Ukrainian conflict is thus inseparable from the memory maintained by the great Russian national narrative. Vladimir Putin recalled this bluntly in his speech of February 21, 2022, considering Ukraine as an “inalienable part of our history [celle du peuple russe]of our culture, of our spiritual space.” The war of words that is being played out on the fringes of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation and whose stake is that of public opinion is structured around a history that goes beyond that of the Middle East since 1948.
The nature of memory, however, is to be selective. The great famine of 1932-1933 organized by the Russian authorities in Ukraine (the Holodomor), the multiple condemnations of Jewish colonization under international law and the terrorist nature of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 are thus absent from the official speeches of the political authorities deemed responsible for the conflicts.
By tracing the mechanisms of their storage in memory, of the amnesic, negationist or mendacious rewritings of the past, the history of past conflicts helps us to take a nuanced and detached look at the world and its dynamics. It gives us keys to reflect and act as an enlightened citizen of the world. It improves our knowledge of the scourges of war and disinformation that threaten democracy and that it is necessary to understand in order to better combat them.