The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War - Softcover

Le Naour, Jean-Yves

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90 ratings by Goodreads

9780805079371: The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805079378 ISBN 13: 9780805079371

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks, 2005

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The powerful story of a soldier who lost his memory and identity, and of a people in mourning who found in him their own missing men

In February 1918, a derelict soldier was discovered wandering the railway station in Lyon, France. With no memory of his name or past, no identifying possessions, marks, or documents, the soldier-given the name Anthelme Mangin-was sent to an asylum for the insane. When, after the Great War ended, the authorities placed the soldier's image in advertisements to locate his family, hundreds of "relatives" claimed him-as their father, son, husband, or brother who had failed to return from the front.

Marshaling a vast array of original material, from letters and newspaper articles to accounts of battlefield deaths, hospital reports, and police files, French historian Jean-Yves Le Naour meticulously re-creates the long-forgotten story of the single soldier who came to stand for a lost generation. With humane sympathy and the skill of a novelist, Le Naour recounts the twenty-year court battles waged by the families competing to take the amnesiac soldier home. In the process, he portrays not just the fate of one individual but the rank and file's experience in the trenches and an entire nation's great and inconsolable grief following a war that consumed the lives of one million men.

Dramatic, taut, and powerfully relevant to our own times, this heartrending history depicts the pain and turmoil of a society that, without bodies to bury, is caught between holding on and letting go.

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About the Author:

Jean-Yves Le Naour teaches history and political science at the University of Aix-en-Provence, France. His previous titles include A History of Sexual Behavior During World War I. The Living Unknown Soldier will be published in six languages.

From Publishers Weekly:

This incisive historical study probes the vexed issues of war and remembrance through the tragic story of Anthelme Mangin, an unidentified amnesiac World War I veteran who washed up in a French mental hospital in 1918. The Mangin case became a cause c�l�bre after a war in which hundreds of thousands of French soldiers had gone missing in action, buried or obliterated by artillery fire, or hastily interred in anonymous graves. Many families claimed him as their own long-lost relative, usually in spite of conclusive proof to the contrary; literary renderings styled him a reborn innocent, uniquely free from the memory, and therefore free from the trauma and hatreds of the war; he became a symbol of the mixed feelings of grief and guilt that France felt towards the soldiers whose lives were shattered in the conflict. Historian and political scientist Le Naour (A History of Sexual Behavior During World War I) draws on legal and medical files from the case, press accounts, personal letters, poems, novels and plays to illuminate French attitudes towards World War I vets; he explores the anguish and pathos of the families of the missing, psychiatric attitudes towards shell-shocked soldiers, methods for establishing identity, and the conflicting political significance assigned to the dead and missing by the left and the right. His treatment is limited mainly to the French context, but readers interested not just in World War I but in America’s own cults of the Vietnam MIAs and the missing from Ground Zero will find much food for thought in this acute, well-researched and moving study. Photos.
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