Marianne in the Trenches: Typology and Iconographic Polysemy of Marianne between 1914 and 1918

Abstract

The French national icon Marianne is a spark plug of symbols, from the cockade to the Phrygian cap, from references to the Greek Minerva of wisdom to the allegory of peace holding an olive branch, from Joan of Arc (to which a section is devoted in this chapter) to La Marseillaise. Innumerable photo-montages portray a hybrid Marianne, ranging from the pacifist and maternal sower, having stepped down from the pediment of town halls to act as a protective divinity to soldier fathers, to the avenging fury attacking the Prussian eagle. We can see a redeployment of Marianne during the Great War: the iconography no longer mirrors the republican debate, but redirects its incredible plasticity and its ability to depict a national character much more complex than meets the eye. However, Guilllaume Doizy is not wrong when he suggests that Liberty is the allegorical principle promoted by the wartime Marianne. This may come as a surprise, for equality or fraternity would have been expected to be emphasized, over Liberty, by illustrators. Marianne is thus instrumental in remembering that it is primarily the Manichean and eschatological struggle of republican Liberty against the barbaric despotism of the enemy that is at stake in the mobilizing discourse of the early stages of the war. We cannot say, as Doizy purports, that “in political cartoons, the figure of Marianne appears to have been rather insignificant within Belle Époque imagery.”¹