It is well established that the social elites during the First World War suffered more from death and disablement than virtually any other group. Since young men from middle- and upper-class backgrounds tended to serve as junior officers, they were particularly exposed to danger and death. This is especially the case for educated youths from elite schools and universities, whose devastation by the war became widely known through the interwar ‘literature of disenchantment’ and passed into the mythology of the war itself. Curiously, the experience and self-understanding of these elite groups and the institutions that they called home remains relatively unknown; this in turn is crucial in understanding both their suffering in wartime and the importance of intellectual elites to the nation in the early twentieth century.Footnote 1
Relatively little is known of how the members of these elite groups related to each other and their institutions as they confronted the challenges of the Great War.Footnote 2 While the names of many of the individuals and their colleges or universities are familiar, they have hitherto been invoked to support arguments about the histories of ideas, education, or the war in general.Footnote 3 The First World War occurred at a point which was simultaneously a key juncture in the history of higher education and a moment of deep anxiety for the intellectual elites of Britain and France. These elites understood their war experiences in the context of wider changes in higher education and society that threatened their traditional prestige in the pre-war years.
The university elites that form the subject of my inquiry were families, born of intimate and deeply personal ties, created at and specific to the institution in question. By comparing two of the most pre-eminent academic institutions in Britain and France, Cambridge University and the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Paris, I will show how the Great War shook these families, and the educated elites that they structured, to the core, compounding pre-war anxieties and challenging their existence and self-identity in a conflict where learning itself was presented as a combatant. These scholarly families were built upon the inter-connectedness of intimacy, intellect, and influence; the experience of the Great War undermined all three of these and left university families confronting their own extinction.
I
The ‘university family’ refers to the community which existed in and around the university. This encompassed not only students, but also academic staff and alumni. The latter group, by definition not present at the institution (unless they had become academics), often overlapped significantly with both of the former groups. In each instance, the relationships formed were of a particularly close kind, and these ties, embedded in the institutional realities and accumulated traditions of the college and university, intimately informed the wartime experience.Footnote 4 While friendship was an important element of the social relations of academic institutions, the ties being discussed here went beyond the mere dyadic bonds of friendship and had something of the intimate but involuntary connections that structure families. Indeed, in many cases, group members actively disliked one another but retained a close bond which was premised upon their shared institutional inheritance. Terms such as friendship and kinship are not mutually exclusive, and thus the university family could contain both friends and antagonists.Footnote 5
Sociological literature on the family suggests a number of different family characteristics. D. H. J. Morgan's work pointed to three main criteria in the development of family life; namely, the sharing of experiences and crises which form ‘family themes’, the centrality of ritual, and the importance of the dwelling space.Footnote 6 Graham Allan's work has shown how kinship relations are identified through shared behaviour, beliefs, or obligations.Footnote 7 Perhaps most importantly, Allan distinguishes kinship from friendship; in short, kin ties are for life.Footnote 8 Meanwhile, Leonore Davidoff sees ‘culture bound’ notions of kinship as a distinctly modern phenomenon which emerged in response to the challenge to the traditional family structures in the nineteenth century.Footnote 9 In addition to patterns of behaviour observed from the outside, the self-understanding of the family as such is an important consideration. These communities understood themselves as separate, with internal hierarchies, rituals, rites, and obligations, as well as a distinct corporate identity which mediated their relation to and understanding of the wider world.
In what sense were universities families? First, students had a very limited choice of colleagues; when they arrived at university (or a constituent college), they had to live and fraternize with other members of the same group, as members of a family do. Thus, a student might identify as a Cambridge Man, a Trinity Man, or a normalien. The university or college community became a surrogate family. This was especially pronounced in residential universities – such as Oxford or Cambridge – where students inhabited the same space within the university campus, literally removed from their actual families.Footnote 10 The invocation of Alma mater – which was pronounced in, but not limited to, the public schools which fed Oxford and Cambridge – underscored this idea.Footnote 11 These families were also overwhelmingly male and only slowly coming to embrace women.Footnote 12 These sorts of ties existed on a number of levels at the university, and kinship could be established through membership of the university, a college, a society, or a sports team. Crucially, societies with the strongest ties, such as the Apostles, an elite society at Cambridge University, were not premised upon shared sentiment or friendship. Rather, candidates were chosen secretly based on intellectual merit, often without seeking membership at all.Footnote 13 The admission of new members was known as a ‘birth’.Footnote 14 The result was an intimate network of men who were friends, enemies, and many shades in between, but inextricably linked by this association for the rest of their lives.
