Primary Source Analysis: Fighting France

Edith Wharton is most popularly known as a novelist, but she has also written many memoirs, poems and travel writings. At the beginning of World War 1, Wharton was one of the few foreigners allowed to travel along the front lines, mostly because of her connections with Walter Berry, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris at the time. She got to witness firsthand the transformation of Paris and France as a whole as war slowly took over the lives of soldiers and civilians while visiting hospitals, trenches, and abandoned villages. She recorded her day to day travels in a series of articles that were first published in Scribner’s Magazine, but later brought together and published in 1918 in the book Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort.

            Although Wharton was an American novelist, it cannot be denied that her heart belonged to France. She moved to France in 1913 after her marriage fell apart and decided to live there permanently in 1920. In the very first chapter, The Look of Paris, Wharton travels to Paris during August of 1914 on the day before war has been officially declared. She describes her surroundings through rose tinted glass, as she does throughout the majority of the book, despite her dismal surroundings. She talks about the Parisians being against the war, not because of moral reasons but simply because it would be an inconvenience. The people seemed to disregard the rumors of war flying around town and “went on steadily about [their] midsummer business of feeding, dressing, and amusing the great army of tourists who were the only invaders [they] had seen for nearly half a century” (Wharton 6). Although the majority tried to pretend that the looming war was just a myth, Wharton repeatedly overhears many saying the same phrase: “We don’t want war – mais il faut que cela finisse!” (Wharton 7). This statement basically says that although Paris did not want war to come to them, they knew it must happen eventually, leaving them no choice but to be prepared.

The next morning, the definite declaration of war had been made, with newspapers displaying the headline “General Mobilization” (Wharton 7). Wharton witnesses firsthand the concept of mobilization, saying “we were being shown what mobilization was – a huge break in the normal flow of traffic, like the sudden rupture of a dyke” (Wharton 8). She watches the people of Paris rushing towards railways with their luggage trailing behind them, these same people who only hours ago were living their daily lives as though there were no threat of war and life was just as normal as always. Wharton describes the night that follows as “a night of singing and acclamations, not boisterous, but gallant and determined.” (Wharton 8). The men that were idling behind were seen singing patriotic war songs through the windows of pubs and the “steady stream of conscripts” were seen trudging through the streets with their wives and families, “carrying all kinds of odd improvised bags and bundles” with “the stare of driven cattle” on their faces (Wharton 8). The war had disrupted their way of life, but as said before, if Paris had to fight, then fight they would.

            The next day, all of the railways and transportation were being used solely to move soldiers, so those civilians who could not bribe their way out of town were forced to return to a solemn Paris, full of “porter-less halls, waiter-less restaurants, [and] motionless lifts” (Wharton 9).  Wharton describes the transformation of Paris as a “gradual paralysis” (Wharton 9). All of the transportation, cars, taxis, cabs, vans, had vanished from the streets; even the canals laid motionless with the complete lack of unloading and loading. The streets were empty of people, gardens left untended, dogs left uncared for. Wharton states, “Paris, so intensely conscious yet so strangely entranced, seemed to have had curare injected into all her veins” (Wharton 10). On this day, according to Wharton, the beautiful city that she had romanticized about all of her life had been poisoned by the lethal injection of mobilization and left to die.

In this first chapter of Fighting France, Edith Wharton gives a new perspective on total war. She describes the immediate change of the city when given the news of mobilization. She does this from a third party perspective of someone not yet directly involved with the war, but talks about the situation almost as someone who has suffered a great loss. At the end of the chapter, she watches a soldier stop before the statue of Strasbourg and lay a garland at its feet. This act would ordinarily cause a patriotic uproar and attract a crowd, but instead not one person acknowledged the soldier, solidifying what Wharton had known all along: “when an armed nation mobilizes, everybody is busy, and busy in a definite and pressing way. It is not only the fighters that mobilize: those who stay behind must do the same. For each French household, for each individual man or woman in France, war means a complete reorganization of life” (Wharton 10). For Wharton, Paris had been injured and she would have to be the one to find a cure.

Wharton, Edith. "The Look of Paris." Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, 2011. 4-11. Nook Edition. Downloaded January 22, 2013.