I will compare the experiences of one academic family in Britain and one in France. In Cambridge, one of the most important family networks linked two of the oldest, largest, and most prestigious colleges, Trinity and King's. At the heart of this network was the Apostles secret society, founded in 1820.Footnote 15 While taking examples from the Apostles, I will also examine figures in the wider Trinity and King's communities who overlapped with members of that society. By 1914, Trinity and King's dominated the Apostles, and more generally speaking, constituted Cambridge's intellectual elite.Footnote 16 This elite network within an elite institution valued scepticism, intellect, and intimacy, and Trinity and King's were known to be more familial than other Cambridge colleges.Footnote 17 These familial ties had been strengthened in the late nineteenth century as a reaction against demographic changes in the wider university community, the rise of professional vocations, secularization, and an increase in government interference in running the ancient universities.Footnote 18 This in turn occurred within the wider context of challenges to the traditional position of the aristocracy, who made up about one fifth of this milieu.Footnote 19 The family was brought closer together by the menace of a changing government and society, but this was nothing compared to the shock of war to follow. This network was intimate, intellectually self-assured, and powerful; its influence reached into parliament, the law, the church, journalism, and the civil service.Footnote 20 By the turn of the century, however, anxieties had crept into family life.
Comparable in France was the network of elite scholars who studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. The ENS had its own history, traditions, quirks, and a deep-rooted sense of superiority and difference.Footnote 21 The ENS's political and scholarly power had never been greater than under the Third Republic, when its alumni populated government ministries and dominated the reformed universities. Normaliens, too, faced much anxiety in the pre-1914 decade. The normalien network may have emerged victorious from the Dreyfus controversy, but it came at a cost; conservatives waged polemical war on the republican higher education system in the years that followed, rejecting the academic oligarchy and ideological orthodoxy of the influential Parisian scholarly set at the Sorbonne, most of whom were normaliens.Footnote 22 Compounding this, the ENS itself was formally annexed by the University of Paris in 1903, which threatened the École's traditional sense of difference.Footnote 23
There were important differences between the two networks. The British example had a much older tradition to fall back on, with roots deep in the history of Cambridge University where societal and sporting life was well established, the student body was overwhelmingly residential, and where the university retained a greater degree of autonomy with respect to the state.Footnote 24 The converse was true in France. French universities, although boasting long pre-histories, had only been officially re-established by the republican government in 1896, and were subject to tight state control and shared the prevailing state ideology.Footnote 25 Moreover, societal culture was not a dominant feature of French scholarly life, and, at an institution like the ENS, academic concerns were more pronounced.
War came as a fundamental shock to these intimate academic communities, compounding growing anxiety about their position and function within their universities and society. The disruption caused by the conflict, with the family scattered across different fighting fronts, demonstrated the nature of the ties that bound them and how they felt that the war was undercutting an integral part of their self-understanding. Michael Roper's work has shown how, in the terrible suffering of wartime, the link to blood family (and home) provided fundamental emotional sustenance as young men confronted their own mortality; Martha Hanna has developed this theme in the French case.Footnote 26 Here, it will be argued that this same preoccupation coloured the experience of university, or non-blood, families. Family was a source of comfort and the loss of kin an occasion for deep grief. Moreover, as intellectual pursuits were an integral part of the identity of the university family, the war posed an extra threat: it was, from the outset, presented and understood as a cultural war, where, in addition to armies, national ideas were pitted against one another.Footnote 27 In this context, these intellectual elites, who understood themselves not only as representatives of elite educational institutions but as embodiments of national cultural values and traditions, saw their entire world menaced, their family, and all that it stood for, on the cusp of annihilation.
II
The outbreak of war in August 1914 came as a surprise and shattered the sense of normality in academic life. Many scholars were away from their home institution and suddenly found themselves in ‘enemy’ territory, quickly rushing home. At the same time, while many older academics were returning home, younger ones were readying themselves to leave home for the front.
One feature distinguished the British experience from the French. Only in the latter was there compulsory military service in the first half of the war.Footnote 28 Thus, while scholars in France were mobilized when hostilities began, they had a choice in Britain.Footnote 29 However, British students and academics of military age mostly volunteered for the armed forces, so that in both instances, when academic term resumed a few months after the outbreak of war, university and college buildings were empty, lectures were either cancelled or given to meagre audiences, and ‘normal’ life had ceased.Footnote 30 The normalien community was stunned by the assassination of one of their own, the socialist leader and anti-war campaigner, Jean Jaurès, on 31 July; it was a terrible harbinger of things to come.Footnote 31
In both examples, students and academic staffs broadly supported intervention in the war in August 1914. France had been invaded and the logic of national self-defence came before all else, especially in the early weeks of the war. The British case was more complex, but, generally speaking, the manner in which the war broke out took people by surprise and undermined anti-war sentiment. While there had been a significant anti-war movement at Cambridge, the German violation of Belgian neutrality on 4 August made most believe that intervention was necessary.Footnote 32 However, in each case, reactions were informed by the assumption that a certain type of war would be fought, one which would be relatively short and decisive.Footnote 33
The cessation of normal life was dramatic and best encapsulated by Arthur Benson, the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
The first months of the war were a nightmare which I do not willingly recall. My chief occupation at the beginning of the war was seeing the university and the college where my work lay melt away at the call to service … as far as my own occupations went, it was like presiding at my own funeral. Writing and teaching disappeared.Footnote 34
III
Within weeks, the academic family had been fragmented. Normal functions were curtailed. While men of military age found themselves on active service in France, Belgium, and elsewhere, the university campus too was transformed. The absence of students, emptiness of lecture halls, and the new uses which university buildings were put to all contributed to this unavoidable sense of change.
Universities did function in wartime but the continuation of their traditional roles was often symbolic. Louis Liard, the vice-rector of the Académie de Paris (and thus responsible for all educational institutions in that city), announced in October 1914 that:
Whatever its circumstances may be, the University of Paris intends to begin classes again at the usual date. The majority of our students are in the army. However, for those who remain, being either not of age or not in a fit state to fight, all the faculties will open as if the war did not exist.Footnote 35
In Britain, it was quickly decided that term would be held as normal. At the opening of Michaelmas term at Cambridge in October 1914, the vice-chancellor, M. R. James, said that:
The university meets in such circumstances as it has never known. We shall be few in number, and perpetually under the strain of a great anxiety. We may be exposed to actual peril: in any case we must look forward to straitened resources and, what is more, personal sorrows.Footnote 36
Empty university buildings were quickly deemed useful and appropriated for use as makeshift hospitals or for the billeting of troops. Both developments contributed to the sense of rupture in university life. The First Eastern Hospital, which was housed at the King's and Clare College cricket field from October 1914 could accommodate 1,200 patients. The King's College council's annual report noted ruefully that ‘no difficulty has been found in accommodating the members of the diminished college in the other buildings’.Footnote 37
As early as 6 August, the ENS was taken over by the Union des femmes de France and turned into a military hospital furnished with 100 beds.Footnote 38 While the ENS tried to continue as normal, the presence of the military hospital meant that students could not be fed or stay in residence.Footnote 39 The director, Ernest Lavisse, wrote a few weeks later that the hospital's presence at the ENS made the running of the institution, even in a reduced sense, ‘certainly difficult, if not impossible’.Footnote 40
The university space was transformed within weeks of the outbreak of the war, and the family was scattered across Europe and beyond. The physical dislocation of family members demonstrated the strength of the ties which bound the network together and the resourcefulness of the family under duress. A measure of this can be seen in the volume of correspondence exchanged, be it by esteemed professors, alumni, or students, which sought to maintain a semblance of normality. For example, the director (Lavisse) and secretary (Paul Dupuy) of the ENS both began a regular correspondence with the many normaliens at the front.Footnote 41 So did the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, H. M. Butler, as well as many dons who were not fighting, such as Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, and A. C. Benson.Footnote 42
The philosopher and normalien, Emile Boutroux, was president of the ENS's past pupils' association and organized their yearly meeting at the Sorbonne. During the war years, he began proceedings by reading a list of the dead and missing, a figure especially severe at the École Normale Supérieure.Footnote 43 Boutroux also kept in regular correspondence with many of his former students who were at the front. ‘With shells bursting all around, they tell me what they are doing, and relate their impressions with the same lucidity and mental calm they showed when studying with me.’Footnote 44 Boutroux's correspondents did not write to him of philosophy or academic matters; however, it seems that there was deep meaning in maintaining the familial link in the most trying of circumstances.
Correspondence between members of these networks in wartime included long meditations on both personal and often intimate matters as well as more scholarly issues, underscoring how although the latter was an important part of the network's identity, the bonds stretched beyond this, embracing the everyday, the mundane, and the personal. As with blood families, the link to home provided essential sustenance in wartime.Footnote 45 However, many scholars did bemoan the fact that intellectual thought was rendered impossible on account of the war. Intellectual incapacity was experienced as much by those in the rear as well as those at the front. Marcel Étévé, who entered the ENS in 1910, felt stifled by his experience of the war. ‘This war … is shattering at its heart, intellectually above all … what an effort it is to pick up a book or write! And I wonder how I could ever again … do something of intellectual merit if I were to return from this expedition.’Footnote 46
The letters of another normalien, the historian Pierre-Maurice Masson, also demonstrated a preoccupation with continuing his academic work while at the front. Masson, who was completing his doctoral dissertation on the religion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, experienced no difficulty in turning his mind to academic matters. His was virtually complete when the war began and he was correcting proofs in the trenches. In 1915, he wrote to his wife that ‘I felt that the intellectual virus was not dead in me as I had so much pleasure in re-reading my proofs.’Footnote 47 The symbolism of his work – being a Catholic, normalien, writing about the religion of one of the philosophical inspirations of the Revolution and Republic – meant that Masson became an iconic figure in union sacrée France. His work was an act of defiance in the face of war, a triumph of intellect over brutality. However, while Masson joined the ranks of the dead at Verdun in 1916, his fame as a soldier-scholar grew.
Fighting in the Austrian army, the Apostle Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote to his mentor, the pacifist Bertrand Russell, in February 1915 that he had been working on a manuscript on logic since the beginning of the war.Footnote 48 Russell, who had not enlisted in the armed forces, was amazed at this, writing that ‘since the war began, it has been impossible for me to think about philosophy’.Footnote 49 Wittgenstein told Keynes that he would be mistaken ‘if you think that being a soldier prevents me from thinking about [philosophical] propositions’.Footnote 50 F. H. Keeling, a Trinity-educated socialist and intimate of Keynes, found that he lost faith in the academic life but that his political convictions had been vindicated by the war experience.Footnote 51
The same phenomenon was apparent amongst scholars on the periphery of the Apostles network. Gordon Butler – son of the Master of Trinity and part of a distinguished family of scholars – wrote in October 1914 that ‘my academic mind yearns for a Thucydides, but at present I have only a Virgil’.Footnote 52 By September 1915, he wrote to his younger brother, Nevile, that he was reading Charlotte Bronté, Jane Austen, and George Eliot, ‘so you see what war and wounds have reduced me to’.Footnote 53 Reading was a common pastime for these men as there was a lot of spare time at the front and also, as in this case, junior officers spent a lot of time convalescing from wounds.
Denys Winstanley, a fellow of Trinity who was on active service and was close to many Apostles, felt that his academic career as a historian was over too, not because of inertia caused by the war, but because of the contemporary abuses of history in it.
I am still reeling under the blow of the popular comparison of Asquith and Lloyd George with Newcastle and Pitt. Nothing is now left for me but to turn my face to the wall and die: I have laboured in vain and am inclined to [think] that I will never write another history book.Footnote 54
The outbreak of war, and the disruption which it caused to normal academic life, fundamentally threatened that which made the university family distinct and structured their collective sense of identity. This was as much the case at the military front as it was on the home front, and in each instance, the fragmentation brought about by war led scholars to question their relationship to their intellectual work. This was especially pronounced in Britain. In the French case, the logic of national self-defence meant that for people like Masson, continuation of intellectual work was an act of defiance. Roper has written of the importance of ‘psychic nourishment’ for troops at the front by food parcels sent from home.Footnote 55 In the scholarly context, intellectual nourishment was fundamental. However, while intellectual death undermined a great part of the academic identity, literal death was a more profound challenge to the family.
IV
While other challenges to the academic community could be surmounted and the family proved adept at doing this, death was irrevocable. Here, the understanding of the university community as a family is especially important: kinship is, by definition, relatively static. This is what differentiates kinship from friendship; the latter can change in composition, as well as volume, over the course of a lifetime. Family relations remain stable: the composition rarely changes, additions are infrequent, and subtractions (due to death) generally take place in an ordered manner. The Great War threatened an entire way of life and all of the accumulated traditions embodied which these families embodied. That said, close and frequent encounters with death again showed the resilience and strength of the academic family as it sought new means of mediating, interpreting, and surmounting often incomprehensible trauma.
Férenc Békássy was from an aristocratic Hungarian family and was educated at King's College, Cambridge, where he took his history degree in 1914. In 1912, he was elected to the Apostles.Footnote 56 Békássy was a popular figure at King's and a talented poet. Having returned to Budapest on the outbreak of war, he enlisted in the Hungarian army and was killed on the Eastern Front in June 1915.Footnote 57
Békassy's experience demonstrated two things. First, it showed that those fighting on the ‘enemy’ side were far from reviled on account of the outbreak of war; the family was stronger than that. Békassy's Cambridge colleagues pleaded with him not to enlist in the Hungarian Army, and once he had, they fretted over his well-being.Footnote 58 Békássy, in turn, stayed in touch with his Cambridge friends as much as he could. Second, it demonstrated that the family ties formed at Cambridge could be used to understand the war experience, and, ultimately, the death of a family member.
Békássy was energized by the war, immersing himself in Hungarian nationalism, but his relationship with his Cambridge family remained stable. Writing to Keynes, Békássy was concerned only with life at Cambridge, inquiring ‘how the society [the Apostles] continues’.Footnote 59 Another Apostle, Frank Lucas, wrote to Keynes that it was ‘fitting that the Society should have brothers fighting on both sides: and not all unfitting perhaps … that Békássy should follow Rupert [Brooke] dead as Rupert living’.Footnote 60 Lucas's use of the term ‘brothers’ is significant, especially as Rupert Brooke and Békassy – both of whom were Apostles, poets, and Kingsmen – were known to be antagonists. Their relationship was not one of friendship; however, it was a way for other members of the group to understand the deaths of both.Footnote 61
Arthur Benson's reaction to the death of Brooke in 1915 was also instructive.
I cannot claim to have known Rupert Brooke intimately … When he died, I wrote down careful recollections of him in minute detail, hardly to be reproduced. But my impression of him is vivid and clear, which is indeed hardly to be wondered at, for he was very unlike other people.Footnote 62
Benson wrote, almost out of a sense of duty and obligation, of the death of a fellow member of Cambridge's intellectual elite (although Benson was not an Apostle). The reaction of Keynes was similar: ‘Yesterday came news that two of our undergraduates were killed, both of whom I knew, though not very well, and was fond of. And to-day, Rupert's death. In spite of all one has ever said I find myself crying for him.’Footnote 63 Both responses to Brooke's death hint at something larger; the death of a vocation and a way of life, in this case embodied by the intellectual elites of the Apostles.
The ubiquity of death simultaneously undermined the ability of the academic to fulfil their usual scholarly functions, reinforcing the sense of crisis and helplessness. Keynes wrote of the death of one student that ‘It makes one bitterly miserable and long that the war should stop quickly and on almost any terms. I can't bear that he should have died.’Footnote 64 T. R. Glover, a divinities scholar at St John's College, noted in his diary that with the escalating death toll ‘Keynes [is] losing [the] edge of his marvellous accuracy [and] getting frightened about it.’Footnote 65 The deaths of members of the academic family – even distant relatives – were felt acutely.
It was much the same story at the ENS, although as the composition of the network was overwhelmingly French, there were no equivalents of the brother turned ‘enemy’ as with Békassy or Wittgenstein. Lucien Herr, the École's librarian and mentor to many students, described the feelings of melancholy felt by those at Rue d'Ulm. There was ‘too much bad news, too many losses, too much slaughter of our best men, of an entire generation that was supposed to replace us’.Footnote 66 It was the end of an era.
The letters of the normalien Marcel Étévé from the front elucidate the familial identity which bound students of the École Normale Supérieure together. Étévé carefully noted the death of normaliens as he became aware of them, whether they were friends or merely acquaintances. Initially, he undertook this with normalien friends, including André Durkheim, son of the sociologist, Émile.Footnote 67 He corresponded with Paul Dupuy, the secretary of the ENS, and told him of a scholarly library which had been installed behind the front lines for intellectually inclined officers.Footnote 68 As news of the tremendous number of casualties suffered by normaliens was communicated to him, Étévé – yet to reach the front lines – increasingly reflected upon his own mortality and relationship to his scholarly brethren. He did not, for example, wish to write to Dupuy until he had reached the front himself.Footnote 69 He wrote to his normalien friend René M. that he tried not to think too much of the ever-increasing list of the normalien dead and thus maintain hope for the future.Footnote 70 In a subsequent letter, Étévé elaborated, remarking that he tried not to reflect too much on (and regret) his ‘years of happiness’ at the ENS.Footnote 71 When his mother sent him the annuaire of the ENS which contained the lists of all the missing and dead normaliens, Étévé wrote to her that ‘nothing prepares [one] better [for death] than to accept’.Footnote 72 The sense of inevitability which ran through Étévé's letters was realized when he was killed in July 1916.
Many French academics lost sons in the Great War, such as Emile Durkheim, Gustave Lanson, Raymond Thamin, Ernest Denis, Émile Picard, and Paul Vidal de la Blache. The loss of blood relations, rather than undermining the notion of the academic family proposed here, instead showed its distinct contours. The case of Émile Durkheim illustrates this. Durkheim was the figurehead for the normalien social science network in France, a father figure for a generation of gifted sociologists. Both his son, André, and his nephew, Marcel Mauss, were at the front. Durkheim's letters to Mauss demonstrated a preoccupation with death that increased as the conflict went on, and moreover, showed how, to Durkheim, the deaths of other normaliens were like those of family members which made him fear for his blood relations all the more. Of the death of the sociologist and normalien Robert Hertz he wrote:
On learning this news, I feel more worried about you and André than I did in the past. Until now, death only hit men who were a little peripheral to me … This time, it's someone who kept a place in my heart. And that is why I think of others.Footnote 73
In January 1916, André was reported missing in Salonika. Durkheim wrote to the normalien Georges Davy of his ‘anguish’ and that it was ‘an obsession that fills every moment and is even worse than I supposed. Still, I have been preparing for this blow for a long time.’Footnote 74 This news, followed in April 1916 by confirmation of André's death, left Durkheim a broken man; he sought to cope with the grief by retreating into his work, and briefly discovered some comfort through this.Footnote 75 To the normalien Henri Hubert, André's death was especially crippling for Émile as he was both his father and his teacher. As such, André was Émile's son ‘twice’. For his part, Mauss wrote that André was ‘a son and a brother and a pal’.Footnote 76
Durkheim was not alone in experiencing the convergence of death in the academic and blood family. Lanson, a literary scholar and normalien who lectured at the Sorbonne, experienced the same with the death of his son in late 1915 followed by the death of his student, Masson, in April 1916. Lanson had been offered a one-year teaching post at Columbia University in New York but refused to leave France while he was part of the family on which both young men still drew for support. It was only after the deaths of both that he realized that he could serve the nation by lecturing in the still-neutral United States, although he never expressed this publicly.Footnote 77 Masson was awarded a posthumous doctorate by the Sorbonne later in 1916. In his supervisor's report, Lanson wrote paternally that, in the course of their academic relationship, ‘I had the chance to witness all the sensitivity of his heart and the nobility of his character. There was no soul more tender, large, proud, or more right.’Footnote 78 Another of Lanson's supervisees, Gustave Cohen, described Masson as his ‘brother’ in a letter to his mentor.Footnote 79
The academic family was also riven by perceived wartime betrayals, and the cases of Britain and France diverge here. There was relatively little dissent among the normalien community regarding the necessity of prosecuting the war to the end, even if it were destructive almost beyond comprehension. France was, of course, invaded. The nature of British entry had been contested, and support for the prosecution of the war evolved and changed as the conflict progressed. Cambridge, and in particular, the colleges of King's and Trinity, became hubs for dissent. Scholars often found themselves at loggerheads with members of their academic family over their attitude to the war. Significantly, the foreign members of the community did not bear the brunt of this. Those – like Békassy or Wittgenstein – who enlisted in ‘enemy’ armies were never condemned for the decision; rather, their predicaments were a symptom of the scourge of modern war, or to be lauded, depending on whether one supported or opposed the war, respectively. However, it is an open question as to whether the situation would have been different if they were German, and not from the less stigmatized Austria-Hungary.
As the war progressed, Cambridge became a hub for opposition to the war and, with the introduction of conscription in 1916, conscientious objection. Many Apostles were pacifists. John Maynard Keynes was most likely a pacifist too, but he was also employed by the British treasury from 1914. He found his new work intellectually stimulating. However, this left him in the uncomfortable position of being both part of the war-machine but, theoretically, opposed to it. His friends pilloried him for this position.Footnote 80 However, by not declaring himself as a conscientious objector, Keynes argued that he could use his influence to help other group members who wished to avoid conscription, and in this goal he was occasionally successful.Footnote 81 Indeed, due to his growing influence at government, members of the Apostles family, who were not close friends, contacted him, hoping to leverage his political influence and their shared association. The mathematician G. H. Hardy of Trinity was a suspected pacifist and as such was denied permission to attend an international congress in Sweden in 1916.Footnote 82 He wrote to his fellow Apostle, Keynes, asking him to exert influence. ‘I may be asking what is hopeless, but if you can do anything I should be eternally grateful.’Footnote 83 This shows how, as Graham Allan has argued, kinship was a resource which could be leveraged in times of crisis even where it had not been previously.Footnote 84 Similarly, Masson wrote to Albert Thomas, who had been his contemporary at the ENS fifteen years previously, on the latter's appointment to head up the French armaments effort in May 1915.Footnote 85 This was significant as they had not been friends and diverged from one another sharply in their political views. The common connection formed at Rue d'Ulm, combined with the intense stresses of wartime, reactivated the kinship bond and created solidarity between two men who otherwise existed in different worlds.
While there was a convergence of blood family and academic family in the case of Durkheim, these could also diverge to produce a family feud. The case of Bertrand Russell – Apostle, logician, lecturer at Trinity College, and outspoken pacifist – divided Cambridge, and ultimately led to his dismissal from his teaching post.Footnote 86 Russell's anti-war agitation led to him being deprived of his lectureship at Trinity in 1916 in a case that pitted pro- and anti-war factions against one another. After the dismissal of Russell, a number of younger fellows of Trinity drew up a petition to H. M. Butler, the Master of the college, ‘to place it on record that they are not satisfied with the action of the College in depriving Mr Russell of his lectureship’.Footnote 87 One of the signatories was James Butler. In private correspondence, the Master wrote to his son that ‘there is no fear that I can misunderstand your signature [on the petition] … we need not discuss the matter either orally or on paper’.Footnote 88 Thus, war issues could pit academic and blood family against one another and make them choose the former over the latter.
The Russell case and the issues surrounding it added to the sense of crisis amongst the elites of Cambridge. It was divisive and left a legacy of bitterness and silence. The Trinity philosopher and Apostle J. M. E. McTaggart refused to communicate with many of his fellow Apostles, including Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, on the matter.Footnote 89 News of the bitterness travelled far. Writing home from Egypt, the Trinity fellow Denys Winstanley hoped that he ‘succeed in steering clear from college politics and factions’ and, as with Durkheim, hoped that he could retreat to academic work to achieve this.Footnote 90 Indeed, the Russell incident, so symptomatic of wartime divisions and anxieties was reignited when the Second World War broke out. G. H. Hardy, one of Russell's quiet supporters, wrote an account of the events of 1914–18 to clear up any misinformation about the Russell case and – he hoped – to prevent history from repeating itself.Footnote 91 The event became notorious, an example of how the academic idyll could be poisoned by the all-encompassing dynamic of modern war.
V
The formal cessation of hostilities in November 1918 did not end the trauma. While universities would soon re-open and attempt to recapture their pre-war vitality, a palpable sense of loss pervaded amongst those who had survived the conflict. The end of the military conflict challenged members of the family to continue their pre-war intellectual vocations while simultaneously making sense of the carnage that interrupted it. It also posed a deeper question; namely, could the academic family – as understood before the war – still exist? This question could be answered through stock-taking – establishing who had and had not survived the war – but also by meditating on what it was that these men had died for, and how they might be remembered.
The process of remembrance facilitated the exploration of these questions. War memorials were the main means by which people attempted to perpetuate the memory of those lost in the war. They were the places where people grieved, both individually and collectively.Footnote 92 As university families existed before the war, remembrance also had the function of recapturing some of the life of the pre-world and taking the full measure of what had been lost in the intervening years. University and college war memorials in Britain and France, including those of the elites of the ENS, and Trinity and King's colleges, always listed the dead and only the dead, arranged alphabetically. They recalled loss, not service.
Remembrance took many forms in the aftermath of war.Footnote 93 Academic families sought to remember their fallen brothers through a number of activities; ranging from plaques and monuments of different sizes, memorial volumes, the publication of war letters or poems, scholarships, and eulogies.
While university memorials painted a general picture of wartime losses, memorials erected by colleges told a greater story of the impact which the war had upon smaller, more intimate communities. At Cambridge, losses were severe. In total, 2,470 staff, students, and alumni died, or just under 18 per cent of those who enlisted. Within colleges, losses were not spread evenly. While Trinity fell in line with the larger picture (its 574 war dead accounting for 18 per cent of its men who enlisted), King's suffered more severely, with the 158 dead amounting to almost 23 per cent of the total who enlisted.Footnote 94 In France, the ENS's losses numbered 236 dead of 833 who served, or 28 per cent.Footnote 95
In order to inscribe the names of the dead on the planned ENS War Memorial, Gustave Lanson, the new director, had to work out who had served and died. He completed this work late in 1919.Footnote 96 The monument was placed in the middle of a hallway at the heart of the institution, and it was inaugurated in December 1923 by the president of the Republic, Alexandre Millerand. His presence demonstrated the national importance of the sacrifice of the intellectual elites of the ENS. The monument aux morts would become the site for the annual ceremony of remembrance which itself became a fixture on the calendar of the ENS.
Memorial forms often perpetuated wartime politics and divisions and were as remarkable for what they did not say as well as what they did. The King's College Cambridge memorial, located in the college chapel, did not initially list the name of Férenc Békássy, who was killed fighting for the ‘enemy’. Due to pressure from his friends in the Apostles, King's later erected a separate memorial to Békássy in the memorial chapel which depicted his contradictory position as someone who was both part of the community and separate from it, an estranged brother.Footnote 97
Békássy's friends also ensured that his talent as a poet was not forgotten and that a small memorial volume to him was produced. In 1925, Frank Lucas published a collection of his poems. In the preface, he wrote that ‘only a pale shadow of him lingers [in Cambridge]; but all who knew him, and some who did not, will be glad to have this memorial’.Footnote 98 The publication of war letters was another way in which the memory of individuals could be perpetuated. War letters gave an insight into both the personality and intellect of the author and their determination in the face of battle, while also showing how they connected into wider networks. The publication of war letters was more common in France, where the letters of Étévé and Masson were given much publicity.
The sense of familial loss can be seen most strikingly in the work of the secretary of the ENS, Paul Dupuy. In the years following the war, he gave orations at the funerals and re-interments of normaliens. These orations were published in a volume in 1924 called Mes morts, or My dead.Footnote 99 The title speaks of the connection between the institutional administrator and his students, which went far beyond a mere bureaucratic or academic one. As far as Dupuy was concerned, normaliens were all his family. Dupuy's attitude was perhaps best expressed in the oration which he gave for Jean Vigier at Angoulême (Charente) in 1922. Dupuy said that the grief of Vigier's family was also ‘my grief’.Footnote 100 Dupuy blended this familial language with the language of sacrifice, the patrie, and the lévee-en-masse. Mes morts exemplified the multi-faceted nature of remembrance: it was deeply personal, shared with close friends and colleagues, and simultaneously reflected wider discourses, showing where the ENS fit into national life.
The decimation of these educated elites reverberated long after the cessation of hostilities. War memorials, and Armistice Day ceremonials, were regular reminders of the suffering. However, reminders were manifest in other ways too. Absences were palpable and the way of life seemed to have changed. Students, staff, and alumni who inhabited the university space in the early and mid-1920s encountered, and contributed to, a changed atmosphere and an anxiety, all of which related to the war experience.
This has been best examined in the British context, where the idea of the ‘lost generation’ involved not only a loss of life but a change of artistic and literary sensibilities.Footnote 101 The war was everywhere. John Lehmann, who came up to Cambridge in the early 1920s, wrote that ‘Cambridge … was haunted inescapably by the old war; it was always there in the background conditioning the prevalent sensibility.’Footnote 102 The new generation of students, those who had not experienced the war, actively sought to disengage entirely from its influence, often through the pursuit of frivolity and debauchery.
Meanwhile, for those who had experienced the war, there was a different sense of a breach. The pacifist and Apostle, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, was dismayed by the way in which those who had actively participated in the war felt that they could return to normal in the immediate aftermath of war, as if the changes that had taken place were of no significance. For him, it was not enough to return to normal; normality could not exist as such anymore. Lowes Dickinson elaborated on this sense of betrayal in his memoir, written in the 1920s and unpublished until 1973.
I learned … that students, those whose business it would seem to be to keep the light of truth burning in a storm, are like other men, blindly patriotic, savagely violent, cowardly or false, when public opinion once begins to run strongly. The younger dons, even the older ones, disappeared into war work. All discussion, all pursuit of truth ceased, as in a moment. To win the war, or to hide safely among the winners, became the only preoccupation.Footnote 103
As an Apostle, Lowes Dickinson felt that intellectual integrity was an integral and inseparable part of scholarly identity and self-perception. Whether in peace or wartime, this would and should not change, irrespective of political or societal pressures. However, as has been shown here, amongst the intellectual elites of France and Britain, where people did cease intellectual work, or where they sacrificed it to political expediency, the decision was rarely taken lightly and was often deeply troubling. One means of countering this was to apply intellectual energy to the institutional embodiment of the peace, the League of Nations. This Lowes Dickinson did, as did a number of prominent normaliens such as Henri Bergson, Paul Appell, Paul Painlevé, and Albert Thomas.
A pall hung over the ENS too in the immediate post-war years, even for those with no direct experience of war. Many feared that the first post-war generation of students, recently demobilized and lacking in the requisite preliminary study, were not up to the high standard of the intellectual elites who preceded them.Footnote 104 Pacifism and anti-militarism emerged as significant and disruptive forces at the ENS in the early 1920s, and demonstrations were frequently perpetrated by the new generation of students.Footnote 105 Significantly, these demonstrations were staged in the spirit of normalien theatricality, and were an attempt to reassert the traditional collective identity through protest.Footnote 106 The ENS was slow to rebuild links to scholars in Germany, and for a number of years students studying German were sent to German-speaking areas to avoid contact with ‘enemy’ universities of the recently ended war.Footnote 107 As in Britain, not all ‘enemies’ were equally vilified; the ENS established a a formal exchange of students with Hungary in 1922.Footnote 108
This sense of a breach between the pre- and post-war periods was embodied in scholarly modes of thought as much as it was in actual lives lost. This was most pronounced in the case of the famous network of social scientist normaliens who had trained under Émile Durkheim in the decades before the war, and who had been torn asunder in the conflict. In 1923, Marcel Mauss sought to arrest this by reviving the Année sociologique, the organ of the normalien sociologists which had not been published since before the outbreak of war.
Monument aux morts at the École Normale Supérieure.
Mauss's journey to this point was a long one; in 1914, he had been mobilized as an interpreter and attached to the British Army, commenting that ‘I just wasn't made for the intellectual life and I'm enjoying the life war is giving me … I was made for this and not for sociology.’Footnote 109 However, once the war was over, it became clear that the practice of sociology was also a form of remembrance. The first number of the Année sociologique which emerged in 1923 was a tribute to the many lives lost in wartime, centring on the father figure of Émile Durkheim and the common space which all the collaborators had inhabited at the ENS. Mauss noted in his introduction that the journal had been, historically, ‘not only a publication’, but more than this; those who worked on it themselves formed a group, and any description of the work that they undertook was by definition an ‘intimate’ one.Footnote 110 The introduction gave short biographies of the various deceased collaborators, their relationships to one another, and their academic work. It was a family tree for a lost generation. In conclusion, Mauss wrote that the belief in their science and the perfectibility of man through it was a task which could never be abandoned.Footnote 111 Thus, the ideas of the normalien group would continue, as both an act of remembrance and as an assurance that something of the lost generation lived on.
VI
The war was a caesura for these intellectual elites. Not only did it cause deep emotional trauma, it threatened to leave an intellectual void on top of the physical one. It came at a time when the traditions of the university family were menaced by both social change and political polarization. These changes continued into the post-war period, further underscoring the sense that an entire way of life was changing. In Britain, both Oxford and Cambridge succumbed to the reality that they needed formalized government grants to survive, a further incursion into the previously autonomous existence of the elites.Footnote 112 The emergence of the mobile research student, a consequence of wartime change, further undermined traditional collegiate ties.Footnote 113 In France, conservatives and Republicans once more bickered over the national curriculum and the role of intellect in national life, but the great pedagogical voices of the ENS were all dead too, of old age and broken hearts.Footnote 114 However, the ENS generally retained its political influence, with (pre-war) normaliens such as Painlevé, André Tardieu, Léon Blum, and Émile Borel all holding government ministries in the turbulent 1920s and 1930s.
Békássy memorial next to King's College War Memorial. By kind permission of the Provost and Scholars of King's College, Cambridge.
The intrusion upon family intimacy explains why the war remained palpable for many years after the formal end of hostilities. It also explains the proliferation of many different memorial forms at university campuses, which themselves served to exacerbate the sense of an epoch-defining break with the past. The war was inescapable, yet, at the same time, many tried to escape it. Russell and Hardy left Cambridge altogether. Moreover, it soon became apparent that the war was far from over; its concomitant problems created new anxieties. This only compounded the sense of loss for intellectual elites, as the lost generation were precisely those whose intellect and moral qualities were desperately needed as Europe faced into a ‘Morbid Age’.Footnote 115 The dead were ‘the very best and finest and freshest that can be found … the very men whom we most need to people and replenish the world, to fight most eagerly against the evil of the world’.Footnote 116
The war slowly eroded intimacy, showed traditional influence to be powerless in the face of mass destruction, and assailed intellect. The undermining of these cornerstones through which these intellectual elites saw themselves – and the world – rendered the future as incomprehensible as the recent past.
